by Adams, Max;
Æðelstan’s sensitivity to his split loyalties, which would extend to the inclusion of Danish nobles among his household and to active diplomatic engagement with Anglo-Scandinavian York, may find remarkable expression in the greatest Anglo-Saxon poem. The single surviving manuscript of Beowulf, that Dark Age epic of monster and exiled prince, of loyalty, brotherhood and much more besides, dates to around the year 1000. The combined research of hundreds of scholars and poets has reached no firm conclusion about its origins, transmission, date or provenance. In current thought the first transcription of a legendary poetic form, whose origins lie somewhere in the era of pagan Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Germanic and early Irish Christian myth, must have taken place some time in the eighth century. It survived by oral or written transmission, or both, until the two scribes whose work survives fossilized it in a single monumental form.
Æðelstan’s biographer Sarah Foot makes a case that at least one transcription and evolution of the poem occurred during the reign of Æðelstan, when it would have provided a unique multi-cultural expression of common origins.28 One might add to her argument that the martyred seventh-century Northumbrian King Oswald, a recent favourite at Gloucester and at the Mercian court, has been proposed as the epitome for righteous exiled princes—not least by J. R. R. Tolkien, who deployed Oswald as a prototype for his fictional returning king in the Lord of the Rings.29 As a king with his own split loyalties, an Oswald obsession and a demonstrable love of poetry, Æðelstan is a good candidate for propagating Beowulf among an increasingly literate audience trying to make sense of its own innate affinities with ambiguity.
The new king lost little time in entering the diplomatic and political fray, deploying the immense political and military capital accumulated by his father, aunt and grandfather. More than thirty years old and schooled in the politics of Anglo-Scandinavian relations by the expert dynasts of the West Saxon ruling house, Æðelstan’s political maturity is evident from the start. By the end of 926 he had received the Continental embassy which resulted in the dispatch of his half-sister Eadhild to the marriage bed of Hugh, count of Paris and duke of the Franks.
Æðelstan had already, earlier that same year, contracted a union of potentially greater significance: the ‘D’ Worcester version of the Chronicle records that ‘King Æðelstan and Sigtryggr, king of Northumbria, met at Tamworth on 30 January and Æðelstan gave him his sister in marriage.’30 Tamworth was the Mercian royal burh where Æðelflæd had died and where a 1913 statue of her≈≈ stands close by the walls of the later medieval castle. Tamworth (Tomworðig: ‘enclosure by the River Tame’) lay on a tributary of the upper Trent river system and was the caput of an early regio or petty kingdom. Its natives, the Tomsæte of the Tribal Hidage, had been absorbed into the Mercian overstate by the eighth century, from which time it became a favourite royal residence and possible minster foundation, close to the principal Mercian see at Lichfield and to Watling Street, less than 2 miles (3 km) to the south. During the annexation of much of Mercia by Scandinavian armies in the 870s, Tamworth may have fallen under Danish authority; but it acted as a sort of offensive border garrison for West Mercian forces after Æðelflæd constructed a new fortress here in 913.
Tamworth is celebrated among archaeologists for its Anglo-Saxon water mill complex, excavated by Philip Rahtz and Roger Meeson in two campaigns in the 1970s. It stood on the north bank of the River Anker, close to its confluence with the Tame and to the south-east corner of the later burh defences.31 The second of two successive horizontal paddle mills on the site, providing a rich and invaluable insight into the sophistication of Early Medieval civil engineering (including, for example, the survival of a high-quality steel bearing from the wheelhouse), has been dated by its well-preserved timbers to about 855. Its late ninth-century destruction by fire might plausibly, but with caution, be laid at the door of the mycel here. Eadweard’s immediate occupation of the burh on his sister’s death indicates its continuing symbolic and strategic importance. Æðelstan established a mint here, and his choice of Tamworth as a venue for a royal wedding and diplomatic alliance echoes his own political affinities as much as it does the convenience of a border town for inter-kingdom negotiations.
The grandson of Ívarr who married the king’s sister in 925 may or may not have been aware that for the Angelcynn such a marriage transaction implied political submission. He may have seen it as an alliance of equals, and the Chronicle affords him the title of king. Whatever the case, his apparent enthusiasm for a rapprochement with the southern English kingdoms, and the implication that he must have been baptized in order for his marriage to be consecrated, indicates a greater willingness to make accommodations with native culture than his cousin Rögnvaldr had shown. So too does his readoption of the St Peter coinage in York and, perhaps, Lincoln. His wife’s fate is not known; nor, oddly, is her name.
How Sigtrygg’s reign might have played out over the next decade cannot now be established: he was dead within a year.32 He was immediately succeeded by the most aggressive of the grandsons of Ívarr, that Guðrøðr who had imposed his military rule on Dublin so effectively after 921, who had plundered the Patrician cult centre at Armagh and more recently attacked Limerick, according to the Annals of Ulster. But his attempted coup at York was swiftly countered by Æðelstan and by the end of 927 he had returned to Dublin.∂∂ The Worcester version of the Chronicle records Æðelstan’s ‘annexation’ of Northumbria in the aftermath of Guðrøð’s expulsion. In this fortuitous and expedient series of events one can, perhaps, detect a step-change in Æðelstan’s thinking about Northumbria: from dangerous enemy to dynastically entwined ally, to its potential absorption into his kingdom. Now he marshalled military, political and cultural forces behind the project; but, despite later historians’ wishful thinking, the fall of York did not fire the starting gun on a race towards the unification of England; and it could not.
44. PLACE NAMES on a signpost in the East Riding of Yorkshire: ‘telltale suffixes like –by and –Thorpe testify to the presence of Norse speakers’.
Early Medieval kingship relied on the preservation and expansion of networks of patronage constructed across generations. The kings of Wessex owned large estates spread across the southern shires, from Kent to Devon, accumulated by their forbears. Æðelstan was able to expand his portfolio by right of succession to Æðelred and his aunt Æðelflæd—although those estates seem to have been confined to lands in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, the ancient territories of the Hwicce where Æðelred’s line had once probably been kings in their own right.ππ There is almost nothing from further north; nothing in the Mercian heartlands around Tamworth and Lichfield—we do not know in whose portfolio they lay.
Some of the kings’ wealth in the south had been alienated by grants, as bookland, to the great minsters and to ealdormen and thegns, ensuring their support and spiritual protection and spreading the munificence of the king. Some of that land had returned to the king’s portfolio through lapses in ownership, legal forfeit and the fallout from the heyday of the Viking armies. The remainder was often distributed by Æðelstan in rebuilding the fortunes of those southern churches that he so conspicuously favoured. But he was not the only great landowner, and even with sceptre and rod in hand and a crown on his head, he must negotiate power with others who held it. As the machinations of the community of St Cuthbert show, the manipulation of grants was a subtle, complex affair. Tenth-century politics rarely consisted of the simple military arrogation of rights to land: it required the conversion of capital into power by exploiting webs of obligation and gift which, like the root systems of trees, lie substantially obscured and hidden from us. Even when they are exposed to our limited view, we never get to see the whole picture.
The fragmentation and theft of estates that had occurred in areas of Scandinavian control, the collapse of episcopal and minster administration and the inability of the southern kings to access those lines of patronage meant that in East Mercia and Lindsey, in East
Anglia and Northumbria, even if the king’s writ ran, his ability to manipulate landholdings to buy favour and support was limited in the extreme. Those networks would have to be built from scratch, accumulated through military victory or bought with hard cash.∆∆ Two grants of Eadweard, confirmed by Æðelstan, show that the West Saxon kings were active in the business of acquiring and strategically deploying estates in key areas along and across the border with Danish Mercia.*** Now, those techniques needed to be implemented on a vastly grander scale, over a much longer period.
How, then, was Æðelstan to bring the North into the orbit of an expanded Wessex? The Worcester version of the Chronicle offers one clue in its extended entry for 926, properly 927:
He brought into submission all the kings in this island: first Hywel, king of the West Welsh, and Constantín, king of Scots, and Owain, king of Gwent††† and Ealdred Eadulfing from Bamburgh. They established a covenant of peace with pledges and oaths at a place called Eamont Bridge on 12 July: they forbade all idolatrous practices, and then separated in accord.33
The historian is wisely sceptical of such one-sided accounts, especially when there is no surviving record from any of the other participants. But the Worcester Chronicle embeds a more northern perspective than the Winchester prototype, which is absolutely silent in these years; and in any case the location and form of these ceremonial ‘submissions’ is telling.‡‡‡ Eamont Bridge can be identified: just south of Penrith on a narrow spur of land between two rivers, the Eamont and Lowther. Roman roads run north to south and east from here (including the A66 trans-Pennine route towards Stainmore). The Roman fortress and later medieval castle of Brocavum, or Brougham, occupies a strategically important site close by at the rivers’ confluence and, just to the west, an impressive henge monument speaks of a landscape steeped in symbols of earthly and unearthly power. More importantly, Eamont Bridge lay in an area that had once formed part of the British kingdom of Rheged and had fallen under Northumbrian control by the end of the sixth century. That control had lasted perhaps 100 years; in Æðelstan’s time it seems as though the region was disputed between the kings of York and Strathclyde, with the possible territories of Dublin Norse abutting it to the south. Æðelstan’s confidence and military capability was such that he was able to conduct peace negotiations on his antagonists’ patch or, at least, on their borders.
This was a landscape of pastoralists living in widely dispersed settlements with nothing like a burh for several days’ travel in any direction. Carlisle may have retained some minster functions and perhaps a harbour; a monastery existed just to the west of Penrith at Dacre, where four enigmatic, distinctly Anglo-Scandinavian stone bears guard the compass points of the church; and contemporary sculpture has been retrieved from Penrith itself. This was by no means an empty landscape; but so far as royal power was concerned it may have constituted neutral territory: a debatable land. This was a meeting of wary neighbours, not a surrender, and it follows an established pattern of siting what, these days, would be called political summits on frontiers.34
The oaths and pledges recorded in the Chronicle must have been supplemented by the exchange of royal, or at least noble, hostages as guarantors of that peace. Æðelstan will have swelled the coffers of his treasure chests with tribute; and with fresh cash assets he was in a better position to purchase rights to land beyond his homeland. The treaty signed at Eamont looks like a repeat of the ‘status quo’ agreement which had pertained under Eadweard from 920, reinforced by the dynastic marriage between Æðelstan’s only full sister and Sigtryggr. But Æðelstan’s hand had been considerably strengthened by Sigtrygg’s death and by the timely departure of Guðroðr to Dublin.
The significance of the renunciation by all participants of idolatrous practices, apparently aimed at those with Norse affiliations, is unclear. No Scandinavian king was present, so far as the Chronicle was concerned, so one suspects the presence of a number of jarls with authority over parts of the kingdom of York or of East Mercia, acting as local regents to Æðelstan’s undeniable overlordship.
A poet, seemingly present at the event and acting in semi-official capacity as a correspondent embedded within the king’s entourage, has left some lines of verse for historians to chew on. The Carta dirige gressus, as it is known from its first line, survives in two manuscripts. One, curiously, is an eighth-century gospel book, probably produced at Lindisfarne, which was in the possession of the St Cuthbert community at Chester le Street in the tenth century.35 The poem was copied on to the lower margin of a page some time in the late tenth or early eleventh century. That a scribe at Chester le Street was interested in composing or copying a laudatory poem concerning Æðelstan is not surprising.§§§ The verses, in six stanzas, have been convincingly dated to the immediate aftermath of the Eamont peace treaty by Michael Lapidge, the scholar of medieval Latin literature who has made a special study of poetry in the reign of Æðelstan.
Carta, dirige gressus
per maria navigans
tellurisque spacium
ad regis palacium.
Letter, direct your steps
Sailing across the seas
And an expanse of land
To the king’s burh.36
The poem directs itself to the queen, the prince, distinguished ealdormen and arms-bearing thegns ‘whom he now rules with this Saxonia### [now] made whole∫∫∫ [perfecta]: King Æðelstan lives glorious through his deeds’. The poet, who helpfully records his own name, Peter, in the last stanza, goes on to versify the death of Sigtryggr and the arrival of Constantín, eager to display his loyalty to the king, securely placing the poem in the context of the events of 927. He ends with a prayer that the king might live well and long through the Saviour’s grace. Michael Lapidge argues that the poem acted as a sort of headline dispatch to the court at home, a Neville Chamberlain-like brandishing of a treaty. He also argues that the court in question must be Winchester; but, given the hostility of that burh and its minster to Æðelstan’s regime, I wonder if Gloucester was its intended destination: a royal possession very much more closely affiliated to the king and his interests.
One minor problem concerns the identity of the queen, one of the poet’s addressees. Æðelstan, conspicuously, had not married and would not marry or produce any children, legitimate or otherwise. ΩΩΩ The queen concerned must, I think, be the mother of the prince addressed in the same line: that is to say, Eadweard’s third wife Eadgifu, whose sons Eadmund and Eadred would succeed their half-brother, Æðelstan, in due course and who herself died after 966.≈≈≈ The shadowy influence of that interesting woman surfaces from time to time in the middle of the tenth century, a reminder that political power could be exercised by means more subtle than the king’s army or even that of the poet’s hand.
If Æðelstan could not yet unify all the peoples of the island under his governance he could at least use the time-worn tools of the propagandist’s quill to spread the message that all was well in Saxonia under his God-given rule. By 930 the king’s moneyers, whose message penetrated deeper and more widely than those of the versifier, were portraying him wearing a crown and styled REX TOTIUS BRITANNIÆ.
Æðelstan’s pretensions to supremacy over the whole island of Britain, and apparent desire to take his place on the list of Bretwaldas, those who had anciently wielded imperium over the whole island of Britain, feed into a well-rehearsed narrative of English unification and supremacy, etched onto the dies of his coinage and inscribed in the lists of those who witnessed his laws and gifts. It is superbly ironic that of all the sources available to us for his reign, the coins and charters should also most convincingly undermine those claims.
* See map, p. 322
† See above, p. 124.
‡ It is just possible that Eardwulf and Eadwulf are the same person, i.e. the father of Ældred.
§ I am particularly grateful to fellow members of the Bernician Studies Group for a discussion of the three relevant passages in the HSC: 22–24.
∫ The seizure of the property of a debtor.
Ω II Eadweard; the date range is suggested by Simon Keynes. Keynes 2001, 58. The code contains just eight clauses; an adjunct to the codes promulgated by earlier West Saxon kings rather than a replacement.
≈ Mersey is ‘boundary river’ in Old English.
∂ Traditionally the burh and bridge have been placed at the well-known Trent Bridge crossing. Archaeologist Jeremy Haslam has proposed a site further to the west at Wilford, partly protected by a broad meander of the river and close to a settlement focused on St Wilfred’s church; Haslam 1987.
π Also known as the church of the Culdees, possibly ‘Companions of God’, an extreme ascetic, communal movement seeming to originate in Ireland. Woolf 2007, 314.
∆ A long-awaited modern edition with an English translation, by the eminent Durham historian David Rollason, is to be published shortly. The Historia Regum was compiled at Durham in the twelfth century but contains a miscellany of earlier material, including otherwise unknown regional annals.
** Sometimes associated with St Edith of Polesworth.
†† She witnessed a charter of that year (S363) as coniunx regis.
‡‡ The embassy is dated to 926, the second year of Æðelstan’s reign, by Flodoard of Rheims. Foot 2011, 47.
§§ See below, Chapter 10.
## William of Malmesbury’s testimony is supported by a grant of privileges from the new king to Æðelred’s and Æðelflæd’s minster, St Oswald’s in Gloucester, in the year of his succession. Foot 2011, 34.
