A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (37 page)

The other essential element in the defence strategy was the creation of a standing army. Alfred reorganized the kingdom’s military resources, starting from existing West Saxon military traditions of the ‘fyrd’ or army. The West Saxon fyrd was not a levy
en masse
but a mobilization of king’s men and their retainers – the king’s following arrayed for battle with, in summer, local territorial forces from the shires. This meant landowners and their personal followings led by ealdormen, reeves and local king’s thegns, operating either as divisions in the king’s army or as local defence forces. Raising these forces as need arose took time, and by the time they had arrived on the scene the enemy was probably gone. Alfred ordained that the force be divided in two, one half active for military service while the other remained to work on the land; he doubled the length of the service, probably from forty to eighty days, establishing in effect a fighting force available through most of the campaigning season. These seems to have been a standing elite that amounted to a King’s lifeguard: no king of Alfred’s line fell in battle, despite their exposed position of command fighting at close quarters in the middle of the shield wall.
²⁸

In the autumn of 892 famine threatened in northeast Francia. The Vikings made their way to Boulogne, where the Franks provided them with 250 ships so that they could cross the Channel ‘in one journey, horses and all’. These were heterogeneous war bands of diverse allegiances under an experienced leader like Hæstan, who came ‘with eighty ships in the mouth of the Thames,
and built himself a fort at Milton’. In that same season ‘the other host’ was at Appledore. Wessex was ready. In the 870s the raiders had campaigned through the heartlands more or less at will. Now a yet larger force made hardly any serious penetration of the frontiers.

After a faltering start, the Alfredian defence system worked, in the words of Richard Abels, ‘precisely as planned’. The enemy was able to land because there was an uncompleted burh on the Lympne. They set up fortifications under the watchful eyes of an army in the field and the new, year-round garrisons of the burhs. In land, instead of towns and settlements open to attack, they would find garrisoned burhs fortified with earth banks and palisades, proof against storm assault. To lay a siege now meant being attacked from neighbouring garrisons or the field army division of the fyrd. To leave the garrison in place was out of the question. From Maidstone Alfred could monitor the enemy through pickets along the Downs while patrols could pick off raiding parties. Alfred’s ability to maintain his troops in the field proved decisive. However, his physical distance from the centre of military action in 893 meant that the exploits of his son Edward as field army commander, recorded fifty years later in the chronicle of Ealdorman Æthelweard but unmentioned by the official chronicle, may have seemed more dramatic.

Alfred had designed his system of burhs not so much to prevent conquest as to minimize the possibility of raiding. As a result he was able to fight Vikings simultaneously on the east, west and north frontiers of the kingdom. His son Edward was able to use the system for aggression, conquest and settlement.

A king’s navy

King Alfred ordered the building of a fleet of ships – it seems that his son Edward had about a hundred in 910 – England’s first royal navy. The ships were to be built to a new design that he stated ‘could
be most serviceable’. They were commanded and crewed by Frisians and English, although the actual ship designs owed nothing to Frisian example. The
Chronicle
reports they were twice as long as the Danes’, were faster and, having more freeboard, steadier in the water. This presumably offered a firmer fighting platform in hand to hand combat: during an encounter in 882 two ships’ companies were slaughtered, whereupon two more surrendered. As with the system of burhs, Wessex arranged for the financing of its ships. Specific estates thought capable of raising the necessary funds were designated ‘ship sokes’ and each was required to provide a warship and provision its crew.
²⁹

Thanks to demonstration sailings by Edwin and Joyce Gifford in the mid-1990s of half-scale models built after ten years’ research, we have a good idea of how Alfred’s longships may have performed. Built in the Sutton Hoo manner (a vessel unearthed at Graveney in Kent, dated to about 900, indicates that Alfred’s naval architects may have been aware of that tradition) but with up to 60 oars, they ‘could have carried a complement of 140 men at speeds of up to 12 knots when sailing and 7 knots under oar’. Since Alfred’s coastal burhs were rarely more than 25 miles (40 km) apart, the Giffords estimated that squadrons could have reached any stricken beach within two hours of receiving the alarm. Given the improved signalling facilities and coastal fortifications we may have another part of the explanation for the decrease in Viking successes. The Anglo-Saxon state put high store on its naval defence. According to William of Malmesbury, King Edgar (957–75) patrolled the coasts of Britain on the look out for pirates on an annual basis. His account indicates that Edgar maintained three fleets, one each on the east and west coasts and one in the north. Presumably each flotilla returned to its home waters under its own commander once it had sailed its stretch of coastline. Admittedly it is highly improbable that the king regularly circumnavigated Britain, but it was hardly less impressive that he was reported to have maintained a standing navy.
At his death the
Chronicle
said that while he lived ‘no fleet however flaunting of itself was able to win booty in England.’ Writing in 1996, M. Strickland argued that the navy was ‘the arm to which the Anglo-Saxons attached great, if not supreme significance’.
³⁰
Indeed, the English may have set a trend. A longship found at Hedeby in the late 1990s, with space for sixty-four oars, suggests that Alfred’s model found imitators.
³¹

A warship could make a spectacular gift to the king ‘who had everything’. Bishop Ælfwold of Crediton (later the see of Exeter) bequeathed a longship of 64 oars to Æthelred II. Earl Godwine gave a great ship to Edward the Confessor. Emperor Henry III asked England for a flotilla of ships to support him in his campaign against Count Baldwin V of Flanders.

Threnody of triumph

Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons, died on 26 October 899, aged either 50 or 51, after a reign of twenty-eight years – a momentous epoch in the history of England. By holding the line against the Viking Danes, Alfred prevented the establishment of a pagan power on one of the pillars of European civilization. Triumphant in the field, he structured a national defence in depth, organized the reform of the demoralized clergy as leaders of a programme of education, commissioned or himself carried through translations into English of major works of history and philosophy, and almost certainly inaugurated the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

His reputation seems to have faded somewhat after his death. No other English king bore his name. But it was he who brought Wessex and West Mercia through the decades of danger. There was little likelihood of his subjects following the fashionable reinvention of Vikings, begun by gallery curators in the 1970s, as over-aggressive traders and salesmen pressing their wares on somewhat unappreciative customers.

Archaeological digs from the 1960s on may have revealed new dimensions of this Viking trade, but they have also heightened awareness of Winchester as the ‘traditional’ capital of Wessex; by identifying Alfredian towns and fortifications on the ground they have also substantiated Alfred’s activities as defensive strategist. Ealdorman Æthelweard, the king’s distant kinsman who died a century after him, dubbed him ‘the Magnanimous’, ‘unshakable pillar of the people of the west a man full of justice, active in war, learned in speech and, before all, instructed in divine learning . . .’
³²

Later generations took as given the platform of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom Alfred had rescued and upon which they built the kingdom of England. Comparisons are often made between Charles the Great and Alfred the Great, so it is worth noting that whereas the successors of Charles, the Carolingians, fragmented his empire, Alfred’s successors strengthened the ties that united his kingdom and created an English ‘empire’ in Britain. Whether because of childhood memories of public inscriptions in Rome, or because he knew of the Latin-literate public policy of Carolingian Europe, or, more probably, because of his own passion for learning, Alfred profoundly believed that exploitation of the power of the written word, above all the ‘Englisce’ written word – whether in charters, the Guthrum treaty, the law code, the
Chronicle
or the translations of those books ‘needful to know’ – was indispensable to good government. In the words of Simon Keynes,

Soldier, law-maker, statesman, educator, and scholar, not to mention ship-builder . . . all were . . . inseparable [from] his determination to discharge the responsibilities of his high office for the good of his subjects and in the service of God.
³³

9

LITERATURE, LEARNING, LANGUAGE AND LAW IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

Bede wrote in Latin, Europe’s language of learning, and pre-Conquest England produced many other fine Latinists whose work will be mentioned. But the chief theme of this chapter is English and its pioneering achievement as Europe’s first vernacular to evolve from the oral tradition into a fully articulate vehicle for all the categories of high civilization – literature, learning, law, administration and historical writing. Thus a language that begins to emerge as a distinct branch of the Germanic group about the fifth century would outmatch even Old Irish and Welsh in the range of its applications, as well as proving their equal in the glories of its literature. The tradition was on an upswing even as it was blotted out. To judge from the surviving manuscripts, the decades before Hastings saw a surge in the number of books produced in the vernacular.
¹
Many were older titles but the quantity indicates an increase in the reading population.

In addition to the
Beowulf
manuscript itself, as many as 300 manuscripts and texts survive, despite a tragic fire in the year 1731 that consumed much of the great collection of medieval manuscripts assembled by Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631), a founder member with William Camden of the original Society of Antiquaries. One of the manuscripts destroyed was the epic fragment known as the
Battle of Maldon
, an account of a heroic defeat at the hands of Danish raiders during the reign of Æthelred ‘the Unready’ (see
chapter 11
). Shortly before the great fire David Casley, deputy keeper of the collection, had made a careful line by line copy of the manuscript fragment. Thanks to him we have what scholars consider a sound version of this masterpiece of alliterative Old English verse, the last in the Germanic heroic tradition and, in short, the culmination of the spirit of
Beowulf
itself. Other superb poetry includes the old heroic poem
Widsith
and one commemorating the great victory at Brunanburh found in the
Chronicle.
Of the prose there is, of course, the
Chronicle
itself, the English language law ‘codes’ of most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, translations of scholarly texts and books of the Latin Bible texts, such as the interlining of the Latin text of the Lindisfarne Gospels with an English translation, the issue of government writs in the language of the people, and even word games or ‘riddles’ written in English. We start with the poetry.

Old English poetry

The characteristic verse idiom in Old English poetry comprises the measured line divided into two balanced half-lines, each with a minimum of four syllables, in which syllable length and stress are swung together by alliterative patterns. Such alliteration, which seems ideally adapted to declamation in an oral tradition, is to be found in other early Germanic languages. The Anglo-Saxon poet attempting Latin verse met with problems of metrical versification that did not confront his Continental counterparts for whom the Latin language was still a living tradition. Aldhelm, England’s earliest poet in Latin, produced some fine work in the language, but equally from time to time deployed his native alliterative idiom in the language of the church.

According to a story that was still going the rounds four hundred years later, Aldhelm, a Wessex nobleman and first bishop of
Sherborne (705–9), was wont to take his stand on a bridge at a river crossing near his church, harp in hand, and sing to his congregation hurrying homewards after mass, hoping to hold their interest in things spiritual with words from scripture tagged into popular songs. Aldhelm in his minstrel mode reveals a world where the vernacular tradition of the
gleomen
or
scops
(minstrels) was shared as part of a common culture by noble, churchman and commoner.

The
scop
(pronounced ‘shop’, with a short vowel sound), a bardic minstrel who might be in regular service with one lord or travel from one mead-hall court to another, was the guardian of the ancient Germanic oral tradition. Writing about
AD
100, the Roman historian Tacitus knew of the Germans’ ‘old songs’ (
carmina antiqua).
According to the
Beowulf
poet, the din of carousing and banqueting daily shook the walls of King Hrothgar’s Heorot Hall. We may have a hint of the effect from the writings of Adelard of Bath, a twelfth-century English scholar and musician at the court of Henry I’s Queen Matilda, who was descended from the old English royal line. According to Louise Cochrane, Adelard recalled how once, when he was playing the stringed
cithara
before the queen, a little boy among the courtiers became so carried away by the rhythm of the music that he enthusiastically waved his arms about, making the company laugh out loud. Anyone who has heard performances of medieval minstrel music will know the pulsating and rowdy rhythmic effects possible on early stringed instruments.