by Adams, Max;
*
The political fallout of the settlement of Yorkshire and the defeat of the Summer Host by Ælfred re-energized the Newton’s cradle of southern overlordship. Ælfred’s pragmatic acceptance of new realities was, for most of a decade, successful. Guðrum was true to his word. At the end of the tumultuous year of 878 the Host overwintered at Cirencester, the ancient Roman town lying some miles north of the Thames, Mercia’s boundary with Wessex. Their new quarters might have seemed threatening, no more than two days’ march along the Fosse Way from Chippenham; but, in retrospect, it seems that their proximity to the old border had more to do with extended negotiations with the councillors of Wessex and Mercia than to re-grouping for another attack. It was not acceptable to either party that Guðrum rule over the lands of the Mercians and settle there, as Hálfdan had done in Northumbria. A better solution presented itself: under the year 879 the Chronicle records that the Danish army moved to East Anglia and ‘occupied that land and shared it out’.8
Æðelweard’s tenth-century account is more nuanced than that of the Chronicle and, in the light of scholarly debate about the nature of Danish East Anglia, more realistic: the mycel here ‘laid out their camp there, and brought all the inhabitants of that land under the yoke of their overlordship [imperium]’.9 Having lost their last legitimate dynast with Eadmund, the East Anglians were consulted by neither the Host nor the Mercians, nor by Ælfred: Danish rule was imposed on them.
There is no surviving narrative history of the years of Guðrum’s reign in East Anglia, only contradictory scraps of evidence suggesting varying degrees of Scandinavian settlement, assimilation and overlordship. The most valuable of those fragments is the unique document known as the Treaty of Ælfred and Guðrum, dated to some time between 880 and 890 and, reasonably, within a year or so of his arrival there.10 We would like to know much, much more about the ceremonial aspects of such a unique testament to Anglo-Scandinavian relations. Were the bones of the treaty put in place during Guðrum’s baptismal feast, man to man between the two kings; or did detailed negotiations extend over several months, involving otherwise faceless functionaries? The document’s brevity suggests the former. Its nature (the boundary clause draws a line between East Anglia and Mercia, rather than with Wessex) suggests that Ceolwulf II, puppet king of Mercia and sometime Wessex ally, was by then dead, since he was not a signatory. It begins:
This is the peace which King Ælfred and King Guðrum and the councillors of all the English race [Angelcynn] and all the people which is in East Anglia have all agreed on and confirmed with oaths, for themselves and for their subjects, both for the living and for those yet unborn, who care to have God’s grace or ours.11
The first clause of the treaty, the demarcation of territory, appears straightforward: ‘up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to the Watling Street’. The Lea rises at Leagrave on the north-west outskirts of Luton at the foot of the Chiltern Hills, only a couple of miles from the Roman town of Durocobrivis (Dunstable) on Watling Street. The Ouse in question is the River Great Ouse, which crosses the Roman road again at a key point: Stony Stratford, on the north-west edge of modern Milton Keynes. From there the river flows north-east, passing through Olney (Ollanege—Olla’s island) and then winding lazily downstream towards Bedford in a series of meanders. Between Luton, Bedford and Stony Stratford, then, is an odd triangle of territory retained to the north of Watling Street by Ælfred on Mercia’s behalf, for reasons that are unclear.∆ The odd, straight line between the source of the Lea and the town of Bedford is today traced almost perfectly by the railway line from Luton which links the two.
23. THE TREATY OF ÆLFRED AND GUÐRUM: ‘Up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to the Watling Street...’
Even more obscure is the question of whether the two kings intended that the boundary with Mercia was to continue north-west along Watling Street from Stony Stratford towards the Mercian heartlands around Tamworth and Lichfield, effectively leaving the Viking fortresses of Nottingham, Leicester and Repton in Guðrum’s hands. Or was the Great Ouse itself effectively the western border of his new state? The latter makes more sense, even if it leaves open to question who, precisely, was ruling over north-eastern Mercia. The later history of East Anglia is distinct and separate from that of Mercia west of the fens. Huntingdon, Cambridge and Colchester seem to have been Guðrum’s principal defended towns.
The four subsequent clauses of the treaty are concerned with drawing equivalent values for the lives, oaths and freedom of movement (to use a fashionable phrase) of two classes of free men,** known in some sources as twihynde (men worth 200 shillings—the ceorls) and twelfhynde (members of the nobility, worth 1200 shillings).12 Overriding all other considerations is the sense that this was intended as a permanent settlement, an acceptance on Ælfred’s side that the Danes were in Britain to stay and, on Guðrum’s, that half a loaf was better than none. The Danish king seems to have embraced his new status as a Christian, looking south to Wessex and east to Francia as a fully fledged member of the Christian kings’ club. He minted coins: first in imitation of indigenous East Anglian and Frankish issues and then, using his baptismal name Æðelstan, in imitation of Ælfred’s coins, only lighter in weight. On the reverse is a cross; and so the first two bona fide Scandinavian kings of English states, Guðrøðr and Guðrum, both seem to have adopted Insular Christian values, at least nominally.
The treaty boundary suggests that London lay outside the new Danish kingdom. It also suggests that by now Ælfred had made provision for the governance of Mercia, since he was drawing up its new eastern boundary. By 881 West Mercia was ruled by Æðelred, later Ælfred’s son-in-law and always described as an ealdorman in Wessex sources; he was not obviously connected to any of the three main dynasties of Mercian kings but a de facto king so far as Mercia was concerned. The unknown dates of his appointment as its lord and of the creation of the treaty pose a nice problem for historians. My guess, and it is no more than that, is that during the discussions between Ælfred and Guðrum, Æðelred emerged as a skilled negotiator able to carry the weight of opinion of the Mercian nobility, that he showed himself to be pro-Wessex and Ælfred; and that the West Saxon king rewarded his loyalty by supporting his case to govern Mercia after Ceolwulf’s (undated) death.
In assertion, perhaps, of his desire to show independence from direct political control, Æðelred almost immediately mounted a military campaign against Mercia’s old antagonist, Gwynedd.†† The campaign was disastrous: Anarawd ap Rhodri, son of the great warrior whom Ceolwulf had defeated and killed three years before, inflicted a humiliating defeat on the ealdorman, for the time being ending Mercian ambitions to overlordship in North Wales. Many historians date Æðelred’s submission to Ælfred from that defeat; and yet, it is equally plausible that he had already accepted the West Saxon king as his lord and was using new-found stability deriving from the Anglo-Danish treaty to flex his military muscle. In the event the defeat, at the mouth of the River Conwy on the north-east edge of Snowdonia, allowed Anarawd to assert his supremacy over Powys in central eastern Wales and Ceredigion in the west, while curbing Mercian expansionism: the desk toy of political momentum clacked rhythmically once again.
Ælfred’s later acquisition of Bishop Asser of St David’s as court scholar and chronicler of his life allows the contemporary Welsh scene to be sketched, albeit in rough outline, for the first time. The invidiousness of the southern Welsh position is striking: King Haifaidd of Dyfed (roughly the territory of the Pembroke peninsula) feared the power of the sons of Rhodri Mawr: Cadell in Ceredigion bordering it to the north, Merfyn in Powys and Anarawd in Gwynedd, the latter allied with the new Northumbrian king Guðroðr. Across the Irish Sea lay the aggressive Norse kings of Dublin, Wexford and Waterford. To the immediate east of Dyfed, Ystrad Tywi is likely to have faced the same pressures.
/> The three south-east kingdoms of Wales—Brycheiniog under Elise ap Tewdr, Glywysing under Hywel ap Rhys and Gwent under Kings Brochfael and Ffernfael—felt additional pressure from Æðelred in Mercia, their traditional antagonist. Asser, for one (directly addressing his Welsh audience at home), regarded the Mercian ealdorman’s influence over these south-east kingdoms, his immediate neighbours across the River Severn, as a predatory tyranny.13 Beset on all sides, one by one the smaller Welsh kingdoms submitted to Ælfred, now cast in the role of the great protector, in a process which might have continued for most of the 880s and 890s as each player sought to gain maximum advantage for the least risk.
Ælfred’s overlordship of the Welsh kingdoms and of Mercia was a matter of political and military expediency on both sides. Only in retrospect have over-enthusiastic commentators and nationalists encouraged the idea of an Ælfredan project to create a single kingdom of England or Britain. He might have styled himself as king of the Angelcynn, the English people; that is not the same as proclaiming himself king of Mercia or of the Britons or, indeed, of Kent, let alone of some notion of England which does not belong to his age. The grand unifying project of an English kingdom was not a design of the West Saxon kings; at least, not before the days of Ælfred’s grandchildren.
The project may, in distant origin, have been conceived by the Venerable Bede, whose passion for the universal church had a complementary and logical secular counterpart. Ælfred, it seems to me, was content with the benefits of overlordship or imperium: political influence and the peace and wealth it might bring. His grand project was a Carolingian-style renaissance: spiritual, educational, philosophical, channelling political energy away from warfare towards culture and learning. Asser may have been prejudicially inclined towards his personal patron, and he may be over-egging the pudding when he describes the benefits of West Saxon overlordship to his native Welsh constituents; but he does not overstate by much the potential advantages of submission:
Nor did all these rulers gain the king’s friendship in vain. For those who wished to increase their worldly power were able to do so; those who wished an increase of wealth obtained it; those who wished to be on more intimate terms with the king achieved such intimacy; and those who desired each and every one of these things acquired them. All of them gained support, protection and defence [amor, tutela, defensio].14
It is easy to get worked up by the idea of overlordship: it bears connotations of racial and ethnic submission that still underlie national sensitivities. But it is best seen as an extension of the rules of lordship and patronage which operated at all levels of Early Medieval society. Political submission in the age of the first Viking invasions involved a set of mutual obligations and ties concerning royal fosterage, reciprocal rights for traders, political marriages, baptism and godparenting, as well as military support, attendance at the king’s councils and the rendering of tribute in various kinds, including hard cash. The record of Guðrum’s submission and baptism after the battle of Edington provides the model. For a modern analogy, one thinks of Britain’s post-war relationship with the United States in which Britain is expected to represent American interests in Europe and fight in its wars in order to enjoy the benefits of protection, economic favouritism and a ‘special’ status. Political intervention in the affairs of tributary states was and is a matter of political delicacy, and Early Medieval rulers, like their modern counterparts, were acutely aware of the importance of show and ceremony in their portrayal of such relationships.
*
Ælfred’s establishment of a king’s peace in the 880s was assisted by events on the Continent. Just as the Anglo-Saxon, Welsh and Pictish states had been destabilized and rendered vulnerable to external attack by dynastic uncertainty, so also Francia experienced twenty years of succession disputes from the late 870s. Charles the Bald, Charlemagne’s grandson and the architect of Frankish defences against Scandinavian incursions, died in 877. His eldest son Louis le Bègue (‘the Stammerer’), survived him by just two years. Louis’s successor in West Francia, his son Louis III, died in 882; his second son, Carloman II, assuming the throne in Aquitaine and Burgundy, died in 884. In East Francia Louis the German, another grandson of Charlemagne, died in 876 and was succeeded by his eldest son, another Carloman, who died in 880; his second son, another Louis, died in 882.
In that year, a sense of state impotence against the ravages of the Host in Francia was registered by Archbishop Hincmar in his final entry as the chronicler of St Bertin. Carloman, he wrote, ‘lacked the resources to mount resistance to the Northmen once certain magnates of his kingdom withdrew from offering him help’.15 Hincmar himself, aged and weak, fled in a sedan chair, barely escaping with the relics and treasures of his church.
The former Frankish empire was reunited, briefly, by Charles le Gros (‘the Fat’) until 888; but it was not until the reign of Charles Simplex (‘the Simple’ 898–929: a last, posthumous son of Louis the Stammerer) that Francia between the Jutland peninsula and the Pyrenees once more enjoyed the fruits of dynastic stability. The discreet departure of a Viking fleet from Fulham on the Thames near London in 879, heading for Ghent with unfriendly motives, shows how the runes were read by Viking chiefs in the aftermath of Guðrum’s submission.16 The Anglo-Saxon chronicler’s frequent notices of these ominous events across the Channel is evidence that at Ælfred’s court keen interest was taken in their movements.
Between the defeat of Guðrum in 878 and the arrival from Francia of a new Continental army on the shores of Kent in 892, Viking interest concentrated on easy Frankish pickings: laying siege to Paris in 885–886, penetrating the rivers Scheldt, Seine and Marne with apparent impunity and attempting to wrest control of Brittany. Charles the Fat was forced to pay them off with 700 lbs (320 kg) of silver 17 and to acquiesce in their subsequent attacks on Burgundy.
That is not to say that the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were free from external threat. In 882 Ælfred took a fleet to sea and captured two Viking ships, according to the Chronicle. Two years later part of the Host laid siege to Rochester in Kent; the fortress was only relieved by the king after the best part of a year. This force may have been a discontented element among Guðrum’s veterans in East Anglia; in the same year Ælfred sent a fleet to the mouth of the River Stour and was able to defeat a force of sixteen ships.
These notices of engagements pepper a decade during which Ælfred began to put in place long-term plans for defence, for the revival and reform of the church and for his cultural renaissance. Asser’s arrival at the court of Wessex in about 885 was complemented by the importation of several scholars from Mercia and the Continent: Bishop Wærferth of Worcester; Plegmund, whom he would elevate to the primacy of Canterbury; Grimbald and John from German Francia. Latinate scholarship, literacy and the political testimony of those who had witnessed Frankish policy towards the Scandinavian threat, armed Ælfred with weapons of intellectual and political expertise underpinned by the economic clout of the great minsters and the institutional authority of episcopal and metropolitan sees.
Ælfred’s domestic battles proved just as challenging as his military campaigns but he seems, like Newton, to have grasped the underlying mechanical laws of his age better than any other. He saw that military victory must be followed by economic reform, the construction of public works and defence based on geographical realities, all underpinned by support for the church and a revival of education. But the apparent benevolence of his rule masks a hard-headed realism that required sometimes forceful impositions on the shires of Wessex and the south-east, in the face of opposition and truculence from local and regional power brokers among his ealdormen, thegns and bishops.
Ælfred had built a small fortress at Athelney at the height of the crisis in the winter of 878. He had seen the effectiveness of Viking fortresses at Reading, Wareham and Nottingham. The defences at Rochester, which held out against a Viking siege in 884 until it could be relieved, and existing Mercian fortifications at Hereford, Tamworth and Winchcomb
e, provided inspiration and engineering exemplars for a grand scheme later recorded in a document known as the Burghal Hidage.‡‡
Ælfred’s first concern seems to have been the defence of the south coast. Where the walls of ancient Roman towns or forts were serviceable or restorable, as at Portchester, Chichester, Exeter, Bath, Hamtun and Winchester, they were repaired and garrisoned. Naturally defensible sites that could be fortified by the expedient of raising a bank and palisade across a promontory, such as Halwell in Devon and Twyneham (Christchurch in Dorset), were enrolled in the scheme. Iron Age hillforts like Cissanbyrig (Chisbury) and Watchet guarded strategic routes and were refortified. Occasionally, as at Axbridge (just downstream from the township at Cheddar) and Wallingford, a new burh was constructed on or close to an existing royal estate. The smallest of the burhs, the fort at Lyng near Athelney on a low prominence in the Somerset levels, needed just 100 men for its garrison walls; the largest, at Wallingford and Winchester (the latter following the surviving Roman wall circuit of Venta Belgarum), required 2,400 men.
The scale and ambition of Ælfred’s scheme can, perhaps, best be seen at Wareham (see p.195), where the Host had made camp in 875 and where, between the Rivers Frome and Piddle which run eastwards into Poole’s great natural harbour, a new town was constructed.§§ The grid layout, the still-impressive ramparts and the size of the enclosed area, requiring a garrison of 1,600 men to defend it, are impressive evidence of engineering, military and social commitment. That is not to say that the natives of south Dorset, or any other region included in the scheme, signed up with enthusiasm to burghal construction, occupation and functioning in an integrated plan of ‘national’ defence. Asser hints at discord, even downright obduracy among those required to enforce these burdens on the estates of Wessex:
