Great Tales From English History (8 page)

But while myths may be factually untrue, they can help convey a deeper truth - in this case the humbling of the great king hiding in the marshes. So down-and-out that he had to suffer the scolding of a peasant woman, Alfred showed grace under pressure. He resisted the temptation to pull rank and lash out when rebuked - and he also made good use of his weeks in the wilderness. In May 878 Alfred rode out of his fortified camp in the marshes at Athelney, met up with his people and, just two days later, led them to a famous victory at Edington in Wiltshire. Guthrum was compelled to renounce his bloodthirsty Norse gods and to accept Christianity. He withdrew to the Danelaw with his forces, and for a dozen years the Vikings left Wessex largely in peace.

Alfred made good use of the respite. He built a defensive network of forts and fortified towns known as
burhs
, from which comes the modern word ‘boroughs’. No one in Wessex was more than twenty miles from a
burh
where they could take refuge, and many of these military settlements later grew into towns. Taking on the Vikings at their own game, he designed and built a fleet of longships - in later centuries Alfred came to be described as the ‘Father of the Royal Navy’ - and he also reorganised his army. As the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
reported in 893, ‘the king had divided his army in two, so that always half his men were at home and half out on service, except for those men who were to garrison the burhs’.

The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
was one of Alfred’s great creations, a history of England up to his own reign, which then turned into a sort of yearly newspaper, regularly updated, recording that year’s events in a forthright and sometimes quite critical fashion. The first updating was in the early 890s, and from then on monasteries around the country added their own instalments to a project that was one of the most remarkable of its kind in Europe. The
Chronicle
reported battles, famines, floods, political back-stabbing, triumphs and disasters in lively prose - not in Latin but in English, the language, as Alfred put it, ‘that we can all understand’.

Alfred felt passionately that his kingdom must be educated. ‘The saddest thing about any man,’ he once wrote, ‘is that he be ignorant, and the most exciting thing is that he knows.’

He put together a panel of scholars and started to learn Latin himself so that he could translate some of the great Latin texts into English. In a world without clocks, the King was anxious to work out the exact time of day, inventing a graduated candle on which the hours were marked off. Then he came up with the idea of a ventilated cow’s-horn lantern to stop the candle blowing out.

When Alfred died in 899, Wessex was a thriving and dynamic kingdom, and it is not surprising that he should have become the only king in English history to be known in later centuries as ‘the Great’. But he himself was modest about his achievements. He suffered as an adult from the agonies of swollen veins in and around the anus, the embarrassing complaint we call piles, along with other pains that baffled his doctors. These infirmities seem to have contributed to a strong sense of his own imperfections, and his account of his life ended on a tired and rueful note. Comparing his life to a house built out of whatever timber he could forage from the forests of experience, he described how ‘in each tree I saw something that I required’. He advised others ‘to go to the same woods where I have cut these timbers’ so that they could construct their own house of life, ‘with a fair enclosure and may dwell therein pleasantly and at their ease, winter and summer, as I have not yet done’.

Reading these words, it does seem reasonable to assume that such a spiritual and modest man would have accepted the reproof of a peasant woman when he let her loaves burn in the wilderness. But Alfred himself would surely expect us to be rigorous about the truth.

AD
911-18

T
HERE IS A BATTERED SILVER PENNY FROM KING
Alfred’s reign on which is inscribed the grand Latin title
REX ANGLO[RUM]
- ‘King of the English’. But the claim was only half true. Alfred had been King of those
Angel-cynn
, the kin or family of the English, who lived in Wessex, and his resourcefulness had kept Englishness alive in the dark days when the Viking forces drove him and his people into the Somerset marshes. The work of extending Anglo-Saxon authority across the whole of Engla-lond, as it would come to be known, was done by Alfred’s children and grandchildren - and of these the most remarkable was his firstborn, his daughter Aethelflaed, whose exploits as a warrior and town-builder won her fame as the ‘Lady of the Mercians’.

‘In this year English and Danes fought at Tettenhall [near Wolverhampton], and the English took the victory,’ reported the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
for 910. ‘And the same year Aethelflaed built the stronghold at Bremsbyrig [Bromsberrow, near Hereford].’

Women exercised more power than we might imagine in the macho society of Anglo-Saxon England. The Old English word
hlaford
, ‘lord’, could apply equally to a man or a woman. The abbess Hilda of Whitby (Caedmon’s mentor, p. 45), who was related to the royal families of both Northumbria and East Anglia, had been in charge of a so-called ‘double house’, where monks and nuns lived and worshipped side by side and where the men answered to the abbess, not the abbot.

The assets and chattels of any marriage were legally considered the property of both husband and wife, and wills of the time routinely describe landed estates owned by wealthy women who had supervised the management of many acres, giving orders to men working under them. King Alfred’s will distinguished rather gracefully between the ‘spear’ and ‘spindle’ sides of his family. It was women’s work to spin wool or flax with a carved wooden spindle and distaff, and the old king bequeathed more to his sons on the spear side than to his wife and daughters with their spindles. But he still presented Aethelflaed with one hundred pounds, a small fortune in tenth-century terms, along with a substantial royal estate.

Aethelflaed turned out to be an Anglo-Saxon Boadicea, for like Boadicea she was a warrior widow. Her husband Ethelred had ruled over Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that had spread over most of the Midlands under the great King Offa in the late 700s. Extending from London and Gloucester up to Chester and Lincoln, Mercia formed a sort of buffer state between Wessex in the south and the Danelaw to the north and east, and the couple had made a good partnership, working hard to push back Danish power northwards. But Ethelred was sickly, and after his death in 911 Aethelflaed continued the work.

‘In this year, by the Grace of God,’ records the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
for 913, ‘Aethelflaed Lady of the Mercians went with all the Mercians to Tamworth, and built the fortress there in early summer, and before the beginning of August, the one in Stafford.’

It does not seem likely that Aethelflaed fought in hand-to-hand combat. But we can imagine her standing behind the formidable shield wall of Saxon warriors, inspiring the loyalty of her men and winning the awed respect of her enemies. She campaigned in alliance with her brother Edward, their father’s successor as King of Wessex, and together the brother and sister repulsed the Danes northwards to the River Humber, thereby regaining control of East Anglia and central England. To secure the territory they captured, they followed their father’s policy of building fortified
burhs
.

Aethelflaed built ten of these walled communities at the rate of about two a year, and their sites can be traced today along the rolling green hills of the Welsh borderland and across into the Peak District. They show a shrewd eye for the lie of the land, both as defensive sites and as population centres. Chester, Stafford, Warwick and Runcorn all developed into successful towns - and as Aethelflaed built, she kept her armies advancing northwards. In the summer of 917 she captured the Viking stronghold of Derby, and the following year she took Leicester ‘and the most part of the raiding-armies that belonged to it’, according to the
Chronicle
. This was the prelude to a still more remarkable triumph: ‘The York-folk had promised that they would be hers, with some of them granting by pledge or confirming with oaths.’

The Lady of the Mercians was on the point of receiving the homage of the great Viking capital of the north when she died, just twelve days before midsummer 918, a folk hero like her father Alfred. She had played out both of the roles that the Anglo-Saxons accorded to high-born women, those of ‘peace-weaver’ and ‘shield-maiden’, and her influence lived on after her death. Edward had had such respect for his tough and purposeful big sister that he had sent his eldest son Athelstan to be brought up by her - a fruitful apprenticeship in fortress-building, war and busy statecraft that also helped to get the young Wessex prince accepted as a prince of Mercia. After his father’s death in 924, Athelstan was able to take control of both kingdoms.

Athelstan proved a powerful and assertive king, extending his rule to the north, west and south-west and becoming the first monarch who could truly claim to be King of all England. In his canny nation-building could be seen the skills of his grandfather Alfred and his father Edward, along with the fortitude of his remarkable aunt, tutor and foster-mother, the Lady of the Mercians.

AD 978-1016

E
THELRED THE UNREADY IS A FIGURE OF
fun in English history. It is now considered old-fashioned to classify monarchs as good kings or bad kings, but by almost any measure Ethelred was a bad one. In 978 he inherited the rich and respected kingdom of Engla-lond that had been pulled together by Aethelflaed, Edward, Athelstan and the other descendants of his great-great-grandfather Alfred. By 1016 Ethelred had lost it all, from Northumbria down to Cornwall, in the course of a reign that made him a byword for folly, low cunning and incompetence.

Perhaps the one sphere in which he deserves some sympathy is his unfortunate nickname, a mistranslation of the gibe made after his death by chroniclers who dubbed him Ethelred ‘
Unred
’. In fact, unred was an Old English word that meant ‘ill-advised’, and it made a rather clever pun on the meaning of Ethelred’s name, ‘of noble counsel’, rendering Ethelred Unred ‘the well-advised, ill-advised’.

In Anglo-Saxon ‘ethel’ (also spelt ‘aethel’) denoted someone well born or royal - hence the vast number of Ethel-related names, from Ethelbert to Aethelflaed. All the offspring of a king, down to his great grandchildren, were known as
aethelings
- ‘throne-worthies’ - and it was from this gene pool that the
aetheling
who seemed most qualified for the job was selected. It would be many years before the rule of primogeniture, whereby the king would be automatically succeeded by his eldest son, came to prevail. If the Anglo-Saxon
aetheling
system still operated today, it might be decided that Prince William was more qualified than Prince Charles to succeed the Queen.

Ethelred, however, did not become king through discussion or consensus. He owed his throne to murder. One day when he was only ten, his older half-brother Edward - his father’s son by a previous wife - rode through the gates of Corfe Castle in Dorset to quench his thirst after an afternoon’s hunting. The young Ethelred was staying in the castle with his mother, and out in the courtyard a quarrel developed between her followers and Edward. They handed him a drink, then stabbed him to death before he could dismount.

Did Ethelred, inside the castle, hear his half-brother hit the ground in the courtyard? His mother was suspected of inspiring the stabbing, but Ethelred never investigated the murder that handed the crown to him as a ten-year-old, and it cast a shadow of suspicion over his entire reign.