CHAPTER 2
NEW GODS FOR OLD
In 1960 an Italian stood in the city of London, in the shadow of St Paul’s, and wept. Many centuries earlier, in AD 604, another Italian had stood in the ruins of London and I think he probably wept too. In 1960, the Italian was my mother, newly arrived in London and unable to speak a single word of English, sick with hunger and humiliation as the family she had gone to work for as an au pair all but starved her. Although my mother knew no English, she knew of St Paul’s, even from her little village in Piemonte, and on a rare day off she managed to make her way there. Sitting on its steps, looking over the vast city, so different and so indifferent, she wept, thinking of all the decisions and plans that had brought her here, to this strange land. But my mother did not know that the church on whose steps she sat was first founded by an Italian, just as far from home, and just as uncertain of the wisdom of what he was doing.
Back in 604, the Italian who stood on Ludgate Hill, looking around at the tumbledown remains of a once great Roman city, was named Mellitus. And he wept – although I am sure that a man of his gravitas would have kept his tears silent and wept inwardly – he wept from despair at the ruin that lay around him and the magnitude of the task that lay in front of him. He had been made bishop of London, the shepherd of a city that had ceased to exist, and pastor to a people who worshipped, in the view of the Italian, sticks and stones. It was no sort of task for an aristocratic Roman. But it was the task he had been entrusted with and, as Mellitus stood on Ludgate Hill, he must have thought back to the man who had sent him from the cerulean skies of Italy to the fogbound banks of the Thames.
For 200 years London had disappeared into the silence of prehistory. The man who dragged it from the darkness was Italian. His name was Gregory, and he was pope.
In AD 591, as recounted by Bede, Gregory was in Rome and saw, for sale in a slave market, some pale-skinned, fair-haired young men – very different from the olive and black of his own compatriots. When he asked where they hailed from, he was told they were Angles. In a rare example of a pun working as well in translation as in the original, Gregory replied, “Not Angles but angels!” and, on learning that they were pagans, he decided to do something about that, and reclaim for the Church that part of the Empire that had been lost to it.
Gregory dispatched a mission to England, led by Augustine, the prefect of Gregory’s own monastery. The missionaries were somewhat less keen on the task appointed them than the man sending them. On their way to Britain, they grew steadily more frightened at the idea of travelling to the ends of the world, to people who not only didn’t speak their language but whose manners and customs were notoriously barbarous. So much so, they stopped and Augustine returned to Rome to try to persuade Gregory to rethink this whole mad idea. Gregory did no such thing, but sent Augustine back with a letter to encourage the faint-hearted, and orders to carry on. So, in 597, Augustine and his companions landed in Kent, on what was still the island of Thanet, and were met by the king, Æthelbert, in the open air, for Æthelbert feared that in the dark of a hall these strange men from far away might overwhelm him with their foreign magic. Safe under the sky, the king heard Augustine preach and was sufficiently impressed to grant him land in Canterbury and freedom to preach. Æthelbert’s wife, Bertha, was herself foreign, the daughter of King Charibert of the Franks, and as such represented a significant strengthening of ties between Kent and the rising power of the Frankish court.
Power, in the small kingdoms that had proliferated throughout the British Isles in the two centuries following the Empire’s collapse, was a delicate, hard-won, and even harder-held prize. Given that its ultimate source was the sword and battle, it might seem strange to call it delicate, but no king reigned on his own, instead relying on a network of alliances with the most powerful families in his kingdom. By marrying abroad, Æthelbert risked alienating some of his supporters – at the very least, he forwent the possibility of tying local support to him through marriage – but he must have calculated that the prestige attached to marrying a descendant of Clovis, the great Merovingian king, more than made up for that. But it was one thing to marry a Frank – it was another thing to accept her religion. For Bertha was Christian, while Æthelbert, like all the Anglo-Saxons and in contrast to the native Britons, was pagan.
The conquest of Britain, although swift in retrospect, was slow at the time, taking centuries. But although slow, it was thorough: the Anglo-Saxons almost completely eradicated the culture that they displaced, replacing an urban, literate, Christian and Roman civilization with a rural, oral, pagan, and Germanic society. While the Britons, driven into the west and on the verge of becoming the Welsh, retained the faith of their fathers and some semblance of Romanitas, the Anglo-Saxons left Roman cities as ruins and put their pigs to root through the shells of country villas, while they sacrificed to their gods on hill and wooded grove. And that is about all we can say for certain about the religion of the Anglo-Saxons. Everything else is reconstruction. The Anglo-Saxons who first learned to write were the first Christian Anglo-Saxons; whatever records they may have left of the faith of their fathers were almost all destroyed in the great conflagrations that engulfed most of the country’s monasteries during the Viking depredations of the ninth and tenth centuries. Archaeology has allowed us to piece together a little – oxen were frequent sacrifices it seems – but most of the rest is derived from extrapolating details of early Germanic and late Norse religion to Anglo-Saxon England. How well that works remains an open question.
Whether impressed by political or spiritual considerations – I suspect the distinction, so beloved of contemporary historians, would have been meaningless to Æthelbert – the king decided to embrace the religion of his wife. This was not a decision without risk, for his eldest son remained pagan, thus creating a potential scission – and rival power centre – in his court. For his part, Augustine was so encouraged by his initial success that he wrote to Pope Gregory, asking him to send more of, well, everything. In response, Gregory sent Mellitus, in 601, as head of a second mission, along with the necessaries for such a mission, including liturgical vessels and vestments, relics, and books. It was to Mellitus that Augustine gave a bishop’s hat and – it must have seemed a plum prize when first mooted – the see of the greatest city in the land: London.
Æthelbert’s gamble had paid off. He was now the power in the land, the king to whom other kings bowed, and, showing his political muscle, he saw to the conversion to Christianity of his nephew, Sæberht, king of the East Saxons and lord of London. As fruit of that conversion, and to further the mission among the East Saxons, Augustine sent Mellitus to Sæberht with orders to reestablish the bishopric of London.
Standing on Ludgate Hill, Mellitus must have realized that London was most definitely not Rome. But he came as a missionary from a church still rooted in the urban geography of Empire, which planted bishops in cities, and London was the best, indeed the only, candidate for that title in Britain. The next most populous Anglo-Saxon settlement, Southampton, would have comfortably fitted into the baths of Caracalla in Rome.
While the old Roman city had been largely abandoned, a small trading centre had developed a little upriver from Londinium, running along where the Strand now lies and up towards Covent Garden. According to Bede it was a trading centre, and one visited by many people arriving by land and sea. This long puzzled archaeologists, as virtually no trace of early Anglo-Saxon settlement could be found within the City. It was only with further excavations, in the 1980s, that the evidence was uncovered, showing that the Anglo-Saxons, despite the apparent advantages of a still largely intact defensive wall, had founded their settlement about a mile upstream, stretching from where the National Gallery is today to Aldwych.
Why did the Anglo-Saxons avoid living in old Roman-era towns? On the practical level, they were consummate carpenters, but the repair of stone and brick-built buildings was beyond them, so living in Londinium would have entailed the constant risk of a roof or wall falling on their heads. Leaving aside practicality, the abandoned cities and towns of Britain must have seemed wraith-haunted places to them, full of shadows, and telling all too credibly of death and decay. Much better, much less troubling, to build afresh, away from the works of giants.
But Mellitus was a Roman. He was not going to build his church in among hovels when there was a proper city, albeit ruined, just to the east. So, taking a probably reluctant Sæberht with him (kings were no more likely to enter ruined cities than anyone else), Mellitus headed through the gap where a gate in the wall had once been and on, through the ruins, towards the hill that rose above them. There must have been Christian churches in Londinium, although as yet no trace of them has been found by archaeologists, but it’s likely Mellitus too searched for some continuation of the old clergy, some sign that the Mass continued to be offered among the ruins.
My mother, without voice in a strange city, also went searching for religious, and she found them: the Sisters of Verona, who were living in Chiswick in a convent so memorably cold and draughty that even fifty years later it’s the first thing my mother recalls. But at least she found a sister who could speak the same language as her, Sister Gesualda, and confirmation that no, it was not accepted practice in England for au pairs to be semi-starved and denied their wages. Continuing the immigrant basis that has usually been apparent in London’s religious life, Sister Gesualda, despite her name and fluent Italian, was actually Scottish, having arrived in the capital via long missionary stays in Africa and the Philippines.
Although the Britons maintained the practice of Christianity, there is no record of continuing worship in London. Whatever churches Mellitus might have been able to find were in ruins, their sanctuary lights extinguished, and with the inexpressible sense of presence that is always felt a living church gone.
With no sign of a living church, Mellitus turned to the familiar dead. Rome, too, was a city of ruins, the shadow of its former imperial self, and without the papacy it too might well have been abandoned completely to decay. Even with the popes, and the life-giving pilgrim blood and money they attracted, much of Rome stood empty, stone shadows cast upon cracked pavements, classical temples sending lonely fingers up to the sky. So when Mellitus saw an abandoned temple to the goddess Diana on top of Ludgate Hill, he would suddenly have felt the distance between him and home shrink. It was no wonder that the new bishop of London chose to set up his altar amid the ruins of such a familiar goddess. Diana held no fear for Mellitus. So it was here that Mellitus offered Mass, amid the ruins, to the new God he and his countrymen were bringing to this strange people.
Mellitus remained in London for ten years. But the mission, that had begun so well, was about to run up against its first great check. For in a time when missions could hardly function without royal patronage and protection – there were no courts, no police, no redress other than the king’s sword should brigands be drawn to the accumulated surpluses laid up by the thoughtful, careful husbanding of monks – the death of kings meant all might change. And so it did. In 616, kings Sæberht and Æthelbert died. Sæberht had three sons and they quickly abandoned any pretence they had of following the new, foreign religion and reverted to their old ways, but not without a certain curiosity. For, seeing Mellitus offering Mass, they demanded some of that bread too.
Mellitus, no doubt reflecting on the pressing need for better catechesis, explained that they could only take communion if they had first been baptized. The three brothers were having none of that. They weren’t going to get wet, but the reverence surrounding the giving of bread made them think it carried a strong magic – and they wanted that magic. Mellitus, taking this as a teaching moment, continued to explain why communion was impossible without prior baptism, but to no avail.
The brothers, in charge now, weren’t about to accept this clerical pettifogging. No bread, no stay.
Having had a bishop for a decade, London was once more bishop- and church-free.
It is a curious feature of Bede’s history that, although he was himself convinced that the Roman version of Christianity was correct – orthodox in fact – while the type of Christianity that spread to northern Britain by the efforts of monks from Ireland was in certain aspects – notably when it celebrated Easter – wrong, the Roman missionaries in his history all appear as strangely lacking in fervour when compared to their Celtic brethren. We’ve already seen that Augustine and his fellows had barely made it out of Italy before they wanted to turn back. Now, having been sent packing from London, Mellitus too decided on the better part of valour. Not for him the red crown of the martyr; he was heading back, if not home, then at least across the Channel to Gaul, where they had decent wine.
He was joined in Gaul by Justus, the bishop of Rochester in Kent, for Æthelbert’s son, Eadbald, had likewise apostatized, taking as his wife Æthelbert’s widow (not Bertha – she had died some time before Æthelbert, and the king had remarried). This frankly rather icky marriage was forbidden under church law – one dreads to think of the pillow talk between Eadbald and his wife – but Eadbald had probably entered into the marriage to shore up a rather shaky reign, tying a powerful clan to him by marriage as his father had done.
Maybe centuries of being sent off by their mothers with the injunction to return with their shields or on them had exhausted Italian military fervour. It was certainly true that when the Second World War started, very few displayed any enthusiasm at all for the Duce’s ambitions. My own grandfather, when called up, leafed through the booklet on health exemptions and, finding that a certain number of teeth were deemed necessary for the fighting man, repaired to a room on his own with a pair of pliers and a bottle of grappa, thus escaping enlistment at the price of the mother of all hangovers – and a gap-toothed smile.
Augustine himself had died in 604 and Laurence succeeded him as archbishop of Canterbury. Pope Gregory’s original intention had been for there to be two archbishoprics in the country, in London and York, corresponding to the main civilian and military centres of Roman Britain. But, not surprisingly, Æthelbert was unwilling to let the archbishop pass from his immediate area of control, nor would he have been able to protect him elsewhere. So Laurence remained in Canterbury and, ever since, the bishop of a small town in Kent has ranked first among the prelates of England.
However, with Æthelbert’s death and Eadbald’s readoption of pagan practices to go with his forbidden wife, Archbishop Laurence decided to follow his brother bishops, Mellitus and Justus, into exile. It was surely better to go somewhere where he could serve God, rather than remain among pagans who rejected his message.
So what had begun so well was on the point of complete collapse. Laurence retired to bed, ready to take ship to Gaul the next day, when an irate St Peter appeared to him and set about whipping the cowardly cleric. Peter pointed out, in between strokes of the lash, that he had been imprisoned, beaten, whipped and, finally, crucified for the sake of the Faith and the people set under his care, while Laurence and his fellow bishops were set on fleeing because the Anglo-Saxons were not listening to them with sufficient respect.
The next morning, an abashed Laurence went to see King Eadbald and, showing him the weals on his back and sides, pointed out the power of the apostle who had thus lashed him and, by implication, that of the God Peter served. According to Bede, Eadbald, alarmed by this demonstration of divine power, received baptism, put aside his unlawful wife, and set about promoting Christianity in Kent, sending messengers across the Channel to recall bishops Mellitus and Justus. Back in England, Justus resumed the bishopric of Rochester but the Londoners were not prepared to take Mellitus back; the city had reverted to paganism. It was not until 675 that it would definitely have a bishop again: Earconwald.
As for Mellitus, he became archbishop of Canterbury after Laurence died, and was a noted sufferer from gout. Bede tells how Mellitus was carried on his sickbed in Canterbury, where he lay crippled with his gout, when the call of “Fire!” went up. Seeing the flames about to engulf church and town, he prayed with such fervour that the wind swung north, blowing the fire back whence it had come, and then dropped away to nothing. So, with his episcopal see still intact, Mellitus went the way of all flesh on 24 April 624, the first of the patron saints of London.
There is something gloriously appropriate that the first of the city’s patron saints should be an immigrant and then an exile, a sufferer from gout (and while I know there are other causes of the condition apart from excess wine and rich foods, I like to think that St Mellitus enjoyed them well), and a fireman. These four – immigrants, exiles, consumption, and fire – have always been drivers of the city and, in St Mellitus, we have a true patron of London.
The mission had survived, thanks to St Peter and his whip, but after its initial glorious promise, it seemed to be dying slowly away. To any outside observer wanting to put his bet with the smart money, the old gods would have seemed the better wager; the people of London, despite its decline still the largest concentration of people in the country, had tried both and opted for Woden and Thunor, the gods of battle. And no wonder. This was an age where the truth of theology was tested in battle; a god that could not give victory on the battlefield was not worth a prayer. As such, why should the Anglo-Saxons adopt the god of the people they had already defeated in claiming their new kingdoms? Christ was the God of the beaten Britons, driven into exile in Brittany or into the mountains of Wales and the north.
The short answer: Jesus jumped sides, and started fighting for the Anglo-Saxons.
The slightly longer answer: through a combination of battles and marriage alliances, power in seventh-century Britain shifted to the northern kingdom of Northumbria, whose kings had, while in exile in Ireland, become Christians. Returning, and claiming the throne of Northumbria, the successive kings Oswald and Oswiu (who were brothers) invited monks from Iona to set up a monastery on Lindisfarne. This rapidly became a great centre of learning and the training school for generations of missionary monks. And as the most powerful kings in the land, Oswald and Oswiu had the political and military muscle to protect the new church.
However, it’s worth mentioning that the Anglo-Saxons converted freely and of their own choice. When faced with a choice between their old pagan gods and this new God from across the sea, they chose, over the space of a couple of generations, to follow these new ways, even though by doing so they were accepting the religion of the defeated Britons.
While the battle for England’s soul was fought out, London largely went its own way. Cedd is often listed as the next bishop of London, but this Northumbrian was rather the bishop of the East Saxons. A monk of the Iona/Lindisfarne school, he saw his duties as tending to a people – the East Saxons – rather than being bishop of a place. Wine comes after Cedd in the list of bishops of London, but likewise he had little to do with the city. It was only with Earconwald, who accepted the pallium around 675, that the line of resident London bishops resumes. But more interesting than Earconwald is the extraordinary man who made him into a bishop, Theodore.
The phrase that accompanies his name gives away something of what made Theodore so remarkable: of Tarsus. Theodore of Tarsus. Tarsus, in modern-day Turkey but then part of the Greek-speaking world, is a long way from England. So how did a Greek end up as archbishop of Canterbury?
Tarsus lay near Antioch, a city renowned for the intellectual rigour of its scholars. Theodore was born in 602 and studied at Antioch, learning the distinctive style of biblical exegesis practised in the city, an analytical style that strove to uncover the precise literal meaning of biblical texts through the careful application of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy. Through his immersion in the school of Antioch, Theodore gained an impressive mastery over a huge range of scholarly disciplines. But the seventh century was a time of turmoil in the East, with the empires of Byzantium and Persia exhausting each other in a series of wars, only for the Persian Sassanid Empire to be brought crashing down by the eruption of the tribes of the Arabian peninsula, who had united under the flag of holy war in the name of a new religion: Islam. For their part, the Byzantines buckled but they did not break, and the Arab advance spread west and east, stymied for centuries by the walls of Constantinople. However, in the face of such invasions, the safest place to be was definitely behind the walls, and Theodore made his way to the imperial city and then, for reasons unknown, on to Rome.
By the time Theodore emerged from monkish obscurity into historical documents, he had already lived a full and, for the time, long life. He was in his sixties and no doubt, after the various trials and upheavals that had brought him to Rome, expected to live out the rest of his life there. But that was not to be his fate.
Wigheard, the new archbishop of Canterbury, had arrived in Rome to receive his pallium (the insignia of his office as metropolitan) but died of the plague there in 667, leaving Pope Vitalian (r.657–672) with a body and a vacancy on his hands. Burying the body, he set about filling the vacancy, offering it to Hadrian, one of his counsellors and abbot of a monastery near Naples. Hadrian declined the post, but put Theodore’s name forward. The pope accepted his suggestion, with the proviso that Hadrian accompany Theodore to England. Hoisted by his own recommendation, Hadrian had to agree.
Their departure was delayed while Theodore grew out his hair – Greek monks were tonsured by completely shaving their heads, while Western monks shaved crown and sides, leaving a ring of hair around their heads. Once Theodore had grown enough hair to shave most of it off again, Pope Vitalian consecrated him bishop on 26 March 668. With Hadrian, he set off on the long journey north on 27 May 668, arriving exactly a year later. Theodore was sixty-seven years old.
He was also a man in a hurry. With Hadrian, he set out on an immediate tour of his archdiocese, which had fallen into some disarray, with only three bishops in office. Theodore set about filling vacancies, reorganizing and breaking up overly large dioceses, and summoning regular synods, while setting up a school in Canterbury to teach the scholarly disciplines with which he and Hadrian were familiar. So successful were they in their teaching that Bede tells us of some of their students, still alive in his day, who were as fluent in Greek and Latin as they were in English.
It was Theodore, the Greek from Rome, who decisively remodelled the church in England, fixing its diocesan structure and ensuring that bishops, where possible urban bishops, wielded authority rather than abbots of monasteries.
Theodore eventually died, aged eighty-eight, a very, very long way from where he had been born and lived most of his life. The final twenty-one years of his life, spent in a north-western corner of the world that he can never have expected to visit, were extraordinarily productive in terms of scholarship, leadership, and formation, leading many later Anglo-Saxons to view it as something of a golden age.
Theodore died in 690, nearly a century after Augustine had landed in Kent, and with his death passed a remarkable century in which the popes in Rome had played a decisive, although long-distance, role in the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons. As we have seen, when faced with a choice between Christianity and the old gods of their forefathers, the Anglo-Saxons freely chose the new God from the East. Some contemporary attempts to reconstruct the old Anglo-Saxon religion seem to be as much about explaining away such a decision as trying to understand why they made the choice they did.
For my part, and though such a crucial decision will have had many components, there seems little reason to doubt that a large part of it was as Bede claimed. For when writing of a crucial meeting called to decide whether or not to accept Christianity, he puts into the mouth of an unnamed thegn this account of the bleakness and nobility of the old pagan world view, and the hope that had flown among them:
When we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thegns and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing. Therefore, if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.7
Nobility and pathos were found in the old pagan world view, but there was precious little hope. Nor was there much choice for the sons and daughters of the nobility beyond weapons training and war, and marriage. Christianity gave hope, and a whole new set of possibilities; a son might take up a pen rather than a sword, a daughter might enter a joint monastery and become, in time, its head, ruling over men and women.
But how deeply had Christianity penetrated into wider, and poorer, Anglo-Saxon society by the time of Theodore’s death? In this matter, the dead speak louder than the living. Think of the magnificent Sutton Hoo burial. It is magnificent because of what the living have sent to the grave to accompany the dead man, most probably King Rædwald of the East Angles. He died around 624. But even poor men were not sent to the afterlife without goods. This was the characteristic feature of pagan burials, whereas with Christian burials it was impossible to tell whether the dead man was a king or a slave.
So, what happens with the dead? By the late seventh century, the practice of packing stuff in with the dead has declined, with 45 per cent of burials bare and 25 per cent furnished only with knives. “Around the 720s, the deposition of all non-perishable grave-goods, except occasional knives, finally ended.”8
As far as the dead were concerned, the Anglo-Saxons were Christian.
But while the Anglo-Saxons had accepted the religion of the people they had conquered, their cousins across the sea had not, and in AD 793, amid portents and signs, comets and dragons flaming in the sky, the Viking Age began. And it began as it was to continue, in fire and blood, in slaves taken and plunder looted. The Northmen attacked Lindisfarne, the holiest site in Anglo-Saxon England, and the shock of desecration echoed around Europe. Anglo-Saxon scholars and missionaries, taking up the baton passed to them by the Irish, had set out to bring the news of hope to their own people across the grey sea, sending missionaries to the tribal peoples of north-western Europe, while Charlemagne harvested the fruit of Anglo-Saxon scholarship for his Carolingian Renaissance among the Franks. So when news of the attack on Lindisfarne reached Charlemagne’s court, the Northumbrian scholar Alcuin responded, by letter, with outrage and amazement.
Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church of St Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples.9
But this was only the start. With their incomparable longships and desire for plunder, the coastal, poorly defended monasteries must have seemed to the Vikings like an all-you-can-eat smörgåsbord. Indeed, the carefully spaced regularity of some of the attacks suggests that the Vikings were, in effect, farming the monasteries, waiting long enough after one attack for a fresh crop of monks and religious artefacts to be sown before attacking again. For while gold was great, monks, sold as slaves in the slave markets of the Viking trading centre at Dublin, were no less valuable a resource.
As the attacks continued, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms slowly frayed and crumbled until, in AD 865, what The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle called “a great heathen army” landed in East Anglia. And there, it waited.
The peace, if such it was, lasted a year, while Edmund, king of the East Angles, bought off the invaders with gold and horses. But the leaders of this Great Army had not come for swift profit and sudden escape: they had come to conquer. As 866 wound down towards autumn, the dragon stirred and, with sudden ferocity, turned north, destroying in a few months’ campaigning the ancient kingdom of Northumbria and, according to some scholars, sacrificing its king to the Norse gods via the rite of the blood eagle. This meant the ribs of the unfortunate king were prised apart and the lungs pulled from the still living man, to be draped over his shoulders in a grotesque mockery of wings.
Too fearful to intervene, the remaining Anglo-Saxon kingdoms – East Anglia, Mercia, and Wessex – looked on, wondering where next the dragon would turn its gaze. When the Army stirred again, it fell upon the kingdom of the East Angles.
This year [869] the army rode over Mercia into East-Anglia, and there fixed their winter-quarters at Thetford. And in the winter King Edmund fought with them; but the Danes gained the victory, and slew the king; whereupon they overran all that land.10
Mercia was next, and it duly fell, its king abdicating his throne and going into exile rather than facing the unstoppable might of the Great Heathen Army.
In five years, the Viking army had conquered what it had taken the Anglo-Saxons centuries to overcome. Now only Wessex remained and it was surely only a matter of time before it was conquered too. The old king was dead, and of his sons just two remained alive: Æthelred, and a young man, just twenty-one, who had never been expected to take the throne: Alfred.
London played a crucial but obscure part in Alfred’s great struggle with the Vikings. It seems, from hints in the historical record, that the bridge first built by the Romans had been repaired over the centuries so that it still stood. No doubt spring surges and, just as dangerous to a wooden structure, fires caused sections to collapse, but it seems to have been regularly rebuilt. The Vikings were traders as much as they were raiders, so London, with its ease of access by boat and continuing trading network, was of great interest to them. So they took it. It was the winter of 871–72 and the city remained under their control until 886, when Alfred retook it. During that time, Alfred had won some battles and lost more. He’d been driven, a fugitive, into hiding in the marshes of the Somerset Levels, and there into myth, only to re-emerge into history to inflict a decisive defeat on the Viking army at the Battle of Edington in 878. From there, he advanced eastwards until “Alfred occupied London, and all the English people submitted to him, except those who were in captivity to the Danes; and he then entrusted the city to ealdorman Æthelred to rule.”11
If Alfred had simply been a general, he would have been notable enough, but victory – for a time – over the Vikings was the spur to a quite remarkable outpouring of political and scholarly genius (and I do not use the word lightly). If there was one thing Alfred’s long struggle against the Vikings had taught him, it was that victory, and peace, was temporary. The Northmen would be back. But Alfred was determined to be ready for them next time.
So he set about the most fundamental reorganization of England since the Romans. Reasoning that the great strategic advantage held by the Vikings was their ability to launch surprise attacks and then withdraw on their longboats, Alfred created through the length and breadth of his kingdom a network of towns, burhs, fortified by wooden palisades and ditches, and so placed that all his subjects could reach safety within a day. Some of these burhs used existing Roman defences, others were built from scratch, but what Alfred effectively did was plant the first towns in England since the withdrawal of the legions.
The Anglo-Saxon settlement of London already existed but, having grown up along the strand, it was acutely vulnerable. So, Alfred moved London back within the old city walls, where it could better resist Viking attack.
To go with the fixed defences he had built throughout the kingdom, Alfred reorganized the army, establishing a mobile force that was permanently ready to deal with any Viking incursions, rather than having to call men from their fields, which had ensured that by the time enough were assembled the raiders had long gone.
But Alfred was, first and foremost, a Christian king. In analysing the reason for the Viking attacks, and their success, he looked to understand why God had permitted such a scourge to fall upon his people and the people of England. Extraordinarily, he concluded it was because the English had allowed their love of learning and scholarship to wither and decay. Looking around, Alfred saw a country, which had once been renowned as the foremost intellectual centre of northern Europe, now unable to produce even a handful of competent Latinists. This seems to be true, for even at Canterbury, the surviving Latin texts of the time reveal that whoever was writing them was almost completely ignorant of the language. The contrast with the time of Theodore and Hadrian, when the church in England boasted men as fluent in Greek and Latin as English, could not have been starker.
So, with characteristic boldness, Alfred set about renewing learning. He imported scholars from elsewhere in Britain and abroad, and he set them to the task of translating into English “certain books which are the most necessary for all men to know”.12 And to show how serious he was about all this, Alfred learned Latin himself and set about doing some of the translating. Thus, and uniquely for a king of this era, we have Alfred’s own thoughts – because he could not resist interpolating them in the texts he was translating – on topics ranging from the qualities required of a king through to the difficulty of finding loyal friends.
All this preparation bore fruit, for when the Vikings did return, in the 890s, the Anglo-Saxons were ready for them. An increasingly demoralized army of would-be raiders was hounded from one side of the country to the other until finally it gave up in disgust and went off to seek easier treasure elsewhere.
Alfred died in 899 but his remarkable son and daughter, Edward the Elder and Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, continued the strategy he had developed. Gradually they reclaimed the Danelaw, that part of Britain settled by the Northmen and ruled by them, until finally Alfred’s grandson, Athelstan, became the first true king of England.
If it sounds as if I’ve got a bit of a crush on Alfred, I plead guilty. The Victorians venerated him as the perfect king, but later generations have consigned him to a barely remembered folk tale of burnt cakes. Maybe he is too pious for modern tastes, but I find his deep search for the right path in the extraordinarily violent world in which he lived hugely relevant to modern times. Besides, Alfred loved books, with the deep passion of a time when books were rare and all the more precious for that.
Alfred and his children and grandson earned England – for England now recognizably existed – a century of peace.
Through that time, London was still served by only a handful of churches: St Paul’s, All-Hallows-by-the-Tower, St Andrew Holborn, and St Bride’s Fleet Street, with St Alban Wood Street, St Mary-le-Bow, and St Peter Cornhill as other possibilities. Not very many for a city that had grown greatly during the century. Priests were still too few for a parish system – little local churches serving local communities – to be feasible. Instead, large monastic churches – minsters – with teams of monks and priests were responsible for large areas, and from the minsters priests and monks went out to bury, baptize, and preach. Anglo-Saxon priests functioned more like sixteenth-century Jesuits, on their far-flung missionary journeys, than thirteenth-century rectors, with their intimate knowledge of the doings of a small parish. Even in London, there were not enough clergy for a fully fledged parochial system. But as the ninth century, with its Viking wars, passed into the relative peace of the tenth century, priestly numbers slowly increased in common with a general rise in population.
All were to be tested again, though, as the tenth century turned into the eleventh and England found itself ruled by the most incompetent monarch ever to take the throne: Æthelred. There have been worse men as kings – in terms of personal brutality it’s hard to beat a man who executes his own wives, but at least Henry VIII maintained the kingdom. If the first and most fundamental duty of a king is the defence of the realm, then Æthelred failed, and failed abjectly. The Vikings were back, and instead of meeting them in battle, Æthelred paid them off, again and again and again, with the raiders demanding more each time. The kingdom was bled dry.
In the end, Æthelred was driven into exile by the Danish king, Swein Forkbeard. Calling on his ally, Olaf, the king of Norway, Æthelred returned, although he needed Olaf to do the fighting for him. Finding Swein’s army holding London Bridge, Olaf had his men tie hawsers to the bridge supports and row, row, row, muscles bulging and throats bursting, until they pulled the bridge, with Swein’s army, down.
Olaf was a new breed of Viking: a Christian Viking. Christianity does not seem to have significantly reduced the violence of Viking kings but at least more of their exploits were written down. In gratitude to their saviour, Londoners consecrated a slew of churches to Olaf in the early decades of the eleventh century, including St Olave’s Church Southwark and, probably, St Olave Hart Street. Indeed, the Danes, having embraced Christianity, espoused it with fervour, initiating the explosion of church-building that would go on to transform London in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. At the start of the eleventh century there were maybe seven churches serving the city but by 1170 there were 126 parish churches and thirteen conventual churches serving city and suburbs. These churches reflected the wealth of the patrons who paid for their building – and given the amount of money extorted by the Viking incursions against Æthelred’s England, it’s not surprising that many of them were Danish institutions. But others marked a late outpouring – possibly desperate – of Anglo-Saxon piety, and then there were some Norman institutions, of which the most notable surviving example is St Bartholomew-the-Great.
Æthelred finally died, unlamented, in 1016 and Cnut, the son of Swein Forkbeard, took control of the country after a brief struggle with Æthelred’s son, Edmund Ironside. Danish control only lasted twenty-six years. In 1042, Æthelred’s son Edward “the Confessor” returned from exile in Normandy to become king. His great significance for London’s religious life was his decision to rebuild a monastic church upon marshy Thorney Island, upstream from the city, an island formed by the forking of the Tyburn as it flowed into the Thames. The new minster, lying to the west of the city, became Westminster Abbey, and Edward moved his royal residence from the city to the environs of his new abbey church, thus creating the west–east tension between London’s political and commercial centres that has characterized the city’s life and growth ever since.
Edward built his church in the new Romanesque style, spending on it “a tenth of his entire substance in gold, silver, cattle and all other possessions”,13 although that did not save it from Henry II, who almost completely demolished the Confessor’s church when rebuilding it in the snazzy new Gothic style.
English history has a very convenient and universally remembered date for the transition from the Early Medieval (what used to be called the Dark Ages), to the full-blown Medieval: 1066. Before the Conquest, kings were labelled by appellations: Æthelred “the Unready”, Edward “the Confessor”, Edgar “the Peaceable”. After, they were numbered. Before, they had names like Eadwig and Æthelstan. After, they were called William and Henry.
England was about to be thoroughly Frenchified.