NEWTON’S CRADLE—ST CUTHBERT—A SLAVE-KING—THE ÆLFRED–GUÐRUM TREATY—ÆLFRED THE OVERLORD—THE BURHS—A RENAISSANCE—DANISH RULE—TOWN AND COUNTRY
In 879 the Northumbrian monastic community of St Cuthbert had not yet adopted Ælfred and his offspring as royal patrons. The catastrophic loss of Bernician royal power in the ninth century, which culminated in the conquest of southern Northumbria in the 860s and 870s, precipitated a long-term crisis in their fortunes. Viking depredations in the Western Isles and Ireland had prompted the flight of the Iona community with the relics of their precious Colm Cille, both to Ireland and to Dunkeld in Strathtay under the protection of Cináed mac Ailpín. Many monasteries, the beating heart of the northern church, had been abandoned or survived in much reduced circumstances; others, like Portmahomack, served new, secular masters. The economic and psychological impact of these events on the institution of the church was extreme. It survived by adapting.
When their patron kings failed them, royal monastic foundations had to sup with the devil in a bid to retain their power and their estates. Without productive monastic lands and communities of priests and monks, abbots, craftsmen and farmers protected by the king’s peace, the paruchiae, the earthly kingdoms of Cuthbert and Bridget, David, Colm Cille and Patrick must fall, like their temporal counterparts. And so they began to court the enemy.
21. THE VICTORIAN STATUE of Ælfred at his Berkshire birthplace of Wantage (now in Oxfordshire); unveiled in 1877, and sculpted by Victor, Count Gleichen, a captain in the Royal Navy.
The two-centuries-long survival battle of the Northumbrian church, beginning so inauspiciously with the notorious raid on Lindisfarne in 793, played out like a military campaign across the physical and political landscapes of the North. Uncanny parallels between the defensive and offensive strategies employed by the church and those improvised by kings reinforce the idea of policy developing on the hoof: retrenching, even fleeing when necessary; taking opportunities when they arose to recover, reinforce and re-invent themselves, ensuring their ultimate survival. Dynasties in Mercia, East Anglia, Ireland and Pictland had failed to adapt; Ælfred was an apprentice learning a new set of rules. The Insular Christian state must anticipate, comprehend and negotiate with the Viking worldview.
We can reconstruct a surprisingly detailed account of the fortunes of St Cuthbert’s community at this period. That is a testament, in the first place, to its robust survival into and beyond the years of Norman conquest and to the assiduous, even tenacious, records kept by its monks. These are supplemented by scattered accounts preserved in disparate, often contradictory sources, frequently obscure and sometimes simply fabricated, which nevertheless paint a rich and complex picture of religious politics.*
By the time of the 793 Viking raid Lindisfarne’s property portfolio, assembled through the donations of Bernician kings across 150 years, comprised large parts of the modern county of Northumberland and the Scottish Border region, from East Lothian beyond the River Tweed to the River Tyne in the south. Other lucrative and politically advantageous estates had been acquired near York and in the ancient Roman civitas capital at Luguvalium (Carlisle) on the west coast. Each of these monastic territories, like those belonging to secular lords, was made up of contiguous parcels of land centred on a vill† and its dependencies, often in multiples of six or twelve. Farm rendered to vill, vill rendered to shire and shire to the lordship of St Cuthbert. Lindisfarne’s impressive portfolio enabled its inhabitants to enjoy the fruits of a mixed agricultural economy, to specialize in the production of grain, wool and illuminated manuscripts the equal of any in Europe; to fill the shelves of their libraries with the works of ancient scholars and their churches with jewel-encrusted reliquaries and the finest stone sculpture. They sponsored missionary activities on the Continent, maintaining diplomatic relations with kings and bishops across the Atlantic region and, far beyond, with Rome. Sometimes Northumbrian kings, tired of the warrior life and seeking peace and communion outwith the war band, abdicated to retire on the Holy Island haven cut off by the tide twice a day.
Northumbria at one time encompassed no fewer than four episcopal dioceses, with seats at Lindisfarne, Abercorn on the River Forth, Hexham in the Tyne Valley and Whithorn on the Solway coast. It was an empire of élite endeavour. From Aidan, in 635, the Lindisfarne foundation was ruled under seventeen abbot-bishops up to the year 900. Its most celebrated—and reluctant—bishop, Cuthbert, died as the community’s head in 687 and twelve years later his incorrupt body was translated to a special sarcophagus that became a sort of spiritual tribal totem. The stability and continuity of the community’s leadership through times of internal and external strife and the ultimate threat of apostasy is a reflection, as it was with royal dynasties, of its robustness as an institution.
By the time of the Viking raids, Abercorn had already been lost to Northumbrian control. The last Bishop of Whithorn is mentioned a few years after 800, indicating the decline of that community in the face of Scandinavian expansion in the Irish Sea.‡ Hexham’s last Anglo-Saxon bishop died in 821, its see absorbed into that of Lindisfarne to cover the whole of northern Northumbria. To the south, the ancient kingdom of Deira in southern Northumbria had been represented by a single see at York since the middle of the seventh century. After 735 it enjoyed the dignity and power of an archbishop, and has done so in an unbroken sequence since, exercising at least nominal power over the northern sees. Its survival in the crucible of Anglo-Scandinavian conflict is no less remarkable than that of St Cuthbert’s community, even if it is harder to trace in detail.§
In the days of Bishop Ecgred (830–845), in response to periodic and ultimately unsustainable attacks by Viking raiders, the community on Lindisfarne decided to relocate to a place of greater safety on one of its original estates, at Norham on Tweed. Leaving behind, perhaps, an estate manager and sufficient workers to maintain the island’s farms,# the community of St Cuthbert relocated wholesale: not just its priests and monks but its precious relics (Oswald, Aidan, Cuthbert, the bones of King Ceolwulf, and others) and its treasures; even the fabric of the wooden church. Further crises were precipitated by the civil war of the 860s between Osberht and Ælle, both of whom ‘stole’ lands from the saint, and by Hálfdan’s second invasion of 875 when he sailed up the River Tyne, ‘devastating everything and sinning cruelly’ against Cuthbert.1
Hálfdan may shortly thereafter have been deposed by his own army, and he seems not to have been able to exercise direct royal rule over the North; he was certainly dead by 877. After that a series of client kings, the diminished successors to Osberht and Ælle, ruled in York between 867 and about 880. Ecgberht, Ricsige, and a short-lived successor, also named Ecgberht,2 proved unsatisfactory to both the Host and the Northumbrian nobility. Weak kings were of no use to Cuthbert: without effective patrons and protectors, and in the face of heathen invaders, the power of the northern church was under the severest threat. Even the long-lived Archbishop Wulfhere endured temporary exile in Mercia, having been deposed with Ecgberht in 872.
Cuthbert himself had intervened in the Northumbrian royal succession during a crisis in the 680s;∫ now, his spiritual descendants must play the same hand. A single coin, very likely minted in Lincolnshire in the 880s, offers archaeological corroboration for the rule of a King Guðrøðr in southern Northumbria, otherwise known principally from a very odd entry in the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto describing events in the years after Hálfdan’s departure.3 It seems that St Cuthbert appeared one night in a vision to Eadred, the abbot of Carlisle. The dead saint adjured him to:
Go over the Tyne to the army of the Danes and tell them that if they wish to be obedient to me [that is, to St Cuthbert], they should show you a certain young man named Guðrøðr son of Harthacanute, the slave of a certain widow.
Cuthbert gave detailed instructions for Eadred and the Host to offer money to the widow to redeem the boy and then to:
22. THE RIVER TYNE AT NEWBURN, its lowest fording point—possibly Oswigesdune, the site of Guðrøð’s investiture around 880.
Lead him before the whole multitude so that they may elect him king and at the ninth hour lead him with the whole army upon the hill which is called OswigesduneΩ and there place on his right arm a golden armlet,≈ and thus they shall all constitute him king.4
What Cuthbert had ordered was duly enacted by the abbot and by the Host, who ‘honourably received’ Guðrøðr. The young man was inaugurated as king and swore peace and fidelity over the body of the saint in his modest wooden coffin, produced by the abbot for the occasion. The new king, instructed by the visionary Cuthbert through his real-life proxy, then proceeded to hand over to the community all the lands between the Rivers Tyne and Wear.
It is one of the more extraordinary episodes in Early Medieval British history and very difficult, if not impossible, to accept at face value. Teasing the probable, the plausible and the realpolitik from the miraculous, we might envisage the abbot acting as an honest broker between the Host and the indigenous Christian élite, identifying a candidate for the kingship who would be acceptable to all parties and then arranging a suitable hybrid inauguration ceremony to seal the deal. His (the dead saint’s) fee was a generous endowment of land.
On the face of it this still sounds improbable: the Scandinavian Host, backed by military might and unopposed by credible regional powers, ought to have been able to impose one of its own, or a local puppet, on the natives. But Early Medieval kingship was at all times a negotiated office, dependent on customary rules of lordship, obligation and consent. In the ranks of the Host’s senior commanders, it seems, there was no suitable candidate of royal descent. The Cuthbert community, under the guidance of its abbot and bishop, was here offering up the support of the Bernician establishment to a Scandinavian-born or half-Scandinavian ex-slave of royal parentage, already assimilated into Northumbrian society, who appears to have been converted during his youth to Christianity: so long as he rewarded the saint’s followers with suitably large estates.∂
The inclusion of the Guðrøðr narrative in the Historia and in the much later Libellus de Exordio of Symeon is intimately connected with the fate of Cuthbert’s relics, through which the spiritual and temporal power of the saint were constantly expressed. At various times between the 840s and the early 880s the community and its precious relics seem to have been on the move. We find the saint and his devoted bearers, the remnants of the Lindisfarne community, with Abbot Eadred and Bishop Eardulf in attendance, at the monastery of Whithorn; at the mouth of the River Derwent on the Cumbrian coast; at a Lindisfarne estate outside York called Crayke and, finally, at Chester le Street (Kuncacester), a former Roman fortress that lay at the centre of those new estates granted to Cuthbert by King Guðrøðr. There is yet more to this than meets the eye, and the internal politics, which must have swept up Cuthbert’s community in a whirl of tensions and political friction, can be judged more in the imagination than in the evidence.
A so-called Seven Years’ Wandering5 (876–883), during which the treasures and body of Cuthbert are portrayed as having been constantly in motion can, in the cold light of analysis, be seen as a series of visitations, or a progress between and through the saint’s extensive territorial holdings.6 St Cuthbert, dead these 200 years, was behaving like an itinerant Early Medieval king, consuming the productive surplus of his estates, checking on their management and the rule of their minsters and generally surviving, if tenuously, the chaos of the century. In promoting a candidate for the kingship, Cuthbert’s followers aimed to prevent civil war, realign their fortunes to those of the new power in the land, and consolidate their now fragile landholdings.
An episode said to have occurred at Derwentmouth (near modern Workington) is particularly significant: it relates an attempt by Abbot Eadred to take Cuthbert’s relics over the sea to Ireland, an attempt confounded at the last minute by either a tempest or ‘waves of blood’, depending on which account one reads. It seems that there was disharmony within the community—a disagreement about whether to flee Britain or to seek some other permanent home for bishopric, relics and community, exhausted by the impermanence of its situation. Guðrøð’s elevation to the kingship in about 880 or 881, sponsored by Cuthbert, killed two birds with one stone. Cuthbert, his bearers and the bishop of north Northumbria were able to settle at Chester le Street, just a few miles south of the River Tyne, surrounded by sufficient estates and with royal support ensuring their security and wealth, at the right distance to influence events further south and yet remain detached. These ‘new’ estatesπ appear to have encompassed those vills originally granted in the seventh century to found two great, now much reduced houses, Jarrow and Monkwearmouth, so recovering the monastic territories of Benedict Biscop and of Bede (the land of Werhale)7 somehow lost during the crises of the ninth century.
The Lindisfarne community remained at Chester le Street for more than 100 years until its final, permanent move to Durham in 995. From Guðrøð’s reign onwards new holdings were acquired overwhelmingly in what is now County Durham. For the Host this new ecclesiastical bloc was a useful buffer zone between their Deiran settlements and interests and the inconveniently independent-thinking and still-powerful Bernician lords of Bamburgh. For Cuthbert’s paruchia, it meant survival against the odds. In exile they succeeded in forging their own kingdom within a kingdom.
*
The political fallout of the settlement of Yorkshire and the defeat of the Summer Host by Ælfred re-energized the Newton’s cradle of southern overlordship. Ælfred’s pragmatic acceptance of new realities was, for most of a decade, successful. Guðrum was true to his word. At the end of the tumultuous year of 878 the Host overwintered at Cirencester, the ancient Roman town lying some miles north of the Thames, Mercia’s boundary with Wessex. Their new quarters might have seemed threatening, no more than two days’ march along the Fosse Way from Chippenham; but, in retrospect, it seems that their proximity to the old border had more to do with extended negotiations with the councillors of Wessex and Mercia than to re-grouping for another attack. It was not acceptable to either party that Guðrum rule over the lands of the Mercians and settle there, as Hálfdan had done in Northumbria. A better solution presented itself: under the year 879 the Chronicle records that the Danish army moved to East Anglia and ‘occupied that land and shared it out’.8
Æðelweard’s tenth-century account is more nuanced than that of the Chronicle and, in the light of scholarly debate about the nature of Danish East Anglia, more realistic: the mycel here ‘laid out their camp there, and brought all the inhabitants of that land under the yoke of their overlordship [imperium]’.9 Having lost their last legitimate dynast with Eadmund, the East Anglians were consulted by neither the Host nor the Mercians, nor by Ælfred: Danish rule was imposed on them.
There is no surviving narrative history of the years of Guðrum’s reign in East Anglia, only contradictory scraps of evidence suggesting varying degrees of Scandinavian settlement, assimilation and overlordship. The most valuable of those fragments is the unique document known as the Treaty of Ælfred and Guðrum, dated to some time between 880 and 890 and, reasonably, within a year or so of his arrival there.10 We would like to know much, much more about the ceremonial aspects of such a unique testament to Anglo-Scandinavian relations. Were the bones of the treaty put in place during Guðrum’s baptismal feast, man to man between the two kings; or did detailed negotiations extend over several months, involving otherwise faceless functionaries? The document’s brevity suggests the former. Its nature (the boundary clause draws a line between East Anglia and Mercia, rather than with Wessex) suggests that Ceolwulf II, puppet king of Mercia and sometime Wessex ally, was by then dead, since he was not a signatory. It begins:
This is the peace which King Ælfred and King Guðrum and the councillors of all the English race [Angelcynn] and all the people which is in East Anglia have all agreed on and confirmed with oaths, for themselves and for their subjects, both for the living and for those yet unborn, who care to have God’s grace or ours.11
The first clause of the treaty, the demarcation of territory, appears straightforward: ‘up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to the Watling Street’. The Lea rises at Leagrave on the north-west outskirts of Luton at the foot of the Chiltern Hills, only a couple of miles from the Roman town of Durocobrivis (Dunstable) on Watling Street. The Ouse in question is the River Great Ouse, which crosses the Roman road again at a key point: Stony Stratford, on the north-west edge of modern Milton Keynes. From there the river flows north-east, passing through Olney (Ollanege—Olla’s island) and then winding lazily downstream towards Bedford in a series of meanders. Between Luton, Bedford and Stony Stratford, then, is an odd triangle of territory retained to the north of Watling Street by Ælfred on Mercia’s behalf, for reasons that are unclear.∆ The odd, straight line between the source of the Lea and the town of Bedford is today traced almost perfectly by the railway line from Luton which links the two.
23. THE TREATY OF ÆLFRED AND GUÐRUM: ‘Up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to the Watling Street...’
Even more obscure is the question of whether the two kings intended that the boundary with Mercia was to continue north-west along Watling Street from Stony Stratford towards the Mercian heartlands around Tamworth and Lichfield, effectively leaving the Viking fortresses of Nottingham, Leicester and Repton in Guðrum’s hands. Or was the Great Ouse itself effectively the western border of his new state? The latter makes more sense, even if it leaves open to question who, precisely, was ruling over north-eastern Mercia. The later history of East Anglia is distinct and separate from that of Mercia west of the fens. Huntingdon, Cambridge and Colchester seem to have been Guðrum’s principal defended towns.
The four subsequent clauses of the treaty are concerned with drawing equivalent values for the lives, oaths and freedom of movement (to use a fashionable phrase) of two classes of free men,** known in some sources as twihynde (men worth 200 shillings—the ceorls) and twelfhynde (members of the nobility, worth 1200 shillings).12 Overriding all other considerations is the sense that this was intended as a permanent settlement, an acceptance on Ælfred’s side that the Danes were in Britain to stay and, on Guðrum’s, that half a loaf was better than none. The Danish king seems to have embraced his new status as a Christian, looking south to Wessex and east to Francia as a fully fledged member of the Christian kings’ club. He minted coins: first in imitation of indigenous East Anglian and Frankish issues and then, using his baptismal name Æðelstan, in imitation of Ælfred’s coins, only lighter in weight. On the reverse is a cross; and so the first two bona fide Scandinavian kings of English states, Guðrøðr and Guðrum, both seem to have adopted Insular Christian values, at least nominally.
The treaty boundary suggests that London lay outside the new Danish kingdom. It also suggests that by now Ælfred had made provision for the governance of Mercia, since he was drawing up its new eastern boundary. By 881 West Mercia was ruled by Æðelred, later Ælfred’s son-in-law and always described as an ealdorman in Wessex sources; he was not obviously connected to any of the three main dynasties of Mercian kings but a de facto king so far as Mercia was concerned. The unknown dates of his appointment as its lord and of the creation of the treaty pose a nice problem for historians. My guess, and it is no more than that, is that during the discussions between Ælfred and Guðrum, Æðelred emerged as a skilled negotiator able to carry the weight of opinion of the Mercian nobility, that he showed himself to be pro-Wessex and Ælfred; and that the West Saxon king rewarded his loyalty by supporting his case to govern Mercia after Ceolwulf’s (undated) death.
In assertion, perhaps, of his desire to show independence from direct political control, Æðelred almost immediately mounted a military campaign against Mercia’s old antagonist, Gwynedd.†† The campaign was disastrous: Anarawd ap Rhodri, son of the great warrior whom Ceolwulf had defeated and killed three years before, inflicted a humiliating defeat on the ealdorman, for the time being ending Mercian ambitions to overlordship in North Wales. Many historians date Æðelred’s submission to Ælfred from that defeat; and yet, it is equally plausible that he had already accepted the West Saxon king as his lord and was using new-found stability deriving from the Anglo-Danish treaty to flex his military muscle. In the event the defeat, at the mouth of the River Conwy on the north-east edge of Snowdonia, allowed Anarawd to assert his supremacy over Powys in central eastern Wales and Ceredigion in the west, while curbing Mercian expansionism: the desk toy of political momentum clacked rhythmically once again.
Ælfred’s later acquisition of Bishop Asser of St David’s as court scholar and chronicler of his life allows the contemporary Welsh scene to be sketched, albeit in rough outline, for the first time. The invidiousness of the southern Welsh position is striking: King Haifaidd of Dyfed (roughly the territory of the Pembroke peninsula) feared the power of the sons of Rhodri Mawr: Cadell in Ceredigion bordering it to the north, Merfyn in Powys and Anarawd in Gwynedd, the latter allied with the new Northumbrian king Guðroðr. Across the Irish Sea lay the aggressive Norse kings of Dublin, Wexford and Waterford. To the immediate east of Dyfed, Ystrad Tywi is likely to have faced the same pressures.
The three south-east kingdoms of Wales—Brycheiniog under Elise ap Tewdr, Glywysing under Hywel ap Rhys and Gwent under Kings Brochfael and Ffernfael—felt additional pressure from Æðelred in Mercia, their traditional antagonist. Asser, for one (directly addressing his Welsh audience at home), regarded the Mercian ealdorman’s influence over these south-east kingdoms, his immediate neighbours across the River Severn, as a predatory tyranny.13 Beset on all sides, one by one the smaller Welsh kingdoms submitted to Ælfred, now cast in the role of the great protector, in a process which might have continued for most of the 880s and 890s as each player sought to gain maximum advantage for the least risk.
Ælfred’s overlordship of the Welsh kingdoms and of Mercia was a matter of political and military expediency on both sides. Only in retrospect have over-enthusiastic commentators and nationalists encouraged the idea of an Ælfredan project to create a single kingdom of England or Britain. He might have styled himself as king of the Angelcynn, the English people; that is not the same as proclaiming himself king of Mercia or of the Britons or, indeed, of Kent, let alone of some notion of England which does not belong to his age. The grand unifying project of an English kingdom was not a design of the West Saxon kings; at least, not before the days of Ælfred’s grandchildren.
The project may, in distant origin, have been conceived by the Venerable Bede, whose passion for the universal church had a complementary and logical secular counterpart. Ælfred, it seems to me, was content with the benefits of overlordship or imperium: political influence and the peace and wealth it might bring. His grand project was a Carolingian-style renaissance: spiritual, educational, philosophical, channelling political energy away from warfare towards culture and learning. Asser may have been prejudicially inclined towards his personal patron, and he may be over-egging the pudding when he describes the benefits of West Saxon overlordship to his native Welsh constituents; but he does not overstate by much the potential advantages of submission:
Nor did all these rulers gain the king’s friendship in vain. For those who wished to increase their worldly power were able to do so; those who wished an increase of wealth obtained it; those who wished to be on more intimate terms with the king achieved such intimacy; and those who desired each and every one of these things acquired them. All of them gained support, protection and defence [amor, tutela, defensio].14
It is easy to get worked up by the idea of overlordship: it bears connotations of racial and ethnic submission that still underlie national sensitivities. But it is best seen as an extension of the rules of lordship and patronage which operated at all levels of Early Medieval society. Political submission in the age of the first Viking invasions involved a set of mutual obligations and ties concerning royal fosterage, reciprocal rights for traders, political marriages, baptism and godparenting, as well as military support, attendance at the king’s councils and the rendering of tribute in various kinds, including hard cash. The record of Guðrum’s submission and baptism after the battle of Edington provides the model. For a modern analogy, one thinks of Britain’s post-war relationship with the United States in which Britain is expected to represent American interests in Europe and fight in its wars in order to enjoy the benefits of protection, economic favouritism and a ‘special’ status. Political intervention in the affairs of tributary states was and is a matter of political delicacy, and Early Medieval rulers, like their modern counterparts, were acutely aware of the importance of show and ceremony in their portrayal of such relationships.
*
Ælfred’s establishment of a king’s peace in the 880s was assisted by events on the Continent. Just as the Anglo-Saxon, Welsh and Pictish states had been destabilized and rendered vulnerable to external attack by dynastic uncertainty, so also Francia experienced twenty years of succession disputes from the late 870s. Charles the Bald, Charlemagne’s grandson and the architect of Frankish defences against Scandinavian incursions, died in 877. His eldest son Louis le Bègue (‘the Stammerer’), survived him by just two years. Louis’s successor in West Francia, his son Louis III, died in 882; his second son, Carloman II, assuming the throne in Aquitaine and Burgundy, died in 884. In East Francia Louis the German, another grandson of Charlemagne, died in 876 and was succeeded by his eldest son, another Carloman, who died in 880; his second son, another Louis, died in 882.
In that year, a sense of state impotence against the ravages of the Host in Francia was registered by Archbishop Hincmar in his final entry as the chronicler of St Bertin. Carloman, he wrote, ‘lacked the resources to mount resistance to the Northmen once certain magnates of his kingdom withdrew from offering him help’.15 Hincmar himself, aged and weak, fled in a sedan chair, barely escaping with the relics and treasures of his church.
The former Frankish empire was reunited, briefly, by Charles le Gros (‘the Fat’) until 888; but it was not until the reign of Charles Simplex (‘the Simple’ 898–929: a last, posthumous son of Louis the Stammerer) that Francia between the Jutland peninsula and the Pyrenees once more enjoyed the fruits of dynastic stability. The discreet departure of a Viking fleet from Fulham on the Thames near London in 879, heading for Ghent with unfriendly motives, shows how the runes were read by Viking chiefs in the aftermath of Guðrum’s submission.16 The Anglo-Saxon chronicler’s frequent notices of these ominous events across the Channel is evidence that at Ælfred’s court keen interest was taken in their movements.
Between the defeat of Guðrum in 878 and the arrival from Francia of a new Continental army on the shores of Kent in 892, Viking interest concentrated on easy Frankish pickings: laying siege to Paris in 885–886, penetrating the rivers Scheldt, Seine and Marne with apparent impunity and attempting to wrest control of Brittany. Charles the Fat was forced to pay them off with 700 lbs (320 kg) of silver 17 and to acquiesce in their subsequent attacks on Burgundy.
That is not to say that the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were free from external threat. In 882 Ælfred took a fleet to sea and captured two Viking ships, according to the Chronicle. Two years later part of the Host laid siege to Rochester in Kent; the fortress was only relieved by the king after the best part of a year. This force may have been a discontented element among Guðrum’s veterans in East Anglia; in the same year Ælfred sent a fleet to the mouth of the River Stour and was able to defeat a force of sixteen ships.
These notices of engagements pepper a decade during which Ælfred began to put in place long-term plans for defence, for the revival and reform of the church and for his cultural renaissance. Asser’s arrival at the court of Wessex in about 885 was complemented by the importation of several scholars from Mercia and the Continent: Bishop Wærferth of Worcester; Plegmund, whom he would elevate to the primacy of Canterbury; Grimbald and John from German Francia. Latinate scholarship, literacy and the political testimony of those who had witnessed Frankish policy towards the Scandinavian threat, armed Ælfred with weapons of intellectual and political expertise underpinned by the economic clout of the great minsters and the institutional authority of episcopal and metropolitan sees.
Ælfred’s domestic battles proved just as challenging as his military campaigns but he seems, like Newton, to have grasped the underlying mechanical laws of his age better than any other. He saw that military victory must be followed by economic reform, the construction of public works and defence based on geographical realities, all underpinned by support for the church and a revival of education. But the apparent benevolence of his rule masks a hard-headed realism that required sometimes forceful impositions on the shires of Wessex and the south-east, in the face of opposition and truculence from local and regional power brokers among his ealdormen, thegns and bishops.
Ælfred had built a small fortress at Athelney at the height of the crisis in the winter of 878. He had seen the effectiveness of Viking fortresses at Reading, Wareham and Nottingham. The defences at Rochester, which held out against a Viking siege in 884 until it could be relieved, and existing Mercian fortifications at Hereford, Tamworth and Winchcombe, provided inspiration and engineering exemplars for a grand scheme later recorded in a document known as the Burghal Hidage.‡‡
Ælfred’s first concern seems to have been the defence of the south coast. Where the walls of ancient Roman towns or forts were serviceable or restorable, as at Portchester, Chichester, Exeter, Bath, Hamtun and Winchester, they were repaired and garrisoned. Naturally defensible sites that could be fortified by the expedient of raising a bank and palisade across a promontory, such as Halwell in Devon and Twyneham (Christchurch in Dorset), were enrolled in the scheme. Iron Age hillforts like Cissanbyrig (Chisbury) and Watchet guarded strategic routes and were refortified. Occasionally, as at Axbridge (just downstream from the township at Cheddar) and Wallingford, a new burh was constructed on or close to an existing royal estate. The smallest of the burhs, the fort at Lyng near Athelney on a low prominence in the Somerset levels, needed just 100 men for its garrison walls; the largest, at Wallingford and Winchester (the latter following the surviving Roman wall circuit of Venta Belgarum), required 2,400 men.
The scale and ambition of Ælfred’s scheme can, perhaps, best be seen at Wareham (see p.195), where the Host had made camp in 875 and where, between the Rivers Frome and Piddle which run eastwards into Poole’s great natural harbour, a new town was constructed.§§ The grid layout, the still-impressive ramparts and the size of the enclosed area, requiring a garrison of 1,600 men to defend it, are impressive evidence of engineering, military and social commitment. That is not to say that the natives of south Dorset, or any other region included in the scheme, signed up with enthusiasm to burghal construction, occupation and functioning in an integrated plan of ‘national’ defence. Asser hints at discord, even downright obduracy among those required to enforce these burdens on the estates of Wessex:
What of the mighty disorder and confusion of his own people—to say nothing of his own malady##—who would undertake of their own accord little or no work for the common needs of the kingdom?... By gently instructing, cajoling, urging, commanding and (in the end, when his patience was exhausted) by sharply chastising those who were disobedient and by despising popular stupidity and stubbornness in every way, he carefully and cleverly exploited and converted his bishops and ealdormen and nobles, and his thegns... and reeves.18
At times, Asser goes on, forts remained unbuilt or incomplete because of idleness or laxity in carrying out the king’s commands. The same issues of parochialism, regional political tension and reluctance to accept the heavy burdens of Ælfred’s demands fomented unease and recalcitrance which must, at times, have driven the king to distraction. These tensions reinforce a sense that even among the Angelcynn, regional and factional interests were more pervasive than any sense of ‘Englishness’.
It is particularly significant that burhs were raised at key strategic points along the Thames: at Southwark, opposite the Roman city of London; on Sashes Island in Berkshire, at Wallingford, Oxford and Cricklade at the river’s head. They might just as well have been sited to reinforce a message to Mercia as to provide a general line of defence against Scandinavian threats from the north. A thousand-odd years later in the 1940s the Thames once more became a strategic frontier, part of the General Headquarters Line—a natural defensible ditch against an invading army possessed of tanks and aircraft. Passing along the upper reaches of the river today one can still see the remains of many of the pill boxes which face the river on its north (Mercian) side. At Wallingford the Ælfredan defences are still visible, as is the classic grid pattern of the town.∫∫
The development of many of the burhs into successful commercial trading centres in the tenth century at Oxford, Hastings, Lewes, Wareham, Chichester and elsewhere, is a reminder that one of their functions was to concentrate population, both for defence and to bolster the internal economy of Wessex. The extent to which Ælfred conceived of their economic potential is unclear. He had the defunct trading ports to hint at such potential, but he also appreciated the need to incentivize the regional populations who must garrison them. One potential solution was to give rights of freehold and trade in the burhs (the origins of medieval burghal rights) in return for co-operation, and the clearest statement of this strategy comes from a charter belonging to the last decade of his reign.
The ‘Arrangements for the building of fortifications at Worcester’,19 as this charter is known, offers a partial glimpse of some of the processes involved. The burh had been founded or refounded by Æðelred and his wife Æðelflæd, Ælfred’s formidable daughter. The charter, dating between 880 and 899, records that some time after its establishment they decided to grant half of their rights ‘whether in the market or in the street, both within the fortification or outside’ to Bishop Wærferth. In addition, land-rents, fines for fighting or theft and dishonest trading, damages to the burh wall and other offences admitting of compensation, were to be shared between the ealdorman and the bishop. Significantly, the waggon-shilling and load-penny were to go to the king, ‘as they have always done at Droitwich’. These latter were dues on cart-loads or mule-loads of salt, a traditional royal perquisite.ΩΩ The document was drawn up in Mercia before its councillors and with King Ælfred as chief witness.
There is much in this document to intrigue the historian. First, the detail shows that burhs were defined as much by their regulations as by their physical form. The marketplace operated under its own rules, not defined here but perhaps similar to those later prescribed under King Æðelstan (924–939).≈≈ Here the portgerefa or port-reeve administered rules and tariffs on behalf of the ealdorman and king. He may also have played an increasing judiciary role, maintaining defences and order within the ramparts. Early Medieval law had to adapt to these new judicial and economic entities. That ealdormen and bishops were to enjoy many of the fruits of these new, protected trading entrepôts shows how commercial and political capital was being deployed by the king to ensure their success and his councillors’ loyalty to the project; and how those powers and commercial rights were to be concentrated in the late Saxon town.
The Worcester charter also offers hints to help solve some of the difficulties caused by the uncertain chronology of the Burghal Hidage and the difficulty of dating its sequence, which are crucial to understanding Ælfred’s development as a political and military thinker. The telling clue, I think, is that the burh at Worcester had been founded some time before the charter was drawn up. In that time Bishop Wærferth’s status had changed. Asser tells us that in the years after Edington, when Ælfred conceived his vision for a renaissance among the Angelcynn, he drew to his court scholars from Kent, from Wales (Asser himself), from the Continent (Grimbald and John) and particularly from Mercia. One of these, Plegmund, would be rewarded with the spiritual throne of Canterbury in 890. Wærferth, Bishop of Worcester, whose huge diocese comprised the ancient territory of the Hwicce, was another. Asser says that he (Asser) was rewarded with many gifts for his contribution to the court, including two monasteries.∂∂ Wærferth, we know from other sources, was granted lands by Ælfred and Æðelred at Hwaetmundes stane in London, together with commercial privileges there.20 A later grant, dating from Ælfred’s last years, confers lands at Æðeredes hyd (Queenshythe, on Thames Street) on Plegmund and Wærferth. It has been suggested that both sites were part of Ælfred’s plan to restore ‘the city of London splendidly—after so many towns had been burned and so many people slaughtered’.21
We know that Asser came to the royal court in about 885, and that he believed Ælfred’s London project to have been in train the following year, at the latest. It is tempting, therefore, to date the Worcester charter to the second half of the decade, and the original construction of the burh there to a few years before. The generous royal grants at Worcester, London and elsewhere can be seen, in this context, as Ælfred’s recognition of the contribution made by key loyalists to the grand design. A more cynical view might be that he was purchasing their approbation and co-operation: Wærferth was being rewarded with lucrative protectionist trading rights.ππ
Like Ælfred’s other bishops, Wærferth also received a personal copy of the king’s own translation of Pope Gregory’s Cura Pastoralis, or Pastoral Care. By great fortune, his is the only copy that survives—in the Bodleian library at Oxford.22 Ælfred had chosen his trustees carefully, not least in his support for Æðelred with whom he maintained a close relationship throughout the last two decades of his rule. By the time of his death at the age of fifty Ælfred had constructed a network of more than thirty defended trading and military strongholds across the breadth of Wessex and beyond: his influence on the geography of the South is profound and enduring.
Asser dates the restoration of London to 886 and this may indeed be the year in which some formal recognition of the ancient city’s new status was made. There is every reason to believe that Ælfred gave his daughter, Æðelflæd, in marriage to the Mercian lord at this time, sealing their alliance. The Chronicle’s version of Asser’s statement is that Ælfred ‘occupied London, and all the English people submitted to him, except those who were in captivity to the Danes; and then entrusted the city to Ealdorman Æðelred’.23 It sounds as though London’s and Mercia’s status were consolidated in a single event; and it is not impossible that the written treaty with Guðrum dates from this period of consolidation.
Many commentators now suspect, however, that new commercial life had been growing within the old Roman walls since the demise of Lundenwic in the 830s or 840s. The archaeologist Jeremy Haslam argues that, apart from a brief period between 877 and 878, the Host, with its Mercian appointee Ceolwulf, was in control of the port.24 The departure of the fleet from Fulham in 880 and of Ceolwulf at about the same time, together with Ælfred’s endorsement of Æðelred, allowed him to assert control over the pre-eminent site on the navigable Thames, a pivotal location in the defence of Wessex and in its trading links with Mercia and the Continent.
The occupation of the city recorded under 886 in the Chronicle, described later by Æðelweard as a ‘citadel’, may have been an additional response to the military activities at Rochester in 884 and on the coast of East Anglia in 885, as well as a core component of the burghal system rolled out during the same decade.25 A notable coin issue, the Ælfredan ‘London monogram’ of the 880s, was very public confirmation that the king intended to associate his military, political and economic successes with the former Roman capital.
Mapping Ælfred’s control and influence during the 880s and 890s is relatively straightforward, even if the chronology floats uncertainly. The nature and extent of Æðelred’s power in Mercia is much more difficult to determine in detail. We know that London was placed under his protection after its capture (for want of a better word) by Ælfred some time between 878 and 886. We also know that the boundary of Guðrum’s lands, at least nominally, followed the line of the River Lea and then the River Great Ouse as far as its conjunction with Watling Street at Stony Stratford, on what later became the Buckinghamshire border with Northamptonshire.∆∆
To the west and north of that point the geography of power in the last decades of the ninth century becomes more obscure. Buckingham itself appears, slightly anomalously, in the Burghal Hidage, along with those Mercian outposts Worcester and Warwick, indicating that during Æðelred’s rule as ealdorman he was able to extend his control to the upper reaches of the Warwickshire Avon and the Great Ouse. Bedford, we know, lay at the edge of Guðrum’s East Anglian territory. The fortified towns under Scandinavian control are the next pointers, albeit negative: Derby (Norðworðig to the native Mercians), Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln and Stamford, the so-called Five Boroughs,*** are regarded as having been settled by veterans of the mycel here.
Key to the pattern of Danish control of the north Midlands is the course of the River Trent. Fortified redoubts on the river at Torksey, Nottingham, Derby (on the Derwent, a tributary) and Repton, which became the foci of more substantial settlements, provided the communications and trading network from which the settlers supported themselves after initial phases of raiding and looting. From these centres, which would become the medieval shire towns of the Midlands, existing estates were bought, stolen, fragmented and redistributed to create a patchwork of land-holding, based on ancient divisions but distinct, perhaps, in their management and composition. No historian believes that Danish veterans formed anything like a majority of the rural population; but they occupied key landholdings and, we must suppose, positions of civic and rural authority. From Lincoln the Danish settlement spread east to the coast. Additional forts, raised in later defence against aggressive West Saxon and Mercian military campaigns, were constructed at Northampton and Towcester. The River Great Ouse may have acted as the boundary between the Midlands Scandinavian settlers and those under the rule of Guðrum.
It is striking, on a map showing Scandinavian place names in the Midlands,††† that they occur almost exclusively north and east of Watling Street, often shown on maps as a continuation of the Ælfred–Guðrum treaty line.26 Further along that line, towards the north-west, Æðelred’s ability to engage with the forces of Gwynedd at Conwy shows that he was in control of the Cheshire plain and the old territories of the Magonsæte and Wrocansæte. There was, then, a congruent if sparsely detailed zone of influence which remained under West Mercian control and which does not seem to have come under concerted external attack after 878. It is striking that a large number of minster foundations survived the first Viking Age in West Mercia, just as the institutional apparatus of bishop and diocese was also sustained there long enough to re-emerge, more or less unscathed, in the reform movement of the late tenth century.
The mycel here and its adherents, whatever their status in Eastern Mercia, had given up their ambitions to conquer Mercia south and west of Watling Street. Æðelred’s authority was that of a de facto king, judging by the geographical spread and unequivocally independent nature of his charter grants.27 But no coinage bearing his name has been found, even though there is strong evidence for minting in Mercia, possibly at Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford, during the latter part of Æðelred’s reign and that of his widow, Æðelflæd.28 Ælfred’s mints struck coins in his name as Rex at the Mercian burhs of Gloucester, Oxford and London. Just as Ælfred’s militarized peace guaranteed Mercian authority with its neighbours, so his coinage guaranteed the value of the economy throughout the lands of the Angelcynn.
*
Although the documentary and literary evidence from later centuries shows how deeply embedded Scandinavian influence became in central Britain, archaeologists trying to detect the invaders’ settlements in the excavated buildings and landscapes of the period have had much less luck. To begin with, large-scale excavations of the sort needed to understand the fine detail of settlement development, function and layout are understandably rare in towns which have been occupied ever since. The justly famous Viking dig on Coppergate in York in the late 1970s provides the exception rather than the rule.‡‡‡
The Five Boroughs have not yet given up their secrets.29 But it is significant that both Derby and Leicester were important ecclesiastical centres before the middle of the ninth century, and that both had been the sites of Roman forts. Derby’s Roman name was Derventio, strikingly like its Norse name but unlike the Old English Norðworðig. Lincoln, a former Roman colonia (Lindum) like York (Eboracum) and London (Londinium), had probably been the seat of the bishops of Lindsey, the last of whom is recorded in about 870 before a long hiatus. Nottingham is unusual: its Brittonic name Tig Guocobauc, the ‘city of caves’, was recorded (by Asser) alongside the Old English Snotengaham—whose form suggests that it had once been the centre of a regio or tribal territory: that of Snota’s people.30 Its fate at the hands of the mycel here in 867, when they captured and fortified it, is directly attested in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Excavations have so far only hinted at the nature of a D-shaped fortification enclosing a clifftop promontory overlooking the River Leen, less than a mile above its confluence with the Trent.31 Stamford, the lowest crossing point of the River Welland west of the fens in Lincolnshire, where the Roman Ermine Street runs north-west, was a borough by 972, but its history before that is more or less obscure: it is the only one of the Five Boroughs not to have become a county town.
If nothing else, then, it seems that the leaders of the mycel here were careful in their choice of targets, seizing existing central places to control new territories. They took advantage of both military opportunities and the tax-raising, administrative and legal reins which made them effectively kings of East Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia.
Perhaps the most accessible (accessible, that is, to archaeologists excavating in advance of construction) of the towns that fell under Scandinavian rule in the ninth century is Thetford on the Norfolk–Suffolk border, England’s sixth largest town at the time of the Domesday survey in 1086. It suffered severe decline in subsequent centuries and the focus of settlement moved away from the late Saxon core on the south bank of the River Little Ouse; so it remained largely undeveloped until after the Second World War. Thetford obeys the first rule of Early Medieval connectivity on the Viking travel map: lying on a navigable waterway at a ford, close to an Iron Age hillfort and on the line of the ancient Icknield Way on the east edge of the fenlands. It was occupied in 870 by the mycel here, and by the reign of King Eadgar (959–975) at the latest it had its own mint.32 It supported ten churches in the period before the Conquest of 1066.
Excavations in recent decades have shown that defensible earthen ramparts stood on both sides of the river.33 By the end of the tenth century the town was a thriving trading centre, producing distinctive Thetford ware pottery and supporting a range of crafts: bone- and antler-working, silver-smithing, weaving and leather-working. The Viking Age might have left the natives with a fear of invasion; it seems also to have driven Britain towards a new urban and industrial confidence. But we would have considerable difficulty in discriminating between a ‘Danish’ town like Thetford and an Ælfredan burh without supporting historical evidence—which itself has to be read with caution.
The same problems of identification and interpretation bedevil attempts to trace rural Scandinavian settlement—the dwellings of the veterans who settled as farmers and integrated with the ceorls and thegns of the countryside. The Norse and Old English languages were mutually intelligible, at least at a basic functional level; their cultures shared Germanic origins and interactions. But would we be able to distinguish a ‘Viking’ house in rural Lincolnshire from that of an indigene? Did Scandinavians build new houses in their own style, or occupy the existing dwellings of the natives? Did they rapidly copy local building traditions so as to fit in and not attract undue attention? Even outstanding examples of exotic longhouses, apparently so diagnostic a feature of Scandinavian settlement in the far north and west, are difficult to interpret. The most often cited of these is a remote upland farmstead at Gauber high pasture, Ribblehead, high in the Yorkshire Dales at over 1000 feet (300 m). Around a paved courtyard, in the ninth century, a longhouse 60 feet by 15 feet (18 × 5 m) was constructed on a thick rubble wall base with rounded corners and entrances in the ends, along with a smaller rectangular ‘kitchen block’ and a smithy: a self-contained steading whose economy must have been primarily pastoral. Alan King’s 1970s excavations invited the question: how can we tell the difference between a new Scandinavian settlement on apparently marginal land, and an indigenous Northumbrian farm? The question remains unresolved.34
If we cannot yet diagnose Scandinavian rural housing there are at least hints of where we might look. James Campbell, professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford, points to the remarkable concentration of no fewer than thirteen names ending in -by in two Norfolk hundreds, East and West Flegg.35 They lie on the coast just north of Great Yarmouth in an area either side of Filby Broad, confined by the rivers Bure and Thurne, which must, in the Early Medieval period, have formed a large low-lying island in the peaty coastal marshes. Large parts of the surrounding broadlands lie below sea level; a catastrophic inundation would cut them off again. Campbell believes that something like a longphort may have existed here; a western counterpart to the island fortress of Walcheren in the estuary of the Scheldt, a more established version of the camp at Torksey on the lower Trent. Archaeologists concentrating resources here might one day identify and excavate the houses of those enterprising pirates and their successors.
A number of sites have produced evidence that they were occupied before, during and after the Scandinavian settlement. If we cannot identify new Norse settlers in the landscape, can we tell when they took over existing settlements? The answer, frustratingly, is very rarely. The prevailing model of pre-Viking settlement is of dispersed farms and vill complexes with low population concentrations, often impermanently sited, unenclosed and with mixed agricultural economies: ceorls producing a broad range of food renders and craft products for their lords; lords consuming instead of farming. With the secularization of the minsters in the eighth century, regularly laid-out farmsteads and hall complexes enclosed by ditch or hedge, increasingly specialized in their output and tending towards nucleation,§§§ appear de novo or supersede earlier, less formal, layouts. The old, bullion-fed economy of folkland### and render was evolving towards heritable bookland and rents paid in cash, with surpluses heading for regional markets.
Excavations spanning the entire second half of the twentieth century at the deserted medieval village of Wharram Percy, where generations of archaeologists have cut their teeth, have shown that, with patience, the telltale signs of Scandinavian influence can be detected. Wharram lies 20 miles (32 km) north-east of York in a dry valley on the high chalk Wolds. At the site of what became the South Manor, occupation has been proved continuously between the eighth and fourteenth centuries. In the late ninth to early tenth century the settlement was reorganized with formal boundaries and a wooden church was built whose successor still stands, roofless, in apparent isolation from modern life. At the South Manor a smithy continued to function through the turbulence of Viking occupation at York; and distinctly Scandinavian items—strap-ends, belt-sliders and sword hilts, and a Norwegian hone stone—were among its artefacts.36 This high-status establishment was either taken over by new Scandinavian lords, or its indigenous thegns were susceptible to their material luxuries. Given the lack of apparent violence in the Wharram record, we might offer the thought that this was an instance where an élite member of the Host married into the family of a local worthy. At the time of the Domesday survey in the 1080s, Wharram belonged to a Lagmann (Lǫgmaðr) and a Carli—distinctively Scandinavian names.37
24. THE RAMPARTS AT WAREHAM: a model Ælfredan burh, the site of an early royal monastery and the Viking camp of 875.
The vastly enlarged pool of evidence from excavation during the last thirty years has created a picture of regional variability, diversity of layout and complexity of interpretation: there is no model rural settlement of the ninth and tenth centuries. Increasingly, archaeologists are running shy of ethnic explanations of dramatic changes taking place in rural settlements in those centuries and concentrating instead on social and economic evolutions that may represent indigenous change but might have been triggered by the conflicts of the Viking Age.
Sometimes, settlement archaeology has to fill in for an almost complete lack of narrative history. The political fortunes of the Cornish peninsula, the lands of the West Wealas, are invisible. A fatal alliance with a Danish war band against Wessex in the days of King Ecgberht signalled the end of its independence. A last named British king, Dungarth, drowned ignominiously in 875.38 A thriving church, with a major minster at St Germans west of Plymouth, can be inferred from the proliferation of saintly and church enclosure place names. The modern names of Cornwall’s rural settlements, a mix of Brittonic and English, reflect slow and late Anglicization. Apart from Lundy (‘Puffin’) Island there are no accepted Scandinavian names. Ælfred built no burhs west of the River Tamar.
The distinctiveness of Cornish culture is striking. Its Christian stone sculpture has strong affinities with traditions in Ireland, Wales and Man. Its stone and turf ‘rounds’ remind one of Irish raths: tightly-packed complexes of circular houses inside embanked circular enclosures, dating from the late Iron Age and continuing into the post-Roman period. Cornwall may have lain outside the developing market economies of Wessex and the Danish territories, but it was by no means isolated from trade and international influence. A unique style of cooking vessel called bar-lug ware, designed for suspension over an open hearth, is found here in large quantities. It may have its origins in Frisia, and variants are found there, in Ireland and in the Baltic lands; and since it is generally regarded as dating between the eighth and eleventh centuries its presence is happily diagnostic of Early Medieval or Viking Age settlement.
Very few definitively Early Medieval settlements have yet been excavated on the peninsula; but at Mawgan Porth, a few miles north of Newquay on the Atlantic Cornish coast, three very unusual courtyard houses, prolific in their use and disposal of bar-lug pottery and preserved by the deep layers of windblown sand that sealed their fate, tell of a society that was anything but peripheral. In each case a longhouse, built on faced rubble foundations and divided in half to accommodate both cattle and people, lay at the centre of a complex of interconnected rooms clustered around a metalled courtyard.39 Each house seems to have been dug into the middens of its predecessor—these were long-established settlements, self-contained but outward looking. A single coin of Æðelred II, although poorly provenanced, proves that the site was still occupied in the late tenth century or later. The neat, compact internal arrangements—hearths, slab-sided cupboards and stone box-beds—are reminiscent of features found in houses in Orkney and Shetland. But there is no reason to think that this was a Norse settlement: more likely it reflects a broader shared culture of Atlantic maritime peoples whose lives and material cultures reflected common concerns such as shelter, warmth and domestic tidiness; economies based on small mixed farms occupying fertile soil but exposed to severe seasonal conditions. It is not impossible that, developing out of the indigenous tradition of the ‘round’, the Cornish courtyard longhouse farm itself served as a model for other Atlantic communities to follow.
*
The eighth- and ninth-century inhabitants of Flixborough, 5 miles (8 km) south of the confluence of the Rivers Trent and Humber in Lincolnshire, must have undergone an early and prolonged experience of Scandinavian contact. Many of the surrounding place names—nearby industrial Scunthorpe, as well as Althorpe, Appleby, Brigg and Normanby—have a strong Scandinavian flavour. After periodic exposure to coastal and estuarine raids from the beginning of the ninth century the Trent valley was penetrated early in the wars of the 860s; 20 miles (32 km) upstream the mycel here built their stronghold at Torksey in 872; and Lincoln was a Danish burh well into the tenth century. Flixborough’s location, on top of a scarp overlooking the Trent to the west from about 150 feet (45 m) above sea level, put it in the front line of Anglo-Danish relations. It shares many characteristics with that other riverine community, Brandon in the East Anglian Breckland.∫∫∫
It is not the excavated agricultural buildings of Flixborough—barns and workshops—that impress the archaeologist so much as its rubbish dumps, containing hundreds of thousands of animal bones, large quantities of pottery sherds, glass and metalworking fragments from both smithing and, in later decades, smelting; loom-weights and other weaving debris, indicating the production of woollen cloth and linen; and fine metal dress accessories.ΩΩΩ In its ninth-century prime the presence of window lead, writing styli and window glass indicates that Flixborough supported a literate, wealthy community. A remarkable hoard of woodworking tools found contained in a lead tank suggests that the community may have enjoyed the services of its own shipwright.40
The exceptional preservation of the accumulated dross of three centuries of Anglo-Saxon life (material apparently dumped in barrow-loads of alkaline wood ash) can be attributed both to the behaviour of its inhabitants and to the meteorological fates: the whole site, like that at Mawgan Porth, was later buried by 3 feet (1 m) and more of windblown sand. The excavators’ good fortune was boosted by the occurrence of dateable coins, personal adornments and pottery in key phases of the stratigraphic sequence, so the time-slicing archaeological exercise which allots activity and deposition to discrete phases allowed a detailed narrative of Flixborough’s history to be constructed, even if some mixing and reworking of deposits made analysis a complicated process.
Well into the early ninth century Flixborough was connected widely to the outside world: to the pottery production and trading port at Ipswich, to its own Lincolnshire hinterland and to the Continent, whence exotic pottery and glass drinking vessels were imported. There is little doubt, from the nature and quantity of the material culture here, that this was a major estate centre, although there is ongoing debate about whether it was monastic or secular. That ambivalence may well be a signature of such sites; by the ninth century the distinction may be too subtle to matter.
Like Brandon, Flixborough has also been cited as an example of a so-called ‘productive site’: something between a minster and a wic, manufacturing objects for trade and importing luxury goods in return.41 It was well placed to exploit inland and coastal waterways and lay just 5 miles (8 km) west of the old Roman road, Ermine Street, that linked the Humber with Lincoln. A few surviving documents from the period suggest that estate surveys, of a sort common in Carolingian France, were becoming more frequent in the increasingly complex land management environment of lowland Britain.42 So the literate owners of Flixborough might have enjoyed reading reassuring lists of their assets during cold winter days when their barns were emptying of fodder and grain.
For the purposes of detecting Scandinavian influence at Flixborough, three features of the evidence stand out. Firstly, a major redevelopment occurred during the 860s or thereabouts.43 Secondly, that episode did not result in fundamental re-planning of the agricultural and industrial part of the site. It was cleared and rebuilt on a different pattern: under new management, perhaps, but not necessarily foreign management. There is no suggestion of the sort of wholesale destruction graphically encountered at Portmahomack and described so vividly at many other monastic sites. After the mid- to late ninth-century horizon there is less evidence of exotic material being imported to the site, and that is a general feature of the century. Craft products seem by then to have been destined for consumption on the estate. Thirdly, archaeologist Chris Loveluck suggests that what was once a single large estate, of the type recognized across Anglo-Saxon England, seems to have been subdivided, before being restored under single lordship at the time of the Domesday survey.44 The two parts, North Conesby, the ‘King’s settlement’, and Flixborough, ‘Flikkr’s fort’, both bear Scandinavian names.45
Lowland Britain underwent profound social and economic change in the ninth century. If historians and archaeologists are still frustrated in their attempts to detect the whiff of the smoking Scandinavian gun, they can at least begin to describe the geography and economic patterns which mark this age of transition. It may not matter, in the end, whether Viking prints are found on the trigger or not: the first Viking Age turned Europe on its head. Even so, despite the apparent chaos portrayed by the chronicles, the narrative of everyday life continued, altered but dynamically adaptive. People got by.
* In recent years they have been teased out brilliantly by a number of scholars, not least the pre-eminent contemporary historian of the Durham church, David Rollason, the Early Medievalist Alex Woolf in Scotland and the most recent editor of the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, Ted Johnson South. Rollason 1989a; Woolf 2007; South 2002.
† The vills of the Historia and other sources often equate in size and shape to the townships that survive in the modern landscape.
‡ The community survived, however, judging by the number of coins found at the site minted by kings up until the 860s.
§ See below, Chapter 10.
# The site of one of these has been excavated by Deidre O’Sullivan and Rob Young at Green Shiel towards the north end of Lindisfarne. O’Sullivan and Young 1995.
∫ Ælfflæd, sister of King Ecgfrith, begged Cuthbert to advise her on the succession when it looked as though the king might get himself killed in the land of the Picts; as indeed he did in 685. See Adams 2013, 374ff.
Ω The site has not been identified. It derives either from Oswiu or Oswine, both significant royal figures of the seventh century. The topographic suffix ‘dun’ suggests a hill where royal inaugurations had taken place in the past. A small mound overlooking the Tyne from the south at Ryton, close to the tidal reach of the river at Newburn, would suit the topography and the narrative well. See map, p. 322.
≈ Armilia aurea. The sacred arm ring had already been recognized and deployed as a diplomatic tool by Ælfred in his dealings with the Host at Wareham, albeit with limited success. See above, p. 137.
∂ The idea that members of the nobility might become slaves seems odd to modern thinking. Enslavement might come about as a result of debt or poverty, capture during battle or as a punishment. In Guðroð’s case he may have been sold into slavery to reduce his chances of competing for the kingship of the Host. Now, it seems, his time had come.
π See map on p. 322.
∆ Roger of Wendover reports a story that King Offa (757–796) was buried in a chapel on the banks of the River Usk (Ouse) at Bedford; and a charter which may attest to his widow’s possession of a monastery at Bedeford is sometimes cited as supporting evidence. If there was, or had been, a royal mausoleum at Bedford it might explain its otherwise odd inclusion as a border marker, with access by both sides, for the purposes of the treaty. Giles 1849, 166–7; Whitelock EHD 79, 508.
** Ælfred’s own laws contain provision also for a class of six-hundred men, the sixhynde. Keynes and Lapidge 1983, 168.
†† Æðelred’s name only appears in connection with the battle in a thirteenth-century genealogy, as Edryd Long-Hair. The entry in the Annales Cambriae for 880 (corrected to 881) describes the battle as ‘vengeance for Rhodri at God’s hand’. Charles-Edwards 2014, 490; Morris 1980, 48.
‡‡ Its date is much debated: the inclusion of two Mercian towns, Worcester and Warwick, has suggested to many that the unified scheme dates from the reign of Ælfred’s son Eadweard. Others argue that the West Saxon king was able to influence the construction of burhs in Mercia via his son-in-law. The construction dates of the individual burhs are in most cases uncertain.
§§ The possibility that a fort constructed by the Danish army there in 875, or an earlier defensive perimeter for the minster, was Ælfred’s model cannot be discounted.
## Ælfred’s medical history has been much discussed. Asser reflects on his bodily infirmities in several passages. Several scholars have suggested that he suffered from Crohn’s disease, a painful and debilitating intestinal condition.
∫∫ The burghal towns were not, for the most part, designed with complete internal grids of streets. Martin Biddle has shown that centrally opposed gates linked by two roads crossing each other at the centre of the burh naturally developed into a grid of streets as the towns were populated over, perhaps, several decades. Biddle 1976.
ΩΩ The ancient salt route from Droitwich to Worcester is less than 5 miles (8 km) by either Roman road or along the River Salwarpe. From Worcester salt is likely to have been loaded into barges and floated down the River Severn to Gloucester, whence it could be transported overland to the head of the navigable Thames at Cricklade.
≈≈ The so-called Grately code, of about 930. See below, Chapter 9.
∂∂ Congresbury and Banwell; that is to say, he was to enjoy the income from their estates and exercise a role as absentee abbot. See below, Chapter 12.
ππ This is the same Bishop of Worcester who, in 872, had been forced to lease lands to raise tribute for the Host overwintering in London. See above, p. 117n.
∆∆ The Midland shires take their names from settlements which became important during the early tenth century. For earlier political divisions we have to go back to the Tribal Hidage of the seventh or eighth century, when that part belonged, perhaps, to the Chilternsæte of Middle Anglia.
*** See below, Chapter 8, p. 409.
††† The interpretation of place names as direct evidence for the distribution of settlers and especially of ethnicity is fraught with complexity. See Hadley 2006, 99, for example. I use it here in the most general way. But there is a stark geographical reality to this line, which I explore below in Chapter 8.
‡‡‡ See below, Chapters 7 and 8: p. 293 onwards.
§§§ The set of attracting processes by which geographers identify the origins of villages and towns.
### Land held for a life interest, or on lease, and subject to obligations of service or produce. It might be passed to the heirs of a tenant by the king’s permission.
∫∫∫ See above, Chapter 3, p. 105.
ΩΩΩ The excavations identified the craft and agricultural components of a more substantial, as yet unlocated complex lying to the east. Three or four sturdy buildings, with collateral workshops or outhouses clustered around a shallow valley that became a refuse dump, seem to have replaced one another over a period of three centuries of continuous occupation and activity. Loveluck 2007.