A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (36 page)

However it was done, we feel the presence of a vigorous and sympathetic imagination. When the writer of the Old English book of reflections loosely based on Augustine’s
Soliloquies
, which is cast in the form of a dialogue between Augustine and Reason, compares himself, as a researcher in the groves of scholarship, to a forester going out to select timbers suited for his new structure of learning and his assistants to axemen following up with wagons, it is hard not to think of the architect-king supervising work for a new burh. Elsewhere a striking passage expounds trust in divine revelation in terms of the trust accorded to a secular lordship, when Reason asks

Have you not a lord [the emperor] whom you trust in all matters better than yourself? . . . and do you think that the Emperor, the son of an emperor, is wiser or more truthful than Christ the son of God?
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There is nothing mechanical or hack about Alfred’s English prose works, which are among the very earliest of the genre. It is a sophisticated style derived from the rhetorical devices of Latin models and deploying the typical patterns of Anglo-Saxon verse, alliteration and wordplay.

Alfred loved the dialogue as a literary form. A foundation text in his programme was the
Dialogues
of Pope Gregory (an exchange between Gregory and his friend Peter the deacon). It was followed by Alfred’s own adaptation of Boethius. Conceived as a dialogue between the author and Lady Philosophy, the book became one of the most popular of the Middle Ages and its devotion to wisdom
immediately seized Alfred’s imagination. The king’s version, internalized as a dialogue between Wisdom and the Mind, creates an authorial person called ‘Boethius’, who is the victim of a tyrant king and invites us to see the world from his perspective.

The Church, the junior partner?

Alfred strongly associated the church with the governance of his realm but it seems he was the dominant partner: indeed the balance of power between church and court seems to have shifted in favour of the king so that ‘the reign of Alfred should be put in a context of major constitutional change’. By the 790s the church in England had acquired immense wealth, both in treasure and in real estate: in Kent, for example, more than 30 per cent of all the landed wealth seems to have been in the hands of the clergy. Monasteries, it seems, were everywhere. By 800 there were almost thirty in the Worcester diocese alone. Senior clergy were pivotal figures: the archbishop often dominated the synods even when the king was present and Archbishop Wulfred of Canterbury (805–32) struck coins bearing his name alone. But as the ninth century advanced, thanks in part to the Viking raids, the church’s grip was loosened and many religious estates passed into lay control. Alfred gave the huge see of Sherborne to Asser without papal intervention, and after the Welshman’s death King Edward the Elder would divide it into three sees.
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Disposable land was an essential tool of kingcraft – the currency in which the great men who served a king in peace expected payment, as well as the traditional inducement to attract warriors to his following in the days when warfare among the English kingdoms had ensured a supply from among the defeated. For Alfred this course was not open, but on occasion it seems he would appropriate church lands recovered from defeated Vikings.

Justice under law

The administration of law was grounded on the oath of an oath-worthy man solemnly given before God and accepted as valid. Charged with a crime, a man acquitted himself not by a trial on evidence but by giving his own oath and finding oath-helpers to bear out his statements and claims and his good faith. To lose one’s oath-worthy status was to risk falling out of the law and be at the mercy of anyone with a claim against one’s property or a grudge. But the powers of law enforcement were limited and in the most extreme crime, that of murder, the maintenance of order depended on the enforcement of a code of vendetta or feud supervised by the king according to strict rules of compensation based on the scale of wergild (or ‘wergeld’) payments. The laws of King Alfred, which also incorporate those of his predecessor King Ine, are represented by the stately ‘
domboc
’ (‘law book’) set down in about 893. They have been described as ‘the product of deep thought, intensive research, and great political vision’,
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an expression of ideological aspirations perhaps, rather than practical guidance for judges.

Legislation was not necessarily promulgated by the king in written form and judgement was validated more by the word of the king (
per verbum regis
) than by any text. In a celebrated case Alfred delivered judgement by word of mouth while washing his hands in his private chamber. The king, however, seems to have conceived law as a written text, for he remarks in his preamble that he had ‘ordered to be written’ (
awritan het
) many of the laws that his forefathers observed, and how he had not presumed to set down in writing many of his own. His code survives in just six manuscripts, the earliest of them dating from 925–50.

Alfred considered an ability to read English an essential requirement for a man in authority if he were to make sound judgements. Cases determined in local assemblies by ealdormen or reeves were to be referred to the king if they were disputed by the litigants. He
was liable to intervene at random if he considered any judgement unfair and would order the judge to apply himself forthwith to ‘the pursuit of wisdom’ at risk of losing his job. The reading might be records of legal cases heard, or more likely it meant reading in ‘those books that it is necessary to know’. For ‘wisdom’ in Alfredian terms, as described by Asser, was that which taught a man to care for truth and seek the common good rather than his own personal advantage. Rather than lose the king’s favour, illiterate ealdormen, reeves and thegns would apply themselves to the mastery of the unfamiliar discipline of reading and learning, following, if need be, the king’s advice to find someone to read books aloud to him ‘by day and night, at any opportunity’ – the very way Alfred the boy had memorized the poetry book offered by his mother.

Alfred’s London

London comprised the old Roman
civitas
within the walls, the ‘burh’ of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, and the extramural settlement, the port of Lundenwic, which had a population of about 5,000 and covered some 148 acres (60 hectares) on the north bank of the Thames, running westward from Chancery Lane to Trafalgar Square. The first recorded Viking attack here is in 842, the second about 851: coin hoards have been unearthed for the first date at the Middle Temple and for the second a ‘purse-hoard’ of Northumbrian coins was found near the Royal Opera House. Other hoards have been unearthed near Waterloo Bridge (872) and within the city walls, dated to 880. Found in the early 2000s it contained coins of the special London Monogram type, which Alfred probably issued to mark his resumption of control of London after Ceolwulf’s departure. Then for the year 886 the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
records ‘
gesette Ælfred cing Lundenburh
’, in other words he occupied Roman London and made it habitable again. In this year, too, ‘all the English people who were not in captivity to the Danes
submitted to him’. By 893 and again in 895 the ‘citizens’ (burgwara) of London were sufficiently numerous to mount a body for effective military action. In 898 the king presided over a meeting, attended by among others his son Edward, the archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop Wærferth of Worcester and Ealdorman Æthelred of the Mercians and his wife, Alfred’s daughter Æthelflæd, that confirmed the ‘instauration’ of the borough and the establishment of a grid plan of streets between what is now Thames Street and Cheapside. Digs in the early 2000s revealed just such market streets running off a central spinal thoroughfare. The archaeology indicates that from 900 onwards the main business and residential quarters were within the city walls. In other words, by the end of Alfred’s reign, London had ‘entirely changed its shape and focus’
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away from the Aldwych Strand back into the Roman walled city.

Preparations for the return of the heathen and defence of the realm

For much of the 880s the Viking raiders were harrying the northern lands of West Francia so that, in the lament of the chronicler of St Vaast, ‘the Christian folk [were] brought to utter ruin and desolation.’ These same years saw the kingdom of the West Saxons engaged in public works programmes and military reorganization. Three English kingdoms, Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia, had been removed from the map. Alfred planned a system of defence round his borders and land. His plans rested on the known tactics of the enemy, best practice overseas and antecedents in the English tradition.

Asser writes of ‘the cities and towns that he restored, and the others he built where none had been before . . .’, though he does not claim that Alfred was the first to build such towns and fortifications. In the 1970s archaeologist Martin Biddle, excavating the ‘Roman’ burh of Winchester, revealed rectilinear street patterns
adapted to military defence and trade. The basic pattern comprised a main street, with parallel back streets linked at right angles to the high street by side streets, and a perimeter boulevard running round inside the wall. Similar planning has subsequently been detected in other Alfredian foundations such as Wareham, Wallingford and Oxford. It is argued that such sites stand at the beginning of the continuous history of the medieval English town. The once flourishing cross-Channel trade of early ninth-century Hamwic was a thing of the past when Alfred came to the throne, probably in part because it was an undefended site. Thanks to him and his new urban developments, however, a vigorous internal market was to spring up.
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The Viking raiders generally avoided battle. Their preferred tactic was to seize some defensible site as their base of operations and plunder the surrounding region before the English could mobilize forces and then to retreat behind the fortifications until the English should disperse – or they made good their escape under cover of night. It is probable that Alfred knew of the fortified bridges that Charles the Bald had built on the River Seine and similar defensive works, though they were hardly more advanced than the fortified burhs known in eighth-century Mercia.

The basic text here is the Burghal Hidage. It gives a list of some thirty ‘burhs’ (defended settlements or fortifications), each with its own garrison and established around Wessex, Sussex and Surrey in such a way that no place of importance was more than a day’s march from the nearest and that every navigable waterway, Roman road or major track way penetrating Wessex was commanded. Even the best landing beaches were accessible from a garrison in a burh. The system was reinforced by army tracks (
herepaths
) skirting estate boundaries for the muster of local contingents. Some burhs seem to have been intended as towns from the start, others were emergency forts, hurriedly thrown up as part of a crash building programme. Quite apart from the actual construction, huge quantities of gravel,
flints and timber had to be shifted on site before work could begin, calling for high logistical capacity and administrative skills. It has been estimated that labour on the defensive banks for the burh at Wallingford alone would have required more than 120,000 man hours.
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The actual labour force would be recruited at the expense of local landowners, as indicated above, under the convention known by historians as the ‘common burdens’, apparently first established by the Mercian king in the mid-eighth century, when monks were obliged to fulfil it, much to the horror of St Boniface. The so-called ‘
trinoda necessitas
’ (or, as Eric John proposes, ‘
trimoda
. . .’; or ‘three mode necessity’), required those liable to supply work on bridges, fortifications (‘burhbot’) and troops for the levy. Alfred exploited the system as fully as possible and after him it was stretched to embrace ship-building.

The ‘Hidage’, based on the hide, an ancient unit of land considered sufficient to support one peasant family, designates the number of ‘hides’ assigned to each burh for its structural maintenance and defensive manning. A formula specifies that one man was to go from every hide and dictates the length of wall that such a force was expected to defend. Altogether the document calls for some 27,000 men to be employed in the maintenance and defence of the forts. One man from each hide; the idea seems simple enough but recruiting and managing men in such numbers could only have been done by thegns who commanded the loyalty of the men and already took services from their land.

Maybe Alfred’s programme of town fortifications, which perhaps included the late Saxon work on Exeter’s Roman wall, was also coloured by childhood experiences in Rome. In 846 a Saracen fleet had sailed up the River Tiber and attacked the city; the residents at the foreign schools – Franks, Saxons, Lombards and Frisians – helped defend the fortifications. After the raid a high wall, completed in 852, was built round the basilicas of St Peter’s and its
vicinity; the area enclosed was known as the Leonine City. The postern gates were surmounted by an inscription recording its builders, among them the Posterula Saxonum. Nearby, hostels housed the Saxon community in a compound known as their
burh (borgo).
No doubt the inscription over the Saxons’ postern had been pointed out to Alfred and his father on their visit to Rome in 855, along with accounts of deeds of prowess by the school’s trained bands back in 846.
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