Aelfred's Britain

by Adams, Max;

  Following the Thames due west, the Early Medieval sailor would pass, like a litany of commuting stations, settlements on Sheppey itself, on Canvey Island, at Tilbury and Barking, before reaching Lundenwic. Travellers with business at settlements upriver (a royal residence at Kingston; minsters at Chertsey, Dorchester and beyond) need only follow its course until, after perhaps a week’s passage, they reached Cricklade, deep inside what is now Gloucestershire on the edge of the Cotswolds. Here, not much more than 20 miles (32 km) from the Severn estuary, they might disembark and continue to the centre of the salt trade at Droitwich along the existing Roman road network, or to Gloucester in the ancient kingdom of Hwicce. The Severn links Gloucester with the Bristol Channel, the River Wye as far north as Hereford (Here-pæth ford: army-road crossing), and the Irish Sea; further upriver, at Tewkesbury, the Warwickshire Avon penetrates the Mercian heartlands.7 In the Viking Age, north from the Thames estuary, the mouth of the River Orwell gave access to the substantial and long-lived trading centre of the East Angles at Gipeswic (Ipswich), a highly significant source of trade with the Continent, with London and the interior of eastern England through its craft industries and port infrastructure.

  From the Wash, which in the ninth century was more extensive than it is today, the River Great Ouse offered a direct line of inland communication, via various tributaries and linked waterways, to Stamford, to Thetford in the kingdom of the East Angles, to great minsters at Ely and Peterborough (Medehamstede) and inland as far as Bedford, Cambridge and perhaps also Northampton on the River Nene.

  Further north, where the great Circle line of the British coast intersects with the broad Humber estuary, vessels could sail inland along the Yorkshire Ouse as far as the former Roman colonia at Eoforwic (York) where the third of Britain’s international trading ports lay in the kingdom of Northumbria. Alternatively, a sharp left turn a few miles west of the Roman ferry crossing at Brough on Humber would bring a ship south along the Trent, past a trading and production settlement at Flixborough, as far as Lincoln (via the old Roman canal known as Fossdyke), Nottingham, Derby and almost to Lichfield—itself joined to the salt-producing centre at Droitwich through the Roman road network. That network linked almost all the navigable heads of the major rivers: one giant communication and trading system. Roman administrators had conceived it as such, but also as a highway for their armies. Half a millennium later, it was to be co-opted by another race of entrepreneurial invaders.

  Britain’s’ navigable rivers belong largely to the south, but on the west coast the Dee was navigable inland from the Irish Sea to a point beyond Chester; the Mersey as far upstream as Warrington; the Clyde perhaps as far inland as Lanark. In the east, the River Tees gave access at least as far inland as Worsall weir near Yarm; the Wear was accessible by boat as far as Chester le Street. The River Tyne gave access to monasteries at Jarrow, Monkchester, Gateshead and as far west at least as Newburn—a possible major royal residence close to Hadrian’s Wall and the trans-Pennine Stanegate road between Corbridge and Carlisle. Corbridge was a significant crossroads, linking the east–west road and river route with the great north–south Dere Street, connecting Dun Edin (Edinburgh) and Eoforwic.#

  In Scotland, the Tay could be navigated at least as far up stream as the royal palace at Scone, heartland of the kingdom of Atholl, while the opposed inlets of the Forth and Clyde allowed deep penetration from the North Sea and Irish Sea. The Great Glen connected east and west further north. At other points along this circular route, monasteries, royal fortresses and sheltered harbours were the pearls in a necklace of seats of learning, of spiritual (and material) enrichment: repositories of the relics of powerful saints, centres of power and craft, safe havens, markets for goods and news or, depending on one’s point of view, deposits of easy cash.

  Britain, thanks to its rivers, long-distance native tracks like the Icknield Way, and its Roman legacy of hard, direct, metalled roads maintained by trade and the kings’ armies, was extraordinarily penetrable. The ease with which goods and people were able to move across its fertile landscapes between settlements, rivers and production centres rendered it accessible to any pirate captain capable of remembering simple sequences of directions. It is no coincidence that important churches, royal residences, sites of councils and synods, battlefields, production sites and records of destructive Viking raids are all concentrated on these lines of communication: they are the key to Britain’s success, and to envisioning the impact of the Viking Age on the kingdoms of Britain. Over the course of half a century of raiding and reconnaissance Scandinavian seafarers equipped themselves with a detailed mental atlas of the British Isles, a conceptual Tube map that allowed them to access, at speed, almost every significant place in Early Medieval Britain.

  7. PREHISTORIC LEGACY of a connected landscape: the ancient Berkshire Ridgeway.

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  The maritime raiders from the North showed themselves equally adept at political intelligence, exploiting opportunities presented by civil war, dynastic weakness and the preoccupations of neighbouring states. The conflict that broke out between Louis the Pious and his sons in the 830s, and which must have severely compromised the Frankish state’s coastal defences, provoked a rapid response from Norse opportunists. In 834 raiders laid waste the extensive trading settlement at Dorestad, sited on an old course of the River Rhine south-east of Utrecht in Frisia. A year later the first large-scale raid on an Anglo-Saxon kingdom was recorded, at Sheppey in the mouth of the Thames estuary. In 836 King Ecgberht of Wessex fought twenty-five pirate ships off Carhampton on the north coast of Somerset and was defeated, while the monks of the monastery of Noirmoutier at the mouth of the Loire, first attacked in 799, abandoned their island, taking the relics of St Philibert to safety at Tournus in Burgundy. A year later, in 837, the Annals of St Bertin noted a great Viking raid on the trading settlement of Domburg on Walcheren Island at the mouth of the River Scheldt. The picture, if incomplete, is clear: in the political vacuum created by Frankish civil war, Viking pirates roamed at will along the southern part of the North Sea and the English Channel. No contemporary force was able to defend the approaches to the coastal trading settlements.

  In 839 King Ecgberht, ageing and tired after thirty-seven years on the throne of Wessex and having produced a viable, grown-up son to succeed him, wrote to Louis the Pious, tenuously restored to power and concentrating on bolstering his coastal defences. Might he, Ecgberht, pass through Louis’s kingdom on pilgrimage to Rome—in what was, effectively, an abdication?∫ In the same letter Ecgberht related a vision that had achieved widespread notoriety in England. It had been revealed to a priest that, in a certain church, boys (to be interpreted as the souls of grieving saints) could be seen writing down in blood all the sins that the English had committed. The priest was warned that if God’s sinners did not repent their sins and attend to the Christian feast days:

  A great and crushing disaster will swiftly come upon them: for three days and nights a very dense fog will spread over their land, and then all of a sudden pagan men will lay waste with fire and sword most of the people and land of the Christians along with all they possess.8

  As if to confirm God’s wrath a terrible flood killed more than 2,000 people across Frisia; Ecgberht was also dead within the year, having failed to achieve his ambition of reaching Rome but having rescued the ailing fortunes of his kingdom. In the same year Fortriu, the kingdom of the Northern Picts, suffered a devastating Viking raid in which its ruling dynasty was wiped out. Louis the Pious died, too, a year later, his empire split and factionalized.9 Overwhelming disaster must indeed have seemed imminent.

  The raids continued, becoming more intense. Ireland’s suffering at the hands of Norwegian pirates, almost continuous for the first two decades of the ninth century, was exacerbated by Norse raiders establishing long-term bases, the longphuirt, at convenient coastal locations. By 841 the principal of these had been built on the south bank of the River Liffey at a place called Baile Átha Cliath, the ‘p
lace at the ford of the hurdles’ close to the black pool, Dubh Lind, which gives Ireland’s capital its modern English name. Dublin’s Viking past has been sensationally revealed by a series of excavations that show a sophisticated, well-organized trading town developing over the course of the ninth century.10 Other longphuirt were established at Wexford, Waterford, Limerick and Cork: Ireland’s celebrated medieval towns owe their origins to piracy.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates that in 842 there was slaughter at three trading settlements: Lundenwic, Hamwic and Norðunnwig (probably Norwich). It was as if an immense raiding orgy had been planned and executed in the sure knowledge that Atlantic Europe, suffering an acute vacuum of effective military power, was theirs for the taking. Ecgberht’s successor as West Saxon king, his son Æðelwulf, fought against a large Scandinavian fleet off Carhampton and, like his father before him, was defeated. For the next five years the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is blank.

  Viking attentions returned, during these years, to Francia. The three sons of Louis the Pious disputed the succession in a series of campaigns that lasted from 840 to 843. A bloody battle was fought at Fontenoy on the River Yonne, an eastern tributary of the Seine, in 841. Raiders took the opportunity to burn the port at Rouen. The following year Nantes and Quentovic were attacked; raiders overwintered on the monastic island of Noirmoutier at the mouth of the Loire. Embassies passed to and fro between the rival Frankish dynasts. In 843 peace was signed at Verdun, giving West Francia to Charles Calvus ‘the Bald’, East Francia to Louis ‘the German’ and Middle Francia, including the Rhineland, Frisia and Lombardy, to Lothair.

  It is hard to tell how much institutional damage was sustained by the Frankish states in these years: the best evidence comes from the behaviour of the raiders themselves. In 845 the first substantial raid on the Île de la Cité in Paris on the Seine, deep inside northern Francia’s heartland, showed how dangerously exposed the soft underbelly of Charlemagne’s former empire had become. Paris was no mere riverside trading village; it had been a Roman city, Lutetia, with a grand basilica, St Etienne, two splendid bridges and an iconic island location: the former capital of Clovis, first king of a united Francia, from 508. Its port controlled trade along the Seine and its tributary the Marne. If Viking raiders, wasting and pillaging as they sailed and rowed upstream, could penetrate so far into Frankish territory, the arteries of the empire lay open.

  The razing of the trading ports was a commercial nuisance; the attacks on monasteries had been local, highly personal, psychological disasters whose effects on the greater institutions of the church were, initially, low key. Buildings were trashed; lives lost; labour taken into slavery; material wealth stolen. But landed property and rights had not yet been appropriated by the executive arm of the heathen Northern menace; refugees were not on the move in large numbers, so far as we can tell. The attack on Paris showed, for the first time, that Scandinavian raiders might threaten to tear the essential fabric of the Christian state.

  Charlemagne’s, now Lothair’s, capital lay to the north, at Aachen (in French, Aix-la-Chapelle), between the Rivers Meuse and Rhine. During the year in which Paris was attacked his new kingdom was assaulted by a huge fleet, said to comprise 600 ships, sent from Denmark by King Horik along the Elbe. Lothair managed to defeat them and, in the following year, was able to sign a peace agreement with Horik. The interests of Charles the Bald, focused primarily on Aquitaine and the South, were divided by necessity: a war with Brittany, asserting its independence; rebellions on the Spanish border and a bold Viking raid along the Garonne as far inland as Toulouse.11 Paris lay at the edge of his radar. His pragmatic response was to pay the raiders off with a treasure of 7,000 livres of silver,Ω the first of thirteen such ‘Danegelds’ extracted from Frankish kings.

  Historians debate the merits of ransoms paid to raiders, of the dangers of setting such precedents, with the benefit of hindsight. But Charles was inventing a Viking policy on the hoof; the kings of Atlantic Europe would watch and learn from his mistakes and successes over the next three decades and, often, adopt similar expedient solutions. Those same raiders, sailing down the Seine with their ships full of bullion, had sufficient space and nerve to fill their boots on their way home, laying waste the coastal communities of the Channel; they might well have asked themselves how often they could repeat such profitable exercises.

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  The Frankish and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms survived Viking assaults on their trading ports because the essential wealth of north-west Europe lay in its agricultural and industrial surplus and internal trade, not in its economic relations with the rest of the Continent. Merchants had succeeded in evolving emporia from beach markets, often located on the boundaries between kingdoms, and had done very nicely out of them. Kings, too, had seen the potential for raising cash at such sites, through tolls on imports and by recycling and minting silver, hiving off a percentage. Sometimes they allowed powerful clergymen and women to trade free of tolls and to mint their own coinage in such places. The richer minsters, and bishops, possessed their own warehouses at some of these sites. Nevertheless, the economies of Atlantic Europe succeeded because they produced sufficient cattle and grain to support kings, armies and minsters, and such regionally distinct and specialized surpluses as salt, lead, cloth, pottery, furs, antler, glass and iron to largely satisfy domestic consumption.

  Since the end of the Roman imperial state, which had operated under a command economy, emergent kingdoms had succeeded by a combination of cash-raising through warfare and the imposition of customary renders: goods and services owed by units of land to lords higher up the chain of rank, from ceorls to thegns to ealdormen to kings. Those renders were collected at vills and on royal estates, where they were consumed by peripatetic lords and kings on an unending cycle through whose mechanisms they also dispensed justice and distributed wealth and favours, ensuring a smooth bilateral flow of patronage and reciprocal obligation.

  The alienation of estate lands from the king’s portfolio to the church, a gradual process beginning in the first half of the seventh century, affected this system significantly, and increasingly. Minsters, those churches established and maintained by communities of monks, nuns and their unfree tenants, were static institutions whose legacy was a form of sustained capital. They were able to invest in agriculture and manufacture because the fruits of their labours were inherited directly by the community, in an unmoving location with fixed estate boundaries. When we hear about St Cuthbert acquiring land and negotiating with kings long after his death, we have to envision the saint operating from beyond the grave as the symbolic embodiment of those who survived him and continued to function as his community.

  Abbots and abbesses were both physical and spiritual manifestations of the community’s heritage and privileges. Kings, their right to rule legitimized by the church, liked to believe themselves the inheritors of the same functions with regard to the state; but still they were obliged to travel through their lands consuming food, managing the services of their warrior élites: putting it about. The only personal wealth that they could retain was portable treasure in the form of bullion. The estates, with their arable and meadow lands, rivers, quarries and woodlands, were the kingdom’s infrastructure. Public projects, so far as we can tell, were confined to the construction of dykes and bridges and occasional repairs to Roman roads.

  Increasingly, from the late seventh century, minster communities were able to invest in the construction and maintenance of mills, forges and workshops for the crafting of vellum, antler, horn, metalwork, grain and cloth. They began to enclose fields and specialize production.≈ The larger establishments gradually became centres for the gathering of surplus raw materials and the conversion of that surplus into products that might be traded—for books; for craftsmen expert in masonry, sculpture and glazing; for wines, dyes and oils imported from the Continent. Their surpluses included grain, increasingly of the valuable bread wheat varieties; wool and woollen cloth; timber; ironwork; ale; books wh
ere the skills existed to create them; honey; wax for candles; and livestock bred specially for markets such as the trading ports. At what point some of the greater minsters began to look like trading settlements, even towns, is a moot question.

  The evolution of minsters as central places is also, and perhaps even more significantly, traced in their secularization. Originally founded either under royal patronage or by ascetics and charismatic holy persons, minsters were aristocratic institutions, often ruled by collateral members of royal kindreds and increasingly divorced from the spiritual fervour which had led to their foundation between about 635 and 700. By the second quarter of the eighth century Bede was already complaining that royal estates were being given over, with their highly valuable freehold, to persons unsuited to the strict rule of monastic life. He was, in effect, accusing lay aristocrats of taking monastic vows simply in order to avoid the burdens of military service and food render, and so as to be able to bequeath land to their heirs.12

  By the beginning of the ninth century, as the cases of Cwenðryð and others show, minster estates might be acquired as a means of expanding the property portfolios of the landed élite, sometimes in a calculated effort to acquire key resources such as salt, lead, iron and timber. Monastic lands and privileges began to change hands for cash on an open market in which bishops and archbishops were active. The tensions that grew up between those minsters whose communities were substantially composed of monks and nuns in holy orders, and those controlled largely by secular canons, were played out very publicly during and beyond the Viking Age. They form a parallel, equally compelling and significant narrative to the more obvious headline acts of raiding and settling.

  The sorts of transactions by which such monastic estates changed hands can be traced through the increasing use of charters to ‘book’ those lands and by subsequent attempts to alter, forge and invent such titles or the privileges and lands that went with them. Charter donations were often recorded during ceremonies at great assemblies; sometimes, if not always, the transfer was tangibly confirmed by the placement of the enacting parchment and a sod of earth from the land in question on to the altar of the recipient church.13 The Historia de Sancto Cuthberto is highly instructive in this context. It was likely compiled in the tenth century by the community of the venerable Northumbrian holy man, bishop and abbot of Lindisfarne, whose disinterment as an uncorrupted corpse in 698, eleven years after his death, assured his celebrity as the greatest saint of northern England. The Historia purports to record the history of that community, especially in those years after it fled Lindisfarne in the face of Viking attacks; its relations with kings; and the means by which it lost or came into possession of its estates.14