In Search of the Dark Ages

by Michael Wood

  In the summer the Welsh devastated the territory of Offa, and then Offa caused a dyke to be made between him and Wales, to enable him more easily to withstand the attack and that is called glawd Offa from that time to this day, and it extends from one sea to the other, from the south near Bristol to the north above Flint between the monastery of Basingwerk and Coleshill.

  Brut y Tywysogion

  The line of Offa’s Dyke from the Wye to Treuddyn and then along the northern stretch of ‘Wat’s Dyke’ to Basingwerk fits this description exactly.

  ‘ROMAN GENIUS’

  To us the vision and confidence which lies behind such a work perhaps smacks of the ideology of the 1000-year Reich. But the man behind it was a military genius with exceptional engineering skill who has rightly been credited with ‘Roman genius and energy’. That verdict has proved all the more true now we know that the models for the dyke were not the great boundary ditches of the continental Anglo-Saxons, but Roman frontier works. Offa need not have seen for himself the Roman northern walls. One of the books we know he possessed (and which was surely read to him) was Bede’s History, where he could find out how to make just such a work, ‘constructed with sods cut from the earth and raised high above ground level, fronted by the ditch from which the sods were cut, and surmounted by a strong palisade of logs. Severus built a rampart and ditch of this type from sea to sea, and fortified it with a series of towers’.

  ‘THE GOOD KING OFFA’

  As they grow older, dictators often become more religious, especially in societies where every act on earth has significance in the ideal hierarchy. In eighth-century Europe the whole structure of society was felt to be mirrored in heaven, and kings like Offa saw themselves in the same relation to God, the supreme overlord, as their subject kings were to them. They never tired of pressing home the analogy. They gave gifts to God and his saints, founded churches, gave alms to the poor, made pilgrimages to Rome, and even kept vigils in holy shrines much as peasants do in some parts of southern Europe today.

  Offa was no different. But of all the king’s gifts to churches only one can be identified today. We know from a note in a thirteenth-century St Albans manuscript that Offa gave a Gospel book to the church at Worcester. As it happens a fragment of a late eighth-century Gospel book can still be seen in the Cathedral Library in Worcester. This has been there for nearly nine hundred years, and was probably written at Canterbury, where Offa had his best-quality books made. It is not impossible that we have here part of the beautiful book which Offa presented to Worcester, and hence the only surviving artefact which can be associated with him personally. There is no reason to think that Offa himself was literate – few Dark Age kings were – but he understood the symbolic and practical value of the book. ‘I am delighted that you are so keen on encouraging reading,’ Alcuin wrote to him, ‘so that the light of wisdom, now extinct in so many places may shine in your kingdom. You are the glory of Britain, the trumpet of the gospel, our sword and shield against the enemy.’ The enemy of course was paganism, and Alcuin’s greatest fear was that the avaricious and worldly Mercian kings, for all their qualities, might allow the Church to fall to ‘secular priority’.

  THE MURDER OF AETHELBERHT

  In 792 Offa sent ambassadors to Rome to cement his alliance with the papacy. But soon afterwards there occurred an incident which shows how tenuous was the Church’s hold on Dark Age kings. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says simply that Offa ordered Aethelberht, king of the East Angles, to be beheaded. By the tenth century the cult of St Aethelberht was well established at Hereford, where he was buried, and later chronicles were in no doubt that Aethelberht had been innocent and Offa’s role in the affair ‘most treacherous’. By the twelfth century romantic legends were in circulation which told a story of passion and intrigue in which the young East Anglian king was in love with Offa’s daughter and murdered by Offa’s wicked wife. In these legends the place of execution is said to be Sutton, near Hereford.

  ‘STAINED WITH BLOOD’

  It is possible to untangle some of the truth behind the Aethelberht story through the coins. Initially Aethelberht minted coins in his East Anglian kingdom which bore the name of the overlord Offa. Then, some time before his death, we find coins issued in his own name, implying that the king had rejected Mercian overlordship and asserted the independence of his kingdom. How he came to be at Sutton is difficult to say, but his execution undoubtedly shows how Offa felt he could deal with his subject kings. They would be deposed or even killed if they caused him trouble. On this theme Alcuin wrote home to one of Offa’s ministers, Osbert, in 797, following the deaths of Offa and his son within months of each other:

  Thinking of our long friendship, I wanted to write to remind you of my feelings and tell you how I am, for we are unlikely now to have the pleasure of meeting and talking confidentially … I do not believe the noble youth died through his own sins: it was the vengeance of the father’s blood that fell on the son. For you know as well as I how much blood the father shed to secure the kingdom for his son. It proved the undoing not the making of his kingdom.

  Alcuin Letters

  In another letter Alcuin had spoken of Offa’s ‘fine character and modest way of life … devotion to the Christian religion and seriousness of demeanour’. The figure of the dictator as a puritanical strongman is one we recognise today; in the eighth century the Church often asked the impossible of essentially simple men.

  Events like these perhaps give us a clue to Offa’s ‘personality’, if we may, anachronistically, use such a modern term. His stress on his own royal ancestry; his single-mindedness in securing the throne for his son, going so far as to have him anointed in his own lifetime; his supervision of a written genealogy to justify his claim (a blatant piece of what we would call propaganda); above all his ruthless liquidation of rivals: all this suggests a gifted but aggressive and touchy man, not unlike some Third World dictators today. His heavy emphasis on an overtly moral private life cannot disguise the fact that like most successful Dark Age kings (and a reign that lasted 39 years was success in itself), Offa was also uncompromising, cruel and avaricious. All these traits were ascribed to him in the letters of Alcuin, a man who knew Offa well enough: ‘Never forget Offa’s fine character, his modest way of life, his concern to reform the life of a Christian people,’ he wrote, ‘but do not follow him in his cruel and greedy acts.’ However we should remember that an eighth-century man (even a thoughtful churchman like Alcuin) did not find such a personality incompatible with that of a great Christian king.

  THE LAST YEARS

  Offa maintained his supremacy until his death. And he did so by personal charisma and energy even though he was now about sixty. At Whitsun 795 he held a great court in London in the role of overlord. Formerly controlled by the kings of Kent, London’s port tolls were now a source of revenue for Mercia, and Offa had a palace and a private church within the walls of the Roman fort in Cripplegate from where he could supervise the ‘mart of many nations who come by land and sea’ (Bede, History, writing in 731).

  That summer Offa sent an army into Wales and devastated Dyfed. He retired to Tamworth for Christmas, and in the New Year received ambassadors from Charlemagne who came bearing gifts and letters. Some time before the two kings had quarrelled over Charlemagne’s request that Offa’s daughter, Aelflaed, should marry Charlemagne’s son, Charles. Offa had refused unless his heir, Ecgfrith, married Charlemagne’s daughter, Bertha. Charlemagne had immediately broken off relations with him and closed Frankish ports to English traders. Yet the tone of the letters was friendly: ‘to his dear brother Offa, good wishes … It is in the interests of everyone that the bond of holy love and the laws of friendship formed in the unity of peace between kings should be sincerely preserved. … We recognise in you not only a strong protector of your country but a devoted defender of the Faith’. Charlemagne once more offered full protection for English merchants abroad, and, ‘with regard to the dark stones which you asked us to send, have
a messenger come to choose which kind you want. … We will gladly order them to be given and help with transport. And as you have told us the size of the stones you require, so our people have a request to make about the length of their cloaks, namely that you should have them made like those we used to get in the past.’ With the letter there were presents: church vestments and rich cloths for each of the bishops in England, and gifts for Offa himself, silks, a belt and a Hunnish sword, booty from Charlemagne’s seizure of the Avar ring in Hungary. Charlemagne’s letter ends: ‘May Almighty God preserve you, dear brother, in long life and prosperity to protect his holy church.’ As Offa listened to the letter being read out in the royal hall at Tamworth, and reflected on the silks and the Avar sword, he must have appreciated the gesture greatly. He was an elder statesman now – both men were getting on – and there is nothing an old tyrant likes better than to gain respectability in the world.

  OFFA’S DEATH

  On 29 July Offa died at Offley in Hertfordshire, on one of the estates he had given to St Albans. His Mercian retainers and chief men – Brorda his prefect and chief court officer, one of the old guard on whom Offa had always relied – were by his bedside. The changeover of power was rapid, the way prepared. Ecgfrith was acclaimed king. But events moved fast. On 17 November Ecgfrith died. The East Angles and Kentishmen immediately rose in revolt and the new Mercian king, Cenwulf, a distant cousin of Offa, put down the rising in Kent with revolting brutality, ravaging as far as Romney Marsh and leading their ‘king’, Eadberht Praen, a renegade monk, in chains back to Mercia where Cenwulf cut off Eadberht’s hands and put out his eyes.

  Though it was only in the 820s that the Mercian kings’ role as overlords finally collapsed, their hegemony never really recovered. If anything, the violent resistance engendered by the long period under Offa’s iron hand paved the way for the rise of the West Saxons.

  THE MERCIAN LEGACY

  In conclusion, what are we to make of Offa’s kingship, and his role in the development of eighth-century England? His was still a Germanic society, of course, in law, in speech, in social order and the forms of kingship. But we cannot ignore the great intellectual impact of the Roman legacy in the development of Anglo-Saxon civilisation. For the so-called barbarians of the seventh and eighth centuries, the Roman empire cast the same sort of afterglow as the British Empire did in post-colonial Africa, and their kings were as susceptible to its style as Amin was to the Sandhurst tradition, or Bokassa to Napoleonic ceremonial. Vigorous and violent, naive yet cunning, they legitimised their rule with the trappings of empire.

  The ruins of Rome stood around them in tangible form, of course. But it went deeper than that. The Northumbrian bretwalda, Edwin, unsophisticated but immensely proud, as Bede portrays him, made the point of having the insignia of Roman office carried aloft before him in public. He was baptised by a Roman missionary in the Roman city of York, and for all we know held court in the still standing Roman HQ building there. Such men were setting themselves up as civilised heirs of Rome. And prodded by the missionary zeal of the Catholic Church, they learned fast. By the time we get to Offa, a man of far greater power, prestige and sophistication than his predecessors, the Roman legacy had generated a new style. We can see it in the palace with the stone church inside the Roman fort in London; in the ‘wonder and marvel of the age’ at Tamworth; in the Roman-style basilica at Brixworth; in the dyke with its palisades, ditches and wall walks; in the beautiful coins representing Offa as a new Theodosius.

  ‘OFFA, KING OF THE FATHERLAND OF THE ENGLISH’

  Offa began his reign an illiterate barbarian, whose accession can have cast few reverberations over the Channel. Not long before his death four decades later, the grizzled old dictator was an honoured visitor at the papal court in Rome, a figure of European stature. It is ironic that for all the ruthlessness with which he secured his kingdom, his only son died childless so soon after him. But of his achievements there is no doubt. He left his successors a strong unified kingdom in central England where there had been a mass of disparate tribes. And he left too the concept of a kingdom of all the English. It was to be the West Saxons, Alfred and Athelstan, who would turn that concept into fact.

  OFFA’S BURIAL

  Offa’s career is as yet an imperfect jigsaw puzzle. There is even uncertainty over his burial place. We do not know where the Mercian kings of the pagan period (that is, before 654) were buried, as none of their tombs has ever been discovered. A site near the later bishopric of Lichfield is likely, and one at Offlow in Staffordshire is a possibility. Some of the early Christian kings of Mercia, like Ceolred in 716, were buried in the church of Lichfield itself. In the eighth and ninth centuries Repton in Derbyshire was favoured. There the murdered Aethelbald was buried in 757, in a free-standing mausoleum which still survives to roof height, incorporated into the present church. The later king Wiglaf and his grandson Wystan also lay here, and in the crypt the recesses which held the royal caskets can still be seen with a vaulted roof and twisted columns imitating those in old St Peter’s in the Vatican. Around the church at Repton the remains of ninth-century Mercian nobles have been found in elaborate iron-bound coffins, the kind of men who formed Offa’s entourage. But at neither Lichfield nor Repton, nor any of the other places (like Offchurch in Warwickshire) which claim him, is there good evidence that they are the place of Offa’s burial. I therefore prefer to follow the opinion of the monks of St Albans, who had good cause to remember, for to their chagrin they failed to secure the body of their great benefactor. They said that Offa was entombed at Bedford in a small chapel which by the thirteenth century had been swept away by the river Great Ouse. Why Bedford was chosen is a mystery.

  In Wessex, Kent and East Anglia it is unlikely that Offa was mourned, for he had incurred much hatred. But standing by the Great Ouse at Bedford we may perhaps imagine the mounted warriors who formed Offa’s retinue riding round his coffin, and in the old Germanic tradition, ‘singing of his heroic deeds, praising his manhood and weeping for him’. The words they sang might have been ones formerly declaimed before the king in his royal hall:

  Fortham Offa waes geofum ond guthum, garcene man wide geweorthod; wisdome heold ethel sinne.

  Best of men the wide world over, Offa was a great warrior who ruled his kingdom wisely and was famous for his victories and his generosity.

  Beowulf

  FIVE

  ALFRED THE GREAT

  One day a certain peasant woman, wife of a cowherd, was making loaves, and the king (Alfred) was sitting by the fire tending his bow and arrows and other weapons. But when the poor woman saw that the loaves she had put over the fire were burning she ran up and took them off, scolding the invincible king and saying, ‘Look there man, you can see the loaves are burning and you’ve not turned them, though I’m sure you’d be the first to eat them nicely done!’ The miserable woman little thought that this was King Alfred who had fought so many wars against the pagans and won so many victories.

  Annals of St Neots

  FEW LEGENDS ARE as enduring as that of Alfred and the cakes. Along with Robert Bruce and the spider, Elizabeth and the Armada, the Battle of Britain and the Few, it is a legend of resilience in adversity, of an indomitable spirit that succeeds when all around seems destined to fall. In fact the cakes story is no more than a legend, as it first appears in the Annals of St Neots, which date from the early twelfth century.

  The tale is rather similar to the story of Bruce and the spider: its point is the humiliating straits to which the great man had been reduced at the nadir of his fortune, in this case after his defeat by the Danes in 878. But though this is only a folk story, the image of the fugitive king sheltering in a peasant’s hovel has consciously or unconsciously influenced almost all later writers. What, then, are the facts behind Alfred’s decisive war with the Vikings? Who began the Alfred myth? Does he alone among English monarchs really deserve to be called ‘the Great’?

  ‘WHAT OF THE GREAT TROUBLE HE HAD WITH HIS OWN P
EOPLE, WHO WOULD VOLUNTARILY SUBMIT TO LITTLE OR NO LABOUR FOR THE COMMON NEEDS OF THE KINGDOM?’

  Nobody in British history has had as good a press as Alfred the Great. He is ‘the wise king’, ‘England’s darling’, the ‘Truthteller’. A story told against him in the Abingdon Chronicle seems to be the only one of its kind. The chronicler clearly did not like Alfred; he was a ‘Judas … piling bad deeds on top of each other’. And why? Because the king ‘violently alienated estates from the monastery’. (Whether there was any community still at Abingdon by his time we cannot say – the site may have been deserted – but William of Malmesbury confirms that the king took the lands and their revenues to his own use.) The story is interesting because it reminds us that although the Church wrote the accounts we have of Alfred and the other Anglo-Saxon kings, and saw them from a largely ecclesiastical point of view, the kings themselves did not necessarily share this perspective. Religious as such men were, they were not, in fact, ruled by their bishops as much as their biographers claimed. It is true that later kings like Edgar, and perhaps Athelstan, relied very heavily on certain bishops who had risen through the royal chapel as Mass priests or secretaries, men they knew intimately. But equally stories like the expropriation of the Abingdon estates are also told of Edward the Elder and Athelstan. Like Alfred, they were prepared to act against the Church if prompted by the exigencies of defence.

  At a time when obligations often had to be cajoled out of a recalcitrant populace and surly magnates, kings frequently had to rely on their own resources in land, money and men, to prosecute their wars. Indeed it was partly due to the careful husbanding of the family possessions that Alfred and his father, son and grandsons were able, in the end, to combat the Viking menace so effectively. The kind of pressures which kings faced in the Viking era were sometimes only dimly understood by hagiographers like Bishop Asser.