by Adams, Max;
∂ Citing also the presence among the finds of a silver pendant whetstone, an almost universal symbol of warrior power and prestige in the period.
π Man’s Viking archaeology was first systematically explored not by a native archaeologist but by an interned German during the 1940s. Gerhard Bersu, a gifted and innovative excavator, was allowed more or less free run of the enigmatic mounds and half-buried enclosures that dot the Manx landscape.
∆ To use the ironic phrasing of songwriter John Richards.
** Rollo was cited by the Frankish chronicler Richer de Rheims, as the leader of the Viking raiders who besieged Paris in 885–886. The tenth-century writer Dudo of St Quentin wrote an account of his acquisition of Normandy. Somerville and McDonald 2014, 252ff. By similarity of name he is associated with the Göngu-Hrólfr of Orkneyinga Saga: Ganger-Rolf or Rolf ‘the Walker’, a man so big that a horse could not carry him.
†† An alternative story to that told in Orkneyinga Saga, and preserved in the Three Fragmentary Annals, says that Rögnvaldr and his sons were all exiled in Orkney. FA 330.
‡‡ Constantín mac Cináeda or Constantín I; Domnall was, therefore, a grandson of Cináed mac Ailpín. Constantín mac Áed is commonly referred to as Constantin II. It is possible that both Domnall and his cousin spent some years exiled in Ireland with their aunt, which might explain the more than ordinary interest in their careers recorded in the Irish annals. Woolf 2007, 122–6.
§§ Probably Strathearn, but possibly Strath Dearn on the south side of the Moray Firth.
## The sixth year of his rule, i.e. 906.
∫∫ Kent, Wessex, East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia, Essex and Sussex. It is not a contemporary term. In the twelfth century Henry of Huntingdon introduced the idea of the division of seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in his Historia Anglorum. We might further identify sub-kingdoms in Lindsey, West Wealas, Hwicce, Deira and Bernicia.
ΩΩ See below, Chapters 9 and 12. Ritchie 2011.
≈≈ The site has never been conclusively identified; Holme in Cambridgeshire seems a plausible location.
∂∂ Tiddingford, no longer in existence, is identified with Linslade just west of Leighton Buzzard next to the River Ouzel on the Bedfordshire–Buckinghamshire border. It lies a few miles south-west of the boundary described in the Treaty of Ælfred and Guðrum (pp. 173–6).
POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS
ROYAL CULTS—A BATTLE—AN ALLIANCE OF SIBLINGS—WAR OF THE NEW BURHS—FIVE BOROUGHS—EVERYDAY LIFE IN LINDSEY—SUBMISSION—COUP D’ÉTAT—RÖGNVALDR AND CUTHBERT
8
Acuriously anachronistic event stands out among the Chronicle entries for the first decade of the tenth century. In 906 or 909* the bones of a long-dead saint were ‘translated’ from Bardney in Lindsey to Gloucester. On the face of it this seems improbable, for a number of reasons. Oswald was the Northumbrian king celebrated by Bede, who, in the year 635, brought an Irish Christian mission from Iona to mainland Britain: the mission by which the monastery at Lindisfarne was founded. Oswald was killed in the year 642, by the pagan Mercian warlord Penda, and dismembered, his head impaled on a stake at a place that came to be called, in grisly irony, Oswald’s Tree, or Oswestry, on the Mercian–Welsh border. Oswald’s head and right arm were later retrieved by his brother and taken back to Bernicia. The head found its way into the coffin of St Cuthbert (both now lie in Durham Cathedral); the uncorrupted right arm was enshrined at Bamburgh. Many miracles and healing episodes were said to have occurred at the place of Oswald’s martyrdom.
37. ÆÐELFLÆD, LADY OF THE MERCIANS, with her nephew, Æðelstan: the statue at Tamworth, dedicated in 1913, was sculpted by Edward Bramwell.
The fate of the torso did not become apparent for some thirty-seven years until, oddly, it was presented by a Mercian king, Æðelwulf, and his Northumbrian queen, Osðryð, to their royal monastic foundation at Bardney, an event accompanied by a suitably miraculous celestial revelation and much curing of ills. In the eighth century King Offa endowed the shrine with precious gifts.1
Bardney lies on the western edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds, overlooking the peaty flatlands of the River Witham, some 9 miles (14 km) south-east of Lincoln. In the early tenth century Lincoln was a Scandinavian fortress town, one of the so-called Five Boroughs established after the invasion of 865. Two questions immediately present themselves: why did Æðelred and Æðelflæd so desire the relics of a Northumbrian king and saint; and how did they acquire them from within such apparently hostile territory?
Several historians have speculated that a large-scale raid in 909 might have presented an opportunity to steal the relics from under the noses of Lincoln’s Danish garrison:
7 þy ilcan gere sende Eadweard cyng firde ægðer ge of Westseaxum ge of Mercum, 7 heo gehergade swiðe micel on þæm norðhere...
And in this year King Eadweard sent levies from both Wessex and Mercia, and severely harried the Host in the north, destroying both people and every kind of cattle: they slew many Danes and were five weeks in their territory.2
Well, perhaps. In that scenario the acquisition of Oswald’s relics was an opportunistic find of the returning army, or a specifically targeted prize. There are other possibilities: one is that, like Ealdorman Ælfred’s acquisition of the Codex Aureus, the relics were ransomed from the Host by the Mercian royal couple, and for similar reasons, as a devotional offering to a great ecclesiastical foundation. Another, if we accept the ‘D’ manuscript’s date of 906, is that the return of the relics was negotiated as part of the peace treaty brokered at Tiddingford that year; and that perhaps they were re-interred at Gloucester three years later. Either way, we must explain their value to the Mercian royal house and the timing of their acquisition.
Gloucester, Roman Glevum, was the ruined fortress and colonia which controlled an important crossing of the River Severn at the core of the old kingdom of Hwicce. In its northern angle stood a minster founded in the seventh century. Half a mile further north, at Kingsholm, lay a royal vill complex. Æðelred and Æðelflæd are thought to have begun refortification, perhaps after the campaign of 893, as a pivotal extension of the burghal network. Like Chester, its riverside walls were either abandoned or used as quarries for stone to extend its other walls so that they enclosed a length of riverbank, within which lay the new burh.
38. A FIERCE BEAST bound by intricate interlace from St Oswald’s Priory, Gloucester. King Oswald’s great reputation was a source of inspiration to the Mercian royal house.
At the same time, it seems, the couple conceived of a new royal minster, constructed close to the river but just outside the walls. It was a remarkable church, built in dressed stone: small by comparison to Eadweard’s New Minster at Winchester and some other contemporary grandiose designs, but still magnificent. An apse was constructed, most unusually, at its western end and at its east end stood a crypt or mausoleum, apparently very like that at Repton with its candy twist columns and intimate, almost claustrophobic atmosphere.3 The ealdorman and his spouse would be buried here in time. The relics of King Oswald were also interred at the new church, a reflection of its royal credentials and the sainted king’s unearthly powers at a time of considerable political uncertainty. Part of one of its walls still stands, much altered by later works.
A similar scheme seems to have been carried out at Chester, reconstructed and fortified as a burh by Æðelflæd in 907 to counter the threat of Ingimund’s settlement in north-west Cheshire. Here, too, she seems to have re-interred the translated relics of a celebrated royal saint—in this case Wærburg, a granddaughter, ironically, of Oswald’s slayer, King Penda.† In later years the church was rededicated jointly to her and Oswald. The Oswald cult was in time patronized by Eadweard’s son and successor King Æðelstan (924–939), who was probably fostered at the Mercian court. It seems he believed himself, mistakenly, to be descended from Oswald, who featured prominently in Bede’s list of those who had held imperium over all Britain (one of the Bretwaldas listed by the Chronicle under the
year 828).4
From West Saxon royal investment in the cult of another Northumbrian hero, St Cuthbert,‡ and Eadweard’s re-interment of King Ælfred as effectively a secular saint at his New Minster in Winchester, a picture emerges of political and physical capital being invested by the children of Ælfred in appropriating charismatic cult figures of a heroic, golden past to new political ends. It is almost like a Democratic presidential candidate claiming that his or her father had known Kennedy: the magic is supposed to rub off, as political endorsement. The Mercians were buying into Oswald’s and the more credibly indigenous Wærburg’s immense prestige.
39. CHESTER: the Roman fort was rebuilt as a burh by Æðelflæd in the aftermath of Ingimund’s invasion of 902.
This investment in cult figures of the past is paralleled in Alba by the Ailpín dynasty’s acquisition of Columban relics and by the royal cult of St Andrew, and in Wales by long-lasting royal patronage of St David, the least disturbed of all the Insular patron saints (until the eleventh century, at least, when a series of devastating attacks wrought destruction on cathedral, shrine and relics alike). In the British kingdom of Strathclyde or Cumbria investment in more obscure and ancient, semi-mythical saints (Constantine at Govan, Kentigern at Glasgow and Ninian at Whithorn) reinforced claims of legitimacy, sanctity and deep ancestral roots for their emerging dynasts. From a long historical perspective, this renewed interest in royal-sponsored cults can be seen as part of a confident, offensive political strategy countering arriviste Danish rule in East Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia. In the latter kingdom, the Scandinavian rulers appropriated one of their own victims, St Eadmund, as a royal cult: a case of having one’s homicidal cake and eating it. It may be significant that both Oswald and Eadmund seem to have been the focus of head cults, a deeply ancient, pre-Christian Insular phenomenon.
There is a curious footnote to Gloucester’s acquisition of Oswald’s relics. In 910 the Chronicle reported that a fleet of Continental Vikings based in Brittany sailed up the Severn estuary. Eadweard seems to have received intelligence of their imminent departure from Brittany, for he had mustered his fleet in the harbours of Kent. Perhaps informed of his absence in the far south, the Northumbrian Host ‘broke the truce’ and harried Mercia, seemingly taking the opportunity to retaliate for the aggression perpetrated by the armies of the Angelcynn the previous year.
There was evident danger in the two Scandinavian forces combining somewhere in the lands of the Hwicce; but Mercian and West Saxon levies, co-ordinated through the burhs, intercepted the Northumbrian force and, at Tettenhall, on the north-west outskirts of what is now Wolverhampton,§ put it to flight. Two Danish kings,# Eowils (Old Norse Auðgísl) and Hálfdan, were slain along with several of their senior commanders. The Severn fleet seems also to have been put to flight.
Æðelweard, writing as a court insider a hundred years later, indicates that the battle was fought on 5 August; the ‘D’ version of the Chronicle sets it a day later. None of the Mercian or West Saxon participants would have been unaware of the significance of 5 August, especially given the recent translation of remains to Gloucester: this was the day on which, in 642, King Oswald was slain by Penda’s forces at Maserfeld near Oswestry, with the famous proverb on his dying lips, ‘May God have mercy on their souls.’5 The Mercian royal project to bring Bede’s great English martyr into Mercia had, it must have seemed, been given divine approval: absolute proof of the power of the dead saint’s virtue.
Eadweard and his sister moved swiftly to take advantage of Northumbrian losses at Tettenhall. The Mercian Register noted that in the same year, 910, Æðelflæd built a new fortress at an unidentified site called Bremesburh.∫ The year after Tettenhall, Ealdorman Æðelred, reviver of Mercian fortunes and staunch ally of Ælfred and his children, died after his long illness and was buried, most likely, in his new minster at Gloucester alongside Oswald’s relics. In the immediate aftermath, according to the Chronicle, Eadweard occupied London and Oxford ‘and all the lands which belonged thereto’.6 Historians have variously seen this move as opportunism by Eadweard or as part of a long-term strategy to weaken his sister. At this remove it is hard to decide; but family sentiment is not a conspicuous feature of Early Medieval politics.
Notwithstanding Eadweard’s annexation of two Mercian towns, what looks like a co-ordinated project to drive a military wedge into the heart of Danish-held territory now began. Before the second decade of the tenth century was out, new fortresses or burhs were constructed at nineteen sites strung out on a broad line between Thames and Mersey, unmistakeable in their offensive purpose. That line roughly follows Watling Street, north-east of which Scandinavian place names are common and south-west of which they are virtually unknown. It has an ancient and continuing geographic distinction, barely noticed by today’s Midlanders. Broadly speaking,Ω to the north-east all the rivers flow into the Wash or North Sea on the east side, or the Irish Sea on the west. To the south and west every river drains into either Severn or Thames. This is England’s natural fault line, its continental divide: the watershed that divided and divides north from south (epitomized by the famous Watford Gap, on the A5/M1 north-east of Daventry); and I have no doubt that Scandinavian armies and settlers knew its imperatives. Now, its status as the front line between the Anglo-Saxon and Danish kingdoms was to be marked and enhanced by military infrastructure: the new burhs were border garrisons, first for a defensive barrier protecting the headwaters of its own rivers and their road connections, then for an offensive frontier, crossing the watershed from south to north.
That military confidence was backed by a strengthening economy. The number of moneyers, mints and coins dating from the years after about 910 increased dramatically. A series of coins of distinct ornament and carrying Eadweard’s name has been shown to originate in West Mercia, most significantly at Chester but also from moneyers in Shrewsbury, Hereford and Gloucester. These coins were not minted by or for him: they are Mercian, an indication that co-operation between Æðelflæd and her brother allowed for considerable independence of action on her part, but also of a revival in trade and a reinvigorated supply of silver. In the south-east, Archbishop Plegmund was responsible for a substantial new coinage minted at Canterbury, while Eadweard’s Winchester mint was now supplemented by production in Oxford, London, Chichester, Wareham and Exeter. By the end of his reign the number of moneyers has been estimated at more than sixty in the south and over twenty in West Mercia.7
In 912 Æðelflæd had forts constructed at the lost Scergeat, perhaps Shrewsbury, and at Bridgnorth, to prevent further incursions across the Severn there and to provide a base for raiding into Danish territory. In the same year Eadweard raised defences at Hertford, on the traditional boundary of Danish East Anglia, and at Maldon in Essex. The latter, at the head of the broad Blackwater estuary and close to the line of the old road from London to Colchester, must have seemed particularly threatening to Danish commanders; later in the tenth century a celebrated battle would be fought close by.
In 913 Æðelflæd, with the assurance of new burhs protecting the Severn and, perhaps, the Roman road towards the valuable salt springs of Droitwich, made her aggressive intentions clear with the construction of burhs at Tamworth≈ and Stafford, close to the thin blue line of the River Trent and within a day’s forced march of Danish defences at Derby and Leicester. Eadweard, having secured his bridgehead at Maldon the previous year, now built another fortress right on the line of the London to Colchester road at Witham, and a second across the River Lea at Hertford to create a double barrier across the river there, no doubt remembering his father’s inspired coup de main against a Viking fleet on that very river in 894.
It is inconceivable that these projects were not co-ordinated in advance by the two siblings. Burh construction required a large commitment of labour from the levies, co-operation of ealdormen and fine-tuned planning with military support; not to mention large quantities of cash. The boldness of the programme paid almost immediate dividends. W
hile Eadweard was stationed at Maldon, protecting the builders at Witham, ‘a good number of people who had earlier been under Danish domination submitted to him’.8 Parts, if not all, of Essex now came under his control.
The pace and scope of Eadweard’s and Æðelflæd’s offensive showed dazzling ambition; and it could not be allowed to continue unopposed. In 914, as Æðelflæd implemented the next phase of the scheme with new forts at Eddisbury∂ and Warwick, Danish forces came out from Northampton and Leicester and raided southwards. They advanced as far as Hook Norton, south-west of Banbury, and Luton. Both were repulsed by ‘the people of the country’, who ‘fought against them and routed them completely, recovering all that they had taken and also a great part of their horses and their weapons’.9
In 915, pressing the advantage, Æðelflæd’s levies constructed three new fortresses: at Runcorn, on the peninsula between the Rivers Mersey and Weaver; at Chirbury, close to the Severn and the line of Offa’s Dyke at Montgomery (which shows that her offensive ambitions extended to the Welsh kingdoms); and at the unidentified Weardburh.π
The Severn estuary had always been vulnerable to seaborne attack: the same year saw another marine assault, again from Brittany, under two jarls, Ohtor and Harold.∆ They harried inland and seized Cyfeiliog, the Bishop of Archenfield.** Levies from the burhs at Hereford and Gloucester were mobilized and routed them, besieging them in ‘an enclosure’ until they could extract from them hostages and promises to leave. Retreating to their boats, the Vikings raided coastal sites in Cornwall, at Porlock and at a site east of Watchet in Somerset; again they were driven off, forced to shelter on one of the small islands in the Bristol Channel, before departing.
Late in the same year Eadweard supervised the construction of two fortresses at Buckingham, one on each side of the River Great Ouse. Danish Jarls from Bedford and Northampton and many of the chiefs who owed allegiance to those two towns submitted to him, according to the Chronicle. Eadweard then took the fortress at Bedford and built another on the opposite bank of the Great Ouse. In the aftermath, according to a laconic note in the ‘A’ version of the Chronicle, Jarl Ðurcytel ‘went oversea to Froncland with men who wished to follow him, under the protection of King Eadweard and with his assistance’: paid off, one supposes; or given ships.10
