Aelfred's Britain

by Adams, Max;

  The community on Iona, which suffered multiple raids, began a process of removing some of its treasures and monks to a new, apparently safer, location at Kells in what is now Co. Meath, from 807; but Iona still functioned, albeit in a reduced state. Its archaeology has been ill served by a succession of small-scale excavations, none of which has succeeded in piecing together that crucial period in its history. Much later destruction of its heritage was conducted in the name of the Protestant ‘reformers’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; even so, the abbey’s excellent museum contains sculpture and other artefacts of the highest quality.

  In only one case has the Viking history of an Insular monastery been comprehensively explored by excavation. The long, thin, hammerhead-shaped Tarbat peninsula, jutting out into the North Sea north of Inverness has, for much of its history, been easier to reach by sea than by land. It is a natural stopping-off point on the east coast route to Orkney and Shetland: sheltered, with fine access inland and close to a great centre of Early Medieval power, the Pictish kingdom of Fortriu. Even today it is a four-hour drive north from Edinburgh, across or around the rocky massif of the Grampians, beyond the Great Glen and out along the northern edge of the ethereally lovely Moray Firth.

  On its north-western edge, where the Tarbat peninsula forms the jutting lower mandible of the Dornoch Firth, lies a sheltered harbour called Portmahomack; as the Tarbat∫ name suggests, an overland portage route once connected it to the Cromarty Firth. On the south-east side of the peninsula there is direct access, via the Moray Firth, to the Great Glen and thence, with a portage between Loch Ness and Loch Oich and another into Loch Lochy, to Loch Linnhe and the western seaways: to Iona and beyond. Tarbat is on the same latitude as the southern tip of Norway, 250 miles (400 km) to the east.

  Like other such liminal landscapes, the peninsula has an air of otherworldliness; but its apparent remoteness today is illusory: in the Early Christian period it was a busy place, and it lay in fertile lands. Beautifully carved cross slabs stand (or stood) at Nigg, at Shandwick and at Hilton of Cadboll, testifying to a concentration of early churches with wealthy, not to say regal, patrons. The site of a probable early bishopric lies just along the coast of the firth at Rosemarkie, and visible directly across Moray is the great royal Pictish fortress of Burghead, while the hillfort of King Bruide, ally of Colm Cille in the late sixth century, may be that which guards the entrance to the Great Glen at Craig Phadraig.

  Tarbat is mostly low lying, its skyline punctured today only by the grain silos and venerable beech trees that speak of landed wealth, of stability and order. But it has the same edgy sensibility as Whithorn in Wigtownshire, or Iona and Lindisfarne: close to power, remote from the secular world; half belonging to the sea. At Portmahomack a modest whitewashed chapel stands on a small rise set back from the shore and protected from the worst of the North Sea’s tempers. Over the years, fragments of sculpture have been recovered from, or spotted in, the churchyard and surrounding fields. Its harbour and its ancient connectedness made this tiny village a key location on north-east Scotland’s otherwise largely inaccessible coast.

  Bede says that the Picts were converted by the missionary work of Colm Cille in the late sixth century. Others have suggested that St Ninian, a more dubious historical character, was responsible. Behind these two apparently contradictory traditions may lie the identities of not one but two Pictish kingdoms: Fortriu, the lands around the Moray Firth, and Atholl, south of the Grampians and centred on Strathearn and the headwaters of the River Tay.12 Before Martin Carver’sΩ excavations at Portmahomack, between 1995 and 2002, arguments over the origins of Pictish monasticism were, in any case, largely academic: no Pictish monastery site had been identified, let alone investigated. Only the marvellous carved stones bearing hybrid Christian and Pictish symbols that grace the Scottish landscape (and fill its museums) stood to map the geography of its early church. But an aerial photograph taken by archaeologist Barri Jones offered the first key evidence to back up the sculpture on the Tarbat peninsula: the crop mark of a telltale D-shaped enclosure ditch surrounding Portmahomack’s church.≈

  Excavation of the interior of the redundant church and in the fields to the south and west, over several years, hit the archaeological jackpot. Developing from a small cemetery with sculpted stonework in the sixth century, more or less contemporary with Colm Cille on Iona, a monastery flourished here in the seventh and eighth centuries. The presence of vellum and glass-making workshops, an elaborately conceived smith’s hall and the exalted standards of the sculpture being produced on the peninsula, elevate Portmahomack to the first rank of ecclesiastical communities alongside Jarrow, Lindisfarne and Iona. Careful management of the local water supply allowed its monks to construct a mill for grinding corn. A metalled road serving the industrial complex must have added the final touch of sophistication. The production of vellum, a complicated series of chemical and mechanical processes requiring considerable expertise, implies the presence of a scriptorium: books were being written and produced here; there must have been a library.

  Bede, had he visited, would have recognized its layout and culture, the sounds of chant, forge and lowing calves, the smells of byre, steeping tank and wax candle; the timeless magic of the eucharist and the daily hubbub and gossip of the guest house. The workshops, and the church, flourished for a century and more. It is tempting, in the historical and political context of the site, to associate Portmahomack’s heyday with Nechtan mac Dargarto, the king who, in consultation with Bede, brought the Pictish church into line with Roman orthodoxy around the year 712.13

  In uncovering this unique evidence for a thriving, wealthy Pictish monastery, the excavation team, based at the University of York, had first to remove deposits dating to later periods, constructing as they did so a narrative in reverse. The church itself, still in use well into the twentieth century, testified to Christian continuity on the site. Evidence from later phases of the monastic landscape showed that in the ninth and tenth centuries production of metalwork and crops also continued: it survived the Viking Age. But in between these phases and those of its monastic pomp in the eighth century there was stark evidence of an abrupt, not to say catastrophic, event. A great carved cross slab had been smashed and burned, its charred fragments scattered over the site; layers of lurid purple, orange, pink and red soils told a story of absolute destruction by fire some time between 780 and 820, dated by C14 analysis from the abundant burnt material.∂

  4. THE CHURCH AT PORTMAHOMACK on the Tarbat peninsula, Easter Ross: now a museum, once the site of a great Pictish monastery.

  At least one member of the community, buried in the church, had died from a sword wound to the head. It seems reasonable to conclude that seaborne raiders perpetrated the arson: the trashing of the sculpture seems particularly pointed, even vindictive. These decades are historically obscure, but it looks as though the raid on Portmahomack is only the most visible evidence of a concerted campaign against Fortriu which culminated in a great raid recorded in 839: ‘The heathens won a battle against the men of Fortriu and Eóganán son of Aengus... and others almost innumerable fell there.’14 From this disaster the legendary Cináed mac Ailpín emerged.

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  Archaeology and history combine to paint a picture of wanton, if periodic, harassment of the most easily accessible coastal and estuarine monasteries. Even so, those communities seem largely to have survived and their sufferings, psychological and material, at first had little effect on the wider economies of the Insular kingdoms of the early ninth century, let alone on the functioning of the state. Kings on both sides of the Irish Sea and across the Channel concerned themselves with administration, with the contents of their treasuries, with noisy neighbours and troublesome nephews. Hostilities broke out periodically between Mercians, West Saxons, Welsh and East Angles; competing dynasties of Northumbrian kings deposed one another in dizzying succession. Kings in Dál Riata, Strathclyde, Fortriu and Atholl fought for primacy in North Britain and
the Isles, and with the kings of North Irish kindreds for overlordship of the western seaways. The kingdoms of Wales—Gwynedd, Powys, Ceredigion, Dyfed, Glywysing, Gwent and Brycheiniog—sought to assert tributary rights over each other and defend themselves from Mercian aggression.

  Bishops and abbots sought to consolidate and extend their lands, to defend their rights and privileges. Ealdormen sought preferment in the royal household; their retainers hoped for honour in the king’s war band and the reward of gifts and land on which to raise families. Farmers hoped for good harvests and feared ominous portents like fiery dragons in the sky and the appearance of comets. Occasionally they suffered hunger and pestilence. There is a surprising amount of evidence in the annals for diseases in livestock, whose impacts were probably felt much more widely and over a longer period than periodic predations from across the sea.

  Beneath the surface, underlying the bald record of events, swirling undercurrents can be detected. Lowland Britain’s most powerful kings in the eighth century had been drawn from Mercia’s stable royal dynasties. From 716, for eighty years, just three kings ruled here—and one of those for a single year.π The last of the three laid claim to overlordship of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and much of Wales. King Offa’s most visible monument to the strength of that regime is his dyke, built to demarcate Mercia from the Welsh kingdoms and as a testosterone cenotaph to his powers of coercion. In a reign of almost forty years he established Mercia’s supremacy over Wessex, Kent and the other southern kingdoms of Britain. He controlled the valuable trading settlement at Lundenwic on the Thames, key to southern England’s economic hinterland. He was able to appoint archbishops at Canterbury and to raise the see of Lichfield to archiepiscopal status, minting high-value silver coinage and reforming land rights. He interacted with the Frankish court, issued charters as Rex Anglorum, King of the English, and constructed the first fortified settlements or burhs, anticipating Ælfred by a century.

  A rapprochement with Charlemagne in 796, cancelling a Frankish trade embargo and sealing a deal on safe passage for merchants and pilgrims (but not, pointedly, for Mercian traders masquerading as pilgrims), came too late for Offa. His death that year sent ripples across Britain’s political pond. His son, Ecgfrith, succeeded him but died almost immediately. According to Alcuin, Ecgfrith had ‘not died for his own sins; but the vengeance for the blood shed by the father has reached the son’.15

  Offa’s rule, ambitious and impressive, had been that of military overlord as much as statesman. During the uncertainty of the interregnum the Kentish nobility took the opportunity to throw off Mercian rule and raised one Eadberht Praen to the throne at Canterbury. Æðelheard, a Mercian appointee to the archbishopric there, thought it wise to flee. Offa left no other sons; his throne now passed to Coenwulf, only very distantly related but seemingly enjoying the support of senior Mercian ealdormen. Coenwulf moved quickly and violently to suppress the rebellion in Kent. In 798 he seized Eadberht Praen, had him blinded and his hands cut off. He appointed his own brother, Cuðred, as a client king in Kent and restored Æðelheard to his see in Canterbury.

  In the same year Lundenwic, the East Saxon trading centre on the banks of the Thames at Aldwych, suffered a serious fire.16 Mercian kings had long enjoyed the fruits of its commercial success; had this been the last vengeful act of Eadberht Praen, an accident or a Scandinavian raid? Mercian power was, in any event, restored over Kent, Canterbury and the Channel ports. Normal service appeared to have resumed.

  Coenwulf’s chance to reinforce Mercian supremacy over his West Saxon neighbours to the south came in 802 with the passing of their king, Beorhtric. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, on the day of his death the Men of Hwicce (an ancient kingdom, much reduced in status, consisting broadly of Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and eastern parts of Warwickshire, and long subject to Mercian rule) crossed the Thames, the frontier river, and invaded Wiltshire. But the opportunity evaporated: the Mercian force was defeated, the leaders of both armies slain. In retrospect it was seen as a turning point in the fortunes of the two kingdoms. The new king of the West Saxons, Ecgberht was the grandfather of Ælfred.

  Under King Coenwulf, Mercian control of Canterbury was maintained, at least nominally. But tensions between church and state, between Mercia and Kent, were a continuing source of conflict. Since St Augustine’s mission of 597 the primate of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had maintained his see at Canterbury, and Kentish kings had enjoyed the political advantages of that primacy. In 735 Northumbria, then the most powerful of the English kingdoms, was granted the dignity of its own archbishop, with his throne at York close to the church built by Bishop Paulinus in the seventh century among the ruins of the Roman city. London, former capital of Roman Britain, had never had an archbishop. In 786 King Offa persuaded the pope that the senior Anglo-Saxon kingdom must be served by its own archbishop, more inclined to pursue its king’s policies and preferable as a recipient of royal Mercian land grants. Lichfield became Britain’s third archdiocesan see. The appointment of one of Offa’s men, Æðelheard, to Canterbury in 792, inflamed Kentish sentiment against its overlord. Kent wanted a Kentish archbishop, and no competition from Lichfield.

  Archbishop Æðelheard, restored to his see after the Kentish rebellion of 798, travelled to Rome in 801 and, perhaps surprisingly, put the Kentish case to the pope. On the way, we know, he stayed with Alcuin close to the trading settlement at Quentovic on the estuary of the River Canche, near modern Étaples.17 He was lucky to avoid the earthquake that struck the papal basilica of St Peter’s that year. He made his case to the pope, the restored Leo III, and returned to Kent in 802 or 803 with instructions that the Lichfield archdiocese be reduced to its former status. The primacy of Canterbury was restored, although with what damage to relations between the archbishop and King Coenwulf it is hard to say. Æðelheard’s loyalties to Offa had, perhaps, been personal, even familial; he had become a Canterbury man.

  Æðelheard’s successor, Wulfred (805–832), suffered even more strained relations with the Mercian king. He set about consolidating the considerable landed assets of Christ Church, the cathedral minster at Canterbury, and began to mint his own coinage. In 814 he, like his predecessor, travelled to Rome, probably along the ancient pilgrimage route called the Via Francigena through Francia and Lombardy, punctuated by Christian hostels and monastic communities well used to taking in pilgrims, including kings. It was the year in which Charlemagne died and was succeeded by Louis the Pious. The two following years were tumultuous: Pope Leo was the subject of a second coup, died a year later and was followed in quick succession by Popes Stephen IV—during whose brief reign the English Quarter in Rome, the Schola Saxonum, burned down—and Paschal I.

  Wulfred, returning from Rome, found that Coenwulf had performed what amounted to a coup against Canterbury. He had called a synod at Chelsea, on the banks of the Thames upstream from Lundenwic. The synod placed severe limits on Wulfred’s powers; ruled that 25 December should henceforth be the day on which Christ’s Mass should be celebrated; enacted episcopal, effectively secular control over the abbots and abbesses of the minster;∆ and sanctioned the sale or gift of monastic lands to secular lords.18 Wulfred was sent into exile or deprived of his office for some time between 817 and 825, when a synod at the unidentified site of Clofesho** resolved the dispute in Canterbury’s favour. By then Coenwulf was dead and his brother and successor, Ceolwulf (821–823), had been deposed in a coup by a rival dynasty. The new Mercian king, Beornwulf, attempted to follow the practice of his forebears by placing a member of his kin, Baldred, on the Kentish throne; he also set out to make peace with Canterbury.

  Beornwulf (823–825) is unlikely to have been related to his two predecessors: he came from a line of the Mercian nobility with a penchant for giving their sons names beginning with ‘B’. The heartland of their territory seems to have lain in the central Midlands, perhaps near Breedon on the Hill in Leicestershire, where a great minster stood. Its church, perched high above the surroundi
ng countryside (and now uncomfortably close to the edge of a stone quarry), occupied the interior of an Iron Age fortress. A collection of fragments of high-quality sculpture can still be seen there, testament to its Early Medieval importance.

  One of the new king’s most pressing political tasks was to deal with the festering issue of Coenwulf’s daughter, Cwenðryð.†† The ancestral lands of the ‘C’ dynasty family lay around Winchcombe‡‡ in the former kingdom of the Hwicce, where Cwenðryð was abbess of a wealthy minster. Since the late seventh century kings had exploited their extensive landholdings to endow the church with estates which they placed under the control of collateral members of their family, ensuring that the land, although alienated to the church in perpetuity, could still be passed as a family asset down through successive generations. Very substantial holdings, free from many of the burdens of renders and service owed by dependent farmers and warrior nobles, had been accumulated over a century and a half. Minsters, those churches with origins as monasteries endowed with substantial estates, were big players in agriculture, trade, technology and both secular and religious politics. They commanded wealth and the powers of patronage that went with it.

  5. A FABULOUS BEAST of the Viking and Christian imagination: cross shaft fragment from Breedon on the Hill.

  Cwenðryð’s possession of Winchcombe, a community founded on her family’s estates, was not at issue; her control, as abbess, of two other monastic communities, at Minster-in-Thanet and at Reculver (both ancient and lucrative foundations),§§ was a cause of considerable resentment in Kent. These may have come into her possession in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Kentish rebellion under Eadberht Praen in 796, perhaps over a period of several years. The historian of the Anglo-Saxon church, John Blair, likens such acquisitions to ‘a speculator assembling a portfolio’.19 The breadth and value of Cwenðryð’s portfolio is indicated by Thanet’s possession of three trading ships, which plied the waters between the abbey and markets in Frisia, Francia and Lundenwic, where it benefited from the remission of port tolls.20