In Search of the Dark Ages

by Michael Wood

  King Athelstan died on a sickbed in the royal chamber of the palace at Gloucester on 27 October 939. He had reigned for fourteen years and was probably forty-four. Perhaps he had been exhausted by the exertions of kingship, though none of his line lived to a ripe old age. In the last month of his life, his old friend Cenwald, bishop of Worcester, expressed Athelstan’s supremacy in these terms: ‘King of the Anglo-Saxons, Emperor of the Northumbrians, ruler of the pagans and guardian of the Britons.’ The tone was set for the tenth-century empire. In Ireland it was the king’s prestige which struck an Ulster chronicler, who recorded his death in terms used for high kings like Charlemagne or Brian Boru, and before them the Roman Emperors: ‘Athelstan king of the English died, the roof tree of the honour of the western world’ (Annals of Ulster).

  SEVEN

  ERIC BLOODAXE

  King Eric was treacherously killed by Earl Maccus in a certain lonely place which is called Stainmore, with his son Haeric and his brother Ragnald, betrayed by Earl Oswulf, and then afterwards King Eadred ruled in these districts.

  Roger of Wendover Flowers of the Histories

  SOON AFTER 954, a northern cleric sat down at his desk in the library of St Peter’s church in York, the Anglo-Saxon minster, and wrote the above words in Latin.

  The king whose death was thus recorded had been the most famous Viking of the era. Briefly king of Norway, sometime king of the Hebrides, ruler of Viking York for two short but intensely dramatic reigns in the 940s and 950s, Eric’s career took him from the White Sea to Spain, shooting across Scandinavian history like a meteor, but it has only been in modern times that historians have pieced together his role in British history. Nicknamed ‘Bloodaxe’ for his ruthless bravery, Eric lived most of his life a pagan, a true son of Odin. He probably died a pagan too. But why then should a priest in the church of York, one of the greatest centres of Northumbrian Christianity and learning, have noted his death with sympathy? Why did our annalist view his downfall at the hands of the English earl of Bamburgh, Oswulf, as a treacherous betrayal? And why was the accession of Eadred, grandson of Alfred the Great, and like the annalist, an Englishman, greeted with tight-lipped resentment? Eric’s is an intriguing story, but more than that, it takes us to the root of how the Vikings were assimilated in England.

  Eric Bloodaxe was a true saga-hero. Unfortunately, his own saga does not survive today, but its gist is preserved in others written by Snorri Sturluson: they are those of his father Harald Finehair, his half-brother Hakon the Good and that of his enemy the poet Egil Skallagrimson. These sagas are late, written in the first part of the thirteenth century, and in general they are unreliable as history. They are a marvellous entertainment though, and should be read by everyone interested in the Viking story. These sagas do, however, preserve early poetry in praise of Eric, written by poets in his entourage, and this tells much about the way he thought of himself.

  The synoptic histories of the twelfth century written in Latin and Old Norse, which were available to the saga-writers, add only the odd detail; in fact, Eric’s story seems to have been preserved in Iceland and Norway by oral tradition, and it was obviously a story which seized people’s imagination. But to get to the real events of his life we must turn to the lost chronicles written in the north of England in the tenth century, fragments of which have only recently been untangled from much later authors who assimilated them. We also have now the testimony of archaeology to colour our picture of Eric’s career. Especially in Viking York, this evidence is giving us a new insight into the Anglo-Scandinavian civilisation over which Eric ruled in the mid tenth century.

  To contemporary observers it must have seemed that Athelstan’s conquest of Northumbria and his great victory at Brunanburh had sealed the fate of an independent kingdom of Northumbria. But his death at the end of 939 threw everything into the melting pot. It led to a fifteen-year struggle for power in Northumbria where the last energies of the Northumbrian kingship attempted to resist the trend of English history and the military power of Athelstan’s successors, his young half-brothers Edmund and Eadred. Between 939 and 954, seven different kings ruled in York, Scandinavian and English, in nine separate reigns. Between 939 and 948 seven major military expeditions are recorded to have occurred in the zone between York and the Five Boroughs, the armies of the West-Saxon overlord and the Norse king of York attacking each other across the Humber borderland. Something of a Dark Age Vietnam then, where the instruments of war were great mounted raids to devastate the land, burn crops, drive the population away from their homes – the Dark Age equivalent of modern saturation bombing or chemical warfare. It was a war of attrition, where the southern kings systematically set fire to areas, demolished strongpoints and arrested suspects. There was propaganda too: both sides wrote histories of their ruling dynasties from their own point of view. Inevitably, the Northumbrians lost, and became a province of the kingdom of England, albeit a recalcitrant one. Eric was their last king, and that fact coupled with the manner of his fall – left a nostalgic mark in their history books: ‘from that time to the present, Northumbria has been grieving for want of a king of its own, and for the liberty they once enjoyed’ (John of Wallingford’s Chronicle).

  The years during which Eric ruled York, then, are a most violent phase of British history. York was the racial melting-pot of the north and north-west of Britain and it saw constant change. As the biggest city in the north, York was at the centre of these movements. It was the ancient ‘capital’ of Northumbria, former Roman city, catalyst in a diplomatic, political and trade nexus which extended from the Viking ports of Ireland, the Viking settlements in the Western Isles and North Britain, through Viking Scandinavia and further east by the rivers of Russia. In these years successive kings of the Norse family of Dublin were accepted as king in the city, only to see it captured and recaptured by the southern English successors of Alfred. No sooner had the southern kings been accepted as ‘father and lord’ and tribute paid to them, than the Northumbrians invited another Norse king to rule them.

  ERIC’S BACKERS

  At the centre of these intrigues was the enigmatic Archbishop Wulfstan of York. A more unlikely partner to Eric Bloodaxe could scarcely be imagined, but their careers are bound together. Wulfstan was a man unto himself, a resolute northerner to the end. It was he who had ridden south with the York Vikings in 940, devastating the Midlands, sacking Tamworth and fighting against the Anglo-Saxon King Edmund at Leicester. It was Wulfstan’s diplomacy which secured the east Midlands Five Boroughs for Viking rule after his ‘victory’. But he was no puppet; he was for instance instrumental in removing two Dublin Viking kings from York in 944. We find him in a remarkable annal for 947 leading the ‘witan’, the council of wise men, the ‘chiefs of the Northumbrians’, negotiating with the southern King Eadred like a king on the borders of his own kingdom: in this way the ancient Northumbrians had dealt with the bretwaldas of old.

  We know something about the citizens of York, the chief men who supported Wulfstan. Enough to know that they included men of English, Danish and Norwegian descent. Earl Orm, to whose ‘help and advice’ the Northumbrians owed the victory of 940, was a great landowner of Norwegian descent, but his daughter whom he married to King Anlaf Guthfrithson bears an English name, Aldgyth, suggesting that Orm had an English wife. Although he clearly kept in touch with Vikings outside Britain, Orm signed southern charters from 929 to 956, never entirely losing the favour of kings like Athelstan: a slippery customer then, and one who rode changes of regime with a sureness of touch remarkable even in this age of shifting loyalty.

  The master moneyers too were men of substance, rapidly adapting to changes of regime. Athelstan’s old master moneyer Aethelferth (who has an English name) minted coins for the Viking kings as soon as they took over in York. He minted the large and handsome issue of coins of Anlaf Guthfrithson which bore a raven with the legend ‘Anlaf Cununc’ (king) and on the reverse the moneyer’s name and city. Another English moneyer, Rathulf, was brought d
own to Derby by the Vikings as soon as the Five Boroughs fell in 940, and brought dies with him from York to use with the captured dies at Derby bearing the characteristic Derby flower design. We shall find further innovations in Eric’s coinages in York, made by English moneyers. These were important men, and the value the Norse kings attached to them also proves the significance by this time of coins as a means of trade. After a coup in York coinage was almost the first thing to be regularised. Nothing was left to chance there. The moneyers’ careers show we should be wary of attributing ‘national’ characteristics to race: an Englishman in Northumbria did not see the world in the same way as an Englishman in Winchester, and might be happy to serve a king like Eric.

  The Norse kings in Northumbria generated their own styles of kingship, their own coinages, their own literature. At times York was the centre of a Scandinavian empire which included Dublin and the Norse settlements in Ireland, the Western Isles, the archipelagos of north Britain, Northumbria and the Five Boroughs. Kings like Anlaf Guthfrithson gave themselves ‘imperial’ titles just as the southern English kings did – ‘King of Ireland and of many islands’, ‘King of all the Scandinavians of Ireland and Britain’, ‘Unconquerable king, a terror by land and sea, who by his force of arms has brought several countries under his sway’.

  THE ARRIVAL OF ERIC: HIS BACKGROUND IN NORWAY

  The protagonist of our story, Eric Bloodaxe, was such a man, perhaps the most famous of them all. He arrives out of the blue having no ancestors in Britain, unlike the Norse kings of Dublin whose pedigree in York went back to the ninth century. In 947 Wulfstan and the Northumbrian ‘witan’ submitted to Eadred king of the West Saxons and ‘Caesar of Britain’ at Tanshelf on the hill where Pontefract now stands, a Northumbrian settlement of a few hundred people, with a hall and mills, above the river Aire. There in the hall they formally acknowledged Eadred ‘father and lord’, bowed to him and gave him tribute and gifts. But a few months later news reached the archbishop’s palace in York of a new and unexpected development, a new element in the politics of the North. A king to bring back the great days. Southern historians recorded it bluntly: ‘Within a short space of time the Northumbrians were false to their pledges and oaths’. ‘They do not know how to keep faith,’ said one. ‘They set up over themselves a certain man of Danish line called Eric.’

  Who was he and where had he come from? How had he come to be in Northumbria at this moment? He was in fact not Danish but Norwegian. His father was the first king who had subdued all the petty chiefdoms of Norway, Harald Finehair. Eric’s mother was Ragnild, daughter of a King Eric in Jutland, and he was married to the beautiful Gunnhild, daughter of Gorm the Old, king of Denmark. King Harald seems to have set his hopes on Eric, for a later tradition in Norway was that in his old age Harald had raised him to the kingship. But if he did, it proved a meaningless gesture. At Harald’s death his numerous sons began to fight for their inheritance. Eric killed two of them and was momentarily successful, but his violent personality had not endeared him to many in Norway. His fifteen-year-old half-brother, Hakon, who had been brought up by Athelstan in the English court, was brought back from England and set up as king by a powerful group of landowners opposed to the strong and wilful Eric. The takeover was expertly stage-managed, and with his support dwindling away Eric sailed westwards from Norway with his ships, his movables and treasure, his wife and a small army of friends, family and supporters who had stuck by him.

  Initially his journey into exile was a mere plundering expedition. Later Norwegian sources say he touched in at Orkney and perhaps there he heard from Viking traders of events in Northumbria. There, at any rate, many joined him, and after plundering in Scotland and North Saxonland, he arrived in Northumbria. The sagas are unclear about the chronology here and should not be taken literally in much of what they say. But clearly Eric was invited to be king in York. The magic of his name, his lineage and reputation was perhaps paramount in the eyes of men like Earl Orm, Norsemen who were in touch with events in the wider Norse world. The Norse synoptic histories say Eric accepted baptism along with his wife, children and supporters and became king with his residence in Jorvik-York. This account squares perfectly well with the English annals. The same men who had submitted to Eadred at Tanshelf - Archbishop Wulfstan and the Northumbrian ‘witan’, English, Danish and Norse – were within months asking Eric to be their king. Here, they thought, was a man who could restore the great days of Ragnald and Sihtric in York, perhaps even of the bretwaldas of old. To see why they thought this, and why the Church of York backed them up, we must go to Viking York and see for ourselves the rich and volatile society which existed there in the mid tenth century.

  THE NORTHUMBRIANS: ‘A TREACHEROUS AND VIOLENT RACE’

  A Dark Age observer might have remarked of the Northumbrians, as they did in classical times of the Sicilians, that they were a mixture of different races, always changing their constitution. Here was a very traditional society with deep-rooted social customs and means of worship, archaic tenurial systems which nonplussed the compilers of Domesday Book, and which probably represent the failure of the Anglo-Saxon kings to rule effectively north of the Humber. To the southern English they were treacherous, stubborn, violent and rebellious. Their accent was uncouth and incomprehensible to the southerners. They also drank too much. If you were travelling there it was best to ride in a party and take guides and escorts from one border to the next. In the eleventh century merchants were recommended to go in groups of twenty. Most people did not travel far. A journey from Northumbria into Scotland or Merda was the exception, unless with an army. Merchants came and left by sea. For locals, six miles was as far as you would be expected to go to buy and sell goods. The Northumbrian Priests’ Law shows that the usual Sunday observances were waived to allow people to pass through carrying goods by wagon, horseback or on their own backs, ‘for their own needs’.

  Hints of the unstable nature of the times are evident in the provision in the laws for times of war – ‘in case of hostilities one may travel because of necessity between York and a distance of six miles on the eve of festivals’. It suggests that different levels of war existed in such a society, that when the army of the ‘south English’ was not devastating the land, Norse warbands foraging, or forces from Ireland or Scotland on expeditions into Northumbria to seize cattle and slaves, there was still brigandage and banditry; life was brutal and unstable. What is surprising in the face of all this is that York in the tenth century was populous and wealthy, with thriving commercial trade, a boom town second in size only to London, and comparable to the great continental trading towns. The picture of York we get from the sagas and confirmed by archaeology and the author of the tenth-century Life of St Oswald who lived there is a thriving town ‘packed with people of all races’, with colonies of Frisians and Britons as well as the Danish merchants who flocked to the city; men accustomed to political instability, and used to following in the wake of the armies to make a quick killing.

  Northumbria was sandwiched between the English kingdom to the south and the kingdoms of the Scots, Cumbrians and Strathclyde Welsh to the north and north-west. So anyone who was king in York in the tenth century had to be adept at playing off the West-Saxon and British imperialists, or allying with them. They all moved in the same world, of course, and at one level it is the cultural unity of their world which strikes us. You could ride from Perth in Scotland to Kent in the mid tenth century, through British, Norse, Danish and English lands, and be welcomed and entertained in all the kings’ courts on the way, which suggests that the hazards of travel did not prevent the reception of learned men and travellers, and exchange of news and ideas. Language was no barrier among learned men, nor among nobles who, though illiterate, were trained for diplomacy and spoken contact.

  A JOURNEY TO YORK

  We can ride with one traveller to Eric’s court in York. A pilgrim’s account survives of a journey there from Abernethy in Fife in the 940s, a journey which took him on to F
rancia. Preparations for such a ride were thorough: mortgaging your property, procuring good horses, buying travelling clothes, packing purses of gold and silver to buy accommodation. Catroe and his twelve companions were escorted by his kinsman King Constantine to the border of the kingdom of Strathclyde where the king’s brother, Donald, king of the Strathclyde Welsh, received the travellers and entertained them at his court (perhaps on the rock at Dumbarton). Then Donald accompanied them on the long journey south. The kingdom of Strathclyde and its dependency, the kingdom of the Cumbrians, extended deep into what is now England for a period in the 940s, and it was best for the pilgrims that they had the king’s escort through the mixed Norse and British hills of Galloway to Carlisle, possibly the centre of the kingdom of the Cumbrians. Here there were still impressive Roman walls, a working aqueduct and fountain at least as late as 685, and a temple of Mars and Victory which was still standing in the twelfth century. Here they could rest in church establishments, the early church of St Alban, or the church of St Cuthbert. Perhaps they even engaged in a little tourism; for Dark Age men, Roman ruins exerted an unending fascination.

  Then, instead of taking the route along Hadrian’s Wall into ‘North Saxonland’, or the route over Stainmore, they passed through the mixed Anglian, British and Norse population of Westmorland, maybe staying at the Anglian monastery of Heversham on Morecambe Bay, and over the Pennines into the Aire valley with its churches at Ilkley and Otley, and the archbishop’s residence at Addingham. King Donald conducted them to the ‘civitas’ of Leeds (perhaps the present city; an elaborate tenth-century carving is preserved in the church) and here they parted, for this, says the Life of Catroe, was the boundary between the Cumbrians and the Norsemen (of York). This had been doubted by historians, but political boundaries (or zones of control) advanced and receded rapidly in the Dark Ages, and in the 940s, with the constant changes of regime in York, there is nothing improbable in the idea.