KING ÆLFRED’S LEGACY WAS CEMENTED BY THE OUTSTANDING achievements of his son Eadweard, his daughter Æðelflæd and grandson Æðelstan; but they are much more obscure figures, lacking contemporary champions like Asser and also, perhaps, lacking Ælfred’s philosophical and moral sense of his own place in history. Eadweard and his sister were canny and aggressive, seemingly unburdened by their father’s reflective spirit. They inherited a highly organized and professionalized state machinery from their father (and his godson, Æðelflæd’s husband) and with it they constructed a military and economic powerhouse. The once formidable Scandinavian armies were no match for the juggernaut of the Angelcynn.*
By the time of his death in 924 Eadweard would largely complete the task of bringing the Danish territories under his control, extending the burghal system to north and west and apparently effecting the unification of Wessex with West Mercia. The reign of his eldest son Æðelstan at first appears to seamlessly continue the process of West Saxon expansion in the direction of a unified Anglo-Saxon state in which the kingdoms of the Angelcynn and of the Deniscan became England. But in an age of consummate propagandists one must tread carefully. Æðelstan’s succession was not straightforward and, in the swirling currents of dynastic rivalry another, less comfortable narrative can be traced.
Increasingly, historians look to the dispassionate evidence of coinage to test their models of kingship and emergent statehood, while a superabundance of archaeological excavation and Compare the Viking Age travel map of the ninth century (p. 50) to that of the early tenth, (p. 281), which shows the defence in depth of the burghal system. geographical analysis keeps a stage-full of social and economic plates spinning. It is a time of dizzying complexity from which, nevertheless, King Æðelstan emerges in recognizable human form, solidifying from the background action. Vulnerabilities can be sensed in his choice of assembly venues and courtiers; in the defensiveness of his self-aggrandizing titles; in the need to have poets offer up verses of sycophantic praise. He surrounded himself with foster sons from across the political spectrum and from over the seas; he actively sought good matches for his many half-sisters, yet he did not marry himself, and produced no heirs. He was remembered by later generations as a warlike king; but he seems to have devoted much of his time to the pursuit of holy relics and to defining punishments for sometimes trivial offences. He seems to have avoided his own capital, Winchester, for nearly a decade after his succession.
The ambitions of Ælfred’s heirs to imitate the Bretwaldas of the seventh century in exerting imperium, or overlordship, over all the other kingdoms of the island were largely frustrated. The Irish Norse grandsons of the famous Ívarr continued to pursue their interests in the kingdom of Northumbria, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so, mostly at the expense of West Saxon strategies to render the lands north of the Humber tributary. And then, West Saxon lines of patronage did not extend to the lands held for so long by Danish kings and jarls. Attempts were made to purchase estates off Scandinavian lords, but they appear to have been small in scale. The historic bonds of loyalty and kinship which, for the most part, united the ealdormen and thegns of Wessex with their king did not stretch to the Five Boroughs or East Anglia, let alone Northumbria.
Æðelstan deployed a full range of political, legal and economic means to gain influence in those newly won territories. The community of St Cuthbert proved itself amenable to his approaches, backed as they were with land and a large quantity of cash and gifts. Together with the distinctly more ambivalent archbishop of York, they supported and legitimized his northern campaigns. Even so, Æðelstan must contend with more deep-seated ambiguities of identity in both native and incomer populations whose sense of regional affinity was far stronger than any wish to be subject to West Saxon rule. Those ambiguities were felt even more sharply in the Welsh kingdoms, despite the increasingly compliant and favourable behaviour of the grandsons of Rhodri Mawr. A remarkable nationalist tract called Armes Prydein Fawr* survives to show that one man’s realpolitik is another’s base appeasement.
For all of the first four decades of the tenth century a single king sat on the throne of Alba: Constantín mac Áeda, who first promulgated the laws of the Scots at Scone in 906. At the time of his succession there was a real chance that all Alba would fall under Scandinavian rule from ambitious Norwegian exiles or the Norse rulers of Dublin. But, increasingly self-confident and effective, Constantín intervened in the political and military evolution of North Britain; and if he was forced by circumstances to submit to Æðelstan, he ensured an enduring Scots identity from which the distinct medieval nation would emerge. Even so, the Northern and Western Isles became, and remained, thoroughly Norse.
When Scot, Anglo-Saxon, Briton and Irish Norse met in a great battle at Brunanburh in 937, Æðelstan claimed victory; but he achieved no more than a defence of the status quo. In the half century after Ælfred’s death Dane integrated with Anglo-Saxon, and there remains a distincdy regional flavour to the legal and territorial identities of pre-Conquest East Mercia and East Anglia; likewise in Lancashire and north Cheshire. The Midland shires evolved directly out of territories based on the Five Danish boroughs of Derby, Nottingham, Leicester, Lincoln and Stamford, and from other towns that they had fortified, settled and transformed into commercially successful central places. When archaeologists excavate the imposing defended settlements of the East Mercian élite at sites like Goltho in Lincolnshire, they cannot tell if the lords of the estate were Danish or English; and it may not matter. The mutual intelligibility of Old English and Old Norse and the sharing of many cultural and artistic expressions of identity, fostered integration. Anglo-Saxon, Welsh or Dane, the late tenth-century inhabitants of Britain south of the Humber were nearly all Christian.
Towns and mercantile economies flourished under Scandinavian influence, and their example was taken up by their would-be overlords. The same cannot be said of the ancient minsters, many of them absorbed into the secular property portfolios of kings and lay lords, abandoned or shrunk to the point of invisibility. Ælfred had attempted a form of ecclesiastic reform while systematically treating the minsters as a currency of royal patronage. Eadweard had much else on his mind. Æðelstan spent money on churches and, especially, on endowing them with costly relics and treasures. But only under his half brothers Eadmund and Eadred did the Anglo-Saxon state once more put its weight behind a monastic movement, of Continental inspiration but distinctly indigenous form.
The final expulsion of the last Norse king of York in 954 coincided with increasing economic and spiritual self-confidence, and with a stable environment in which agriculture and local communities flourished, so that by the end of the tenth century a landscape of nucleated villages, with small churches and graveyards, looking to their nearest town for markets and for justice, begins to look like the medieval world in embryonic form. For a generation the Insular kingdoms enjoyed relative peace without fear of invasion.
A traveller passing through Britain in the 960s would find much that had changed from the days when Ælfred’s father brought a Frankish bride home. But the British Isles were probably still as regionally distinct as they ever had been; certainly as wealthy, certainly as attractive, if a little less vulnerable to conquest by jealous kings watching from overseas.
* Compare the Viking Age travel map of the ninth century (p. 50) to that of the early tenth, (p. 281), which shows the defence in depth of the burghal system.
† See below, p. 373.