BATTLE OF BRUNANBURH— EGIL SKALLAGRÍMSSON—COPS AND ROBBERS—MIRACLE AT CHEDDAR—ÓLÁFR GUÐRØÐSSON—DANISH MERCIA—THE LORD OF GOLTHO—HYWEL DDA—EADMUND
In the litany of great Early Medieval battles several stand out: Hastings in 1066, Edington in 878 and Heavenfield in 634, each irrevocably altering the course of British history. Stamford Bridge in 1066, Maldon in 991 and Catraeth in about 590 are conspicuous for the magnificence of their poetic or annalistic narratives of martial glory and tragic mortality. Brunanburh, in 937, has its poets too. It was remembered long after the event for a great slaughter of its antagonists and for the glorious victory won there by King Æðelstan. Historians have variously argued that it cemented a process of English unification or that its significance is overstated; but much more ink has been spilled in the cause of elucidating its geography. More than thirty possible sites have been suggested, ranging from Dumfriesshire to Devon.
There can be no doubt that a major battle was fought on the British mainland in 937 and that its combatants included the West Saxon king, his sixteen-year-old half-brother Eadmund, King Constantín of Alba, King Owain of Cumbria/Strathclyde and Óláfr Guðrøðsson, the Dublin Norse warlord. One minor combatant, possibly apocryphal, whose contribution has been preserved in a much later Icelandic saga, can be named as the Norwegian poet-adventurer Egil Skallagrímsson.
48. A CARVING from All Saints’ church, Brixworth, Northamptonshire: Christian eagle or Norse raven?
The closest contemporary records provide only very brief, if convincing details. The Annals of Ulster recorded that:
A great, lamentable and horrible battle was cruelly fought between the Saxons and the Norsemen, in which several thousands of Norsemen, who are uncounted, fell, but their king, Amlaíb, [Óláfr] escaped with a few followers. A large number of Saxons fell on the other side, but Athelstan, king of the Saxons, enjoyed a great victory.1
The Historia Regum, a set of Northern annals embedded in a work attributed to Symeon of Durham, records under the same year that ‘King Athelstan fought at Wendun and put to flight King Olaf with 615 ships, and also Constantine, king of the Scots, and the king of the Cumbrians, with all their host’.2
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 937 for once provides fulsome detail, in a poetic interpolation of seventy-three split lines which begins:
Her Æðelstan cyning, |
eorla dryhten, |
beorna beahgifa, |
7 his broþor eac, |
Eadmund æðeling, |
ealdorlangne tir |
geslogon æt sæcce |
sweorda ecgum |
ymbe Brunnanburh... |
In this year King Æðelstan, lord of nobles, dispenser of treasure to men, and his brother also, Eadmund atheling, won by the sword’s edge undying glory in battle around Brunnanburh.3
The account of the fighting is mostly conventional. The armies of Wessex and Mercia, of Eadweard’s sons, ‘clove the shield-wall, hewed the linden-wood shields with hammered swords’. Rout followed battle; five young kings lay dead on the field, along with seven of Óláf’s jarls. The Norse chief was put to flight, ‘driven perforce to the prow of his ship with a small company’.
The king of Alba fled north, shorn of his kinsmen; his son and friends dead. The remnants of the Norse fleet, seemingly isolated from their leader:
Put out in their studded ships onto Dinges mere to make for Dublin across the deep water, back to Ireland humbled at heart... They left behind them the dusky-coated one, the black raven with its horned beak, to share the corpses, and the dun-coated, white-tailed eagle, the greedy war-hawk, to enjoy the carrion, and that grey beast, the wolf of the forest.4
This is a grand tale of ambition, ignominy, death and glory. But what can we credibly say about Brunanburh as an engagement? The number of ships in the Norse fleet, recorded in the Historia Regum as 615 , is not conventional* and might represent a contemporary, if exaggerated, estimate. Such numbers are hard to interpret; they would have been hard to count even for an eye-witness. Supposing the figure to be based in reality, but exaggerated, and the fleet to have included a wide range of seagoing vessels of various sizes, some carrying baggage, an average of twenty warriors per vessel in 400 ships might be reasonable. That constitutes a fighting force of some 8,000 men, a very large army by Early Medieval standards. Add those of Óláf’s northern allies and it is possible that 10–12,000 men were able to take the field against the southern king. They still lost. Size isn’t everything, even in warfare. The command structures and communications required to mobilize what were, essentially, independent war bands and levies, are unlikely to have been very sophisticated, even supposing that all the allied forces succeeded in meeting at the right time and place.
Infuriatingly, Æðelweard, the late tenth-century court historian, who probably had better access than most to eye-witness accounts and who tells us that the battle’s fame was great even in his own day, gives no details of its progress. And in the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba it is recorded tersely as a battle at Dún Brunde, in which the son of Constantín was killed.5
One other possible early account seems to have been preserved in another poem, which William of Malmesbury claimed to have found in a ‘very old book’ from which he took several excerpts for his life of Æðelstan in the Gesta Regum Anglorum.6 William adds significant information: that the battle was preceded by ‘continuous ravages, driving out the people, setting fire to the fields’. Only ‘at length [did] the complaining rumour [rouse] the king, not to let himself be thus branded that his arms gave way before the barbarian axe’.
The last secular narrative source to add anything useful to these accounts is that commonly attributed to Florence of Worcester,† writing in the twelfth century but possibly with access to material now lost, who says that the Norse fleet arrived in Britain by way of the River Humber.7
Debate over the background to the battle has understandably become intertwined with speculation over its location, but there is little doubt that its inspiration lay across the Irish Sea. None of the evidence suggests that Æðelstan initiated the conflict. Despite his later martial reputation, and his two expeditions to the northern parts of Britain in 927 and 934, he was the least warlike of his recent predecessors as kings of Wessex. His interests lay elsewhere: in law-making, in his collections of precious relics and in political intervention in Francia. Brunanburh is the only recorded set-piece battlefield conflict in his fifteen-year reign.
Óláfr Guðrøðsson was, it seems, spoiling for a fight; in the same summer he had already captured the Norse king of Limerick, his namesake Óláfr Cenncairech, ‘Scabby-head’, during a fleet action on Lough Ree.8 He may now have entered into alliance with Constantín and seems to have nursed designs on his father’s kingdom in Northumbria: his objective must have been the recapture of York. The historian of Viking kingship, Clare Downham, notes a story later recorded by John of Worcester, that Óláfr married a daughter of Constantín who, tellingly, had a grandson of the same name.9
The king of Alba, the ‘hoary-haired’‡ and now quite elderly Constantín, may have harboured bitter resentment over his humiliating treatment at Æðelstan’s hands; the same might apply to Owain of Cumbria/Strathclyde. A northern and Norse alliance is highly plausible.
Notably absent from any of the sources is any mention of the kings of Wales: Hywel, Idwal and the rest. Despite the evident opportunity to raise the banner waved so enthusiastically by the poet of Armes Prydein Fawr, they seem to have kept diplomatically at a distance. They may have been tasked by Eadmund with defending north-west Mercia against invasion; they may also have waited to see who would win.
Four names comprise the material from which all speculation on the site of the battle has been derived: Brunanburh, and variants thereof; Wendun, or Weondun; Dinges mere (where the Norse fleet lay); and Humber. Only the last of these is obviously identifiable. None of the suggested sites for the battle has been able to accommodate all four names. The historian Michael Wood, trusting to John of Worcester’s testimony that Óláf’s huge fleet sailed up the Humber, has made a case for a battle along a traditional and well-attested line between York and the Mercian–Northumbrian border, the setting for many other Early Medieval military encounters. He offers two solutions: Brinsworth near Sheffield, and Went Hill just south of Pontefract.10 The Roman road crossing of the River Went seems to have been the site of a great battle called Winwæd in 655 between the armies of King Oswiu of Northumbria and King Penda of Mercia.11 For a conflict between kings of the North and South it is an entirely acceptable location, but no more than that, and Wood’s argument is dependent on John of Worcester’s late and isolated testimony of a landing from the Humber.
The bulk of historical opinion currently favours Bromborough on the Wirral peninsula. It is the only known place name definitively derived from Old English Brunanburh.12 It is, to be sure, a fine destination for an Irish assault: a short crossing from Dublin and, probably, a sympathetic local population of at least partial Norse affiliations. Ingimund’s invasion of about 902 had paved the way. Nearby Chester, if it could be taken, would make a perfect bridgehead for raiding and preparing a northern campaign linked as it was through the Roman road system to York.
Recent analysis by Paul Cavill and others13 has opened up the possibility that another key name in the sources, Dinges mere, may derive from ‘the marsh by the Thing’; and a convenient ‘Thing’ name survives in Thingwall just a few miles west of Bromborough, close to the Dee estuary. The Wirral, then, has odds in its favour; even so, the niggling worry over a possible River Humber landing, and the lack of a sound candidate for the northern Wendun variant of the battle site, incline one to caution. A third suggested location, the hillfort of Burnswark near Ecclefechan on the north side of the Solway Firth, has not received widespread support; nor has the vote cast by philologist Andrew Breeze for Lanchester in County Durham, the site of a Roman fort lying by Dere Street close to the River Browney.14
In the light of what we know about other Viking Age conflicts in Britain, and of the evidence in William of Malmesbury’s poem for an extensive period of raiding, it is possible that the surviving accounts are a conflation of a running campaign beginning in the east and ending in a rout in the west, with a designated fleet rendezvous on the Wirral. So Wendun (on the Went) and Brunanburh (on the Wirral) might not be mutually exclusive sites. Military historian Ryan Lavelle has pointed out that the apparent loss of the battle site to cultural memory is significant and may be a function of the physical loss of the battlefield to Norse rule within a very few years.15
What of the warrior-poet Egil Skallagrímsson? In Egil’s Saga he was the Icelandic-born son of Skalla Grímr, a refugee from a feud with the great Norwegian king Haraldr Hárfagri. Egil was famously ugly,§ but a brilliant and precocious poet and notoriously eager to engage in combat on the slightest provocation: a perfect Norse anti-hero. He had an older brother, Ðórólfr:# handsome, brave and adventurous, and a friend of Eiríkr blóðøx, ‘Blood-axe’, King Harald’s son, having given him a fine, beautifully painted longship. He enjoyed a career of raiding and trading in the old Viking tradition and when Eiríkr became king of Hordaland and Fjordane, on Norway’s island-rich and fjord-riven west coast, Ðórólfr joined his retinue as a loyal follower. One summer Egil asked if he could join Ðórólfr on one of his ventures, but his brother declined: the young man was too hot-headed, too prone to causing trouble. That night, during a storm, Egil boarded his brother’s ship at its moorings and cut it loose so that it drifted away and was lost. After a frank exchange of views Ðórólfr gave in and took Egil with him.
That winter Egil fell ill and found himself stranded on an island called Atloy, the guest of a wealthy hold named Bárðr. Bárðr’s lord, none other than Eiríkr, arrived for a midwinter feast with his queen, Gunnhildr. Egil took great offence at a perceived insult by his host, drank himself into a furious rage and murdered Bárðr, precipitating his desperate flight and exile and a long-running blood feud with Eiríkr, which sets the scene for a series of epic and bloodthirsty adventures in the Baltic and in Britain. In one set-piece yarn, Egil’s bragging chat-up line to the eligible daughter of a Danish jarl, is suitably masculine, if poetic:
I have wielded a blood-stained sword
And howling spear; the bird
Of carrion followed me
When the Vikings pressed forth;
In fury we fought battles
Fire swept through men’s homes,
We made bloody bodies
Slump by the city gates.16
In the year of Brunanburh the two brothers found themselves in Britain and volunteered, as mercenaries of great renown, to fight for Æðelstan. The Saga’s historicity is not to be trusted: the author’s knowledge of the British politics (let alone the geography) of a long-gone age, outlined in chapters 50 to 52 of the Saga, is ill-informed and not generally credible.
The Saga now introduces us to a number of quasi-historical characters. It tells how Æðelstan, in the face of possible Norse aggression, had appointed two jarls, Álfgeirr and Goðrekr, as regents in Northumbria. This is not inherently implausible, but the story is uncorroborated in any Insular source and no coins bear these names. The Hringr and Aðils who ‘ruled Britain’ at the time and who, in the Saga account, fight against Aðelstan, might be the Welsh kings Hywel and Idwal.
The detail of Egil’s Saga that deals with Æðelstan cannot be taken at face value; but the idea that Icelandic warriors in permanent exile should seek mercenary employment with a foreign king, bringing with them a substantial war band of hardened veterans, is perfectly realistic. So, too, is the Saga’s aside that, because of the king’s well-known piety, Ðórólfr, Egil and their war band must agree to make the sign of the cross at their oath-swearing: a spiritual compromise well suited to the age.
In the defence of the North against Óláfr, Goðrekr was supposedly killed and Álfgeirr fled. Now Æðelstan sent an embassy to Óláfr proposing battle at a place called Vínheiðr, a name which has struck a chord with historians for its apparent similarity to the Wendun of the Historia Regum, although others have seen it as a misplaced reference to an earlier battle in which the two brothers fought, at Dvina in Russia.17 We cannot know; but the idea that battles should be fought on agreed territory on an appointed day has much to recommend it: if nothing else, it solves the problem of how opposing armies encountered one another with such regularity.
49. THOR AND HYMIR fish for the Midgard serpent: a relief carving in the church of St Mary, Gosforth, Cumbria.
The colourful account of the battle in Egil’s Saga, lasting several chapters, involves much preliminary bartering, accusations of deceit and false witness, surprise assaults and fluctuating fortunes over successive days. Egil and his brother, appointed leaders of the Northumbrian army in place of the disgraced Álfgeirr, distinguished themselves, but Ðórólfr fell during an onslaught by the Welsh king Aðils.
At a great victory feast Æðelstan honoured Egil with a fine arm-ring, which drew from the grieving poet a line:
The god of the armour hangs
A jangling snare upon my clutch,
The gibbet of hunting birds, the stamping ground of hawks.
I raise the ring, the clasp that is worn
On the shield-splitting arm,
Onto my rod of the battle-storm,
In praise of the feeder of ravens.18
The historical and political significance of the battle has often been exaggerated. Its immediate outcome, the expulsion of the beaten Óláfr, gave only temporary relief from the ambitions of the grandsons of Ívarr. The status quo of Æðelstan’s imperium was maintained. Constantín had repudiated his tributary status and now stood in direct opposition to Wessex, but was in no position to mount another military campaign. Northumbria and Danish Mercia remained, for the time being, within the king’s tributary portfolio. Even if Æðelstan had been defeated, it is unlikely that the Wessex–Mercia alliance would have collapsed. The participation in battle of the king’s young half-brother Eadmund is a sure sign of his status as heir presumptive.
The Brunanburh/Wendun campaign nevertheless offers some useful insights for understanding Æðelstan’s military position. Overlordship and military command, the loyalty of subject kings and allies, were matters of expediency. If we are to believe the silence of the Chronicle the Welsh kings, obliged by their status as subreguli to fight in the wars of their overlord, instead failed to heed his call. We might just allow that they were deployed defensively at Rhuddlan and on Anglesey. But, whenever kings were challenged, uncertainty offered opportunities to throw off the yoke of submission. If they joined the other side they must expect swift retribution.
If we believe the much later evidence of Egil’s Saga, Æðelstan treated his Northumbrian military commanders (Álfgeirr and Goðrekr) likewise as subreguli: that is, they fought on his behalf in command of their own forces. The same applied to the jarls of Danish Mercia who would have been obliged to fight alongside the king as their personal lord at the head of their war bands; but the warriors of those war bands fought for the jarls as their personal lords.
The king of Wessex did not possess a national militia or fyrð, nor the means to raise one. The obligation to fight in his army under the reforms initiated by Ælfred was tied directly to the ‘common burdens’ imposed on booked land and on burhs in Wessex and West Mercia. By the early tenth century forces were raised under shire levy systems by ealdormen tied to the king and their shires by bonds of mutual obligation and kin affiliation. Outside those core kingdoms he must rely on more independent-minded subject commanders. A key theme of the later tenth century is the attempt by successive rulers to extend formal military service to the towns and shires of the East Midlands and East Anglia.
The tenth-century Anglo-Saxon state, professionalized by Ælfred and buttressed by the military and administrative vision of his heirs, was sufficiently robust to be able to survive the death of the king. Æðelstan died, aged forty-three, at Gloucester in 939, two years after Brunanburh, and was buried in his favoured monastery, Malmesbury, in the Wiltshire Cotswolds: in Wessex, but close to the Mercian border. He was immediately succeeded by his half-brother and protégé Eadmund, aged eighteen, who had fought by his side. Æðelstan’s disinclination to marry and produce his own heir obviated the risk of rival claimants. Eadmund’s accession seems to have been unopposed.
In his last two years Æðelstan’s only recorded political intervention was the dispatch of a fleet in aid of his nephew, King Louis of West Francia, whose installation he had helped engineer in 936 but whose uneasy relationship with Hugh, count of Paris and duke of the Franks, had turned to open conflict. The overseas foray did not go according to plan: Flodoard of Rheims recorded in his Annal of that year that Æðelstan’s fleet ‘plundered the coast of Flanders... without accomplishing anything of their original mission’.19
Less securely dated, but more significant, is a series of reforms reflecting Æðelstan’s ongoing concern with law and order in his expanded kingdom. In the Grately Code of about 930, in among provisions for theft (a seeming preoccupation of the king) and coinage, is notice of a new approach to what one might call collective judicial responsibility and executive action. In response to those who would ‘not do justice nor pay the fine for disobedience’, the leading men were to ‘ride thither, all who belong to the borough, and take all that he owns, and put him under surety’.20 Those who embarked on such expeditions, the posse comitatus of later English law, were to split the proceeds equally with the king.
50. ANLAF CVNVNC (Anlaf, King): the raven penny of Óláfr Guðrøðsson, king of York.
Later in his reign Æðelstan enacted, or supported the enactment of, a remarkable institution called the Friðgegyldum—literally ‘peace-guild’, recorded in The ordinance of the bishops and reeves of the civitas of London.21 The context is an existing provision that thieves under twelve years of age (amended later in the same code, under the merciful advice of Bishop Theodred, to fifteen) and those who steal property worth less than 12 pence, were to be spared death. Guilty felons killed by ‘the Fellowship’ were to have their property divided into three, with the felon’s wife (if innocent) receiving a third share with the king (or bishop or lord, in the case of bookland) and the guild. The subscription fee for members was to be 4 pence every year. The executive arm of the Fellowship was to consist of ten men together under a chief. Ten of these chief men were to act under the authority of a hundred-man; between them the eleven must keep accounts of moneys collected and disbursed on behalf of the guild, and enforce attendance and subscription. And:
Each man of those that heard the summons was to be helpful to the rest both in following the trail and riding with them, as long as the trail could be seen; and after the trail had been lost, a man was to be procured [from two tithings] where the population was large, from one tithing where it was more sparse.22
The guild was not merely a primitive institution for policing. The hundred-men were to assemble once a month and ‘have leisure... and take note how our agreement is being observed, and then 12 men shall dine together and shall supply themselves as they think fitting, and distribute all the leavings for God’s sake’.23 This was a club, joined by an urban élite drawn from a cross-section of noble and probably mercantile interests and used to ensure that those interests were protected for mutual benefit.
It is not clear whether the Friðgegyldum ordinance applied only to the shires of Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Surrey and to the burh of London, or was intended to act as a model for the whole of the kingdom. The impetus for the formation of the guild was burghal and its composition allowed for membership among both nobles and ceorls: the alliterative phrase ge eorlisce ge ceorlisce (‘both nobles and ceorls’) in the prologue strikes a poetic and ceremonial tone confirmed by a reference to XII hynde and twyhynde men.∫
Given the unresolved question of when and how the Mercian and northern shires were created, it is not yet possible to integrate the London Ordinance with wider ‘national’ provisions for law and order; but it seems likely that shire towns, such as the Five Boroughs, Gloucester, Worcester, Northampton and Cambridge, may have adopted a similar Friðgegyldum system. The frequent mention of reeves in the Ordinance anticipates the key judicial and executive roles that they would later play in devolving the king’s law to the regions. The office of the portgerefa had increased significantly in importance since the original development of the trading settlements of the eighth century and their successors, the burhs.
There is an underlying tension here between the king’s law and powerful local interests, hinted at in clause 8.2 of the London Ordinance:
If it happens that any group of kinsmen—whether nobles or commoner within or beyond the borders of our district—become so strong and powerful as to prevent us from exercising our legal rights, and stand up in defence of a thief, we shall ride out against them in full force.24
Were these the same extended families who had stood in Ælfred’s way, who had been so obstructive during the defensive programmes of the 880s and 890s? And if such powerful kindreds existed in Wessex and Mercia, how much more troublesome might they be in East Anglia, in Danish Mercia and beyond? How far were they able to resist the ever-widening powers of the Anglo-Saxon state?
*
The Chronicle is coy about the events of the year after Æðelstan’s death. Even so, it is absolutely clear that his imperium died with him. Later chroniclers’ works preserving lost material with a more northern perspective (albeit much embellished and usable only with caution), show that the political vacuum was filled quickly. The Historia Regum, compiled in Durham in the twelfth century, and the Flores Historiarum compiled by Roger of Wendover in the thirteenth century, both record that in 940 Óláfr Guðrøðsson, miraculously recovered from the apparent disaster of 937, ‘came to York’. His invasion fleet must, as in 937, have navigated the waters of the Irish Sea and Solway Firth or Mersey, or taken the much longer route via the east coast and along the Humber: we cannot say.
Either in the same year or, more likely, in 941 when the Chronicle records that ‘the Northumbrians were false to their pledges and chose Anlaf (Óláfr) as their king’,25 a Norse army came south and besieged the burh at Northampton. Failing to take it, they swept north-west and ravaged the area around Tamworth, on the border of West Mercia, with ‘great slaughter on both sides’.26 Óláfr then turned his attention to Leicester, but by the time his army arrived there Eadmund had responded, and met him with a force sufficiently threatening that there was a stand-off.
Both Roger of Wendover and the Historia Regum record that a peace treaty was signed under the advice and auspices of the two archbishops, acting presumably as proxies or brokers on behalf of the Northern and Southern kingdoms. Under the terms of the agreement, Óláfr was to rule all the lands north and east of Watling Street while Eadmund retained all those to the south and west. The ancient division along the watershed line of central England, defined in the Treaty of Ælfred and Guðrum of about 879, was re-invented for a new generation of antagonists. The treaty was sealed, if we accept the testimony of Roger of Wendover, by Óláf’s marriage: not to a daughter of the king, who was only twenty, but to Aldgyð, daughter of a dux with the distinctly Danish name of Orm, or Urm.Ω The same chronicler adds that Urm had given the Norse invader aid and counsel, with which he had obtained his victory.
There is much food for thought here. The Chronicle’s misplaced entry (under 943) for the events at Leicester tells us that Archbishop Wulfstan was among those besieged there with Óláfr, and that the pair escaped by night. If that was the case, then it was a smart piece of diplomacy for the two archbishops to broker a peaceful end to the conflict and seal it with a Christian marriage and royal baptism.≈ The northern primate seems, then, to have thrown in his lot with the Norse leader, although it is also possible that the archbishop, who had so recently received Amounderness in anticipation of his loyalty to Wessex, might have been held as a hostage. These are murky waters.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this series of events is the identity of the new archbishop of Canterbury, enthroned in that same year. Oda (died 958) was the son of Danish parents; his father was said to have arrived with the mycel here in 865 and his family’s estates were located in East Anglia.27
No less intriguing is the dux or jarl called Urm. One might speculate that he was the Danish leader who ruled the burh of Leicester and its regio—what would become the shire of the same name. His daughter Aldgyð’s English-sounding name suggests that he had married a native. He appears several times as a witness to royal charters: first at Lifton in Devon in 931∂ and then periodically all the way through to 958/9 under a succession of West Saxon kings: a career of more than twenty years at court. If he is the embodiment of Richard Hall’s ‘innate affinities with ambiguity’, it seems to have done him no harm. One can easily imagine Urm as the head of the sort of powerful local kindred about whom Æðelstan’s lawyers were so wary and against whom the Friðgegyldum was designed to be able to act. His military muscle and key position in Danish Mercian society ensured that all parties must court his goodwill.
Óláf’s brief, triumphant entry onto the lists of Insular kings has left an indelible mark in the archaeological record. Immediately replacing the stock of Æðelstan’s silver penny coinage in York, more than 100 dies covering just two years’ minting there (and, perhaps, further south) testify to a large series proclaiming ANLAF CVNVNC (Anlaf, King)—the first recorded appearance of Old Norse in the Roman alphabet.28 The name surrounds a stylish and distinctly Norse-looking depiction of a raven (see p. 396). If his new wife Aldgyð disapproved, the fact is unrecorded.
*
Under Eadmund’s new West Saxon regime the normal business of royal administration resumed on a less imperial scale than in his predecessor’s day. In 941 he held a royal council in villam qui cælebri æt Ceodre: the ‘famous’ palace of Cheddar.29 The grant that survives to confirm the visit is insignificant: a small estate in Hampshire, given to one of the new king’s ministers. The West Saxon kings were generous with their property portfolios, buying the support and loyalty of key men in their shires both new, as in Danish Mercia, and old. In the early years of their reigns such grants were numerous, and carefully chosen.
Cheddar is the only West Saxon royal residence to have been excavated so far.30 It stood at the navigable head of the River Axe (which empties to the north-west into the Bristol Channel), squeezed between the foot of the Mendip hills and the Somerset levels. Like several similar sites, it probably began as a small minster founded close to an earlier Roman site at the centre of a villa regalis, to which a royal hunting lodge was attached. During the secularization process of the ninth century the fortunes of the minster declined and the lodge became a royal township like that at Yeavering in north Northumbria.
51. ‘THROUGH DIFFICULT PATHS unto the edge of a precipice.’ A hollow way leading from Cheddar up onto the Mendip hills.’
A major construction phase seems to have been undertaken in the reign of Æðelstan, providing the site with halls, a chapel, a fowl-house and a wind-powered corn mill, all protected from periodic flooding by an elaborate drainage scheme. The carefully laid-out entrance was graced by a flagpole, whose setting included a plinth made from recycled Roman brick. The palace was still being expanded and refurbished in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.31 Each successive incarnation of Cheddar’s great hall shows engineering taken to new levels of sophistication. The only material traces left for the archaeologist are foundations, but its architecture must have impressed and awed its visitors: the royal court, subreguli, archbishops, duces, bishops, envoys, petitioners and ministri.
The bland record of Eadmund’s Cheddar council of 941 is enlivened by a series of events later thought to portend the future glory of a major celebrity. The greatest of the late Saxon archbishops of Canterbury, Dunstan (who held the see between 960 and 978) was born near Glastonbury in about 910 at a time when few, if any, functioning monastic houses survived. In the case of Glastonbury its community consisted of no more than a clerical school; but such were its ancient reputation and the virtues of its relics that it was much visited. Dunstan attended the school there before being introduced into Æðelstan’s court by the then archbishop of Canterbury, Æðelhelm, and taking vows to become a monk.32 Dunstan was a gifted silversmith and illustrator;π he also managed to attract the jealousy of his peers. He fell foul of court rivalries and gossip and the new king, Eadmund, threatened him with disgrace and exile.
Both Roger of Wendover and Dunstan’s anonymous biographer record the story that at Cheddar events came to a head when the king went out hunting on the wooded hills above the palace:
A multitude of deer took to flight, one of which, of extraordinary size, the king singled out for the chase, and followed with his dogs alone driving him through difficult paths unto the edge of a precipice, over which the stag and dogs fell headlong and were dashed to pieces.33
The king, fearing that he must follow the beasts into the infamous depths of the gorge and unable to rein in his mount in time, is supposed to have uttered a prayer and at that instant, realizing that he must have offended Christ by his unjust treatment of the monk, was saved by the miraculous intervention of Dunstan’s prayers.
The king, it was said, promptly rode with Dunstan to Glastonbury and installed him as its abbot. As it happens, a charter of 940 records King Eadmund granting Abbot Dunstan twenty hides of land at a place called Cristemalforde (‘the ford with a crucifix’) in Wiltshire.34 If the Cheddar story is true, the event must have taken place a year earlier than the council recorded in 941. More likely, the recorded sequence is accurate, but the two events have been conflated by the wishful thinking of later biographers. Either way, Dunstan’s political survival allowed him to establish, under successive kings, an organized community of monks following a form of Benedictine rule from which a great monastic reform movement was born in the 970s.35
The treaty signed at Leicester, meanwhile, did not prevent King Óláfr from extending his influence northwards from York, into the lands of the Bernician lords. In 941 his forces ravaged the church of St Bealdhere at Tyninghame in East Lothian; and the Men of York were said to have laid waste the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.36 But Óláfr seems to have died during this northern campaign, ‘smitten by the justice of God’ according to Roger of Wendover. In his stead, from across the Irish Sea, came a namesake, Óláfr Sigtrygsson, nicknamed Kváran or ‘Sandal’, son of the Norse Dublin king who had married Æðelstan’s sister and ruled Northumbria for six years after 921. Kváran may already have been in York from 940; he had by then bequeathed the kingship of Dublin to another scion of the dynasty of Ívarr, Blákári Guðrøðsson, brother of the deceased Óláfr.
When the Chronicle picks up the narrative again, in 942, it is in the form of thirteen split lines of alliterative poetry, one of its most celebrated entries:
Her Eadmund cyning |
Engla þeoden, |
maga mundbora |
Myrce geeode, |
dyre dædfruma... |
Here King Edmund, lord of the English
Men’s protector, overran Mercia
(Dear deed-doer) As bounded by Dore,
Whitwell Gate and Humber river,
The broad brimming stream; and Five Boroughs:
Leicester and Lincoln,
Nottingham, and also Stamford and
Derby. Danes were before,
Under the Northmen, forced into submission,
In heathen bondage,
A long time, until he afterwards freed them,
For his honour, defender of warriors,
Edward’s offspring, king Eadmund.37
This is the first documentary source to name the Five Boroughs, and such an enigmatic entry raises more questions than it answers. It is generally understood, in the first place, that it represents a record of the military conquest of Danish Mercia by Eadmund in 942. Then, there is the clear statement in the poem of a new boundary line between the lands of the Norse kings of Northumbria and those of Eadmund, redrawn somewhat to the north of Watling Street and on a very ancient line dividing the historical Mercia from Deira: Dore (meaning literally a door, or narrow pass), half a dozen miles south-west of Sheffield, and the Whitwell Gap to the south-east. Linking this line, between the eastern Peak District (lands of the Pecsætan), the western fringes of Sherwood and the River Humber, the border would follow the line of either the River Idle, to its junction with the Trent in Lincolnshire or, similarly, the River Don whose course runs a little to the north.
This had been a much fought-over zone in earlier centuries and if, as Michael Wood suggests, we can place Brunanburh in these debatable lands, it would reinforce the sense of a dynamic landscape of fluctuating, competing fortunes. Significantly, perhaps, place names indicative of Scandinavian settlement occur much more frequently east and south of the Trent, in the heartlands of the Five Boroughs, than they do to its north and west.
The 942 poem is followed in the Winchester version of the Chronicle by a prose statement: that Eadmund stood sponsor for Kváran and a second Norse king, an otherwise obscure Rögnvaldr, at their baptisms, a sure sign of their submission. But perhaps the most intriguing element of the entry is its suggestion that Danes had been subjected to bondage by the heathen Norse. The implication is that assimilated Danes, settled north and east of Watling Street since the days of the mycel here, now Christianized and perhaps, like Urm, married into native families, resented the overt heathenism of the two Irish Norse kings, with their aggressively apocalyptic iconography. Danish Mercia had, finally, sided with Wessex.
It is very difficult, perhaps futile, to attempt an analysis of such niceties of identity. Overlordship was a distant influence on ordinary lives. Coinage was one thing; few inhabitants of Danish Mercia would ever have seen a king. More likely, I think, loyalties and identities were subtly complex and local, looking to the burghal towns and their governors, of whatever persuasion, for markets, opportunities for patronage and cultural influences while they guarded their own backs. Domestically, identities would have been displayed in a variety of media, from dress fashion to tableware to language and the naming of children; to the stories they were told and the games they played. One suspects that women played a far greater role in managing such subtle processes than the historical record, or even the archaeology, allows.
The lord and lady of Goltho, an abandoned medieval settlement lying close to a Roman road some 14 miles (23 km) north-east of Lincoln,∆ experienced these tensions at first hand. Dane or native, their family had seen the turmoil of the ninth century come and go and had prospered, although not without dramatic adaptations to events within and beyond the old territorial limits of Lindsey. Archaeologist Guy Beresford’s excavations of the early 1970s, during which he pioneered the strategic use of machinery to strip and expose complex horizontal and vertical stratigraphic relationships in large, open-area excavations, revealed a settlement history spanning more than a millennium.38
What had appeared, from surface earthworks, to be the grassed-over remains of a Norman motte and bailey castle, in fact started life as a Romano-British farmstead. For 400 years after the end of the Roman occupation of Britain the site was abandoned, or shifted elsewhere in the vicinity, before a new farmstead, the substantial home of a senior thegn or dux, was refounded here in about 800. Guy Beresford believed that a complete lack of evidence for destruction deposits at the site and the paucity of Scandinavian artefacts argued for a native incumbent and that its re-establishment may have been the result of a minor land grant by a ninth-century overlord, one of the still-independent kings of Mercia.
In about 850 Goltho’s two or three moderately substantial longhouses, of a type familiar across contemporary Britain, set in a rectangular fenced enclosure, were replaced by something much more impressive. A prestigious new hall, comparable in size with the earliest hall at Cheddar and capable of hosting large public assemblies, was constructed on the same site.** It formed part of a complex, aligned squarely around a courtyard, with a large barn or weaving shed, byre and kitchen block.
After perhaps a generation (which would coincide neatly with the annexation of East Mercia by the mycel here and the expulsion of King Burghred) the whole was enclosed by a very substantial defensive earthwork, reconstructed analytically by Beresford even after its virtual obliteration by later ditches and ramparts. That it was genuinely defensive rather than merely pretentious is evident from its dimensions: the ditch was 8 feet (2.5 m) deep and nearly 20 feet (6 m) across, with the rampart probably topped by a palisade. Whether it was designed to prevent raids by Vikings, West Saxons, Danish war bands or fellow members of Lindsey’s élite is frustratingly impossible to say but, again, one is reminded of the provisions of Æðelstan’s Friðgegyldum Ordinance, which hint at tensions among powerful local kindreds. The lord of Goltho had enemies.
For most of the period between 865 and 950 Goltho lay outside the area subject to the kings of Wessex. Lincoln was its closest and most important central place. If one supposes that the regio of Lindsey, the north part of Lincolnshire, was ruled by a jarl of the stamp of Urm, then it must have been his patronage to which the thegn or hold of Goltho owed his status and, one presumes, the permission to construct such a powerful personal statement of his wealth and status.
The defended enclosure at Goltho was remodelled several times over the next two centuries, always within the same enclosure and on the same co-axial alignment. In time a regularly laid-out village of tofts†† and cottages grew up close by, its earthworks partially excavated before being razed by the plough in the 1970s. The remarkable preservation of what has been called a ‘private burh’ owes much to the construction, in the Norman period, of a motte whose earthworks covered and sealed the earlier phases.
Large quantities of domestic refuse were recovered from the excavation, showing that Goltho was well within the distribution compass of Lincolnshire potteries, the subject of the intriguing analysis described in Chapter 8. At about a day’s travel from Lincoln, Goltho is a prime candidate for the putative burghal estate proposed by Symonds and Ling, its lord perhaps owning a small estate plot and chapel in the city and fitting neatly into the élite club of its Anglo-Scandinavian heyday. If that were the case, though, we might expect more material finds reflecting contact with the highly networked metalworkers and artisans of Lincoln; and Goltho retained its Old English name while, nearby, the village of Wragby, possibly ‘Vragi’s settlement’, underwent a period of extended Norse ownership. Goltho seems resolutely native.
Goltho must have lain at the heart of a land-holding sufficiently large to support its needs and the grandeur of its buildings. Like Flixborough and Cheddar, its management required a complex machinery of customary obligations and services in which each individual was bound by duty and privilege to all other parties.
A compilation dating from about the early eleventh century‡‡ and known as Gerefa, ‘the Reeve’, sets out an idealized relationship between an estate and those who owed service to it under the watchful eye of its reeve, or steward.39
ÐEGEN LAGV IS þæt he sy his boc rihtes wyrðe
7 þæt he ðreo ðinc of his lande do fyrd
7 burhbote 7 brycgeweorc.
The law of the thegn is that he be worthy of his book-rights and that from his land he must do three things: fyrð-duty, burhbote and bridgework.
These ‘common burdens’ are first recorded under King Offa of Mercia in the eighth century. All those of thegnly rank must raise a company of armed and trained men when called upon by their lord (fyrð-duty); must contribute to building and repairing the walls of the burh (burhbote) and repair bridges when required. The use of the Old Norse term lagu (‘law’) is significant: its adoption must derive from usage in Danish Mercia.
Below the thegn comes the geneat: the dependent tenant or, in earlier times, the ceorl. In Danish Mercia and parts of East Anglia, but especially in Lincolnshire in the late Anglo-Saxon period, classes of tenant called sokemen and liberi homines, or freemen are widely attested. They were able to pass their holdings onto their heirs, like booked land. Historians used to equate their distribution with the Danelaw and drew the quite reasonable inference that here was evidence for independent, free veterans of the mycel here settling the land and sharing it out, just as the Chronicle recorded. For many reasons the argument has not stood the test of time.40 Now, the survival of such distinct classes, or more properly castes, also found in Wales and Kent, for example, is seen as another facet of regional diversity, reflecting earlier customary territorial relations between lords and those who rendered services and goods to them.
The estate demanded duties from its free tenants in the form of a gafol, or tax on the land that they held; in the provision of horses for team work and load carrying; by providing food; in the maintenance of hedges and fencing, as well as supporting the church. In a fascinating aside, we learn that it was the duty of the geneat to ‘lead newcomers to the enclosure’: that is, to ensure that traders or free men entering on the estate lands should be supervised, given hospitality and brought to the lord to see what they were about.
The duties of the kotesetlan, or cottar, were defined by local custom, so conspicuous a feature of Early Medieval cultures everywhere. He had his own land and must render services to the lord and ‘always be available to work’. The poor, unfree gebur carried the heavy burden of unremitting labour and render, working two or three days per week for his lord, paying taxes such as heorðpænig (hearth-penny) and ploughing and sowing the lord’s fields; he must give up part of his barley harvest, two of his hens and a young sheep; he must provide half of the feed for a hunting dog and pay six loaves to the lord’s swineherd when he drove his pigs to wood pasture in autumn. In return, the gebur was provided with tools and with 7 acres of land to plough and sow, two oxen, a cow and six sheep.
Additional clauses in the Gerefa address provisions for bee-keepers, bound and free swineherds, male and female slaves, oxherds, shepherds, cheesewrights and plough-followers, for the beadle and the forester. It is an idealized portrait of a well-mannered and structured hierarchical society whose wealth was produced for the benefit of men like the lord of Goltho: those worthy to ride with and attend upon the king.
*
The Midlands campaign of 942 may have involved military engagement; the poem preserved in the Chronicle entry for that year is not explicit. Some scholars have noted the granting of estates in 941 by Eadmund in the central Trent valley and suggested that, following the earlier precedents of his father and half-brother, the young king was purchasing territories from Danish or Norse control and assigning them to more Wessex-friendly lords.41 This deployment of West Saxon patronage (and cash) which had already reached as far as Amounderness in the north-west and the community of St Cuthbert in the north-east, was an essential tool in the extension of royal authority outside the West Saxon and Mercian heartlands. But Eadmund must have been schooled, and early, in other means of showing political clout. In the same year, the Annales Cambriae record that Idwal Foel, grandson of Rhodri Mawr and king of Gwynedd, was killed along with his son Elisedd by the ‘Saxons’;§§ whether by military expedition or assassination is uncertain. Idwal, and Gwynedd, had maintained an uneasy relationship with the West Saxon project—regional Venedotian policy traditionally looked to Man and the Irish Sea for allies; and Norse place names suggest that, like the Wirral, there was a significant Norse/Irish constituency in the north Welsh kingdom.
In killing Idwal, Eadmund may have been exacting revenge for his possible defection at Brunanburh, or for his failure to submit on the new king’s coronation. Idwal does not appear on the witness lists for Eadmund’s charters, whose attendance was dominated by his brother Eadred, by Archbishop Oda of Canterbury (but not Wulfstan of York) and by Theodred, bishop of London. Eadgifu, the king’s mother, was an occasional witness; but there are no subreguli, not even the generally pro-Wessex Hywel Dda. The new king’s council was, it seems, a smaller, more businesslike affair, with less of the imperial pomp of the father and less overtly political, but keeping a tight circle of loyalists on hand. Urm and his fellow Danish jarls did not appear again at the king’s councils until much later in the decade, after Eadmund was dead.
Hywel Dda may not have been an Eadmund insider, but he took the opportunity afforded by his brother’s death to expel his two surviving nephews, Iago and Ieuaf, annexe Gwynedd and Powys and effectively, for the first time, create a kingship comprising the bulk of Wales outside Morgannwg (formerly Glywysing) and Gwent in the south-east (the latter apparently directly subject to West Saxon lordship).42 Hywel was the most outstandingly successful of the Early Medieval Welsh kings, ranking alongside Constantín of Alba and three generations of Æðulfings in playing a key role in the founding of a medieval kingdom. Like them, he understood the rules of patronage, opportunity and alliance; and if, in the Armes Prydein Fawr, he was cast as a traitorous appeaser by some contemporaries, his canny adaptation to the realities of Norse invasion and West Saxon imperium ensured that he survived long enough for his name to be remembered as both Dda (‘the Good’) and as the promulgator of the impressive Welsh Law code of the Middle Ages.
He may have been influenced, in his youth, by Bishop Asser, Ælfred’s most favoured Welsh intellectual. His pilgrimage to Rome in 928 (in imitation, perhaps, of the youthful Ælfred) and his attendance at successive councils convened by Æðelstan exposed him, uniquely, to a wider European milieu. A single silver penny with the inscription HOWAEL REX survives; probably minted in Chester and following a contemporary West Saxon style. It may commemorate his annexation of Gwynedd in 942.43 The law books called Cyfraith Hywel (the Laws of Hywel) exist in manuscripts that date from no earlier than the thirteenth century. Several generations of scholarship have been devoted to determining key questions surrounding these books: are they the result of royal edicts identifiable with pre-Norman Welsh Law; can they be attributed to a single reign; and, if so, can their inspiration be laid at the door of Hywel Dda, as their medieval compilers wished them to be? The answers to all these questions are complicated, but some basic conclusions can be drawn from the modern edition in English by Dafydd Jenkins and a recent analysis and summary in Thomas Charles-Edwards’s magnificent Wales and the Britons.44
Despite some clear but isolated instances in which Welsh Law borrowed from pre-Conquest English Law, the underlying legal philosophy is much more closely linked with Irish Law texts, which survive in voluminous and early manuscripts. The flavour is less retributive than in English legal codes but, as Jenkins points out, there is a striking internal tension between the crude and the sophisticated.45 Homicide is treated largely as a matter for compensation: in common with most Early Medieval societies, Welsh lawmakers were keen to limit the disastrous effects of blood feud. In contrast and influenced, perhaps, by the widespread tenth-century obsession with the social consequences of property crime, theft is more a matter for punishment. Surprisingly, perhaps, robbery with violence attracts lesser penalties than common theft, being regarded as less stealthy. Truth, in the modern legal sense applied in Scottish and French law, for example, would not be recognized as relevant in the Early Medieval legal process. Proof was demonstrated by oath and by the status of the oath-taker.
The laws relating to women, especially with regard to property and divorce, seem strikingly progressive. After puberty a woman ‘is entitled to control what is hers’; after seven years of marriage, separating couples split their property in shares:
It belongs to the woman to divide and to the man to choose. The pigs for the man and the sheep for the woman... Of the sons, two thirds to the father and one to the mother... The man is entitled to the upper stone of the quern, the woman to the lower... To the woman belong the pan and the trivet and the broad axe and the hedging bill and the ploughshare, and all the flax and the linseed, and the wool.46
Land was partible among sons and brothers, so that holdings must inevitably become smaller over time; but mill, weir and orchard might not be alienated from a kindred, nor divided. Appropriately, for a largely pastoral and overwhelmingly agricultural economy, detailed consideration is given to the values of all the beasts of field and waste: poultry, bees, hunting dogs, birds of prey and even cats. Hazelnut, oak, yew, beech and apple trees had specific values; similarly a lengthy list of household equipment and clothes. Even the various parts of the human body were defined and valued, not as items of trade but in case of claims for compensation, theft and damage. These were laws written by and for lawyers; they were not the edicts of a king; how far they reflect actual practice and behaviour is difficult to say. Collectively, they demonstrate an outstanding vigour in Welsh intellectual thought, drawing on very ancient custom: ideologically driven but fully self-conscious and responsive to a real, living world.
*
After the death of Óláfr and the arrival of Kváran in 941, and following the recapture of Danish Mercia in 942, Eadmund pressed his advantage. In the following year Constantín mac Áeda abdicated his throne after more than forty years, retiring to the monastic community at St Andrews in Fife, perhaps as its abbot. His eldest son and presumed heir, Cellach, had been killed at Brunanburh. Another son, Ildulb, seems to have been too young to succeed and one might surmise that Constantín’s retirement was, therefore, forced by his successor, Mael Coluim mac Domnall. Mael Coluim’s father had been Constantín’s predecessor, so he may have been heir presumptive by customary arrangement, but his rise to power might also have been an opportunistic response to Constantín’s failure at Brunanburh. It is impossible to say, but it is difficult to see this middle-aged man emerging from, as it were, nowhere. He would rule Alba for eleven years.
Between the new king of Alba and the twenty-three-year-old king of Wessex lay the territories of Cumbria/Strathclyde under Dyfnwal (the Brittonic equivalent of Gaelic ‘Domnall’), Bernicia under an unknown dux ; and two kings of Northumbria: Kváran and Rögnvaldr. Every version of the Chronicle records that in 944 Eadmund ‘brought all of Northumbria under his sway, and drove out two kings Anlaf Sihtricson (that is, Kváran) and Raegnald Guthfrithson (Rögnvaldr)’. Once again, it is unclear from this account if King Eadmund himself mounted a military campaign; but the later tenth-century chronicler Æðelweard offers intriguing extra detail:
After the passage of the seventh year [of Eadmund’s reign] [Arch]bishop Wulfstan and the ealdorman (dux) of Mercia expelled certain traitors, that is to say Raegnald and Anlaf [Kváran], from the city of York, and reduced them to submission to the king.47
Archbishop Wulfstan had been an ally of Óláfr. If Æðelweard’s testimony is to be trusted, that alliance did not extend to his two successors, whom he was prepared to sacrifice for his own political ends. As for the Mercian ealdorman, Alex Woolf suggests that he may be identified as Æðelstan the so-called ‘half-king’, variously comes or dux in charter attestations between 938 and 956, who seems to have been appointed as regent in East Anglia from about 932.48 Eadmund’s judgement of character and his intuitive sense of when to deploy military force and political pressure are impressive testimony to his education in statesmanship. The Anglo-Saxon chronicler made sure that he got the credit.
A year later, we know, the king himself travelled north on campaign, apparently safe in the knowledge that Northumbria and York, with its power-broking archbishop, were once again securely part of the West Saxon imperium. He visited the community at Chester le Street, where he conferred more gifts on St Cuthbert and repeated the promises of allegiance which his father had given with such effective results in 934. His army, too, contributed 60 pounds of silver coin to Cuthbert, while:
He himself with his own hand placed two golden armlets and two Greek palls upon the holy body, granted peace and law better than any it had ever had to the whole territory of St Cuthbert, [and] confirmed the grant [of his father’s charter].49
The relationship between saint and royal house cemented, Eadmund ravaged Strathclyde/Cumbria, according to the Annales Cambriae and the Chronicle. Roger of Wendover offers the name of Leolin, king of Dyfed, as a key ally in the campaign and Alex Woolf argues that this must be a mistake for Hywel: so it seems that the old West Saxon ally had been restored to favour.50 Roger also records the grisly fate of the two sons of King Dyfnwal: blinded, so that they could not succeed their father (they may already have been hostages at the West Saxon court). After this brief campaign the Western British kingdom that stretched between Clyde and Eamont was ceded, or let, to Mael Coluim of Alba.
At the end of 945 King Eadmund, at twenty-four years old, could boast that he was, like his distinguished half-brother Æðelstan, overlord of all Britain south of the Forth–Clyde line. Less than six months later, on 26 May 946, he was stabbed to death at Pucklechurch, in Gloucestershire, by a man called Liofa, said to be a thief.51
* Poetic conventions tend to follow simple multipliers like three hundred and three score. The Brunanburh figure might still be an exaggeration. Even so, fleet estimates in the annals on both sides of the English Channel seem to be quite consistent. The fleets of 893 numbered in the low hundreds of ships. Nicholas Brooks offers a very useful summary of the arguments for Early Medieval fleet and army sizes in a famous essay; Brooks 1979, 5–9.
† It was originally thought that the earlier part of this chronicle was written by Florence of Worcester and the later part by his fellow monk John of Worcester; John is now recognized as the author of both, basing his writings on notes compiled by Florence.
‡ From the poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
§ There has been speculation that the historical Egil suffered from Paget’s disease. See a 1995 article by Jesse L Byock: http://www.viking.ucla.edu/Scientific_American/Egils_Bones.htm, retrieved November 2016.
# Pronounced ‘Thorolf’.
∫ 1200 shilling men and 200 shilling men. See above, Chapter 5, p. 176.
Ω If this is true, it implies that either Óláfr had repudiated the daughter of Constantín, whom he is recorded as having married by John of Worcester, or that the earlier marriage is a fiction.
≈ According to the Chronicle account Óláfr obtained Eadmund’s friendship and the latter stood sponsor at his baptism, just as Ælfred had at Guðrum’s, two generations before.
∂ See above, p. 359. The full list of charters attested by Urm comprises: S416; S520; S544; S522a; S550; S633; S659; S674; S679.
π A remarkable self-portrait may survive in the Glastonbury Classbook attributed to Dunstan and held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Bodleian Library, Auct. F. 4. 32 (2176).
∆ And 5 miles (8 km) north of the monastic site at Bardney, from where Oswald’s relics were retrieved in about 906/9. The name only survives from the thirteenth century, when it was recorded as Golthawe, perhaps ‘the enclosure of the (marsh) marigold’. Beresford 1987.
** Two other long halls of almost identical dimensions have been excavated at Sulgrave in Northamptonshire and at Bicester in Oxfordshire. See Hamerow 2012, 47, for the striking graphic evidence of their plans.
†† Toft: a narrow strip of land, fronting on a lane or road, on which a cottage was built, associated with a croft – a parcel of arable or pasture land close by.
‡‡ And therefore to be treated with caution for its applicability to the conditions pertaining a hundred and more years earlier. It is contained in a collection of texts in an Old English manuscript: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 383.
§§ Under the entry for 943, corrected to 942.