A CLASH OF WORLDS—SCANDINAVIAN SOCIETY—THE FIRST RAIDS—THE FATE OF THE MONASTERIES—MERCIAN POWER—POLITICS AND THE CHURCH—THE RISE OF WESSEX
In the 799th year from the Christian incarnation, according to contemporary chroniclers, Pope Leo III was ambushed while riding on horseback from his basilica at the Lateran to St Lawrence’s church in Rome. His tongue was cut out and he was blinded. He escaped, though, and was taken to safety by envoys of Charlemagne, king of the Franks. In the same year, Charlemagne’s Northumbrian scholar Alcuin recorded the first raid by heathen pirates in Francia, on islands off the coast of Aquitaine. The following year, the first of a new century, raiders were said to have destroyed the monasteries at Hartness and Tynemouth on Britain’s North Sea coast;* a certain Godfrið became king in Norðmannia (i.e. Denmark); and on Christmas Day Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo, now restored to power, if not health.
In the year 801 Archbishop Æðelheard of Canterbury journeyed to Rome, spending time on the way with the scholar Alcuin in his abbey at St Josse, near the trading port of Quentovic at the mouth of the River Canche in Picardy. He may have arrived in Rome in time to witness part of the basilica of St Peter’s collapse during an earthquake. The same year a serious fire swept through Lundenwic, the trading settlement on the River Thames, and a small, insignificant war broke out between Mercia and Northumbria.
1. THE DAWN OF THE VIKING AGE: sunrise at Stromness, Orkney.
In 802 Beorhtric, king of Wessex, died and was succeeded by Ecgberht, son of Ealhmund; a great battle was fought between the Men of Hwicce and the Men of Wilsæte, or Wiltshire; the island monastery of Iona, the foundation of Colm Cille, or St Columba, was burned by heathens; and Harun al-Rashid, Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, sent to his friend Charlemagne a gift in the shape of an elephant called Abul-Abbas.1
These chronicle entries, sometimes laconically brief, sometimes viscerally detailed, are a narrow window on a world tense with conflict, dynamically interconnected and full of wonder, terror, politics and, above all, populated by tangible people, actors on a grand stage. We know the names of an astonishing 11,000 men and nearly 800 women who lived in Anglo-Saxon England before the year 1041.2 A probably comparable, possibly larger, number of names survives in Irish sources, many fewer in contemporary Welsh and Scottish materials. These are accidents of record and curation, no guide at all to numbers of real people living in the landscape and even less to the sorts of lives they led through those centuries of upheaval. But their survival is a thread joining us to a very real, if remote past.
Fleshing out the crude sketches of the chronicles requires some imaginative use of evidence from charters, saints’ lives, genealogies, archaeology and place names. Increasingly, these sources allow us to trace a subtler, richer narrative. After that, the unchanging rules of politics and patronage, jealousy, ambition and greed come into play. We can follow the fortunes of popes and kings, queens, archbishops, priests, pirate chiefs, sometimes of lesser nobles and, very occasionally, of the ordinary inhabitants of farm and township and of merchants and moneyers. We can reconstruct the histories of a few places in increasingly fascinating detail, as archaeology reveals glimpses of monasteries and towns, forts and farms, the afterlife and the daily grind of ceorl, peasant, slave and wifman.† Alongside the ordinary, the rational and the inevitable lie traces of the extraordinary, the wondrous, the eccentric and the downright bizarre.
2. IONA ABBEY: the fragile cradle of Atlantic Christianity.
Take Charlemagne’s elephant, Abul-Abbas. We cannot say whether it was male or female, African or Indian, where or when it was born. We know that in the spring of 801 Charlemagne, fresh from his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor by a grateful Pope Leo, was at Ravenna on the north-east coast of Italy when word came to him that envoys from Harun al-Rashid had arrived at the port of Pisa. They brought news that Charlemagne’s own mission, sent to the caliph four years earlier, was returning with extravagant gifts; or rather, one of his envoys, Isaac the Jew, was returning; the other members of the party had died. Now Charlemagne learned that one of Harun al-Rashid’s gifts was an elephant (another was an astonishing brass water clock in which mechanical knights emerged from little windows and the hours were marked by bronze balls dropping onto tiny cymbals).3 Returning to his court at Aachen, Charlemagne dispatched a fleet from Liguria to receive the gifts. That autumn, Isaac landed at Porto Venere. By now it was too late in the year to take the elephant across the Alps, so Isaac and his pachyderm spent the winter at Vercelli in Piedmont, halfway between Milan and Turin. According to the Royal Frankish Annals, Isaac duly delivered the elephant to his emperor at the imperial palace of Aachen in July 802.
We might speculate on the reception of this outsized marvel from the Orient in the capital of the Frankish kingdom, the crowds that must have lined the streets to gawp at its immense size; on the chances of a brave youth daring to reach out and poke its irresistible, leathery flanks; and on the elephant’s own experience of the northern climate and whatever quarters and diet it was given. We would like to know more, much more, than we are told by the official Frankish chronicler.
The elephant survived eight years at the emperor’s court until it died at a place called Lippeham on the River Rhine, seemingly during the advance of its master’s armies to face those of the Danish King Godfrið. Had Charlemagne hoped to impress his heathen foes, to intimidate them? Was Abul-Abbas a war elephant?
In this unlikely episode the Islamic Caliphate, Rome, Francia and Scandinavia are visibly linked by the presence of an exotic gift, by diplomacy, by sea power and military campaign. The elephant stands for all those less tangible threads which connected the far-flung worlds of the Early Medieval period. If elephants could travel such distances, what of the traders, priests and warriors, the pottery, books, swords, bundles of wool and precious gems whose histories are often harder to trace?
Where the annals fail, archaeology picks up the pieces. A fabulous hoard of metalwork buried by its owner on the banks of the River Ribble in Lancashire around the year 903, either for safekeeping or through fear, and unaccountably never retrieved, contains coins from Anglo-Saxon England, from Francia and the Arab lands, and silver arm rings from Ireland and the Baltic, recording the cumulative movements of nameless traders and raiders. A marginal note, written in an elegant Old English hand in a Latin Gospel book, records how it was stolen by the heathen army and ransomed from them by a wealthy ealdorman of Surrey as a pious gift to Christ Church, Canterbury. The timbers of a Viking longship, retrieved in the 1960s from the shallow waters of Roskilde Fjord in Denmark, reveal that it had been constructed not in a Scandinavian shipyard but in Ireland, on the banks of the River Liffey. A sherd of pottery from a monastery on the north-east coast of Scotland, destroyed by fire in about the year 800, came from a Roman amphora. A stone carving in a modest Cumbrian church depicts a scene from Norse legend in which the god Thor goes fishing for a sea monster, using an ox-skull for bait. As I write, the first ever example of a Viking boat burial from the British mainland has just been reported from Swordle Bay, on the remote Ardnamurchan peninsula in Scotland.4 One day, we must suppose, archaeologists digging somewhere in the back gardens of Aachen on the Dutch–German border will find the unlikely bones of Abul-Abbas. The story of the Viking Age is as much a tale of labyrinthine connections as it is of wars and the destinies of kings.
The collision of the Frankish and Scandinavian worlds in the year of the elephant’s death in 810 can, in retrospect, be seen as a catalytic moment in European history. Charlemagne had gained sole control of the kingdom of the Franks on the death of his brother Carloman in 771. He forged strong links with the papacy and with the empires of Islam and embarked on an aggressive programme of expansion, bringing neighbouring territories under his control. He successfully defeated or marginalized rival claimants to the throne. His wide-ranging and efficient diplomatic, military and cultural progress across a forty-year period was the first genuinely unifying national movement in post-Roman Europe. He exploited and encouraged trade within and beyond Francia—his correspondence with the Mercian King Offa reveals a complex and sophisticated use of economics as a political tool. He was united with the papacy in wishing to see the revival of an empire of Christians, sidelining the historical primacy of Constantinople as the legitimate successor of the late Roman state and defending Christianity against heathens of varying hue.
Early Medieval kings were ruthless. Charlemagne committed his fair share of murders and atrocities: forcibly converting heathens, massacring armies, laying waste swathes of farmland and deporting native peoples. But he also inspired a cultural renaissance in literature, art and architecture; the palatine chapel of the royal complex at Aachen survives as a unique expression of his vision. He attempted to construct a canal linking the rivers Rhine and Danube, built bridges and fortifications and laid plans for the empire to survive his death.
By 804 persistent campaigning in the lands of the Saxons between the Rhine and Elbe had extended Charlemagne’s dominions almost to the base of the Jutland peninsula. In that year he is said to have deported all the Saxons living north of the Elbe and given their lands to his allies the Obodrites, whose territories flanked the Baltic coast of what is now Germany. His empire now abutted the southern border of Denmark, a country resistant to Christian missionaries and reluctant to be absorbed into Charlemagne’s imperial dominion. Franks and Scandinavians were now neighbours. Danish kings were no imperialists: they had enough on their plate managing the disparate factions and communities of the western Baltic. But Charlemagne’s northerly progress was a threat that could not be ignored. King Godfrið’s response was to send a fleet and army to Sliesthorp, at the head of the River Schlei, almost the narrowest part of the neck joining Jutland to the Continental plain. The two kings exchanged embassies.5 Hostilities were avoided.
Four years later, Godfrið’s armies pre-emptively invaded the lands of the Obodrites on the southern shores of the Baltic Sea, rendering them tributary. Charlemagne, ageing, ill and perhaps unwilling to embark on another major military campaign, responded by sending his son Charles with an army to counter further Danish incursions. Fierce fighting depleted Godfrið’s army, but he took a number of Obodrite fortresses. In what seems to have been a long campaigning summer Charles countered by building a bridge across the Elbe and ravaging the lands of those peoples who, according to the official Frankish annals, had ‘defected’ to Godfrið.6
Before returning to Denmark the Danes destroyed the trading centre at Riric (possibly modern Lübeck, with its vital access to Baltic trade routes). Godfrið ordered the wholesale removal of its merchants, resettling them at a new trading town on the River Schlei at a place called Haithabu, or Hedeby. Anticipating a response from Charlemagne, Godfrið now ordered the extension, perhaps merely the completion, of a network of defensive earthworks across the base of the Jutland peninsula, from his new town at the navigable head of the Schlei as far as the River Treene, which flows into the Eider and thence into the North Sea. The Danevirke, like Offa’s Dyke, was a hugely ambitious military and cultural project of iconic national significance, stretching more than 20 miles (32 km) in its final, complex form. As late as 1864 it could still be defended, albeit unsuccessfully, against Prussian invasion.
In 809 Danish and Frankish envoys met, hostages were exchanged, and Charlemagne ordered a new fortification to be built north of the Elbe, some 30 miles (48 km) south of the Danevirke. A year later Godfrið sent a second pre-emptive force of 200 ships to invade Frisia, harrying the islands and exacting a tribute of 100 lb (45 kg) of silver. Charlemagne sent his marshals out to raise an army and arranged to rendezvous with his fleet on the Rhine at Lippeham. The death there of his prize elephant coincided with news that the Danish fleet had returned to its home base, and that Godfrið had been murdered by one of his retainers.
If Charlemagne believed that a peace signed with Godfrið’s nephew Hemming, briefly emerging from a pack of likely regal contenders, would set Frankish–Danish affairs at rest, he was mistaken: Hemming was killed in 812. A bitter war of succession between Godfrið’s sons and nephews broke out, lasting more than fifteen years. Charlemagne’s sole remaining legitimate son,‡ Louis ‘the Pious’, succeeding his father in 814, pursued a policy sponsoring exiled pretenders to the Danish throne, part of a giant plate-spinning exercise by which he maintained ambivalent sets of relations with Spanish caliphs, popes, Byzantine emperors, Slavs, Persians and Anglo-Saxon kings, not to mention disaffected members of his own dynasty. These dynastic exiles mixed with a Carolingian court overflowing with would-be Frankish kings seeking political and material support—refugees from successful and unsuccessful coups d’état; it hosted clerics seeking sponsorship for missions to convert heathens of various persuasions, scholars like Alcuin, traders, poets, musicians, engineers and metalsmiths, all part of an increasingly complex web of patronage, ambition, competition and vested interest. The closer one got to the beating heart of the royal court, the higher the potential rewards, the more deadly the consequences of failure or ill-fortune.
The destabilization of neighbouring states, a favourite political tool employed by Early Medieval kings, was an equally high-risk strategy. As the history of Western intervention in the Middle East shows, support for incumbent or prospective leaders by military and economic means might win friends, gain valuable influence and open economic doors, but it has a horrid tendency to unleash unforeseen forces: to backfire. The Carolingian policy of intervention in Danish affairs came to haunt the North Sea states for two centuries.
*
Denmark, lying outside the Latinate Christian world, had no literate chroniclers of its own. Its history, transmitted orally through the generations, flickers in and out of focus as it interacts with Francia, Britain and the lands to the east. There are stories of missionaries building churches in the trading ports of the Baltic but if, sometimes, they lived to tell the tale, they did not effect conversion where it mattered: Denmark would not have a Christian king until the middle of the tenth century. We know the names of some of its kings, the distribution of its settlements, something of its agriculture and buildings. Pagan memorials to the dead can still be seen in the countryside and two trading settlements, Ribe on the west Jutland coast and Hedeby on the River Schlei, have yielded some of the secrets of its early trading success. Some of the vessels sailed by its traders, fishermen and pirates have been recovered from its shallow coastal waters and rivers. The fact that Denmark’s armies could challenge the might of Charlemagne and its fleets terrorize all Europe speaks volumes for Danish cultural wealth and sophistication, not to mention military clout.
If ninth-century Denmark is opaque, Sweden and Norway are even more obscure. We cannot know what social or environmental factors created the circumstances in which Norwegian pirate captains set out to explore the northern seas in the late eighth century with such devastating consequences for the religious communities of coast and island. Their dynastic histories in this period, when they interacted only distantly with the worlds chronicled by Latin clerics, are utterly dark. Even so, the Danish experience, and the annals, offer some clues.
Historians agree that the Scandinavian world had not yet evolved the sort of institutions that would survive the death of its kings. In the Christian states of north-west Europe the church (its archbishops, bishops, abbots and abbesses, priests, monks, nuns and clerics) enjoyed the support and protection of kings, whose gifts of land, held by ecclesiastical communities in perpetuity and often free from obligations of military service and food renders, ensured their stability and continuity. Monastic estates were able to invest the sweat-equity of labour: they built churches, mills, and the agricultural infrastructure that fostered technical innovation. They encouraged the arts and sciences and the writing of history—above all, the production of books, the accumulation of libraries of ancient works, and inquiring scholarship of the sort exemplified by Bede and Alcuin.
In return for royal patronage, the church offered living kings and their favoured successors legitimacy and the promise that their short stay on earth would, if they were virtuous, lead to everlasting tenure at God’s side in the kingdom of heaven. With its strong sense of continuity, its skills in recording land transfers, laws and rights and its unifying message and language, the church acted as a self-interested civil service, maintaining the institutions of state whoever held the reins of temporal power.
The pre-Christian kingdoms of Scandinavia lacked those institutions and their useful by-products. They offered no alternative careers for collateral family members—alternative, that is, to fighting in the king’s war band and competing for regional power. On the kings’ part, side-tracking their family rivals’ secular ambitions by offering them the fruits of large ecclesiastical landholdings without royal interference—in effect, paying them off—was not an available option.
By the turn of the ninth century a network of élite clientèle, with all its benefits for stabilizing kingship, was deeply embedded in the Christian kingdoms. In the pre-Christian, geographically disparate lands of Scandinavia, the state was the king; with his death it collapsed. Networks of affiliation, loyalty, gift exchange and obligation, built up during his reign, were reset to zero. Each new king had to re-invent his kingdom. Only customary laws, passed down through the generations, provided rules for tribal conduct; and the force of arms might at any time prevail. Long-lasting, stable dynasties that succeeded in controlling succession, without excessive internecine warfare, were rare. In that competitive climate, opportunities abounded for young, unmarried Scandinavian men of noble or royal stock to gain glory, cash and a reputation by fighting for an ambitious warlord. But the acquisition of land on which to settle and of a wife with whom to raise a family was another, altogether more difficult matter. A life spent in exile was common.
In crude terms, the dawn of the Viking Age around the year 800 can be portrayed as the extended consequence of such unstable networks coming into conflict with Christianized states whose stability had, ironically, become a fatal liability. Monasteries, trading settlements, royal estates even, were rarely enclosed by defensive walls, palisades or ramparts: they look, in retrospect, terribly exposed, even if they are eloquent testimony to the king’s peace and the written rule of law.
That is not to say that Scandinavian societies were in any way primitive, or any more thuggish than their neighbours and rivals. The Christian chroniclers, self-appointed inheritors of Roman values of universal authority, invested much ink and vellum in de-humanizing their heathen attackers, casting them as amoral, mindless barbarians. But the Scandinavian worldview was multi-dimensional. Like ancient Greeks and Romans, Scandinavians were pantheists: their gods were sometimes playful and indulgent, often vengeful, occasionally cunning and always capricious, interfering with the world of humans, Midgard,§ as with playthings in a child’s toy set.
Oðin the one-eyed, whom the Anglo-Saxons remembered as Woden, was the senior figure of the pantheon: often cited as the progenitor of royal lines, he had received the wisdom of the knowledge of runes by hanging himself, starving, from the world ash tree, Yggdrasil, for nine days. He rode the eight-legged Sleipnir, a flying horse, across the sky. He was a shape-shifting poet whose destiny was to receive into his hall, Valhalla, half of the warriors who died well in battle so that at the end of time, in the last great battle of Ragnarök, he might lead them to their doom. Sacrifice, wisdom, apocalypse, revenge, terrible divine power and magic lie at the heart of the Scandinavian worldview. That those same elements are also fundamental to Christianity, whose repertoire of Old and New Testament heroes was drawn from a blend of ancient Jewish royal histories and Near Eastern mysticism, is one of history’s richer ironies.
It is quite possible that by the time the stories of the Scandinavian gods and their relations with mortals were written down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, something of Christ’s story had been grafted onto those of Oðin, Thor, Loki, Freja and the rest. Scandinavians found themselves attracted to much of what Christian priests told them of their faith and its disciplines. They were impressed by the military might and organizational capabilities of the inheritors of Rome and above all, perhaps, by their skilful use of writing. Scandinavia had its literary élite too; but runes were very much an inscriptional, messaging alphabet, found on memorial stones and carved into wood, or as graffiti. Norse laws and literature, which seem to have been plentiful, were transmitted orally.
What the Scandinavian peoples found hard to comprehend was not so much that Christians should only have one God but that they should insist that believers worship no other (they had heard much the same from the Islamic world). Even so, the fatal gap between the Scandinavian psyche and that of the Romano-Christian world was not so much an incompatibility of moral philosophy as one of institution, technology and geography.
*
The three ship-loads of Norwegians who encountered an unsuspecting king’s reeve on the south coast of Wessex in about 789 may not have been the first of their kind, even if their assault stands as the earliest recorded Viking attack on Britain, enshrined in an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. A Mercian charter of 792, issued by King Offa, confirmed existing exceptions to certain church privileges in Kent (then a Mercian possession) in their obligation to provide levies against ‘marauding heathens’, so the idea of piratical northerners may not have been totally novel.7 The annals that recorded their predations were partisan, their spheres of interest limited, so we must allow for unrecorded attacks of which only scant traces survive: the community of a monastery at Lyminge, a few miles inland of the south Kent coast, was granted refuge at Canterbury in the face of a real or perceived threat of raids; a Northumbrian envoy, returning home from pleading for the support of Charlemagne for the exiled King Eardwulf, was captured by pirates.
The first wave of recorded attacks has, nevertheless, a geographical shape to it: Lindisfarne, the island monastery off the Northumbrian coast, plundered in 793; Bede’s church at Jarrow, a day’s sail south of Lindisfarne, a year later. Then silence until 800, when Hartness and Tynemouth, also on the Northumbrian coast, seem to have been targets. These North Sea raids might plausibly be ascribed to Danish ships, crossing the southern North Sea from their homelands, exploring, probing.
The scale of the raiding is difficult to assess: there is no doubting the ability of the Danes to send large fleets to sea, and there may have been a political dimension: Northumbria and Wessex were allies of Charlemagne; the Danes his antagonists. Danish traders must already have known the geography of Britain’s east and south coasts: they conducted business at markets in East Anglia, Yorkshire, Kent and Wessex as well as at Lundenwic on the Thames. What we cannot say is whether the first raiders, targeting the easy pickings of coastal minsters, used intelligence gained from traders or whether they had been traders themselves. Perhaps our desire to distinguish between the two would have baffled them.
There is another, northern and western dimension to the opening of the Viking Age; and it may have begun some time before the attacks on Wessex and Northumbria. Most scholars agree that the Annals of Ulster, a key Irish chronicle, records attacks by pirates of Norwegian origin: the year 795, for example, saw ‘the burning of Rechru by the heathens, and the shrine was overwhelmed and laid waste’.8 Rechru is either Rathlin Island, off the northern coast of Antrim or, more likely, Lambay near Dublin. In 798 Inish Patrick, off the Dublin coast, was raided and cattle taken. In 802 one of Irish Christianity’s greatest monasteries, Colm Cille’s foundation on Iona, was burned. Four years later it, or one of its dependencies, was attacked again; this time sixty-eight members of the community were martyred.
Behind the clipped language of the annals lie human stories, narratives of tragedy. A remarkable drawing on slate has, in the last few years, surfaced from excavations at the island monastery of Inchmarnock, just off the west coast of Bute.9 Dubbed the ‘hostage stone’, it appears to depict a ship powered by a sail and oars, and a warrior with wild hair, dressed in chainmail, leading a prisoner who seems to be carrying a box, possibly a reliquary. It reminds one, hauntingly, of the sorts of images children create when faced with the trauma of warfare.
Historians have to tried to extrapolate a coherent narrative from these events. Some have seen them as part of a more substantial series of campaigns than the sources allow, as evidence of raiding armies capable of supporting themselves and overwintering on foreign soil. There have been several suggestions that Shetland and Orkney had already been partially settled by Scandinavians by the time that the Viking raids made their grand historical stage call. Orkney, after all, lies no more than three days’ sailing west of Norway. Others have read the contemporary sources at face value: these were opportunistic exploratory raids by independent captains seeking cash and glory for themselves and their dependents but limited in numbers, time and space. Whatever the truth, after 806 the Irish Annals refer only fitfully to fresh attacks from across the seas until the 820s, when notices of Viking activity, notably in Ulster, increase dramatically. In this decade Ireland bore the brunt of pirate aggression.
3. THE ART OF TRAUMA: Viking raiders appear to abduct a monk, in a drawing on slate from Inchmarnock island in the Sound of Bute.
Those first twenty years of raids affected Insular societies only at a very local level. The disproportionate attention they have received from chroniclers, and from historians since, has magnified their impact. There is little evidence that monasteries were destroyed as functioning settlements in that first wave of raids. Lindisfarne, Iona and others still supported monastic communities in the ninth century and beyond. It is true that there had been a general decline in standards since the seventh-century ‘golden age’ of monasticism, whose intellectual and artistic glories lay in the past even in Bede’s day. Scholarship had given way to acquisition; strict rules had lapsed; a more secular world had encroached on the holy sanctuaries. Whether that decline began before, or as a result of, Viking raids is not nearly so certain.
There is some evidence, too, that monastic communities were not quite as unprotected as the more lurid tales suggest. At Jarrow, if historians are correct in believing that it was the monastery ‘at the mouth of the River Don’ recorded in the ‘E’ version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the raiders did not even get away scot-free. Their chieftain was killed (by whom—militant monks or local militia?) and a great storm sank several of their ships.10 On the other hand there is no record at all of the fortunes of Jarrow, or its twin foundation at Wearmouth, in the ninth century; and it is true that two of Jarrow’s major buildings, when excavated, proved to have been burned down and not rebuilt. But silence does not mean non-existence, and a building may burn by accident. The jury is still out.
Alcuin, the Northumbrian scholar who spent much of his career at the court of Charlemagne, wrote a letter of support to the bishop of Lindisfarne in the wake of the raid of 793, lamenting the day when ‘pagans desecrated the sanctuaries of God, and poured out the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope, trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like shit in the street’.11 Alcuin’s perspective was that of the prophet Isaiah, of God punishing the sins of the Jews. In Alcuin’s view these deadly visitations were punishment for sins already committed. Archaeology has not yet been able to confirm the state of the monastery on Lindisfarne immediately after the raid;# but the community was able, in later decades when the threat was even greater and more persistent, to take with them more or less complete the incorrupt body of their holy saint Cuthbert along with the precious head of King Oswald and some of the relics of the founding bishop, Aidan. And Cuthbert’s community maintained a written record of both their possessions and their relations with kings, Vikings and the wider church. That record, the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, has proved to be of the highest value in illuminating the effects of two centuries of upheaval on the British monasteries.
The community on Iona, which suffered multiple raids, began a process of removing some of its treasures and monks to a new, apparently safer, location at Kells in what is now Co. Meath, from 807; but Iona still functioned, albeit in a reduced state. Its archaeology has been ill served by a succession of small-scale excavations, none of which has succeeded in piecing together that crucial period in its history. Much later destruction of its heritage was conducted in the name of the Protestant ‘reformers’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; even so, the abbey’s excellent museum contains sculpture and other artefacts of the highest quality.
In only one case has the Viking history of an Insular monastery been comprehensively explored by excavation. The long, thin, hammerhead-shaped Tarbat peninsula, jutting out into the North Sea north of Inverness has, for much of its history, been easier to reach by sea than by land. It is a natural stopping-off point on the east coast route to Orkney and Shetland: sheltered, with fine access inland and close to a great centre of Early Medieval power, the Pictish kingdom of Fortriu. Even today it is a four-hour drive north from Edinburgh, across or around the rocky massif of the Grampians, beyond the Great Glen and out along the northern edge of the ethereally lovely Moray Firth.
On its north-western edge, where the Tarbat peninsula forms the jutting lower mandible of the Dornoch Firth, lies a sheltered harbour called Portmahomack; as the Tarbat∫ name suggests, an overland portage route once connected it to the Cromarty Firth. On the south-east side of the peninsula there is direct access, via the Moray Firth, to the Great Glen and thence, with a portage between Loch Ness and Loch Oich and another into Loch Lochy, to Loch Linnhe and the western seaways: to Iona and beyond. Tarbat is on the same latitude as the southern tip of Norway, 250 miles (400 km) to the east.
Like other such liminal landscapes, the peninsula has an air of otherworldliness; but its apparent remoteness today is illusory: in the Early Christian period it was a busy place, and it lay in fertile lands. Beautifully carved cross slabs stand (or stood) at Nigg, at Shandwick and at Hilton of Cadboll, testifying to a concentration of early churches with wealthy, not to say regal, patrons. The site of a probable early bishopric lies just along the coast of the firth at Rosemarkie, and visible directly across Moray is the great royal Pictish fortress of Burghead, while the hillfort of King Bruide, ally of Colm Cille in the late sixth century, may be that which guards the entrance to the Great Glen at Craig Phadraig.
Tarbat is mostly low lying, its skyline punctured today only by the grain silos and venerable beech trees that speak of landed wealth, of stability and order. But it has the same edgy sensibility as Whithorn in Wigtownshire, or Iona and Lindisfarne: close to power, remote from the secular world; half belonging to the sea. At Portmahomack a modest whitewashed chapel stands on a small rise set back from the shore and protected from the worst of the North Sea’s tempers. Over the years, fragments of sculpture have been recovered from, or spotted in, the churchyard and surrounding fields. Its harbour and its ancient connectedness made this tiny village a key location on north-east Scotland’s otherwise largely inaccessible coast.
Bede says that the Picts were converted by the missionary work of Colm Cille in the late sixth century. Others have suggested that St Ninian, a more dubious historical character, was responsible. Behind these two apparently contradictory traditions may lie the identities of not one but two Pictish kingdoms: Fortriu, the lands around the Moray Firth, and Atholl, south of the Grampians and centred on Strathearn and the headwaters of the River Tay.12 Before Martin Carver’sΩ excavations at Portmahomack, between 1995 and 2002, arguments over the origins of Pictish monasticism were, in any case, largely academic: no Pictish monastery site had been identified, let alone investigated. Only the marvellous carved stones bearing hybrid Christian and Pictish symbols that grace the Scottish landscape (and fill its museums) stood to map the geography of its early church. But an aerial photograph taken by archaeologist Barri Jones offered the first key evidence to back up the sculpture on the Tarbat peninsula: the crop mark of a telltale D-shaped enclosure ditch surrounding Portmahomack’s church.≈
Excavation of the interior of the redundant church and in the fields to the south and west, over several years, hit the archaeological jackpot. Developing from a small cemetery with sculpted stonework in the sixth century, more or less contemporary with Colm Cille on Iona, a monastery flourished here in the seventh and eighth centuries. The presence of vellum and glass-making workshops, an elaborately conceived smith’s hall and the exalted standards of the sculpture being produced on the peninsula, elevate Portmahomack to the first rank of ecclesiastical communities alongside Jarrow, Lindisfarne and Iona. Careful management of the local water supply allowed its monks to construct a mill for grinding corn. A metalled road serving the industrial complex must have added the final touch of sophistication. The production of vellum, a complicated series of chemical and mechanical processes requiring considerable expertise, implies the presence of a scriptorium: books were being written and produced here; there must have been a library.
Bede, had he visited, would have recognized its layout and culture, the sounds of chant, forge and lowing calves, the smells of byre, steeping tank and wax candle; the timeless magic of the eucharist and the daily hubbub and gossip of the guest house. The workshops, and the church, flourished for a century and more. It is tempting, in the historical and political context of the site, to associate Portmahomack’s heyday with Nechtan mac Dargarto, the king who, in consultation with Bede, brought the Pictish church into line with Roman orthodoxy around the year 712.13
In uncovering this unique evidence for a thriving, wealthy Pictish monastery, the excavation team, based at the University of York, had first to remove deposits dating to later periods, constructing as they did so a narrative in reverse. The church itself, still in use well into the twentieth century, testified to Christian continuity on the site. Evidence from later phases of the monastic landscape showed that in the ninth and tenth centuries production of metalwork and crops also continued: it survived the Viking Age. But in between these phases and those of its monastic pomp in the eighth century there was stark evidence of an abrupt, not to say catastrophic, event. A great carved cross slab had been smashed and burned, its charred fragments scattered over the site; layers of lurid purple, orange, pink and red soils told a story of absolute destruction by fire some time between 780 and 820, dated by C14 analysis from the abundant burnt material.∂
4. THE CHURCH AT PORTMAHOMACK on the Tarbat peninsula, Easter Ross: now a museum, once the site of a great Pictish monastery.
At least one member of the community, buried in the church, had died from a sword wound to the head. It seems reasonable to conclude that seaborne raiders perpetrated the arson: the trashing of the sculpture seems particularly pointed, even vindictive. These decades are historically obscure, but it looks as though the raid on Portmahomack is only the most visible evidence of a concerted campaign against Fortriu which culminated in a great raid recorded in 839: ‘The heathens won a battle against the men of Fortriu and Eóganán son of Aengus... and others almost innumerable fell there.’14 From this disaster the legendary Cináed mac Ailpín emerged.
*
Archaeology and history combine to paint a picture of wanton, if periodic, harassment of the most easily accessible coastal and estuarine monasteries. Even so, those communities seem largely to have survived and their sufferings, psychological and material, at first had little effect on the wider economies of the Insular kingdoms of the early ninth century, let alone on the functioning of the state. Kings on both sides of the Irish Sea and across the Channel concerned themselves with administration, with the contents of their treasuries, with noisy neighbours and troublesome nephews. Hostilities broke out periodically between Mercians, West Saxons, Welsh and East Angles; competing dynasties of Northumbrian kings deposed one another in dizzying succession. Kings in Dál Riata, Strathclyde, Fortriu and Atholl fought for primacy in North Britain and the Isles, and with the kings of North Irish kindreds for overlordship of the western seaways. The kingdoms of Wales—Gwynedd, Powys, Ceredigion, Dyfed, Glywysing, Gwent and Brycheiniog—sought to assert tributary rights over each other and defend themselves from Mercian aggression.
Bishops and abbots sought to consolidate and extend their lands, to defend their rights and privileges. Ealdormen sought preferment in the royal household; their retainers hoped for honour in the king’s war band and the reward of gifts and land on which to raise families. Farmers hoped for good harvests and feared ominous portents like fiery dragons in the sky and the appearance of comets. Occasionally they suffered hunger and pestilence. There is a surprising amount of evidence in the annals for diseases in livestock, whose impacts were probably felt much more widely and over a longer period than periodic predations from across the sea.
Beneath the surface, underlying the bald record of events, swirling undercurrents can be detected. Lowland Britain’s most powerful kings in the eighth century had been drawn from Mercia’s stable royal dynasties. From 716, for eighty years, just three kings ruled here—and one of those for a single year.π The last of the three laid claim to overlordship of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and much of Wales. King Offa’s most visible monument to the strength of that regime is his dyke, built to demarcate Mercia from the Welsh kingdoms and as a testosterone cenotaph to his powers of coercion. In a reign of almost forty years he established Mercia’s supremacy over Wessex, Kent and the other southern kingdoms of Britain. He controlled the valuable trading settlement at Lundenwic on the Thames, key to southern England’s economic hinterland. He was able to appoint archbishops at Canterbury and to raise the see of Lichfield to archiepiscopal status, minting high-value silver coinage and reforming land rights. He interacted with the Frankish court, issued charters as Rex Anglorum, King of the English, and constructed the first fortified settlements or burhs, anticipating Ælfred by a century.
A rapprochement with Charlemagne in 796, cancelling a Frankish trade embargo and sealing a deal on safe passage for merchants and pilgrims (but not, pointedly, for Mercian traders masquerading as pilgrims), came too late for Offa. His death that year sent ripples across Britain’s political pond. His son, Ecgfrith, succeeded him but died almost immediately. According to Alcuin, Ecgfrith had ‘not died for his own sins; but the vengeance for the blood shed by the father has reached the son’.15
Offa’s rule, ambitious and impressive, had been that of military overlord as much as statesman. During the uncertainty of the interregnum the Kentish nobility took the opportunity to throw off Mercian rule and raised one Eadberht Praen to the throne at Canterbury. Æðelheard, a Mercian appointee to the archbishopric there, thought it wise to flee. Offa left no other sons; his throne now passed to Coenwulf, only very distantly related but seemingly enjoying the support of senior Mercian ealdormen. Coenwulf moved quickly and violently to suppress the rebellion in Kent. In 798 he seized Eadberht Praen, had him blinded and his hands cut off. He appointed his own brother, Cuðred, as a client king in Kent and restored Æðelheard to his see in Canterbury.
In the same year Lundenwic, the East Saxon trading centre on the banks of the Thames at Aldwych, suffered a serious fire.16 Mercian kings had long enjoyed the fruits of its commercial success; had this been the last vengeful act of Eadberht Praen, an accident or a Scandinavian raid? Mercian power was, in any event, restored over Kent, Canterbury and the Channel ports. Normal service appeared to have resumed.
Coenwulf’s chance to reinforce Mercian supremacy over his West Saxon neighbours to the south came in 802 with the passing of their king, Beorhtric. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, on the day of his death the Men of Hwicce (an ancient kingdom, much reduced in status, consisting broadly of Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and eastern parts of Warwickshire, and long subject to Mercian rule) crossed the Thames, the frontier river, and invaded Wiltshire. But the opportunity evaporated: the Mercian force was defeated, the leaders of both armies slain. In retrospect it was seen as a turning point in the fortunes of the two kingdoms. The new king of the West Saxons, Ecgberht was the grandfather of Ælfred.
Under King Coenwulf, Mercian control of Canterbury was maintained, at least nominally. But tensions between church and state, between Mercia and Kent, were a continuing source of conflict. Since St Augustine’s mission of 597 the primate of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had maintained his see at Canterbury, and Kentish kings had enjoyed the political advantages of that primacy. In 735 Northumbria, then the most powerful of the English kingdoms, was granted the dignity of its own archbishop, with his throne at York close to the church built by Bishop Paulinus in the seventh century among the ruins of the Roman city. London, former capital of Roman Britain, had never had an archbishop. In 786 King Offa persuaded the pope that the senior Anglo-Saxon kingdom must be served by its own archbishop, more inclined to pursue its king’s policies and preferable as a recipient of royal Mercian land grants. Lichfield became Britain’s third archdiocesan see. The appointment of one of Offa’s men, Æðelheard, to Canterbury in 792, inflamed Kentish sentiment against its overlord. Kent wanted a Kentish archbishop, and no competition from Lichfield.
Archbishop Æðelheard, restored to his see after the Kentish rebellion of 798, travelled to Rome in 801 and, perhaps surprisingly, put the Kentish case to the pope. On the way, we know, he stayed with Alcuin close to the trading settlement at Quentovic on the estuary of the River Canche, near modern Étaples.17 He was lucky to avoid the earthquake that struck the papal basilica of St Peter’s that year. He made his case to the pope, the restored Leo III, and returned to Kent in 802 or 803 with instructions that the Lichfield archdiocese be reduced to its former status. The primacy of Canterbury was restored, although with what damage to relations between the archbishop and King Coenwulf it is hard to say. Æðelheard’s loyalties to Offa had, perhaps, been personal, even familial; he had become a Canterbury man.
Æðelheard’s successor, Wulfred (805–832), suffered even more strained relations with the Mercian king. He set about consolidating the considerable landed assets of Christ Church, the cathedral minster at Canterbury, and began to mint his own coinage. In 814 he, like his predecessor, travelled to Rome, probably along the ancient pilgrimage route called the Via Francigena through Francia and Lombardy, punctuated by Christian hostels and monastic communities well used to taking in pilgrims, including kings. It was the year in which Charlemagne died and was succeeded by Louis the Pious. The two following years were tumultuous: Pope Leo was the subject of a second coup, died a year later and was followed in quick succession by Popes Stephen IV—during whose brief reign the English Quarter in Rome, the Schola Saxonum, burned down—and Paschal I.
Wulfred, returning from Rome, found that Coenwulf had performed what amounted to a coup against Canterbury. He had called a synod at Chelsea, on the banks of the Thames upstream from Lundenwic. The synod placed severe limits on Wulfred’s powers; ruled that 25 December should henceforth be the day on which Christ’s Mass should be celebrated; enacted episcopal, effectively secular control over the abbots and abbesses of the minster;∆ and sanctioned the sale or gift of monastic lands to secular lords.18 Wulfred was sent into exile or deprived of his office for some time between 817 and 825, when a synod at the unidentified site of Clofesho** resolved the dispute in Canterbury’s favour. By then Coenwulf was dead and his brother and successor, Ceolwulf (821–823), had been deposed in a coup by a rival dynasty. The new Mercian king, Beornwulf, attempted to follow the practice of his forebears by placing a member of his kin, Baldred, on the Kentish throne; he also set out to make peace with Canterbury.
Beornwulf (823–825) is unlikely to have been related to his two predecessors: he came from a line of the Mercian nobility with a penchant for giving their sons names beginning with ‘B’. The heartland of their territory seems to have lain in the central Midlands, perhaps near Breedon on the Hill in Leicestershire, where a great minster stood. Its church, perched high above the surrounding countryside (and now uncomfortably close to the edge of a stone quarry), occupied the interior of an Iron Age fortress. A collection of fragments of high-quality sculpture can still be seen there, testament to its Early Medieval importance.
One of the new king’s most pressing political tasks was to deal with the festering issue of Coenwulf’s daughter, Cwenðryð.†† The ancestral lands of the ‘C’ dynasty family lay around Winchcombe‡‡ in the former kingdom of the Hwicce, where Cwenðryð was abbess of a wealthy minster. Since the late seventh century kings had exploited their extensive landholdings to endow the church with estates which they placed under the control of collateral members of their family, ensuring that the land, although alienated to the church in perpetuity, could still be passed as a family asset down through successive generations. Very substantial holdings, free from many of the burdens of renders and service owed by dependent farmers and warrior nobles, had been accumulated over a century and a half. Minsters, those churches with origins as monasteries endowed with substantial estates, were big players in agriculture, trade, technology and both secular and religious politics. They commanded wealth and the powers of patronage that went with it.
5. A FABULOUS BEAST of the Viking and Christian imagination: cross shaft fragment from Breedon on the Hill.
Cwenðryð’s possession of Winchcombe, a community founded on her family’s estates, was not at issue; her control, as abbess, of two other monastic communities, at Minster-in-Thanet and at Reculver (both ancient and lucrative foundations),§§ was a cause of considerable resentment in Kent. These may have come into her possession in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Kentish rebellion under Eadberht Praen in 796, perhaps over a period of several years. The historian of the Anglo-Saxon church, John Blair, likens such acquisitions to ‘a speculator assembling a portfolio’.19 The breadth and value of Cwenðryð’s portfolio is indicated by Thanet’s possession of three trading ships, which plied the waters between the abbey and markets in Frisia, Francia and Lundenwic, where it benefited from the remission of port tolls.20
Cwenðryð’s entrepreneurial spirit is cast in a much more sinister light by a tradition which held that she had done away with her infant brother, Cynehelm, Coenwulf’s only legitimate heir, when he was seven years old. The crime, according to William of Malmesbury—writing in the twelfth century when the story was still circulating—was revealed miraculously (a dove carried a message to the pope, who spilled the beans) and the dead boy was elevated to the status of a martyr. His shrine at Winchcombe became a popular site for pilgrimages, and his fame assured him a bit-part in the Canterbury Tales.##
A series of charters recorded between 821 and 827 show that although Cwenðryð was able to keep her lucrative abbacies, she was successively relieved of other possessions in Kent and Middlesex, part of a diplomatic initiative by King Beornwulf to pacify Archbishop Wulfred and, perhaps, to weaken the power of his own rivals.21 Reading between the lines, it looks as though the see-saw of political initiative had tilted in favour of an independent Canterbury.
The rapid succession of four kings following the death of Coenwulf in 821 is an indication of instability in the ninth-century Mercian state.∫∫ A second indication is the speed at which King Ecgberht of the West Saxons, twenty years into his reign, was able to shake off Mercian superiority and assert his independence during the following decade. The reverse in fortunes appears sudden and dramatic. An entry in most surviving versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 825 is eloquent in its laconic account:
þy ilcan geare gefeaht Ecgbryht cyning 7ΩΩ Beornwulf cyning on Ellendune 7 Ecgbryht sige nam 7 þær wæs micel wæl geslægen...
King Ecgberht and King Beornwulf fought at Ellendun and Ecgberht was victorious and great slaughter was made there... then he sent his son, Æðelwulf, from his levies [fyrð]... to Kent with a great force and they drove King Baldred north over Thames, and the Kentishmen submitted to him, and the men of Surrey and Sussex and Essex... And the same year the king of the East Angles and the court turned to Ecgberht as their protector and guardian... and the same year the East Angles slew Beornwulf, king of the Mercians.22
The location of the battle at Ellendun, unidentified but seemingly in Wiltshire south of Swindon, suggests that Beornwulf was the aggressor, possibly with the aim of reinforcing his own, thin domestic credentials. Mercia’s inability to maintain a stable leadership continued. An ealdorman, Ludeca, succeeded Beornwulf. In 827 he too was slain alongside five of his ealdormen, leaders of the shire levies. We do not know if this was West Saxon or East Anglian aggression, or civil war, but the loss of so many high-ranking leaders in the space of six years is the plain-speaking testimony of an unfolding dynastic catastrophe. Ludeca’s successor, Wiglaf, from a line whose power base seems to have lain around Repton in modern Derbyshire (the so-called ‘W’ dynasty of Mercian kings) came to the throne with his kingdom on the ropes. In 829 he was driven out by King Ecgberht. In triumph, the king of Wessex issued a series of silver coins from London, with REX ECGBERHT on the obverse surrounding a cross; and LUNDONIA CIVIT[AS] on the reverse: to the victor the economic spoils.23 In the same year Ecgberht was able to lead his levies to Dore in what is now South Yorkshire (very likely then the boundary between the kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria) and receive the submission of the North. By 830 he was claiming overlordship over parts of Wales. Offa’s Mercian empire lay shrunken and outflanked.
The compilers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, reflecting on these events during a peaceful interlude in King Ælfred’s reign in the early 890s, noted under the year 829 that Ecgberht was the eighth king to enjoy the status of Bretwalda—that is, to wield imperium over all the other kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons. It is an overtly propagandist declaration: the first seven entries on the list were taken directly from Bede, writing in 731.24 Conveniently missing out the powerful eighth-century Mercian overlords Æðelbald and Offa, this is a self-conscious West Saxon attempt to legitimize the primacy of Ælfred’s line, to draw on the golden age of the seventh century and prefigure its inevitable success in saving the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms from Viking invasion.
Historians have a way of smoothing out unsightly wrinkles. A year after what was, ostensibly, the decisive moment in the rise of Wessex, Wiglaf had been restored and was striking his own coins at London. Mercia survived, albeit with the loss of its authority over East Anglia, Kent, Sussex and Surrey.
* Hartness, later Hartlepool; see endnote 4.
† Ceorl: pronounced churl; a ‘free’ farmer subject to the lordship of a thegn or dreng. Wifman: literally a female man; a housewife.
‡ Charles the Younger died after suffering a stroke in 811.
§ Miðgarðr in Old Norse: Middle Earth.
# As I write, much-anticipated fresh excavations have begun on the island, close to the later medieval priory ruins.
∫ There are twelve Tarbat or Tarbert names across Scotland and two in Ireland. Each one locates a narrow strip of land, an isthmus, separating two nearby stretches of open water. Several can be demonstrated to have been the sites of historical portages.
Ω Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at York University; he is also widely known for his campaign of excavation at Sutton Hoo.
≈ Circular or D-shaped enclosures are diagnostic of Early Medieval monastic sites— or of temporary Viking forts.
∂ C14, a radioactive isotope of carbon absorbed by all livings things, decays at a more or less consistent rate. Charred wood, in particular, can be roughly dated by measuring the amount left in its cells after burning.
π Æðelbald (716–757); Beornred (757) and Offa (757–796).
∆ Since the earliest days of the Insular church the independence of monastic houses had been challenged by the assertion of papal authority through its bishops.
** The most favoured location for this lost site is the magnificent seventh-century basilica at Brixworth in Northamptonshire.
†† Quoenðryð in contemporary charters.
‡‡ Winchcombe, once the centre of an important and wealthy shire of the same name, is now a small town in north Gloucestershire.
§§ Thanet, now part of Kent, was still an island, separated from the mainland by the Wantsum channel and the River Stour, through which ships passed between the English Channel at Richborough castle, and Reculver. Both were former Roman forts now occupied by monastic settlements, sited in key locations to exploit maritime traffic and onward trade to Kent’s hinterland.
## In the Nun’s Priest’s Tale.
∫∫ Ceolwulf 821–823; Beornwulf 823–825; Ludeca 825–827; Wiglaf 827–829 and 830–839.
ΩΩ The ‘7’ symbol was used in manuscripts to denote ‘and’.