A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (42 page)

Compared with its account of Alfred’s reign, and in particular of the tensions among his brothers prior to his succession, the
Chronicle
is very detailed for these years and the revealing account of the ‘rebellion’ of Æthelwold lights up the English political scene ‘as by a lightning flash’.
²
Nothing in the annals for Alfred’s reign could have led us to expect this. For a fateful moment the Norns, the three sisters of Norse myth who control men’s destiny, toyed with the thread of his family line – should they break it? In 903 King Edward fought a major battle against the raiders somewhere in Cambridgeshire. Many great men fell on both sides, among the Danes ‘their king Eohric and prince Æthelwold who had incited
him to this rebellion’. Among the fallen there was also a possible claimant to Mercia. Although the following year ‘the host from East Anglia’ and ‘the Northumbrians’ forced Edward to come to terms, without Æthelwold the main threat was over.

In fact, Edward had now secured his position in the English kingdoms; he next trounced the Northumbrian Danes and thereafter proceeded to entrench his supremacy south of the Humber. A new Northumbrian raiding army in search of reprisals was caught between Wednesfield and Tettenhall in Staffordshire on 5 August 910 and went down to a crushing defeat that left three Danish leaders dead on a field of slaughter held by the English.

An essential partner in Edward’s extension and consolidation of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom was his sister Æthelflæd, wife of Æthelred of Mercia. She had always taken an active role with her husband in the military affairs of western Mercia. The two were responsible for the translation of the bones of Northumbria’s St Oswald southward into Mercia. Following Æthelred’s death in 911 after a long illness, during which she had been the effective power in the land, she continued to complement her brother Edward’s tactics. For William of Malmesbury she was ‘a woman of great determination’; for Pauline Stafford, writing in 1983, Æthelflæd, the Lady of the Mercians, was the virtually independent ruler of Mercia from 911 to her own death 918 and a great ‘warrior queen’. We are told that she led her forces into battle and on occasion, it is believed, commanded the army on horseback

She expanded the network of burhs and continued to strengthen existing ones to serve as defensive and offensive pressure points against the Danish presence in eastern Mercia and the North. The section of annals known as the Mercian register, in the B, C and D manuscripts of the
Chronicles
, tells how after her husband’s death she built fortresses at Bridgnorth, in Shropshire, at the important centre of Tamworth and then at Stafford. She sent an army against the Welsh that captured the wife of the king of the Brecon region,
‘won the borough called Derby’ and took Leicester ‘by peaceful means’, receiving the allegiance of the majority of the Danish forces there. In the year of her death and ‘the eighth year of her rule over Mercia as . . . rightful lord [
sic]
’ she seems to have won recognition for a time as ‘Lady of the people of York’.
³

Devised by Alfred as a defensive measure against invaders, the burghal system began to be adapted by his children as a tool of conquest and consolidation as they recovered the English position in the lands of the Danelaw. The new ‘burh’ towns became centres for royal administration and trade so that by the 950s, it has been said, ‘a burh was defined more by its mint and its market than by its ramparts.’
⁴
From the start, artisans and merchants were encouraged to settle in these walled settlements, which would in time provide the preconditions for a market economy.

Worcester was a case in point. In the 880s, responding to a petition by ‘their friend’ Bishop Wærferth and with the approval of King Alfred, Ealdorman Æthelred and his wife Æthelflæd ordered the building of a burh at Worcester ‘for the worship of god and the protection of all the people’. In return the noble patrons would receive the bishop’s prayers and half of all his revenues from the market or street stalls. Since the church seems to have met the bulk of the costs in erecting the fortifications, it earned its concessions.

The burhs also evolved as a vital armature of the Anglo-Saxon state – centres from which the king’s officers presided over their region and made the royal presence felt throughout the kingdom. The great men were obligated in the king’s service to mobilize the workforce necessary for the maintenance of the burhs and the defensible market town soon emerged as ‘central to England’s political structure’. The point was fully demonstrated in the decades following the Norman Conquest. The Normans, eager to control and exploit that structure of centralization, demolished whole quarters of old English towns and burhs to make room for royal castles.
⁵

The royal team of siblings, the Lady Æthelflæd and King Edward, made a logical division of labour. She looked after the western frontiers against the Welsh and the northwest against the incursions of Irish Vikings via Cheshire and Lancashire while at the same time making probing attacks into the northern Danelaw beyond Watling Street. Edward combated the Danish warlord kings in East Anglia and the east Midlands with the aim of extending West Saxon hegemony in those regions. Contemporaries could have viewed the same events as old-style Wessex and Mercia pursuing traditional interests under two rulers happy to cooperate.

The two royal establishments had not merged into a single court. We find a Mercian source describing the combined military forces as ‘English’, but to all intents and purposes Æthelflæd was a sovereign head of state, a unique position for a woman in the Europe of her time. After her death in 918 a group of Mercian nobles supported the succession of her daughter Ælfwyn as ‘Lady’. Edward may have felt threatened by the burgeoning success of his sister’s ‘dynasty’: he consigned his niece to a convent and took direct control in Mercia.

About this time, according to the Winchester
Chronicle
, the Welsh kings submitted to Edward at a great meeting at Tamworth, the historic seat of Mercian kingship and far from the border with Wales. Two years after this, with the West Saxon king’s rule now virtually undisputed south of the Humber–Ribble line, the
Chronicle
tells us that the rulers of north Britain, among them Ragnald, ‘king’ of Viking York, the lord of the Strathclyde Britons, and Constantine II, king of Scots, and the English lords of Northumbria independent of York, acknowledged him as their ‘father and lord’ at a great assembly in the Derbyshire Peak District on the frontiers between Mercia and the lands of Scandinavian York. As the West Saxon conquest of the Danelaw territories advanced with the extension of West Saxon power, the heterogeneous nature of the local administrations revealed a general lack of political solidarity among the Danish settlers.

King Edward died in the summer of 924 at Farndon on Dee, near Chester in Mercia. He left five sons and six daughters, the offspring of three partners. Of these the eldest boy was Æthelstan, who was of middling height, slim build and flaxen hair and with remarkable piercing blue eyes. He had been fostered at the Mercian court of his aunt Æthelflæd and had probably fought under her command, but his legitimacy was in question. It seems the dead king had meant that he should rule in Mercia, while Alfweard, his younger brother but the oldest legitimate son, should take the ancestral kingdom of Wessex. The prince, however, outlived his father by barely a fortnight and was also buried at Winchester. Æthelstan, with Mercian support, took over in Wessex as well and was consecrated at Kingston upon Thames, as his father had been, despite the claims of three legitimate half-brothers. But the consecration took place in the year following Edward’s death. The opposition party at Winchester had contended that although he was the child of Edward’s first union, his mother Ecgwyna was a woman of low birth, little better than a concubine, and that the prince was to all intents illegitimate. Æthelstan’s party by contrast claimed she had been the ‘noble concubine of his father’s youth’. It was not uncommon for a prince to take such a partner before he was considered of marriageable age: as Pauline Stafford explains, ‘such concubines were usually of high birth’.

William of Malmesbury would describe Ecgwyna as ‘an illustrious lady’, and she did have a daughter who was accepted in marriage as his queen by Sihtric, the ruler of York. Perhaps she was not of the highest rank, but even the bastard daughter of a powerful king may be acceptable as spouse to a lesser. The Welsh prince Llewellyn ‘the Great’ ap Iorwerth (d. 1240) was happy to marry Joan, the illegitimate daughter of John of England. Moreover, William had reason to be loyal to Æthelstan’s memory since the king had handsomely endowed his abbey and the royal tomb was still to be seen there. It was also claimed that the patriarch of the dynasty, his grandfather
King Alfred, had inducted him in a ceremony recalling his own consular ‘consecration’ when a boy at Rome.

Æthelstan: ‘ruler of the whole of Britain’ and kinsman of Europe (924–939)

The title comes from an inscription found in the Coronation Gospels, which King Æthelstan received from his brother-in-law Otto the Great, the German emperor, on Otto’s accession in 936 and later presented to Canterbury Cathedral. In full the title reads ‘
Anglorum basyleos et curagulus totius Bryttannie’
⁶
– note that Æthelstan uses the term
basyleos
, the Greek word for ‘king’ but by his day used by the Byzantine emperors. By 937 Æthelstan was recognized as king throughout England, both Angelcynn and Danelaw, from Northumbria to Kent. By this time, too, he had forced homage from the king of Scotland and many Welsh rulers. In 930 at Nottingham he had presided over what in British terms was a truly imperial court attended by many English notables, two archbishops, three Welsh under-kings and six Danish jarls. Among the business Æthelstan conducted was a grant of lands north of Preston – this was the exercise of effective power. In 927 he established direct rule over Scandinavian York and so became the first king to rule all the lands of the English. In later campaigns he drove the Welsh back beyond the Wye and established the River Tamar as the frontier with the West Britons, in other words the Cornish. In 934 Æthelstan led a joint sea and land force against Scotland.

The mixed, if impressive, auguries at Æthelstan’s succession heralded an astonishing fifteen-year reign of major law codes, of preparations for currency reform and of military triumph. In 937, in the most important victory by a king of England between the death of his grandfather and Hastings, Æthelstan routed a coalition of Olaf Guthfrithsson, king of York and Dublin, Constantine of Scotland/Alba and Owain of Strathclyde, together with warlords from the
Hebrides and the Danelaw, at the Battle of Brunanburh. It was the culmination of a conflict originating in the 920s when Ragnald, the Norse leader from Dublin, had defeated the Danes of York and the English lords of Bamburgh. Brunanburh made Æthelstan the most powerful of Britain’s rulers. His court was a magnet for English nobles from all over the country, and Welsh rulers, kings in their own world, resigned themselves to the status of
sub regulus
(‘under ruler’) in the eyes of the mighty West Saxon.

In his Latin
Chronicle
Ealdorman Æthelweard recalled that the English remembered Brunanburh as ‘the great war’. After Brunanburh, the Vikings in the north of England seemed for a time a spent force. (The Vikings on the Isle of Man may have kept the title ‘king’ until 1266 but caused no serious trouble in England’s affairs.) The
Annals of Ulster
recorded Brunanburh as a ‘lamentable battle’ in which several thousands were killed among the Norsemen and that Æthelstan, ‘king of the Saxons’, won a great victory. For all that, the actual site of the engagement is not known, although Paul Hill (2004), after an exhaustive discussion, concludes that the most likely candidates are Bromborough in the Wirral and Brunenburh in Yorkshire. He also notes that the English army included jarls from the Danelaw and Scandinavian mercenaries and that the great Anglo-Saxon poem on the battle recorded in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
for the year 937 shows strong influence from the skaldic techniques of Norse epic poetry. For Henry of Huntingdon, writing in the twelfth century, the poem despite all its ‘strange words and . . . language’offered a memorial ‘of this nation’s deeds and courage’. The ‘nation’ of which this post-Conquest historian writes is a ‘
patria
. . . a fatherland . . . created not by the Norman conqueror but by his English predecessors.’
⁷

For all its Norse elements it is a vibrant hymn to an English victory and echoes with the world of
Beowulf
and the
scop.
Standing by King Æthelstan, ‘lord of warriors and ring-giver of men . . . upon the fateful field . . . was his brother Prince Edmund’. As the
field grew dark with the blood of men, exults the poet, ‘the sons of Edward . . . triumphant in war’ drove their enemies back to Ireland, back to Scotland, back to Wales. Never, since the Angles and Saxons invaded across the ocean from the east to win a kingdom for themselves, as old books tell, had there been such slaughter in this island by the sword. This allusion to the
adventus Saxonum
(the invasion across the ocean) is almost unique in Old English literature.

Æthelstan’s policy towards the English regions and provinces that still had a measure of independence was clear. Allies like Mercia or English Northumbria were due for absorption. As a fostered courtier at his aunt Æthelflæd’s Mercian court, Æthelstan had been sitting ringside when his father took over power there on her death in 918. He himself had similar intentions towards the rump English kingdom of Northumbria if only to counterbalance and eventually, one supposes, oust the Viking overlords there. He encouraged the spread of the cult of the great northern patron St Cuthbert in Wessex. The treasury at Durham Cathedral still holds a sumptuously embroidered stole that the king presented to the shrine of St Cuthbert in 934 and which was commissioned, or more probably worked in person, by his step-mother Queen Ælflæd.