A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (33 page)

In the forty years before Eric seized the place we hear of six more warlords who held sway in Deira. Of these, Olaf Sihtricson, who held power in York for two brief periods, was also a ‘king’ of the Dublin Vikings and the Dublin connection recurs more than once. But it is hard to believe that men such as these, including Bloodaxe himself, were rulers of a calibre to make York ‘one of the great cities of the Viking world’.

Perhaps, Professor Rollason has proposed, we should see York as ‘essentially an ecclesiastical city ruled by its archbishops, comparable to Trier or Cologne’. Wulfhere, the archbishop ejected by Halfdan, was restored to office only six years later, perhaps precisely so that he would direct the governance of the region. In such a
context the superb Coppergate helmet, war gear with a seemingly incongruous Christian inscription, might be read as emblematic of the entwined sinews of secular and ecclesiastical power. In 1069 the Normans of the post-Conquest garrison, as befitted their Viking ancestry, set a fire that destroyed the great York library. Maybe, Rollason surmises, the archival evidence that could have confirmed the hypothesis of a church-led administration also perished in the flames. Whoever actually ran the place, Viking York was highly prosperous despite the Byzantine and bloody power politics that absorbed its ‘kings’.

Archaeology has revealed the construction of substantial defence works, such as the strengthening of the dilapidated Roman fortifications. Excavations from the 1970s in the Coppergate district uncovered the presence of a major commercial and craftworking centre in the fork at the confluence of the Ouse and Foss rivers. By about 900 there was a grid pattern of long narrow plots divided by wattle fences and built up with post and wattle structures, running back from open shop fronts on the street line. Some fifty years later a large rebuilding project replaced these structures with houses, workshops and occasional warehouses built of robust oak squared uprights clad in oak planking. Archaeology reveals that York was importing honestones from Scandinavia, pottery perhaps with wine in it from the Rhineland, even silk from the Far East. Its workshops were turning out leather goods, wooden household vessels, textiles and grave slabs and other stone work in the region’s own characteristic ‘Jelling’ style of decoration, incised in double outline animal motifs. Furnaces and stocks of ore, crucibles and other equipment testified to working in iron, copper and precious metals. There were jewellers working in (imported) amber, shoemakers and skate makers among other artisans. Wells, drainage channels and purpose-built latrines complete the picture of a well-planned new business quarter. Coppergate was part of a much wider piece of town planning, but York was a thriving emporium before the Scandinavian
settlement. Elsewhere in the city, for example at Fishergate, there are indications of merchants’ quarters laid out in the late eighth century and the presence of Frisian traders.

The York mint was busy in the early decades of the tenth century producing coins for the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelstan, who occupied the place for a time in the 930s, and for the Viking Olaf Guthfrithsson, the last but one Scandinavian ‘king’ of York. Moneyers were part of the social elite and descendants of these Norse artisan dynasties were still at work in the time of William the Conqueror.

North by northeast and the province of St Cuthbert

It seems the Vikings quickly converted to Christianity. The cemetery of the ‘Viking’ period under the present York Minster shows uninterrupted Christianity at the heart of the city. To the northwest, Northumbrian hegemony over the Britons of ancient Cumbria, a region that in addition to the modern county of that name embraced districts along the northern bank of the Solway Firth in Dumfriesshire, modern Scotland, was disrupted and supplanted by raiders from Viking Dublin and also from Norway. In the tenth century a shadowy succession of rulers, beginning with Owain (c. 915–c. 937) and called the kings of the Cumbrians, is occasionally mentioned by northern sources.

Any account of the confused and shifting events and peoples in this northern part of England, based as it is on fragmentary chronicle references, disputed place name evidence and isolated archaeological finds, must largely be speculation, though there are some tempting allusions in sagas and bardic literature. The name ‘Cumbria’, related of course to the Welsh
cymry
, proclaims its British origins, but who these tenth-century kings of Cumbria might be is not clear. One theory starts from the fact that its northern
neighbour, the British kingdom of Strathclyde, with its fortress of Alclyde (Dumbarton), was annexed by the kings of the Scots; it proposes that they used their new province as the base for further expansion southward. On this thesis, the title ‘king of Cumbria’ should be seen as the designation for the Scottish sub-kings of Strathclyde. The names of Owain’s successors, Dunmail (Donald), expelled by the English king Edmund in 945, and Malcolm, who died in 997 and was perhaps also the ruler known as ‘king of the Britons of the North’, certainly have a Scottish ring. With the death of another Owain (Owain the Bald) in 1018 the Strathclyde Cumbrian regime was absorbed by the kings of the Scots. The situation would be contested for generations by border warfare that seems to have determined that British Strathclyde should remain Scottish, and British Cumbria remain English.

An alternative thesis argues that the king of Cumbria was not the Scottish king of Strathclyde under another name but rather an independent British ruler. According to this view, the British population submerged by the original Anglo-Saxon conquests was liberated by the collapse of Anglian Northumbria to reassert its identity under its own line of kings. Central to the debate are the numerous place names in the area of undoubtedly British origin. Were they planted in southward expansion from Strathclyde in the tenth century or were they in fact survivals from the pre-Anglian conquest period? The expert jury is still out, though a layman might suggest that Scottish kings of Strathclyde would hardly name captured or newly founded settlements in the language of their own subject British population.

The situation in the region northwards from the Tees to the River Tyne is a little easier to unravel. It would come under the sway of the monastic community of St Cuthbert. Rich in lands gifted by King Guthred, whom they believed owed his peaceful throne to their intervention, in 875 the community had set off with its patron’s corpse from Lindisfarne in search of more secure premises.
Its peregrinations, first to Norham in Cumbria, then to Crayke and eventually to Chester-le-Street, became woven into the tapestry of the community’s tradition. The brethren of St Cuthbert, far from being a ‘band of ragged exiles clinging to their precious burden’, were in fact ‘rather, a prosperous religious corporation responding to political change by making a series of planned moves between estates which they already owned’.
¹⁵
After twelve years of peaceful prosperity (883–95) at Chester-le-Street, the bishop and community made their final move to Durham. Thus the core of the later palatinate and the powers of its prince bishops was planted in the huge estates acquired by followers of the humble saint in the wake of the Viking invasions. They reflect the territories of the former kingdom of Bernicia south and north of the Tyne. North of the Tyne in the early 900s we find a dynasty of earls ruling from the former royal palace of Bamburgh: the
Annals of Ulster
calls the first of them ‘king of the North Saxons’. They held their lordship up to the Norman Conquest, as we note in
chapter 12
.

8

THE WESSEX OF ALFRED THE GREAT

It was the Wessex of Alfred the Great that prevented Anglo-Saxon Christian civilization from being submerged by what one might call pagan ‘cultural norms’. The Battle of Edington of 878 was the decisive turning point for England – some would say for Christian Europe. Others have argued that the survival of the English language itself could have been in jeopardy. But no serious historical commentator would contest that had Wessex gone under, so would the kingdom of the English or, as Alfred came to call it, ‘the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’.

When he first used the term, in a charter of 885, the idea of a united kingdom even of the West Saxons was still comparatively new, as was the family in power. Alfred’s kin could show descent from Cerdic (it was a condition of the kingship); they also claimed
Beowulf
’s Scyld Scefing among their ancestors, who in turn descended from Sceaf, a supposed fourth son of Noah. Apparently Alfred kept a little handbook by him with a genealogical note on West Saxon kings. On the other hand, his grandfather Ecgberht was the first of their branch of the dynasty to occupy the throne. In fact, one biographer of Alfred suggests that Ecgberht’s background was ‘essentially Kentish’, his father apparently ‘among Kent’s last independent kings’ before the old kingdom became a sub-kingdom or province of Mercia. Following Ecgberht’s defeat of Mercia at
Ellendun in 825, Mercian hegemony in southern England was broken. Ecgberht’s son Æthelwulf now led an army down into Kent and expelled its last king, Baldred, so that it became the great eastern province of the West Saxon kingdom.

The old rivalry of Wessex with Mercia was fading. About 852–4 the Mercian king Burgred (852–74) had married Æthelswih of Wessex, Alfred’s sister, following a successful joint campaign with Wessex against the Welsh. Then about 867 Alfred’s brother Æthelred effectively inaugurated a monetary union by adopting the Mercian type of lunette penny. A common currency based on coins minted exclusively at London and Canterbury now circulated from Dover to Chester and from Exeter to Lincoln.
¹

The making of a king

Alfred was born between 847 and 849 at Wantage in Berkshire, according to Asser, the youngest of the five sons of King Æthelwulf (839–58) by his wife Osburh, who died when he was still a boy. She was of noble birth and through her father could claim part-Jutish ancestry – ‘useable’ antecedents for a prince who would one day rule in Kent. With four brothers ahead of him there must have been doubts that he would in fact become king. Was he originally intended for a career in the church? He was declared heir only at age fifteen.

Yet his public life began early: aged six he was witnessing charters and participating in the activities of the court. He was soon learning the business of the hunt, the handling of weapons and the beginnings of horse mastery. He was also hanging around the falconers in the royal mews, where he no doubt learnt the English manner of carrying the falcon on the left wrist and, in handling, of grasping the bird across her back to reduce the danger of injury from flapping wings.
²
As a father, Alfred would insist that his children, and the noblemen’s sons sent to be fostered at his court, learn
to read and write in English and Latin before they mastered the manly skills associated with the hunt. For literature was a passion – a passion that extended as much to the courtly epic and the minstrel’s lay as to the history and philosophy and the Psalms that he himself would translate. A famous anecdote, which his biographer Asser presumably heard from the king himself, tells how Alfred’s mother promised a beautiful book of English poetry to whichever of her sons could first understand and recite it. The boy, who could not yet read, took the volume to his tutor, had him read it aloud, memorized it and claimed the prize. It no doubt came easily, for he was already memorizing the lays and epics declaimed in his father’s mead hall. Later Alfred, the scholar king, evidently prided himself also as a worthy lord in the heroic manner. Bishop Wulfsige of Sherborne, wishing to flatter the king, used the language of the epic scop to hail him ‘the greatest treasure giver of all the kings . . . ever heard of’.

Rome and Alfred

Simon Keynes has shown that references in a manuscript in Brescia confirm that Alfred twice visited Rome as a boy. On the first occasion, in 853, it would seem he was sent as a harbinger of a visit planned by his father; the pope, we are told, ‘decorated him, as a spiritual son, with the dignity of the belt [
cingulum
] and the vestment . . . customary with Roman consuls’.
³
The boy was to remember the impressive ceremony as a royal consecration. Æthelwulf’s victory over the Vikings at Aclea in 851 was still being feted in Europe in the
Annals of St Bertin
at Troyes. Two years later the boy prince returned, this time as part of his father’s entourage. Together with ‘a multitude of people’, they were received with great honour by Pope Benedict III – Alfred as the spiritual son of the papacy, Æthelwulf as a warrior against the heathen and bearer of lavish gifts to St Peter, among them a gold crown four pounds in
weight, a fine sword bound in gold, four luxury ‘Saxon bowls’ and much else, including largesse for the citizens of Rome.

Returning from Rome in 856, Æthelwulf and Alfred visited the court of the West Frankish ruler Charles the Bald. Evidently, a marriage had been arranged between Charles’s daughter Judith, a girl aged about twelve, and Æthelwulf, now a man in his fifties. Perhaps because he knew kings’ wives were not treated with special deference in Wessex, perhaps to give any child she might bear added status, or perhaps simply because it was becoming standard practice in West Francia, Charles insisted that the bride be consecrated queen during the marriage service. Archbishop Hincmar of Reims, expert in ritual, officiated at the ceremony. That spring, Danish raiders had penetrated to the heart of France and ravaged Orléans and in August a large force rowed up the Seine to within a few miles of Paris. Charles, possibly accompanied by his English royal guest, led an army against them and did great slaughter but failed to drive them from their fortified base. They were to return.