by Adams, Max;
What of the mighty disorder and confusion of his own people—to say nothing of his own malady##—who would undertake of their own accord little or no work for the common needs of the kingdom?... By gently instructing, cajoling, urging, commanding and (in the end, when his patience was exhausted) by sharply chastising those who were disobedient and by despising popular stupidity and stubbornness in every way, he carefully and cleverly exploited and converted his bishops and ealdormen and nobles, and his thegns... and reeves.18
At times, Asser goes on, forts remained unbuilt or incomplete because of idleness or laxity in carrying out the king’s commands. The same issues of parochialism, regional political tension and reluctance to accept the heavy burdens of Ælfred’s demands fomented unease and recalcitrance which must, at times, have driven the king to distraction. These tensions reinforce a sense that even among the Angelcynn, regional and factional interests were more pervasive than any sense of ‘Englishness’.
It is particularly significant that burhs were raised at key strategic points along the Thames: at Southwark, opposite the Roman city of London; on Sashes Island in Berkshire, at Wallingford, Oxford and Cricklade at the river’s head. They might just as well have been sited to reinforce a message to Mercia as to provide a general line of defence against Scandinavian threats from the north. A thousand-odd years later in the 1940s the Thames once more became a strategic frontier, part of the General Headquarters Line—a natural defensible ditch against an invading army possessed of tanks and aircraft. Passing along the upper reaches of the river today one can still see the remains of many of the pill boxes which face the river on its north (Mercian) side. At Wallingford the Ælfredan defences are still visible, as is the classic grid pattern of the town.∫∫
The development of many of the burhs into successful commercial trading centres in the tenth century at Oxford, Hastings, Lewes, Wareham, Chichester and elsewhere, is a reminder that one of their functions was to concentrate population, both for defence and to bolster the internal economy of Wessex. The extent to which Ælfred conceived of their economic potential is unclear. He had the defunct trading ports to hint at such potential, but he also appreciated the need to incentivize the regional populations who must garrison them. One potential solution was to give rights of freehold and trade in the burhs (the origins of medieval burghal rights) in return for co-operation, and the clearest statement of this strategy comes from a charter belonging to the last decade of his reign.
The ‘Arrangements for the building of fortifications at Worcester’,19 as this charter is known, offers a partial glimpse of some of the processes involved. The burh had been founded or refounded by Æðelred and his wife Æðelflæd, Ælfred’s formidable daughter. The charter, dating between 880 and 899, records that some time after its establishment they decided to grant half of their rights ‘whether in the market or in the street, both within the fortification or outside’ to Bishop Wærferth. In addition, land-rents, fines for fighting or theft and dishonest trading, damages to the burh wall and other offences admitting of compensation, were to be shared between the ealdorman and the bishop. Significantly, the waggon-shilling and load-penny were to go to the king, ‘as they have always done at Droitwich’. These latter were dues on cart-loads or mule-loads of salt, a traditional royal perquisite.ΩΩ The document was drawn up in Mercia before its councillors and with King Ælfred as chief witness.
There is much in this document to intrigue the historian. First, the detail shows that burhs were defined as much by their regulations as by their physical form. The marketplace operated under its own rules, not defined here but perhaps similar to those later prescribed under King Æðelstan (924–939).≈≈ Here the portgerefa or port-reeve administered rules and tariffs on behalf of the ealdorman and king. He may also have played an increasing judiciary role, maintaining defences and order within the ramparts. Early Medieval law had to adapt to these new judicial and economic entities. That ealdormen and bishops were to enjoy many of the fruits of these new, protected trading entrepôts shows how commercial and political capital was being deployed by the king to ensure their success and his councillors’ loyalty to the project; and how those powers and commercial rights were to be concentrated in the late Saxon town.
The Worcester charter also offers hints to help solve some of the difficulties caused by the uncertain chronology of the Burghal Hidage and the difficulty of dating its sequence, which are crucial to understanding Ælfred’s development as a political and military thinker. The telling clue, I think, is that the burh at Worcester had been founded some time before the charter was drawn up. In that time Bishop Wærferth’s status had changed. Asser tells us that in the years after Edington, when Ælfred conceived his vision for a renaissance among the Angelcynn, he drew to his court scholars from Kent, from Wales (Asser himself), from the Continent (Grimbald and John) and particularly from Mercia. One of these, Plegmund, would be rewarded with the spiritual throne of Canterbury in 890. Wærferth, Bishop of Worcester, whose huge diocese comprised the ancient territory of the Hwicce, was another. Asser says that he (Asser) was rewarded with many gifts for his contribution to the court, including two monasteries.∂∂ Wærferth, we know from other sources, was granted lands by Ælfred and Æðelred at Hwaetmundes stane in London, together with commercial privileges there.20 A later grant, dating from Ælfred’s last years, confers lands at Æðeredes hyd (Queenshythe, on Thames Street) on Plegmund and Wærferth. It has been suggested that both sites were part of Ælfred’s plan to restore ‘the city of London splendidly—after so many towns had been burned and so many people slaughtered’.21
We know that Asser came to the royal court in about 885, and that he believed Ælfred’s London project to have been in train the following year, at the latest. It is tempting, therefore, to date the Worcester charter to the second half of the decade, and the original construction of the burh there to a few years before. The generous royal grants at Worcester, London and elsewhere can be seen, in this context, as Ælfred’s recognition of the contribution made by key loyalists to the grand design. A more cynical view might be that he was purchasing their approbation and co-operation: Wærferth was being rewarded with lucrative protectionist trading rights.ππ
Like Ælfred’s other bishops, Wærferth also received a personal copy of the king’s own translation of Pope Gregory’s Cura Pastoralis, or Pastoral Care. By great fortune, his is the only copy that survives—in the Bodleian library at Oxford.22 Ælfred had chosen his trustees carefully, not least in his support for Æðelred with whom he maintained a close relationship throughout the last two decades of his rule. By the time of his death at the age of fifty Ælfred had constructed a network of more than thirty defended trading and military strongholds across the breadth of Wessex and beyond: his influence on the geography of the South is profound and enduring.
Asser dates the restoration of London to 886 and this may indeed be the year in which some formal recognition of the ancient city’s new status was made. There is every reason to believe that Ælfred gave his daughter, Æðelflæd, in marriage to the Mercian lord at this time, sealing their alliance. The Chronicle’s version of Asser’s statement is that Ælfred ‘occupied London, and all the English people submitted to him, except those who were in captivity to the Danes; and then entrusted the city to Ealdorman Æðelred’.23 It sounds as though London’s and Mercia’s status were consolidated in a single event; and it is not impossible that the written treaty with Guðrum dates from this period of consolidation.
Many commentators now suspect, however, that new commercial life had been growing within the old Roman walls since the demise of Lundenwic in the 830s or 840s. The archaeologist Jeremy Haslam argues that, apart from a brief period between 877 and 878, the Host, with its Mercian appointee Ceolwulf, was in control of the port.24 The departure of the fleet from Fulham in 880 and of Ceolwulf at about the same time, together with Ælfred’s endorsement of Æðelred, allowed him to assert control over the pre-eminent site on the
navigable Thames, a pivotal location in the defence of Wessex and in its trading links with Mercia and the Continent.
The occupation of the city recorded under 886 in the Chronicle, described later by Æðelweard as a ‘citadel’, may have been an additional response to the military activities at Rochester in 884 and on the coast of East Anglia in 885, as well as a core component of the burghal system rolled out during the same decade.25 A notable coin issue, the Ælfredan ‘London monogram’ of the 880s, was very public confirmation that the king intended to associate his military, political and economic successes with the former Roman capital.
Mapping Ælfred’s control and influence during the 880s and 890s is relatively straightforward, even if the chronology floats uncertainly. The nature and extent of Æðelred’s power in Mercia is much more difficult to determine in detail. We know that London was placed under his protection after its capture (for want of a better word) by Ælfred some time between 878 and 886. We also know that the boundary of Guðrum’s lands, at least nominally, followed the line of the River Lea and then the River Great Ouse as far as its conjunction with Watling Street at Stony Stratford, on what later became the Buckinghamshire border with Northamptonshire.∆∆
To the west and north of that point the geography of power in the last decades of the ninth century becomes more obscure. Buckingham itself appears, slightly anomalously, in the Burghal Hidage, along with those Mercian outposts Worcester and Warwick, indicating that during Æðelred’s rule as ealdorman he was able to extend his control to the upper reaches of the Warwickshire Avon and the Great Ouse. Bedford, we know, lay at the edge of Guðrum’s East Anglian territory. The fortified towns under Scandinavian control are the next pointers, albeit negative: Derby (Norðworðig to the native Mercians), Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln and Stamford, the so-called Five Boroughs,*** are regarded as having been settled by veterans of the mycel here.
Key to the pattern of Danish control of the north Midlands is the course of the River Trent. Fortified redoubts on the river at Torksey, Nottingham, Derby (on the Derwent, a tributary) and Repton, which became the foci of more substantial settlements, provided the communications and trading network from which the settlers supported themselves after initial phases of raiding and looting. From these centres, which would become the medieval shire towns of the Midlands, existing estates were bought, stolen, fragmented and redistributed to create a patchwork of land-holding, based on ancient divisions but distinct, perhaps, in their management and composition. No historian believes that Danish veterans formed anything like a majority of the rural population; but they occupied key landholdings and, we must suppose, positions of civic and rural authority. From Lincoln the Danish settlement spread east to the coast. Additional forts, raised in later defence against aggressive West Saxon and Mercian military campaigns, were constructed at Northampton and Towcester. The River Great Ouse may have acted as the boundary between the Midlands Scandinavian settlers and those under the rule of Guðrum.
It is striking, on a map showing Scandinavian place names in the Midlands,††† that they occur almost exclusively north and east of Watling Street, often shown on maps as a continuation of the Ælfred–Guðrum treaty line.26 Further along that line, towards the north-west, Æðelred’s ability to engage with the forces of Gwynedd at Conwy shows that he was in control of the Cheshire plain and the old territories of the Magonsæte and Wrocansæte. There was, then, a congruent if sparsely detailed zone of influence which remained under West Mercian control and which does not seem to have come under concerted external attack after 878. It is striking that a large number of minster foundations survived the first Viking Age in West Mercia, just as the institutional apparatus of bishop and diocese was also sustained there long enough to re-emerge, more or less unscathed, in the reform movement of the late tenth century.
The mycel here and its adherents, whatever their status in Eastern Mercia, had given up their ambitions to conquer Mercia south and west of Watling Street. Æðelred’s authority was that of a de facto king, judging by the geographical spread and unequivocally independent nature of his charter grants.27 But no coinage bearing his name has been found, even though there is strong evidence for minting in Mercia, possibly at Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford, during the latter part of Æðelred’s reign and that of his widow, Æðelflæd.28 Ælfred’s mints struck coins in his name as Rex at the Mercian burhs of Gloucester, Oxford and London. Just as Ælfred’s militarized peace guaranteed Mercian authority with its neighbours, so his coinage guaranteed the value of the economy throughout the lands of the Angelcynn.
*
Although the documentary and literary evidence from later centuries shows how deeply embedded Scandinavian influence became in central Britain, archaeologists trying to detect the invaders’ settlements in the excavated buildings and landscapes of the period have had much less luck. To begin with, large-scale excavations of the sort needed to understand the fine detail of settlement development, function and layout are understandably rare in towns which have been occupied ever since. The justly famous Viking dig on Coppergate in York in the late 1970s provides the exception rather than the rule.‡‡‡
The Five Boroughs have not yet given up their secrets.29 But it is significant that both Derby and Leicester were important ecclesiastical centres before the middle of the ninth century, and that both had been the sites of Roman forts. Derby’s Roman name was Derventio, strikingly like its Norse name but unlike the Old English Norðworðig. Lincoln, a former Roman colonia (Lindum) like York (Eboracum) and London (Londinium), had probably been the seat of the bishops of Lindsey, the last of whom is recorded in about 870 before a long hiatus. Nottingham is unusual: its Brittonic name Tig Guocobauc, the ‘city of caves’, was recorded (by Asser) alongside the Old English Snotengaham—whose form suggests that it had once been the centre of a regio or tribal territory: that of Snota’s people.30 Its fate at the hands of the mycel here in 867, when they captured and fortified it, is directly attested in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Excavations have so far only hinted at the nature of a D-shaped fortification enclosing a clifftop promontory overlooking the River Leen, less than a mile above its confluence with the Trent.31 Stamford, the lowest crossing point of the River Welland west of the fens in Lincolnshire, where the Roman Ermine Street runs north-west, was a borough by 972, but its history before that is more or less obscure: it is the only one of the Five Boroughs not to have become a county town.
If nothing else, then, it seems that the leaders of the mycel here were careful in their choice of targets, seizing existing central places to control new territories. They took advantage of both military opportunities and the tax-raising, administrative and legal reins which made them effectively kings of East Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia.
Perhaps the most accessible (accessible, that is, to archaeologists excavating in advance of construction) of the towns that fell under Scandinavian rule in the ninth century is Thetford on the Norfolk–Suffolk border, England’s sixth largest town at the time of the Domesday survey in 1086. It suffered severe decline in subsequent centuries and the focus of settlement moved away from the late Saxon core on the south bank of the River Little Ouse; so it remained largely undeveloped until after the Second World War. Thetford obeys the first rule of Early Medieval connectivity on the Viking travel map: lying on a navigable waterway at a ford, close to an Iron Age hillfort and on the line of the ancient Icknield Way on the east edge of the fenlands. It was occupied in 870 by the mycel here, and by the reign of King Eadgar (959–975) at the latest it had its own mint.32 It supported ten churches in the period before the Conquest of 1066.
Excavations in recent decades have shown that defensible earthen ramparts stood on both sides of the river.33 By the end of the tenth century the town was a thriving trading centre, producing distinctive Thetford ware pottery and supporting a range of crafts: bone- and antler-working, silver-smithing, weaving and leather-working. The Viking Age might have left the natives with a fear
of invasion; it seems also to have driven Britain towards a new urban and industrial confidence. But we would have considerable difficulty in discriminating between a ‘Danish’ town like Thetford and an Ælfredan burh without supporting historical evidence—which itself has to be read with caution.
The same problems of identification and interpretation bedevil attempts to trace rural Scandinavian settlement—the dwellings of the veterans who settled as farmers and integrated with the ceorls and thegns of the countryside. The Norse and Old English languages were mutually intelligible, at least at a basic functional level; their cultures shared Germanic origins and interactions. But would we be able to distinguish a ‘Viking’ house in rural Lincolnshire from that of an indigene? Did Scandinavians build new houses in their own style, or occupy the existing dwellings of the natives? Did they rapidly copy local building traditions so as to fit in and not attract undue attention? Even outstanding examples of exotic longhouses, apparently so diagnostic a feature of Scandinavian settlement in the far north and west, are difficult to interpret. The most often cited of these is a remote upland farmstead at Gauber high pasture, Ribblehead, high in the Yorkshire Dales at over 1000 feet (300 m). Around a paved courtyard, in the ninth century, a longhouse 60 feet by 15 feet (18 × 5 m) was constructed on a thick rubble wall base with rounded corners and entrances in the ends, along with a smaller rectangular ‘kitchen block’ and a smithy: a self-contained steading whose economy must have been primarily pastoral. Alan King’s 1970s excavations invited the question: how can we tell the difference between a new Scandinavian settlement on apparently marginal land, and an indigenous Northumbrian farm? The question remains unresolved.34
If we cannot yet diagnose Scandinavian rural housing there are at least hints of where we might look. James Campbell, professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford, points to the remarkable concentration of no fewer than thirteen names ending in -by in two Norfolk hundreds, East and West Flegg.35 They lie on the coast just north of Great Yarmouth in an area either side of Filby Broad, confined by the rivers Bure and Thurne, which must, in the Early Medieval period, have formed a large low-lying island in the peaty coastal marshes. Large parts of the surrounding broadlands lie below sea level; a catastrophic inundation would cut them off again. Campbell believes that something like a longphort may have existed here; a western counterpart to the island fortress of Walcheren in the estuary of the Scheldt, a more established version of the camp at Torksey on the lower Trent. Archaeologists concentrating resources here might one day identify and excavate the houses of those enterprising pirates and their successors.
