A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (46 page)

The two forces face one another across a channel, which can be crossed only by a causeway. Byrthnoth rides up and down the lines to supervise the dressing of the shield wall. Then he dismounts to fight among those ‘companions he knew to be most loyal’. The Vikings, who will first have to face opposition as they cross the causeway and then deploy from the narrow bridgehead, offer to be bought off. But Byrthnoth rebuts their bid; in fact he forces a battle. He orders his men to pull back and allow their enemies to cross the causeway. He seems bent on a hero’s death. Is it a culpable miscalculation? Is it pride, as the poet claims? Or is it, as has been suggested, a sacrificial tactic to deplete the raiders as far as possible, rather than let them off unscathed to ravage elsewhere? A truly heroic calculation.

There follows the roar of battle, with ravens circling overhead waiting for the carrion corpses of the fallen warriors. We hear Byrthnoth urging on those companions who would win glory from the Danes (‘
Denon
’). We see him wield his golden-hilted sword; we hear him pray to the ‘Lord of Hosts for grace to his spirit’ as he is hacked down by a foeman. His companions Ælfnoth and Wulfmaer fall at the side of their lord, but others, spearmen, desert him. Godric, who had received many a fine horse from his ring-giving lord, now leaps on that lord’s horse and rides away on the rearing steed. Others, recognizing the horse, think it is Byrthnoth himself who is in flight and they too flee. The rest, rallied by Dunnere,
‘a simple yeoman’, fight on. Edward the Tall breaks out through the shield wall to avenge in noble death his treasure-giving lord. Heroic, maybe, but surely a gesture of despair: once an Anglo-Saxon shield wall began to break up, as at Hastings, seventy-odd years later, the end was in sight. An old retainer, Byrhtwold, delivers the final threnody: ‘Here lies our lord, the great man in the mire . . .’No one can abandon the battle game now – all are doomed to die. As strength falters so courage must grow. Like Dunkirk an epic reverse, like Dunkirk long remembered, the poem, with its named participants, was surely intended for bardic performance at court or in the great man’s hall. And yet, in the words of Roberta Frank, there must have been among the English ‘ordinary men aching to get back to their ploughs and puddings’. The battle was worthily celebrated on its millennium in 1991. Donald Scragg’s
The Battle of Maldon
came out in that year and the poem exists in more than 45 editions.

For the poet, the battle embodied noble traditions from a heroic age still felt to be part of the present. But reality locked in with Byrthnoth’s shocking death. Up to this time the establishment had discounted Viking nuisance as sporadic and small scale. Maldon forced a rethink. It was Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury, the
Chronicle
tells us, who in the reign of Æthelred decided on the first payment to the ‘Danish men’ of a ‘tax’ because of the terror they brought. The next year the raiders defeated a fleet from East Anglia. It was the beginning of a pattern.

In 994 Sigeric apparently paid a tribute to the Danes to save Canterbury Cathedral from being torched. We first hear of him as a monk at Glastonbury under the patronage of St Dunstan. A brilliant career lay ahead. Appointed archbishop in 990 he made the journey to Rome to receive his pallium from Pope John XV. He won recent media attention when, as reported in the
Sunday Times
of 14 November 2005, Romano Prodi, the former president of the European Commission, planned to activate a tourist pilgrim route,
dubbed the ‘Via Francigena’ (‘Way of the Franks’), stretching for 1,200 miles (1,930 km) and supposedly ‘founded by Sigeric’. In fact, starting with Wigheard in 667, no fewer than nine English archbishops and seven English kings travelled to Rome, but Sigeric stands out because a contemporary travelogue of his route survives. It records seventy-nine stages of the journey and twenty-three churches he visited, among them Reims, Lausanne, Pavia and Lucca. Whether modern pilgrims will be entertained to lunch by the pope, as Sigeric was by John XV, may be doubted. Sigeric, however, was a great prince of the church: he bequeathed seven costly wall hangings emblazoned with white lions to Glastonbury, sufficient to cover the wall surface of the old church when they were brought out every year on his anniversary.

The wealth of the realm

Maldon marked the beginning of decline for a generally fortunate aristocracy. The great inaugural celebrations at Ramsey Abbey on 8 November 991, presided over by Archbishop Oswald of York, its spiritual founder, and Æthelwine, ealdorman of East Anglia, its wealthy lay patron, reflected the glory days of ostentatious magnificence. The event is described by Oswald’s biographer Byrthferth. Luxury and opulence everywhere met the eye; while music of great elaboration assailed the ear as the choir and cantors sang antiphonally and, no doubt, in early polyphony. With this style of singing in two or more parts European art music was already signalling its breach with the monophonic traditions of the rest of world music. Part and parcel of the revolution was the mechanistic apparatus of the organ and keyboard. By this time almost every important Benedictine abbey in Europe had such an instrument. Inspired by the liturgical revolution at Cluny, the service of God was to be conducted with the kind of splendour in liturgy, vestments and music to be expected in the service of a great lord. But while the
scops and scalds of the mead hall would remain true to the bardic monophonic traditions, Ramsey had a fine organ.

The monks of Ely recovered the body of Ealdorman Byrthnoth after the battle for the solemnities of a great funeral. The church dazzled with ornaments (Byrthnoth himself had donated two gold crosses). At Winchester the reliquary commissioned by the king for the remains of St Swithun was made of 300 pounds of refined gold ornamented with silver and precious stones. England at this time was a treasurehouse to its Danish plunderers. ‘The evidence for the wealth of England in this period is various and extensive . . .’, in cash as well as treasures, for it seems that ‘early eleventh-century English kings could raise larger sums in taxation than could most of their medieval successors.’
¹
Following the endowments of monastic reforms the ecclesiastical establishment was also immensely rich. The celebrations at Ramsey were followed by a sumptuous drinks party, as was the approved custom, at which the mead and wine were dispensed most freely. Drawn from warrior stock, great churchmen were as much at home in the mead hall as in the sanctuary and, when occasion required, on the battlefield. Twenty-five years later, the abbot of Ramsey and his predecessor in office both fell fighting in the army of Edmund Ironside against the Danes at the Battle of Assandun.
²

It was a time when the English were becoming acquainted with the use of the word ‘Englalond’ to describe their homeland. It was a land where the elite kin groups of church and state formed, as we have noted, an extended network or cousinship usually linked with the royal family by blood, marriage or by fosterage at court; where the peasantry, as elsewhere in Europe, was largely oppressed (the penalties for theft were savage, on a par with shariah law), but where, and this was unusual, we may detect the beginnings of a middling sort of people who in a later age would be called ‘the gentry’.

For a hundred years, since the time of King Alfred, the idea of society as divided into three orders, those to fight, those to pray and
those to labour on the land, had been common in England, as on the Continent.
³
But it was becoming as misleading as it was simplistic. The growth of the ‘ceorl’ grouping of small gentry-style farmers may be connected with the splitting up of great estates and associated with the creation of new parishes and new parish churches. It evidently came to carry weight in the community of the realm. In 1027, when Cnut issued a letter for proclamation in shire courts throughout the kingdom, he addresses it in English to ‘the whole race of the English, whether nobles or ceorls’.

Following Maldon, a tribute or
gafol
of 10,000 pounds was paid to the raiders. Still larger payments, in money and in gold and silver would be made in subsequent years. The amount of bullion disbursed is a testimony to the great wealth of England; the quantities of silver coinage are a clear demonstration of the power of the English state. Coin hoards in Scandinavia, accumulated as the proceeds of plunder, have provided numismatists with some of their best resources for studying and demonstrating the sophistication and effectiveness of the monetary system of the Anglo-Saxon state. The estimated figures run into millions of items. In the reign of Cnut, in the view of numismatist Michael Metcalf, one issue alone (the Quatrefoil) may have run to as many as 40 million coins.

Two years after Maldon a much larger English army was put to flight (rumour said that the leaders were Danish sympathizers). Then in 994, on the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary (8 September), a large fleet under the command of Olaf Tryggvason of Norway and Swein Forkbeard the Dane, among others, sailed against London. According to the Peterborough
Chronicle
the citizens repelled the attack, to the astonishment of the enemy, thanks to the protection of the Virgin. For this humiliation the Danish army wreaked a terrible vengeance on the country and coasts from Essex to Hampshire, ‘taking their horses’ and riding inland wherever they would. They made winter camp at Southampton and were provisioned with supplies from the whole kingdom of Wessex.
The government agreed a treaty by which yet more money and bullion were handed over. Olaf, however, now accepted baptism (994) as a Christian in a ceremony at Andover, with King Æthelred standing sponsor, and moreover gave his oath never to return to England as an enemy. He kept it too, the chronicler notes in surprise. Perhaps that was because this Viking oath to the Christians was pledged by one who was now a fellow Christian. Olaf went back to Norway to make good his position as king there. Swein, it seems, had already returned to Denmark with the same objective.

Even in these extreme conditions the Anglo-Saxon civil administration of reeve and local collectors was able to meet the demands for supplies to the raiders from central government. More problematic, surely, is the total failure throughout these decades of the Alfredian strategic defence measures of garrisoned burh and standing army units to deliver effective protection. The mid-990s, it must be said, were a time of comparative peace. Perhaps a substantial body of the Danish army settled on the Isle of Wight as a mercenary force in English pay. Then, in the years running up to the millennium, large-scale raids were reported up the Bristol Channel, against the coasts of south Wales and Devon, back to Dorset, up to the Thames and riding through Kent. In the year 1000 they crossed over to Normandy and then they were back harrying southern Wessex. An attempt to buy them off with the largest payment yet, 24,000 pounds, might have had some effect but for the notorious events on St Brice’s Day, 13 November 1002. In a gesture of desperation, certainly ‘ill-advised’ while negotiations were yet going on, Æthelred ordered the killing of all ‘the Danish men who were among the English race’, described in a royal charter as ‘sprouting like weeds amongst the wheat’.

The St Brice’s Day massacre may have decided King Swein to return to the English theatre of operations. We find him campaigning in the West Country the following year. Aimed against those Danes ‘in England’, the wording of the decree presumably
excludes the population of the Danelaw. And it certainly excluded any raiders encamped on the Isle of Wight; to massacre
them
would have required an army. No, the target must have been those Danes in England west of the Danelaw, presumably second-generation, gradually integrating into English communities – or possibly the Danes paid off that summer who had not gone home or ‘ceased their evil doing’. At Oxford, Danes fleeing for sanctuary had broken into the church of St Frideswide: the citizenry burnt it down about their heads. Later it was claimed there had been a Danish plot against the king to ‘ensnare’ his kingdom. Swein of Denmark would do just that. Meanwhile Æthelred found himself facing a demand for compensation from the minster of St Frideswide’s.
⁴
It was a royal edict that had sanctioned the outrage.

Of all the woes to trouble King Æthelred, top of the list must have been Normandy. Treaties with the ducal house could not be made to stick. An attempted naval invasion of the duchy ended in futility. Then the death of his first wife opened the door to diplomacy by dynastic marriage. In the spring of 1002 the princess Emma, daughter of the late duke, Richard I, and sister of the present ruler, Duke Richard II, came to England and, with the newly conferred English name of Ælfgifu, became its queen, her most frequent title in Æthelred’s Latin charters being ‘
conlaterana Regis
’, ‘[she] who is at the king’s side’.
⁵

The marriage was surely loveless. Admittedly Æthelred had already fathered ten children by various wives or concubines and had three more with Emma: the eldest, Edward, became king in due course as ‘the Confessor’; his brother Alfred was to die in the succession struggle following their father’s death; and a daughter, Gode, married a count of Boulogne. But within months of the wedding the king authorized the massacre, with consequences that, in Norman eyes, were ‘shocking even to pagans’ – it is unlikely that Emma would have differed from that opinion. Towards the end of her long life (she died in 1052) Emma/Ælfgifu would commission
an account of her life and times from a Flemish monk, evidently one of her close circle. At the time of the composition of
Encomium Emmae Reginae
, which roughly translates as
In Praise of Queen Emma
, Æthelred had been dead close on thirty years and she had in any case also married his successor Cnut, also dead. Even so it seems a notable fact that it makes not a single mention of her English husband.