A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (43 page)

Æthelstan not only fixed the English–West British boundary at the Tamar, he expelled a Cornish enclave in Exeter, beyond the river, and held his quasi-imperial great court in the city in 928 and 935. With the marriage of his sister to Sihtric, the Viking lord of York, he asserted claims to Wessex hegemony in the old territories of Northumbria. Two years later, by expelling Sihtric’s brother Guthfrith he established himself as king of all the English, as he was to remain until his death in 939. Yet for all his glory historians have sensed something sinister behind the reign. A remarkable number of his kinsmen found a premature or violent death in suspicious circumstances. Years later, the chronicler Symeon of Durham charged him with arranging the death of his half-brother Edwin, who was sent into exile in Flanders and drowned at sea.

While, remarkably for a king, Æthelstan never married, he was the best-connected ruler in the Europe of his day through marriages he arranged for his sisters or half-sisters. Edward the Elder left no fewer than nine daughters, of whom Eadgifu, the second born, had become queen of Francia by her marriage to Charles III of West Francia (ruled 892–922, d. 929). In 922 Charles was ousted in a dynastic struggle and incarcerated by his enemy, the Lord of Vermandois, but Eadgifu had escaped across the Channel to England with their baby son Louis. Thus, with a Queen of France in exile as a half-sister and her son the pretender to that disputed crown, when Æthelstan came to the throne in 924 he already had a personal connection with one corner of continental European politics.

His dynastic diplomacy would not have disgraced the Habsburgs. In 926 Eadhild married Hugh the Great, the Count of Paris, and far and away the most powerful man in West Francia (roughly modern France). Born about 938, their son Hugh Capet would be elected king of France in 987. Æthelstan married his sister Eadgyth to Otto of Saxony in 930. The initiative came from Otto’s father Henry the Fowler, elected king of Germany by the nobles of Franconia and Saxony, though not recognized by Swabia and Bavaria. He needed a ‘good’ marriage for his son and heir to boost his standing and the approach testifies to the high recognition of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom on the Continent. It seems to have been believed that the royal family was descended from St Oswald of Northumbria (see
chapter 8
). Envoys went between the two courts and Æthelstan sent two of his sisters for the young duke’s approval. It is supposed that the duke, later emperor as Otto I, chose the prettier. But while Eadgyth was apparently considered without parallel for her virtue by the English, and while Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, noblewoman and royal intimate, nun and imperial eulogist, praised her charm, regal bearing and her ‘radiant goodness and sincerity of countenance’, beauty as such does not feature anywhere on the inventory. Given that he married two other sisters into the ruling houses of
Aquitaine and Burgundy, it was fitting that
The Annals of Ulster
should dignify him with the appellation of ‘roof-tree of the dignity of the Western World’.
⁸

In the spring of 936 a deputation arrived in England to escort Æthelstan’s now fifteen-year-old nephew, Louis d’Outremer (‘from Oversea’), back across the Channel to be crowned in Laon Cathedral by the archbishop of Reims, as King Louis IV of West Francia. His English mother went into retirement at Notre-Dame, Laon. With one aunt married to the most powerful man in France and another to the king of Germany the young monarch might have expected a smooth ride. Unfortunately the half-English king of France was not properly submissive. He moved his court to Laon, away from the overbearing presence of Uncle Hugh in Paris, and then intervened in the region known as Lothringen (roughly modern Lorraine), which angered the nobles of East Francia. Uncle Æthelstan may have lent diplomatic or moral support. But Louis proved adept at European manoeuvring and came to terms with both his European kinsmen; his career seemed in the ascendant when he died, just thirty-three, in 951.

English connections with Germany continued through the cult of St Oswald well into the Middle Ages, as did more practical links, too. In the 990s Archbishop Egbert of Trier was proud of his English name and liked to boast of his descent from Ecgberht, king of Wessex in the early 800s. It seems that the archbishop was instrumental in the appointment of the English-born Leofsige as abbot of Mettlach on the bank of the River Saar. Praised by a modern German scholar as a ‘Renaissance man’ (‘
Renaissancemensch
’) before his time, Leofsige was noted as a physician, was something of a versifier and as a patron was responsible for one of the oldest structures in the modern Saarland, Mettlach’s octagonal Alter Turm (‘Old Tower’), built as a funerary chapel for St Leodwin.
⁹

To the people of his day Æthelstan was a model of kingship: victorious in war; lord of kings; focus of Europe’s most illustrious royal
kinship; rich in the wealth of this world and, more noteworthy still, in the wealth of the spiritual world. He was renowned as an expert collector of relics. When Hugh the Great sent to petition for the hand of the king’s sister in marriage the embassy, headed by Baldwin Count of Flanders, the king’s uncle by marriage, was laden with treasures of incredible worth – gemstones and exotic perfumes, horses with golden harnesses. But far above these was the sword of Emperor Constantine the Great, the almost conventional opulence of which was as nothing when compared with a simple iron nail set in the sword’s pommel, for this was one of the nails used at the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Nothing in Christendom could exceed the value of this, except for the spear with which the centurion had pierced the side of Christ as he hung upon the Cross or a portion of the Cross itself.

These were fitting gifts for a connoisseur of the numinous, one whose agents trawled Europe for relics much as the Getty Museum today does for works of art. In thanks for a favour Æthelstan had granted, a Breton church sent ‘relics, which we know you value more than earthly treasure’; in return the king distributed largesse from his hoard of holy treasure to monastic communities, with a prodigality to match the open-handedness of Hrothgar, ‘ring-giver of men’, from the ancient hall of pagan Heorot.

In the age of the itinerant royal household, when monarchs must travel their kingdoms to consume the food renders due from their subjects, the imperial court of Æthelstan on the move would have been an impressive sight indeed, though for the localities through which it passed back and forth, from Colchester to Winchester, Tamworth to Exeter, it must have been a serial nightmare of organization. When there were subject kings paying court or an archbishop or two, each with their own retinues, numbers might swell to as many as a thousand to be fed and housed, whether billeted on the locals or in tents and pavilions pitched for the few nights stay before the move on.

Literate and evidently also of artistic taste, Æthelstan, who claimed the scholar Aldhelm among his spiritual ancestors (he commissioned his tomb) and patronized his young kinsman Dunstan, the future archbishop of Canterbury, died at the height of his power to be succeeded by his brother Edmund, and in turn by their younger brother Eadred. Æthelstan is said to have fathered an illegitimate daughter.
¹⁰

Dynasty

Edmund, who ruled from 939 to 946, was the first king to succeed to the rule of all England, thanks to the heroic reign of his predecessor – but it was an uncertain inheritance and he spent most of his time fighting to make it good. Although he had fought at Brunanburh, he would find it a short-lived triumph. First his brother’s death and then the resurgence of Olaf Guthrithsson of York destabilized the results of victory. In 940 the archbishops of Canterbury and York arranged a peace at which Watling Street was agreed upon as the boundary between Danish/Norse and English territories. In fact, shortly after that Edmund was able to recover the region of the Five Boroughs, a success celebrated like that at Brunanburh with a poem, albeit a short one in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle;
Edmund also received the submission of the Welsh prince of Gwynedd. In the last year of his reign he even enforced a momentary English authority on Strathclyde. He died a violent death, stabbed to death at his royal vill of Pucklechurch as he intervened in a brawl trying to save a court official. There were many suspicious dynastic deaths in the tenth century; Edmund’s was certainly murder, though there is no evidence it was premeditated.

The nine-year reign of his successor, Eadred (
d.
955), was marked by his eventually successful struggle to force the Danes of York to acknowledge his supremacy. The changes in his fluctuating authority are reflected in various regnal titles in successive charters,
which twice designated him as ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons, Northumbrians, pagans and Britons’ and as ‘king of the English’. Probably of equal importance in the eyes of the king (nearing forty, it has been suggested, at his succession and subject to severe illness from about 950), was the move towards church reform inaugurated with his encouragement by his chief councillor, Dunstan, abbot of Glastonbury. A man of ‘forceful personality’, Dunstan was driven from court on the death of his royal patron.

The new king, Eadwig, was either immature, lascivious and in thrall to a noblewoman set on marrying him to her daughter, or he just wanted to free himself of the domineering churchman. Possibly, of course, he was merely a victim of gossip. He was certainly young, little more than fifteen at his accession and, if we are to believe the scandal, sexually liberated in advance of what the twenty-first century normally expects from the tenth. Dunstan’s biographer, at least, credited the king with a taste for incestuous troilism, reporting that the churchman had to drag the recently consecrated monarch back to his coronation feast from a bedroom session with mother and daughter. Dunstan was ordered into exile, which he passed in Flanders, and Eadwig married the lady (i.e. the daughter). Later the church ordered the couple to separate on the grounds that the match was within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity. It has been suggested that Eadwig and his bride could trace a common descent from King Alfred. Two years into his reign as king of the English, he faced insurrection in Mercia and Northumbria and was succeeded there as king by his brother Edgar. From this power base Edgar succeeded to the crown of Wessex on Eadwig’s death in 959. He ‘discarded two wives as his needs and aspirations changed’, notes Stafford.
¹¹

Ælfthryth, Edgar’s third partner and mother of the ill-fated Æthelred II ‘Unraed’, displaced Wulfthryth (possibly a concubine), who in turn had displaced Edgar’s first wife, the mother of Edward (later king and ‘Martyr’). The king’s marital status was sufficiently
confused, even at the time, for some to hold that his third partnership was in fact adulterous. Both in England and on the Continent, kings inclined towards serial monogamy and the distinction between wife and concubine was essentially a question of dowry; it assured the wife of a measure of economic independence. The concubine, like a wife, might give her consent to the liaison but consent could be given in secret and in the last resort this, the vital element in a marriage from the church’s point of view, might depend on the word of the king. On repudiating Wulfthryth, Edgar made her abbess of Wilton, and here their daughter Eadgyth (St Edith) was to live an exemplary life of humble devotion, refusing all attempts to persuade her to accept a position as abbess.

Known as ‘
pacificus
’, which may be interpreted as ‘the peaceable’ or the ‘peace-maker’, Edgar, who was inaugurated as king probably at Kingston upon Thames about the year 961 and died in 975, certainly pacified his country with stern, possibly harsh rule. It is also true that there was no attack on his realm from either land or sea throughout the reign. In 973, a year of high ceremonial, he was rowed in state upon the River Dee at Chester by some eight lesser kings – Scottish, Welsh, British and Scandinavian. This may have been the culmination of one of the patrols of England’s coastal waters that Edgar was said to captain. (see
chapter 8
). Whit Sunday that same year, the king’s thirtieth, also witnessed his quasi-imperial consecration at Bath in an order of service (
ordo
) devised by St Dunstan that consciously invoked the Biblical concept of priestly intervention in the proclamation of King Solomon. The text on ‘Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet’ has featured in every coronation up to that of Elizabeth II in 1953.

In a short poem the Parker
Chronicle
celebrates the king as valorous in deeds of war and notes the date as almost one thousand years since the days of the Lord of Victories, i.e. Jesus Christ set firmly in the tradition of warlords. Two years later different versions of the
Chronicle
lament the death of the king, ‘friend to the West Saxons
and protector of the Mercians’, in whose reign, they recall, no raiding host had been able to win booty for itself. Edgar, King from 957 to 975, claimed supremacy of rule in Britain; in England his reign saw major organization of local government by shires, reorganization in church life and reform in the coinage. It firmly established the idea of a single English state.

Church, state and reform

With the arrival of Theodore of Tarsus as archbishop of Canterbury in 669 and his organization of the ecclesiastical structure, the English kingdoms got used to the idea of a supranational allegiance embracing the whole of their part of the island of Britannia. This combined with the emerging concept of an over-kingship, expressed in the Anglo-Saxon word ‘bretwalda’, to prepare the way for the idea of a geographical unity occupied by the ethnic unity of Angelcynn, in a country that Cnut would call
Angla lond
even though it was by then occupied by a mélange of ethnicities, such as Danes, Norwegians and British as well as Anglo-Saxons. The tenth-century Vikings of Dublin, on becoming Christian, distanced themselves from the Irish church to affirm allegiance to Canterbury.