by Adams, Max;
Despite apparently unstoppable forces leading towards what later historians have seen as almost inevitable unification, the evidence emerging from fragments of annals, artefacts and geographies shows just how regionally diverse and conservative the Insular lands were. If one can see the founders of three great kingdoms in Ælfred, in Constantín of Alba and in the grandsons of Rhodri Mawr in Wales, there is equally a patchwork of ineradicable identities expressed in the old kingdoms of Hwicce and Lindsey, of East Anglia, Kent and Northumbria, Strathclyde, Dyfed and Gwynedd. And another set of formidable grandchildren, those of the famous Ívarr, would intervene in the decades after 900 to show just how illusory the apparent forces of centralization were.
The fallout from such tensions, when they erupted in the Viking expulsion from Dublin in 902, was felt across Britain. Alba might have fallen permanently under Norse control; Northumbria forged new and stronger links with its Irish overlords; the armies of Danish East Anglia and East Mercia retained their capacity to threaten the Wessex–Mercia alliance; and in the place names, archaeology and fragmentary annals which tell of raiding, settlement and conquest in the north and west of Britain lies a record of punch and counterpunch, shadowy undercurrents of alliance and betrayal but also of people getting by, adapting somehow to circumstances beyond their control or ken.
Part of this narrative is carried by the tenacious chroniclers of St Cuthbert’s followers, as they fought to keep their estates and influence intact. They supported prospective Danish kings in their bid for power and donated lands to Christian refugees fleeing across the mountains in the west. They were able, after a period of great insecurity, to settle with their precious relics at Chester le Street on the River Wear and carve out a new paruchia* by cannily playing one set of antagonists off against another.
Excavations across many decades have begun to sketch a pattern of settlement, acculturation and integration: on Man, where the best evidence for distinctive Norse houses and burials is wonderfully preserved beneath mound and pasture; on Anglesey, where hints of bloody regime change tell also of continuity and trading success; in the Hebrides and in Orkney, where grand sagas incant an age of derring-do, of conquest and, ultimately, organized settlement and rule.
The towns that emerge on the Danish side of England’s fault line, Watling Street, from the blanket silence of the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers, do so in infuriatingly patchy detail. Four of the so-called Five Boroughs are enigmatic still, their Scandinavian phases as yet unyielding to the spade. Lincoln and York, both so distinct in their historical development, offer the best clues to the dazzling success of the Scandinavian settlers in galvanizing populations concentrated behind their formidable defensive ramparts to energize production and trade on local, regional and international scales. By the early tenth century tenements and workshops, effective coinage, wheel-thrown pottery and an exuberant love of metalwork and precious-stoned jewellery and dress accessories become visible. These tell of a shared self-confidence rather than triumphant exploitation of a subjected populace. In very obvious contrast, the burhs and their economies south and west of Watling Street, in the first years after Ælfred’s death, show only economic stagnation and a sort of mulish reluctance to join in the new mercantile game.
By the end of the first decade of the tenth century Ælfred’s son Eadweard, king of the West Saxons, and his enterprising sister Æðelflæd in Mercia were ready to restore the economic and cultural balance. Their great plan, to conquer Danish Mercia and East Anglia, was heroic in its scale and successes, even if the inevitable human cost, so sparsely attested in contemporary sources, did little to nurture a sense of Anglo-Saxon unity among the southern kingdoms. Local and regional interests fought back against national ideology.
Ancient historical and geographical realities underpinned developments on the Insular scale: ceremonies were held, treaties were signed, battles fought at locations etched into the warp and weft of hill and plain, ford and vill: tidal reaches of rivers, time-worn crossroads, royal townships, shire boundaries and the mounds where laws had been promulgated as long as people could remember. Tribal and dynastic affiliations ran deep; loyalties seemed to tilt as much against old enemies as in favour of new friends. Ælfred’s Britain was a cultural and political patchwork quilt rich in the regional languages, customs and lordships of its kaleidoscope components. The Britain of his children was no different.
* Paruchia: a network of monastic foundations with their estates, functioning under the authority of a mother church.
THE BALANCE OF POWER
NEWTON’S CRADLE—ST CUTHBERT—A SLAVE-KING—THE ÆLFRED–GUÐRUM TREATY—ÆLFRED THE OVERLORD—THE BURHS—A RENAISSANCE—DANISH RULE—TOWN AND COUNTRY
5
In 879 the Northumbrian monastic community of St Cuthbert had not yet adopted Ælfred and his offspring as royal patrons. The catastrophic loss of Bernician royal power in the ninth century, which culminated in the conquest of southern Northumbria in the 860s and 870s, precipitated a long-term crisis in their fortunes. Viking depredations in the Western Isles and Ireland had prompted the flight of the Iona community with the relics of their precious Colm Cille, both to Ireland and to Dunkeld in Strathtay under the protection of Cináed mac Ailpín. Many monasteries, the beating heart of the northern church, had been abandoned or survived in much reduced circumstances; others, like Portmahomack, served new, secular masters. The economic and psychological impact of these events on the institution of the church was extreme. It survived by adapting.
When their patron kings failed them, royal monastic foundations had to sup with the devil in a bid to retain their power and their estates. Without productive monastic lands and communities of priests and monks, abbots, craftsmen and farmers protected by the king’s peace, the paruchiae, the earthly kingdoms of Cuthbert and Bridget, David, Colm Cille and Patrick must fall, like their temporal counterparts. And so they began to court the enemy.
21. THE VICTORIAN STATUE of Ælfred at his Berkshire birthplace of Wantage (now in Oxfordshire); unveiled in 1877, and sculpted by Victor, Count Gleichen, a captain in the Royal Navy.
The two-centuries-long survival battle of the Northumbrian church, beginning so inauspiciously with the notorious raid on Lindisfarne in 793, played out like a military campaign across the physical and political landscapes of the North. Uncanny parallels between the defensive and offensive strategies employed by the church and those improvised by kings reinforce the idea of policy developing on the hoof: retrenching, even fleeing when necessary; taking opportunities when they arose to recover, reinforce and re-invent themselves, ensuring their ultimate survival. Dynasties in Mercia, East Anglia, Ireland and Pictland had failed to adapt; Ælfred was an apprentice learning a new set of rules. The Insular Christian state must anticipate, comprehend and negotiate with the Viking worldview.
We can reconstruct a surprisingly detailed account of the fortunes of St Cuthbert’s community at this period. That is a testament, in the first place, to its robust survival into and beyond the years of Norman conquest and to the assiduous, even tenacious, records kept by its monks. These are supplemented by scattered accounts preserved in disparate, often contradictory sources, frequently obscure and sometimes simply fabricated, which nevertheless paint a rich and complex picture of religious politics.*
By the time of the 793 Viking raid Lindisfarne’s property portfolio, assembled through the donations of Bernician kings across 150 years, comprised large parts of the modern county of Northumberland and the Scottish Border region, from East Lothian beyond the River Tweed to the River Tyne in the south. Other lucrative and politically advantageous estates had been acquired near York and in the ancient Roman civitas capital at Luguvalium (Carlisle) on the west coast. Each of these monastic territories, like those belonging to secular lords, was made up of contiguous parcels of land centred on a vill† and its dependencies, often in multiples of six or twelve. Farm rendered to vill, vill rendered to shire and shire to the lordship of St Cuthbert. Lindisfarne�
�s impressive portfolio enabled its inhabitants to enjoy the fruits of a mixed agricultural economy, to specialize in the production of grain, wool and illuminated manuscripts the equal of any in Europe; to fill the shelves of their libraries with the works of ancient scholars and their churches with jewel-encrusted reliquaries and the finest stone sculpture. They sponsored missionary activities on the Continent, maintaining diplomatic relations with kings and bishops across the Atlantic region and, far beyond, with Rome. Sometimes Northumbrian kings, tired of the warrior life and seeking peace and communion outwith the war band, abdicated to retire on the Holy Island haven cut off by the tide twice a day.
Northumbria at one time encompassed no fewer than four episcopal dioceses, with seats at Lindisfarne, Abercorn on the River Forth, Hexham in the Tyne Valley and Whithorn on the Solway coast. It was an empire of élite endeavour. From Aidan, in 635, the Lindisfarne foundation was ruled under seventeen abbot-bishops up to the year 900. Its most celebrated—and reluctant—bishop, Cuthbert, died as the community’s head in 687 and twelve years later his incorrupt body was translated to a special sarcophagus that became a sort of spiritual tribal totem. The stability and continuity of the community’s leadership through times of internal and external strife and the ultimate threat of apostasy is a reflection, as it was with royal dynasties, of its robustness as an institution.
By the time of the Viking raids, Abercorn had already been lost to Northumbrian control. The last Bishop of Whithorn is mentioned a few years after 800, indicating the decline of that community in the face of Scandinavian expansion in the Irish Sea.‡ Hexham’s last Anglo-Saxon bishop died in 821, its see absorbed into that of Lindisfarne to cover the whole of northern Northumbria. To the south, the ancient kingdom of Deira in southern Northumbria had been represented by a single see at York since the middle of the seventh century. After 735 it enjoyed the dignity and power of an archbishop, and has done so in an unbroken sequence since, exercising at least nominal power over the northern sees. Its survival in the crucible of Anglo-Scandinavian conflict is no less remarkable than that of St Cuthbert’s community, even if it is harder to trace in detail.§
In the days of Bishop Ecgred (830–845), in response to periodic and ultimately unsustainable attacks by Viking raiders, the community on Lindisfarne decided to relocate to a place of greater safety on one of its original estates, at Norham on Tweed. Leaving behind, perhaps, an estate manager and sufficient workers to maintain the island’s farms,# the community of St Cuthbert relocated wholesale: not just its priests and monks but its precious relics (Oswald, Aidan, Cuthbert, the bones of King Ceolwulf, and others) and its treasures; even the fabric of the wooden church. Further crises were precipitated by the civil war of the 860s between Osberht and Ælle, both of whom ‘stole’ lands from the saint, and by Hálfdan’s second invasion of 875 when he sailed up the River Tyne, ‘devastating everything and sinning cruelly’ against Cuthbert.1
Hálfdan may shortly thereafter have been deposed by his own army, and he seems not to have been able to exercise direct royal rule over the North; he was certainly dead by 877. After that a series of client kings, the diminished successors to Osberht and Ælle, ruled in York between 867 and about 880. Ecgberht, Ricsige, and a short-lived successor, also named Ecgberht,2 proved unsatisfactory to both the Host and the Northumbrian nobility. Weak kings were of no use to Cuthbert: without effective patrons and protectors, and in the face of heathen invaders, the power of the northern church was under the severest threat. Even the long-lived Archbishop Wulfhere endured temporary exile in Mercia, having been deposed with Ecgberht in 872.
Cuthbert himself had intervened in the Northumbrian royal succession during a crisis in the 680s;∫ now, his spiritual descendants must play the same hand. A single coin, very likely minted in Lincolnshire in the 880s, offers archaeological corroboration for the rule of a King Guðrøðr in southern Northumbria, otherwise known principally from a very odd entry in the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto describing events in the years after Hálfdan’s departure.3 It seems that St Cuthbert appeared one night in a vision to Eadred, the abbot of Carlisle. The dead saint adjured him to:
Go over the Tyne to the army of the Danes and tell them that if they wish to be obedient to me [that is, to St Cuthbert], they should show you a certain young man named Guðrøðr son of Harthacanute, the slave of a certain widow.
Cuthbert gave detailed instructions for Eadred and the Host to offer money to the widow to redeem the boy and then to:
22. THE RIVER TYNE AT NEWBURN, its lowest fording point—possibly Oswigesdune, the site of Guðrøð’s investiture around 880.
Lead him before the whole multitude so that they may elect him king and at the ninth hour lead him with the whole army upon the hill which is called OswigesduneΩ and there place on his right arm a golden armlet,≈ and thus they shall all constitute him king.4
What Cuthbert had ordered was duly enacted by the abbot and by the Host, who ‘honourably received’ Guðrøðr. The young man was inaugurated as king and swore peace and fidelity over the body of the saint in his modest wooden coffin, produced by the abbot for the occasion. The new king, instructed by the visionary Cuthbert through his real-life proxy, then proceeded to hand over to the community all the lands between the Rivers Tyne and Wear.
It is one of the more extraordinary episodes in Early Medieval British history and very difficult, if not impossible, to accept at face value. Teasing the probable, the plausible and the realpolitik from the miraculous, we might envisage the abbot acting as an honest broker between the Host and the indigenous Christian élite, identifying a candidate for the kingship who would be acceptable to all parties and then arranging a suitable hybrid inauguration ceremony to seal the deal. His (the dead saint’s) fee was a generous endowment of land.
On the face of it this still sounds improbable: the Scandinavian Host, backed by military might and unopposed by credible regional powers, ought to have been able to impose one of its own, or a local puppet, on the natives. But Early Medieval kingship was at all times a negotiated office, dependent on customary rules of lordship, obligation and consent. In the ranks of the Host’s senior commanders, it seems, there was no suitable candidate of royal descent. The Cuthbert community, under the guidance of its abbot and bishop, was here offering up the support of the Bernician establishment to a Scandinavian-born or half-Scandinavian ex-slave of royal parentage, already assimilated into Northumbrian society, who appears to have been converted during his youth to Christianity: so long as he rewarded the saint’s followers with suitably large estates.∂
The inclusion of the Guðrøðr narrative in the Historia and in the much later Libellus de Exordio of Symeon is intimately connected with the fate of Cuthbert’s relics, through which the spiritual and temporal power of the saint were constantly expressed. At various times between the 840s and the early 880s the community and its precious relics seem to have been on the move. We find the saint and his devoted bearers, the remnants of the Lindisfarne community, with Abbot Eadred and Bishop Eardulf in attendance, at the monastery of Whithorn; at the mouth of the River Derwent on the Cumbrian coast; at a Lindisfarne estate outside York called Crayke and, finally, at Chester le Street (Kuncacester), a former Roman fortress that lay at the centre of those new estates granted to Cuthbert by King Guðrøðr. There is yet more to this than meets the eye, and the internal politics, which must have swept up Cuthbert’s community in a whirl of tensions and political friction, can be judged more in the imagination than in the evidence.
A so-called Seven Years’ Wandering5 (876–883), during which the treasures and body of Cuthbert are portrayed as having been constantly in motion can, in the cold light of analysis, be seen as a series of visitations, or a progress between and through the saint’s extensive territorial holdings.6 St Cuthbert, dead these 200 years, was behaving like an itinerant Early Medieval king, consuming the productive surplus of his estates, checking on their management and the rule of their minsters and generally surviving
, if tenuously, the chaos of the century. In promoting a candidate for the kingship, Cuthbert’s followers aimed to prevent civil war, realign their fortunes to those of the new power in the land, and consolidate their now fragile landholdings.
An episode said to have occurred at Derwentmouth (near modern Workington) is particularly significant: it relates an attempt by Abbot Eadred to take Cuthbert’s relics over the sea to Ireland, an attempt confounded at the last minute by either a tempest or ‘waves of blood’, depending on which account one reads. It seems that there was disharmony within the community—a disagreement about whether to flee Britain or to seek some other permanent home for bishopric, relics and community, exhausted by the impermanence of its situation. Guðrøð’s elevation to the kingship in about 880 or 881, sponsored by Cuthbert, killed two birds with one stone. Cuthbert, his bearers and the bishop of north Northumbria were able to settle at Chester le Street, just a few miles south of the River Tyne, surrounded by sufficient estates and with royal support ensuring their security and wealth, at the right distance to influence events further south and yet remain detached. These ‘new’ estatesπ appear to have encompassed those vills originally granted in the seventh century to found two great, now much reduced houses, Jarrow and Monkwearmouth, so recovering the monastic territories of Benedict Biscop and of Bede (the land of Werhale)7 somehow lost during the crises of the ninth century.
The Lindisfarne community remained at Chester le Street for more than 100 years until its final, permanent move to Durham in 995. From Guðrøð’s reign onwards new holdings were acquired overwhelmingly in what is now County Durham. For the Host this new ecclesiastical bloc was a useful buffer zone between their Deiran settlements and interests and the inconveniently independent-thinking and still-powerful Bernician lords of Bamburgh. For Cuthbert’s paruchia, it meant survival against the odds. In exile they succeeded in forging their own kingdom within a kingdom.
