Aelfred's Britain

by Adams, Max;

  It is as if the king had swallowed the Book of Revelation whole and hybridized the Christian apocalypse with the Ragnarök of the Edda; that may, indeed, have been his intention. Its relevance to a grant of land might seem tangential. The main body of the text confirms that Æðelstan had purchased ‘with no little money of my own’∂ the substantial territory of Amounderness, ‘without the hateful yoke of servitude [i.e. it was freehold, or ‘booked’ land], with meadows, pastures, woods streams and all conveniences’, and gifted it in perpetuity to Almighty God and the Apostle Peter: in other words, to the minster church at York under its archbishop, Wulfstan (931–954/6). The preamble, I think, enshrines Æðelstan’s desire, as a Christian king, to impose order and rightfulness onto the actual fabric of his dominions, ensuring that their landed wealth be devoted to God, not to the impious and undeserving secular lords who had formerly possessed it.

  Dire imprecations were aimed at anyone who would dare to challenge the king’s will or ‘infringe this little document’. Before the signatures of the fifty-eight witnesses, there is a description of the bounds of the Amounderness estate. Its northern edge was defined by the channel of the tiny River Cocker, rising a few miles south-east of Lancaster and falling into the River Lune close to the sea. From the source of the Cocker the boundary ran more or less straight to the east as far as ‘another spring which is called in Saxon Dunshop’. From this riverlet, now Dunsop, whose twin sources lie high up on the moors of the Forest of Bowland east of Lancaster, the boundary ran due south to the River Hodder at Dunsop Bridge, then downstream to its confluence with the River Ribble and thence to the sea. From the small town of Whalley, north-east of Blackburn, river and boundary alike follow the line of the Roman road as far as Preston, and the sea route to Ireland and Man. Along the way it passes the spot where the celebrated Cuerdale hoard was hidden in about 905.

  The Amounderness of the tenth century was a large tract of land incorporating substantial parts of modern Lancashire. Its name probably derives from the Old Norse personal name Agmundr.12 Matthew Townend, a historian of Viking Age York, notes the presence of a hold bearing the name Agmundr at the Battle of Tettenhall in 910.13 He also makes a connection with Holderness, a similar-sized territory on the east coast whose name means ‘headland of the hold’. In northern Northumbria such territorial units were known as shires, the large territories centred on a royal vill and traditionally comprising twelve townships from which renders of goods and services, later rents, were gathered centrally for consumption by its lord. Townend suggests that these shire-sized territories were the sorts of lands that might be given by the kings of the Host to his holds or hölðar, senior military followers one rank below the jarls or duces of the charters; and this agrees with the size and strategic nature of the Cuthbert lands given by Rögnvaldr to his powerful warrior, the potens miles Onlafbald, after 918.π It is possible that in the early tenth century, before Æðelstan purchased it, Amounderness owed its renders not to any political centre on the Insular mainland, but to a lord on Man, or in Dublin.

  In the late seventh century the ultra-orthodox Bishop Wilfrid had acquired for his monastery at Ripon the lands of former British churches west of the Pennines whose clergy had supposedly deserted or fled them. Of these estates, Dent in Cumbria and land ‘around Ribble’ belong in the area bounded by the Amounderness grant.14 What we might be seeing in Æðelstan’s purchase and gift is evidence of a long-standing claim to this territory by the church establishment at York; of its being bought out of Norse lordship and ‘returned’ to its rightful owner. Implicitly, Æðelstan was purchasing the loyalty of Northumbria’s institutional church and seeking its approval for his planned campaign in the North.

  Whether Amounderness was actually worth very much in cash terms is quite another matter. Academic opinion is in any case divided on just how ‘Scandinavian’ the region was in the tenth century. There are, it is true, substantial numbers of Norse place names in western Lancashire and coastal Cumbria, which have often been associated with Ingimundr’s invasion and settlement following the expulsion from Dublin in 902. Most recently, though, archaeologist and Early Medieval historian Nick Higham has sought to cast doubt on the idea of a mass migration15 and paints instead a portrait of mixed or patchwork communities with distinct and complex regional affinities, rather than a single people identifying themselves as either ‘English’ or ‘Norse’. It must be significant that Amounderness lay some 50 miles (80 km) south of Eamont, the location of Æðelstan’s treaty of submission in 927, and that its southern boundary formed a principal route between Dublin, Man and York. The transfer to the Northumbrian church of such an important estate, fringing the Irish Sea and within the borders of the king’s extended dominion, looks like an astute political move.

  The link with Ripon might be reinforced by a charter of Æðelstan purporting to confirm the liberties and customs of that foundation;16 but most commentators regard it as a later forgery. It is entirely possible that the court did visit Ripon on its way north: the minster with its famous crypt was certainly standing in the 930s.∆ That Æðelstan had further business with the Northumbrian church cannot be doubted, however:

  While king Æðelstan was leading a great army from the south to the northern region, taking it to Scotland, he made a diversion to the church of St Cuthbert and gave royal gifts to him, and then composed this signed testament and placed it at Cuthbert’s head.17

  The charter recording gifts of land and fabulous treasures to the community at Chester le Street is preserved in the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto. It lists, among sundry other items, a chasuble and alb (both priestly vestments), a thurible or censer, three gospel books, a Life of St Cuthbert, a stole with maniple, chalice and paten, a ‘royal headdress woven with gold’, a cross and two silver candelabra, cups, tapestries, horns of gold and silver, bells, banners, a lance** and two golden armlets. The king ‘also filled the aforementioned cups with best coin, and at his order his whole army offered Cuthbert 1200 shillings’.18 In addition, he gave to St Cuthbert an estate of twelve vills (an entire coastal shire in Early Medieval terms) at Bishop Wearmouth, on the south side of the Wear in what is now Sunderland.

  The remarkable survival of the Historia is matched by the preservation of some of these splendid gifts. One of the gospel books, which contained an inscription matching the text of the charter, survived until its virtually complete destruction in the disastrous Cotton Library fire of 1731. It bore a portrait of both king and saint before a church, the king with an open book in his hand, perhaps in an act of presentation. Its loss would be all the more lamentable were it not for the fact that the Life of St Cuthbert recorded in the list of Æðelstan’s gifts seems still to exist. It belongs in the Parker Library, the rare books and manuscripts collection of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, listed as MS 183 (see p. 355). Folio 1, verso, shows a slightly different version of this same image: the king, three-point crown on his bowed head, presents the tonsured saint with a gospel book on the steps of his church at Chester le Street. A thick border is richly decorated with plant scrolls in a style linked to the court at Winchester. That same style is evident on the stole and maniple which also survive, almost miraculously, in the collections at Durham Cathedral, having spent most of the last thousand years with the saint’s relics.†† Those unique examples of Anglo-Saxon embroidery are the same items made by or under the supervision of Ælfflæd (mother of the unfortunate æthelings Ælfweard and Eadwine) during the reign of Eadweard.‡‡

  The meeting between King Æðelstan and St Cuthbert (in the terrestrial guise of Bishop Wigred, incumbent of the Lindisfarne see) at Chester le Street during the high summer of 934 enacted a ceremony of mutual legitimization. The king gave the saint the promise of his protection, wonderful treasures, cash and lands suitable to the needs of a great monastic house. St Cuthbert, in return, gave his blessing and backing to the king’s military campaign and to his claim to wield imperium over all Britain (like the first royal patron of Lindisfar
ne, and Mercian cult hero, King Oswald). By the well-understood rules of such transactions the relationship between the Chester le Street community and the royal house of the West Saxons was also back-dated.

  Æðelstan’s magnificent patronage of the Bernician saint during the 930s surely lies behind ‘earlier’ entries in the Historia in which St Cuthbert appeared to the isolated and desperate Ælfred in the dismal marshes of Athelney at a time of extreme distress.§§ Æðelstan’s visit was not, then, meant to be seen as opportunistic but as the fulfilment of a visionary meeting between his grandfather and the saint. Whether the fond remembrance of that episode would have survived military defeat at the hands of Constantín of Alba is another matter.

  The king’s Mercian progress, his grant to the archbishop, his visit to Chester le Street and the nature of the gifts themselves require some explanation. Why choose Nottingham as the venue for a grant of Cumbrian land to York? Why ply St Cuthbert’s church with what looks like the contents of a clearance sale, albeit an extravagant one? And how did the king acquire a coastal estate on the banks of the River Wear in the first place? One detects the operation of careful diplomacy.

  We know, from the witness list appended to the Nottingham charter of 7 June 934, that both Archbishop Wulfstan of York and Bishop Wigred of Chester le Street were present.19 Here was the perfect opportunity to negotiate terms in advance of the visit: to ensure a peaceful reception, to sound out the archbishop’s position regarding the proposed campaign; to seek his advice on the niceties of the Northern political situation. The Amounderness grant might be seen as his brokerage fee. Instead of seeing the Cuthbert gifts as a random collection of baubles and the odd patch of land, we might better regard them as a sort of wish-list, provided by the community to indicate the sorts of gifts that would be acceptable to the saint in return for endorsing the king’s Alban expedition. The very specific nature of some of the gifts is telling: at the end of MS 183 is a list of kitchen utensils and what looks like part of a dinner service.

  Æðelstan must either have purchased the estate of Bishop Wearmouth from its current Norse lord (it had been given by Rögnvaldr to Onlafbald after 918), or was merely confirming rights to the estate that had lapsed with time. These were his means of extending those thin northern lines of patronage.## His army’s donation to Cuthbert of 60 pounds of silver (1200 shillings) was, significantly, matched by an identical later gift from King Eadmund’s army: evidently 60 pounds was the going rate for blessing an entire host on its way to do battle. It is tempting to think of it as a shilling per warrior—if so, it would be useful evidence for the size of a tenth-century army.

  The campaign was duly successful, reinforcing the pact between the Æðulfings and St Cuthbert. The Chronicle (all versions are identical here) records merely that Æðelstan invaded Alba with a land and naval force and that he harried much of the country. There is additional detail in the pages of the Historia Regum, drawing on a more regional tradition. Here we are told that Æðelstan’s land army laid Alba waste as far as Dunottar (the great coastal fortress just south of Stonehaven, which had been attacked by Norse raiders in 900 and where Constantín’s immediate predecessor had been killed) and the mountains of Fortriu; and that his fleet raided as far as Caithness in the extreme north-east.20

  Much has been written about the implications of this campaign for understanding Æðelstan’s military capabilities. So little is known of late Anglo-Saxon fleets that it is difficult to draw very much from the notice of a raid along the east coast of Scotland, except that these would appear to be hostile and dangerous waters, requiring skilled pilotage and knowledge of safe anchorages (such as Portmahomack). It is pointless to speculate where the fleet was based. It is equally difficult to know how often, if at all, the land army was forced to fight in the open against a significant military force, or whether Constantín was content to stand off and limit the damage to raiding. Æðelstan, for his part, may have been satisfied to demonstrate that, like his illustrious seventh century Northumbrian predecessors Æðelfrið, Oswald and Oswiu (and, for that matter, the Roman emperors), he could claim imperium over all the lands of Britain. There can be no doubt that the king of Alba submitted to him, despite the shortness of the campaign. The whole enterprise cannot have lasted much more than a month: on 13 September the king, on his way south again, issued a charter at Buckingham; this time Constantín subregulus headed the list of witnesses, while the Welsh kings’ names were not recorded.21 Constantín was still in attendance at the king’s assemblies in the first part of 935, unrecorded by the diplomatically silent Chronicle of the Kings of Alba. An abridged copy of a lost charter records his presence at what must have been a grand occasion ‘in civitate a Romanis olim constructa quæ Cirnecester dicitur’:

  In the city at one time built by the Romans that is called Cirencester has been recorded by the whole class of nobles rejoicing under the arms of royal generosity—I, Æthelstan, endowed with the rank of extraordinary prerogative, king, etc.—I, Constantine, sub-king. I, Eogan mac Domnaill, sub-king. I, Hywel Dda ap Cadell, sub-king. I, Idwal Foel ab Anarawd, sub-king. I, Morgan ab Owain, sub-king. I, Ælfwine, bishop.22

  47. THE ROMAN AMPHITHEATRE at Cirencester: an imperial venue to impress Æðelstan’s royal guests.

  Cirencester is a throwback to the geography of Ælfred’s campaigns against the mycel here in the 870s, when Guðrum’s beaten army retired there before embarking on its final journey into East Anglia. Lying a few miles north-west of Cricklade, the burh sited at the highest navigable point on the Thames and the historic boundary between Mercia and Wessex, the Roman town of Cirencester (Corinium Dobunnorum, civitas capital of the Dobunni ) was a key royal estate in the lands of the Hwicce, enjoying the fruits of a productive landscape and well connected to all parts.∫∫ Its grand amphitheatre, which still stands on the outskirts of the town, may still have been thought of as a suitable venue for a royal council, endowed with imperial associations that could hardly have been lost on a king bearing such an illustrious name as Constantín. The magnificent minster church here, rebuilt in the early ninth century, is known primarily from excavation; it seems to have matched basilicas at Brixworth and Wareham for grandeur and what John Blair calls Roman monumentality.23 All three would have made suitable settings for royal or ecclesiastical councils.

  The apparent harmony of these occasions masks serious tensions. The sub-kings required to attend Æðelstan were isolated from whatever political developments their absence was fomenting back home. Worse, perhaps, was the large quantity of tribute that they had to raise annually for their overlord. William of Malmesbury seems to have had access to a now-lost source when he records that, in the aftermath of the Peace of Eamont in 927, Æðelstan forced the Welsh kings to meet him at the burh of Hereford, at the northern edge of the region inhabited by the Dunsæte. Here, he imposed on them an annual tribute of 20 lbs of gold (9 kg), 300 lbs (136 kg) of silver, 25,000 oxen, ‘besides as many dogs as he should choose’.24

  Some of those kings’ constituents might have wondered if they would have been better off suffering the periodic depredations of Norse raiders. To some, the relationship of their kings with Æðelstan went beyond expedient tribute; amounted, in fact, to supine capitulation to the old enemy. An extraordinary, bitter expression of Welsh resentment survives in a 199-line poem called Armes Prydein Fawr: the Prophecy of Britain. The dating of the poem is not certain, but some time in the second quarter of the tenth century during the reign of Æðelstan would suit its themes and message very well.25

  The muse foretells that the day will come

  When the men of Wessex meet for counsel

  In one chorus, with one counsel, and England will burn.26

  The targets of the prophecy’s ire are the ‘high king’ and his officers, particularly those at Cirencester (meiryon Kaer Geri): ‘the taxes that they try to raise are a great source of trouble’.27 The high king is likely to be the man whose coins proclaimed him Rex Totius Britanniae; but the title also
invokes the cursed memory of a more ancient figure, Vortigern (the name carries the same meaning in Brittonic) the British tyrant who rashly lost Thanet in the middle of the fifth century when Hengest and Horsa, legendary Saxon warlords, acquired it ‘by mendacious guile’.28 Since then, the ignoble, arrogant progress of the English, the Lloegr,ΩΩ has been inexorable: the ‘slaves from Thanet are our rulers’,29 and the present subreguli of the Welsh are castigated for their timidity.

  The poet predicts a war in which the free Welsh, ‘excellent men in the tumult of battle, wild and steadfast, quick under pressure, stubborn in defence... will drive the foreigners as far as Caer Wair’.30 The war will be won when the Welsh forge an alliance with the Men of Dublin, the Irish of Ireland, Anglesey and Pictland, the Men of Cornwall and Strathclyde. In the vision of the poet, English and Welsh meet on the banks of the River Wye with enormous armies. There will be ‘cry after cry on the shining water’, with banners discarded and the English falling like ‘wild cat’s fodder’.31 The high king’s treacherous tax gatherers will wallow in their own blood, fleeing through the forest before they are banished forever from the island of Britain. The Cymri will have their Day of Judgement. In modern terms, the Armes Prydein Fawr is a patriotic call to arms, or the nationalist manifesto of a liberation movement. Just how much traction it achieved cannot now be measured.

  Just as the West Saxons and Mercians had appropriated the battle-saints of the Northumbrians, Cuthbert and Oswald, to drive forward their political and military ambitions, so the Welsh invoked St David and his martial lieutenants Cynan and Cadwaladr to carry them to victory. St David’s relics lay in the tiny city that bears his name in the extreme west of Wales in Dyfed, on the Pembrokeshire coast north of St Bride’s bay. In the early tenth century these were the lands ruled by Hywel ap Cadell, the king later blessed with the nickname Dda, ‘the Good’. Hywel was a grandson of Rhodri Mawr, the king of Gwynedd (reigned c. 844–878) whose dynasty had probably crossed from Man earlier in the ninth century. Famous for notable battles against Viking war bands and for having been slain by King Ceolwulf II of Mercia, Rhodri consolidated Venedotian power over much of north and central Wales. On his death he left the rule of Gwynedd to his son Anarawd, who was succeeded by Idwal Foel (‘the bald’). Rhodri’s son Cadell inherited Seisyllwg, anciently Ceredigion, and divided it between his sons Hywel and Clydog. On Clydog’s death in about 92032 Hywel became sole ruler of both Seisyllwg and Dyfed, the latter acquired by marriage, and this new polity became known as Deheubarth: the ‘Right-hand part’ (that is, the south, looking from an Irish Sea perspective). By 930 Hywel seems to have extended his control to include Brycheiniog; he and Idwal had submitted to Eadweard and he had made an unlikely pilgrimage to Rome in 928.