A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (45 page)

The first instance of the portrayal of a king’s crowned head on the coinage, as opposed to a chaplet, wreath or helmet, comes in the reign of Æthelstan.
¹⁶
The Grately code, given at Grately in Hampshire as
II Æthelstan
in the late 920s, contains the earliest piece of Anglo-Saxon legislation to refer to the administration of the coinage. It specifies that there is to be one coinage over all the king’s
dominion; that moneyers are licensed to operate only in towns; and that any found breaching this rule, or guilty of false moneying and unable to clear himself by the ordeal shall have the hand that committed the offence struck off and set on the mint. The code details the number of moneyers to be licensed in various centres: seven in Canterbury, for example, comprising four for the king, two for the archbishop, one for the abbot; in Rochester one for the king and one for the bishop; London eight; and Winchester six. There would also be a dozen or more in other named boroughs: Exeter was an important mint continuously from the reign of Alfred, Oxford from the reign of Æthelstan to the end of the period and in the east the importance of Lincoln as a die-cutting centre and mint was exceeded only by York.
¹⁷

The practice of naming the mint lapsed for the most part until the early 970s when King Edgar seems to have made it obligatory. As Mark Blackburn notes in his work on the Grately code and the coinage on which much of this section is based, this means that it is possible not only to date the great majority of coins of the late ninth century and the early tenth, and to date them to specific periods within reigns, but also to suggest regions in which they were struck, in some cases identifying the actual mints.
¹⁸
Moneyers, who were highly regarded as craftsmen, were appointed by the crown. For the best part of a century, from 973 to 1066, the national coin-types were changed every six years or so and all money had to be brought in and reminted. The succeeding types varied in weight in a way that suggests a systematic monetary policy. During this period there were at least forty and perhaps as many as seventy minting places in England and there was hardly a village south of the Trent that would have been more than a day’s walk from one of them. In medieval terms the Anglo-Saxon state operated a monetary system that was exceeded in its complexity and controls only by the Byzantine empire.
¹⁹
In fact, the English king’s monopoly of minting rights was almost unique in Europe and the enforced integrity of
the coinage respected at home and abroad. For generations, sterling was the currency of choice in much of northwestern Europe, where many mints copied the designs of the English coinage.

The English state

When King Alfred sought to administer his kingdom he was working within an old system of lordship, of courts and territories. In the twelfth century William of Malmesbury wrongly believed that Alfred had invented the hundreds and tithings of England; nor does it seem that he gave any new shape to the West Saxon shires whose origins date back long before his day. But by getting boroughs built and garrisoned, whether or not with market-friendly street plans, as excavated at Winchester, he opened the way to England’s urban future. The shiring of England was largely a tenth-century programme. ‘The creation of many of the midland shires’, it has been said, ‘cannot have occurred much earlier than the reign of Edward the Elder or later than that of Æthelred II.’
²⁰
It is reasonable to suppose that much of the work was done in the reign of King Edgar. It was well done. When British local government was reorganized in 1974 just three of England’s historic shires were dissolved: Cumberland, Westmoreland and Rutland, all three ‘Johnny-come-lately’ post-Conquest creations.

The basic, all-purpose tool of Anglo-Saxon administration, evolving at least from the reign of Alfred, was the administrative letter or ‘writ’. It was adopted and adapted for instructions to reeves, directives to ealdormen, and announcements in the shire court of land transfers, grants of privilege and official appointments. The document known as
VI Æthelstan
, although related to the king’s business in requiring every reeve to exact a pledge from his shire to observe the king’s peace, was issued in the name of the bishops and reeves of the ‘peace guild of London’. Given that the language of the people was the common means of communication in all official
as well as social contexts, it is not surprising to find that the use of messages in written form was not confined to the royal government.

The king’s writ, then, authenticated by his seal, was a simple and effective means of conveying the royal will nationwide and of instructions to regions and individuals. The evolution of this brilliant tool of Anglo-Saxon administration during the transition from English to Norman is detailed by Richard Sharpe in his fascinating article (2003). He contrasts it with the large-format diplomas, written in an imposing script and in ponderous Latin, although, a significant detail this, breaking into English for the practical specifics of the boundary markers if a piece of real estate was the matter in hand. In the vernacular from the start, the
gewrit
uses an informal script even though, thanks to its seal, it was every bit as authoritative as the diploma. A kind of hybrid, the writ charter, first found in the reign of Æthelred II and in English up to the year 1070, opened with a general address to the
thegnas
summoned by the sheriff; later this official is to be designated subordinate to the
comes
(count), the Latin equivalent of the earl. As to the document itself, it was issued by the king at the request of the beneficiary, who paid for it, to be read aloud in the shire court. Up to 1066 it was, of course, read in English; for the next four years in English with a French translation, and then from 1070 onwards in Latin with translations into English and French.

The use of written documents was not, of course, unique to England, but the idea of using the vernacular in government always had been. In the opinion of Elton, there was nothing to match the writ – characteristically brief, concise, exact and highly authoritative. After the Conquest, once the English bureaucracy had trained its replacements in the mechanics of government, writs were turned into Latin. ‘The central organization built up by the Normans and Angevins – and by them bequeathed to later ages – grew upon those little scraps of parchment with their pendant seals.’
²¹

Queens, questions of policy and an ominous intervention

With the death of Æthelstan, the ageing dowager Queen Eadgifu, widow of Edward the Elder, had used her position at the courts of her sons Edmund and Eadred to push the interests of her favourite reformers. She helped advance Dunstan and Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester. Queen Ælfthryth, third wife of her son Edgar, would occupy a similar position in court religious policy, her support going especially to Bishop Æthelwold. She used her influence with the king to settle land disputes in favour of Winchester and to cooperate in the foundation of her nunnery at Wherwell.

When Edgar died two court factions would face each other. On one side were supporters of Edward, the son of his first wife, led by Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury, and the ealdorman of East Anglia; on the other stood Æthelred, championed by his mother Ælfthryth, patron of Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester, and who in addition could call upon her relative Ælfhere, ealdorman of Mercia, and probably on her brother Ordulf, a substantial lord of southwest England. Edward was the older claimant but his mother had not been consecrated Queen, whereas Ælfthryth had been consecrated with her husband at the time of King Edgar’s ‘imperial’ coronation at Bath in 973. A century earlier the Carolingian princess Judith had been anointed queen on her marriage to King Æthelwulf. This had apparently been the first time Wessex had known a full queen in the technical, consecrated sense. Had she had sons their ‘throne worthiness would have been superior to that of their younger brothers’. So, more than a century later, Æthelred’s party now argued that he enjoyed a privileged status by virtue of his mother’s coronation, though at that time she was a wife of eight years standing and her son probably about five years old.

The ritual used for the queen recalled the ceremony used in West Francia when coronation was part of a queen’s marriage, so
Ælfthryth received a ring as a sign of faith and, as the bishop poured the oil on her head in the presence of the great nobles, he blessed and consecrated her for her share in the royal bed. The crown used was considered the crown of eternal glory and it is tempting to think that we may have a sight of the actual headpiece in the depiction of the crowning of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the Queen of Heaven in the sumptuous Benedictional of St Æthelwold, Ælfthryth’s favoured churchman.
²²

Thanks to the vagaries of royal partnership rules, King Edgar ‘
pacificus
’ left two sons contesting his crown, each abetted by a court faction (and the younger by an ambitious mother). When the successful older son of King Edward was set upon and murdered at Corfe in Dorset in May 979, as he rode to visit his young brother Æthelred. The body was buried without ceremony. Few people doubted that Queen Ælfthryth was involved. The murderers were members of her household; the young king was dragged from his horse at the gates of her estate. Although regicide was considered a particularly heinous crime by the monastic reformers who had long been prominent in government, the killers were never brought to book.

In fact, the monastic restructuring and other church reforms under King Edgar had offended some churchmen and, perhaps more important, had encroached on aristocratic preserves and property interests. Edgar’s death had been followed by attacks on the properties of the reformed monasteries by rival court factions. Whatever the politics behind the crime, the surviving boy-king Æthelred does not seem to have been as grateful as his mother expected. There were rumours that she had beaten him about the head with a candlestick, outraged at his ingratitude.

11

DANISH INVASIONS AND KINGS ÆTHELRED ‘UNRÆD’, CNUT THE GREAT AND OTHERS

Writing of Edward the Confessor, his modern biographer Professor Frank Barlow observed, ‘He was the son of a warrior king.’ That warrior king was Æthelred II. Commonly pigeon-holed as ‘the Unready’, Æthelred saw a good deal of action in the second half of his long reign. The English and their great men generally recognized him as ‘lord’ of their land in the old-fashioned sense of warlord and ring-giver. In the last year of his life, at war with the Danish pretender Cnut, an English army raised by his warlike son Edmund, called ‘Ironside’, refused to take the field when it was learnt that Æthelred would not be there to lead them.

Nine or possibly twelve years old when he came to the throne, Æthelred would reign for some thirty-eight years, the ninth longest in the history of the English monarchy since the time of King Alfred. It was the best part of a year before the remains of Edward, soon to be called ‘the Martyr’, were given a decent burial at the nunnery of Shaftesbury. Thus as a result it was not until May 979 that Æthelred was consecrated at Kingston upon Thames, in the presence of the archbishops of Canterbury and York and ten bishops. The Abingdon version of the
Chronicle
says that ‘the councillors of the English people’ rejoiced at the event; but it also speaks
of the appearance of a red blood cloud in the sky the same year. Later people reckoned the reign was ill-omened from the start. The king’s name, ‘
Æthel-ræd
’, literally ‘noble-counsel’, was common among English king lists; but given the many disasters of his reign, particularly in his last years, some wit after his death could not resist adding the by-name ‘
Unræd
’ (‘ill counsel’, rather than ‘unready’, though he would often seem that as well).

While most accepted Queen Ælfthryth was complicit in her stepson’s death, she seems to have had support from the powerful ealdorman of East Anglia, and also Ealdorman Byrthnoth of Essex. The year 980 saw the first Viking raid in nearly a century, though few seem to have heeded the omen – court intrigue was doubtless more absorbing. In any case the big occasion for that year was the rededication, in October, of the building known for many decades as the Old Minster at Winchester. Even as late as 984 the death in August of that year of the dominating figure of Bishop Æthelwold would probably have seemed more significant than the renewal of harassment by the Norsemen.

Æthelred, a young man of handsome face and stylish appearance, took as wife Ælfgifu, a lady of noble birth who was apparently the daughter of Thored, earl of Northumbria. The match may have been thought to offer valuable goodwill for the Wessex dynasty in that distant and prickly province and the king gave land to the community of St Cuthbert at its church in Chester-le-Street. Friends would be needed in the face of what were now annual Danish raids, whether by fleets returning from the Scandinavian homeland each new raiding season or by a force that, once established, remained in an English base.

The raiders expect support from their Norse kinsfolk in Normandy. Æthelred sought the good offices of a papal envoy in diplomatic approaches to Richard of Normandy. In summer 991 a large fleet appeared off the coast of Suffolk and sacked the trading port of Ipswich before working its way down the Essex coast to the
Blackwater estuary. There on 10 or 11 August, at Northey island near Maldon, stood England’s senior ealdorman, Byrthnoth of Essex at the head of his household warriors and the local fyrd, crying the defiance of a loyal liegeman: ‘This is Æthelred’s land.’ In his early sixties, he was a man of heroic stature, more than six feet tall. With holdings in ten shires, after his lord the king he was England’s second or third most important layman. The ‘Battle of Maldon’, the epic poetic fragment that tells of the battle against the
wicinga
, reads like an eyewitness account.