Aelfred's Britain

by Adams, Max;

  Unlike coins and pottery, large stone sculpture tends to remain in the place where it was first installed: the survival of many hundreds of crosses, hogbacks, memorials and other fragments allows us to map the presence, if not the motives, of those who commissioned them. Across what are now the counties of Durham, Yorkshire and Lancashire wealthy tenth-century patrons (of whatever ethnic background) chose to invest in an art form that committed them to a Christian future, to a sense of belonging and community. But their ideologies and cultural sensitivities were neither conservative nor isolated from the wider Atlantic world; their imaginative repertoire was eclectic.

  From the simple plaiting of the Borre tradition,††† through the intertwined beasts of the Jellinge style, all rotating hips and elongated, writhing limbs; through its evolution towards the Mammen style and then to its ultimate expression in the floral exuberance of Ringerike ornament, Christian and non-Christian Anglo-Scandinavian art is a fluid correspondent between peoples, ideologies and cultural expressions.

  A sense of unresolved spiritual tension is nevertheless played out in the wider landscape. Some place names seem to reflect a revival of paganism in the North. Roseberry Topping, the striking eminence that overlooks the Tees Valley from the edge of the North York Moors, was once Othenesberg—Oðin’s hill; places incorporating the element haugr—Old Norse ‘mound’, as in pagan burial mound, are relatively common in Yorkshire, as at Kilgram Grange (Kelgrimhou: Kelfgrím’s mound) and Ulshaw Bridge (Ulveshowe: Úlf’s mound).44 It is also true that many pre-conquest churches did not survive the Viking Age. Some of them, like Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Monkwearmouth, were refounded in the tenth or eleventh centuries while others, like Ripon, Beverley and York itself, show evidence of continuity despite records of attack and pillage or the dumb witness of neglect. Ironically, the presence of tenth-century sculpture at church sites where seventh- to eighth-century carving is also present is considered one of the most secure markers for continuity of worship and institution through the first Viking Age.

  *

  Æðelstan’s motives for visiting York, and his experience there, must be set against a fluid and responsive background, full of cultural and political risks and opportunities. If, in that Northern summer of 936, his intelligence sources were alert to noises offstage in Ireland and the Irish Sea, he might also have sensed a new or perhaps recycled threat to his northern imperium.

  By 935 Óláfr Guðrøðsson, son of the would-be conqueror of York in 927 who had died the previous year, was attracting the notice of the Ulster annalist, who recorded that he plundered the royal crannog on Lough Gabhair in Meath. In 936 the same Annal records the shocking news that the monastic church at Clonmacnoise had been plundered by ‘the foreigners of Áth Cliath’—that is, the Dublin Vikings, probably under Óláf’s leadership.

  Æðelstan had few friends in the North. Kings in Cumbria and Alba might sense, in the bellicose Óláfr’s ambitions, a chance to throw off the yoke of his overlordship. If Æðelstan contemplated the possibility that Óláfr might compete for the throne of Northumbria, and that a number of his tributary kings might be tempted to join a new anti-West Saxon alliance, he was being no more than prescient.

  * Among the more extreme punishments are stoning, burning, throwing off a cliff, drowning and the cutting off of hands. A later ordinance of Æðelstan declared a general amnesty. III Æðelstan and IV Æðelstan. Attenborough 1922, 143–51.

  † Days of prayer and fasting to celebrate the Ascension in the Christian calendar.

  ‡ An annual cash render owed to the Holy See; King Offa seems to have initiated the practice. King Æðelwulf willed 300 mancuses (each worth 30 shillings) to be sent to Rome annually after his death. Observance of the practice seems to have been intermittent.

  § In Old Norse: Urm, Guðþormr, Hávarðr, Gunnarr, Ðorrøðr, Haddr and Skúli. S416: Stenton 1971, 351. Of these, Gunnarr, Urm and Skúli were still attesting charters in 949, under King Eadred: S 552a. Urm (see below, p. 404). Jarl Urm’s last charter attestation took place as late as 958/9: S679 during the reign of Eadgar.

  # King Ælfred’s daughter Ælfthryth was Adelof’s mother; his father was Baldwin II of Flanders.

  ∫ One of these sons may have been fostered at Æðelstan’s court. See below p. 377.

  Ω Hadder and Scule had previously witnessed the 931 charter at Lifton (S416).

  ≈ The scribe ‘Æðelstan A’ must, it seems, represent the flowering of Ælfred’s programme to revive literacy and improve the quality of ecclesiastical Latinity. If so, its success is self-evident.

  ∂ A version of the grant held at York includes the telling phrase ‘from the pagans’. EHD 104: Whitelock 1979, 549n.

  π In Norðleoda laga, The law of the North People, a tract from the beginning of the following century, the wergild, or head-price, of the hold equates to that of the king’s high-reeve, half that of a bishop or ealdorman and twice that of a thegn. EHD 51: Whitelock 1979, 469.

  ∆ It was destroyed twelve years later. See below, Chapter 12.

  ** It is possible that this was the lance with which Æðelstan had been presented by Adelolf, on behalf of Hugh the Great, in the great embassy of 926 at which Hugh had acquired Eadweard’s daughter and Æðelstan’s sister, Eadhild. It was said to be the lance with which a Roman soldier (St Longinus) had pierced the side of Christ: one of the most precious relics in Christendom. No historian takes seriously the idea that this was actually a first-century lance; but the significance of the gift would not have been lost on any of the participants.

  †† David Rollason shows that the manuscript cannot have been written as early as 934 and might, therefore, have been given to the community at Chester le Street in 937 on Æðelstan’s subsequent northern campaign (see below, Chapter 11); equally, he might have brought it north in 936 if, as seems likely, he was at York in that year. But he also allows the possibility that the manuscript was no gift to Cuthbert, but a possession of the king’s. Rollason 1989b.

  ‡‡ See above, Chapter 9.

  §§ See above, Chapter 4, pp. 145–6.

  ## I am, once again, grateful to the members of the Bernician Studies Group for insightful discussions on the Æðelstan–Cuthbert charter.

  ∫∫ Cirencester is the meeting point of the Fosse Way, Akemennestraete and Ermine Street.

  ΩΩ Lloegr is a term of unknown derivation, but seems always to have been the name applied, perhaps pejoratively, to the English by the Cymri. Elsewhere in the poem, the West Saxons (Iwys or Gewisse) are more specifically identified as the enemy.

  ≈≈ Known as the Bossall/Flaxton hoard. The numismatist Michael Dolley believed that some elements of this hoard were dispersed, so it may originally have been even more substantial. He describes a silver armlet, weighing 2.15 oz (61 g), as of ‘Viking type’. It carries a distinct stamped trefoil decoration. Dolley 1955.

  ∂∂ A numismatic term denoting all the coins in a particular find spot.

  ππ Royal townships revealed by excavation. Adams 2013, 221–5; Adams 2016, 226ff. And for Cheddar see above, p. 140, and below, p. 405.

  ∆∆ Compare the Viking Age travel map of the ninth century (p. 50) to that of the early tenth (p. 281), which shows the defence in depth of the burghal system.

  *** A depiction of a naked female with legs apart, the hands emphasizing the genitals. Examples are found in medieval churches in Britain and Ireland.

  ††† These styles, named after sites in Denmark where examples were first identified, appear on both stone sculpture and metalwork, an evolving set of artistic and cultural fashions that took on a new life in the British Isles as they hybridized with indigenous styles.

  A HOUSE OF CARDS

  BATTLE OF BRUNANBURH— EGIL SKALLAGRÍMSSON—COPS AND ROBBERS—MIRACLE AT CHEDDAR—ÓLÁFR GUÐRØÐSSON—DANISH MERCIA—THE LORD OF GOLTHO—HYWEL DDA—EADMUND

  11

  In the litany of great Early Medieval battles several stand out: Hastings in 1066, Edington in 878 and Heaven
field in 634, each irrevocably altering the course of British history. Stamford Bridge in 1066, Maldon in 991 and Catraeth in about 590 are conspicuous for the magnificence of their poetic or annalistic narratives of martial glory and tragic mortality. Brunanburh, in 937, has its poets too. It was remembered long after the event for a great slaughter of its antagonists and for the glorious victory won there by King Æðelstan. Historians have variously argued that it cemented a process of English unification or that its significance is overstated; but much more ink has been spilled in the cause of elucidating its geography. More than thirty possible sites have been suggested, ranging from Dumfriesshire to Devon.

  There can be no doubt that a major battle was fought on the British mainland in 937 and that its combatants included the West Saxon king, his sixteen-year-old half-brother Eadmund, King Constantín of Alba, King Owain of Cumbria/Strathclyde and Óláfr Guðrøðsson, the Dublin Norse warlord. One minor combatant, possibly apocryphal, whose contribution has been preserved in a much later Icelandic saga, can be named as the Norwegian poet-adventurer Egil Skallagrímsson.

  48. A CARVING from All Saints’ church, Brixworth, Northamptonshire: Christian eagle or Norse raven?

  The closest contemporary records provide only very brief, if convincing details. The Annals of Ulster recorded that:

  A great, lamentable and horrible battle was cruelly fought between the Saxons and the Norsemen, in which several thousands of Norsemen, who are uncounted, fell, but their king, Amlaíb, [Óláfr] escaped with a few followers. A large number of Saxons fell on the other side, but Athelstan, king of the Saxons, enjoyed a great victory.1

  The Historia Regum, a set of Northern annals embedded in a work attributed to Symeon of Durham, records under the same year that ‘King Athelstan fought at Wendun and put to flight King Olaf with 615 ships, and also Constantine, king of the Scots, and the king of the Cumbrians, with all their host’.2

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 937 for once provides fulsome detail, in a poetic interpolation of seventy-three split lines which begins:

  Her Æðelstan cyning,

  eorla dryhten,

  beorna beahgifa,

  7 his broþor eac,

  Eadmund æðeling,

  ealdorlangne tir

  geslogon æt sæcce

  sweorda ecgum

  ymbe Brunnanburh...

  In this year King Æðelstan, lord of nobles, dispenser of treasure to men, and his brother also, Eadmund atheling, won by the sword’s edge undying glory in battle around Brunnanburh.3

  The account of the fighting is mostly conventional. The armies of Wessex and Mercia, of Eadweard’s sons, ‘clove the shield-wall, hewed the linden-wood shields with hammered swords’. Rout followed battle; five young kings lay dead on the field, along with seven of Óláf’s jarls. The Norse chief was put to flight, ‘driven perforce to the prow of his ship with a small company’.

  The king of Alba fled north, shorn of his kinsmen; his son and friends dead. The remnants of the Norse fleet, seemingly isolated from their leader:

  Put out in their studded ships onto Dinges mere to make for Dublin across the deep water, back to Ireland humbled at heart... They left behind them the dusky-coated one, the black raven with its horned beak, to share the corpses, and the dun-coated, white-tailed eagle, the greedy war-hawk, to enjoy the carrion, and that grey beast, the wolf of the forest.4

  This is a grand tale of ambition, ignominy, death and glory. But what can we credibly say about Brunanburh as an engagement? The number of ships in the Norse fleet, recorded in the Historia Regum as 615 , is not conventional* and might represent a contemporary, if exaggerated, estimate. Such numbers are hard to interpret; they would have been hard to count even for an eye-witness. Supposing the figure to be based in reality, but exaggerated, and the fleet to have included a wide range of seagoing vessels of various sizes, some carrying baggage, an average of twenty warriors per vessel in 400 ships might be reasonable. That constitutes a fighting force of some 8,000 men, a very large army by Early Medieval standards. Add those of Óláf’s northern allies and it is possible that 10–12,000 men were able to take the field against the southern king. They still lost. Size isn’t everything, even in warfare. The command structures and communications required to mobilize what were, essentially, independent war bands and levies, are unlikely to have been very sophisticated, even supposing that all the allied forces succeeded in meeting at the right time and place.

  Infuriatingly, Æðelweard, the late tenth-century court historian, who probably had better access than most to eye-witness accounts and who tells us that the battle’s fame was great even in his own day, gives no details of its progress. And in the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba it is recorded tersely as a battle at Dún Brunde, in which the son of Constantín was killed.5

  One other possible early account seems to have been preserved in another poem, which William of Malmesbury claimed to have found in a ‘very old book’ from which he took several excerpts for his life of Æðelstan in the Gesta Regum Anglorum.6 William adds significant information: that the battle was preceded by ‘continuous ravages, driving out the people, setting fire to the fields’. Only ‘at length [did] the complaining rumour [rouse] the king, not to let himself be thus branded that his arms gave way before the barbarian axe’.

  The last secular narrative source to add anything useful to these accounts is that commonly attributed to Florence of Worcester,† writing in the twelfth century but possibly with access to material now lost, who says that the Norse fleet arrived in Britain by way of the River Humber.7

  Debate over the background to the battle has understandably become intertwined with speculation over its location, but there is little doubt that its inspiration lay across the Irish Sea. None of the evidence suggests that Æðelstan initiated the conflict. Despite his later martial reputation, and his two expeditions to the northern parts of Britain in 927 and 934, he was the least warlike of his recent predecessors as kings of Wessex. His interests lay elsewhere: in law-making, in his collections of precious relics and in political intervention in Francia. Brunanburh is the only recorded set-piece battlefield conflict in his fifteen-year reign.

  Óláfr Guðrøðsson was, it seems, spoiling for a fight; in the same summer he had already captured the Norse king of Limerick, his namesake Óláfr Cenncairech, ‘Scabby-head’, during a fleet action on Lough Ree.8 He may now have entered into alliance with Constantín and seems to have nursed designs on his father’s kingdom in Northumbria: his objective must have been the recapture of York. The historian of Viking kingship, Clare Downham, notes a story later recorded by John of Worcester, that Óláfr married a daughter of Constantín who, tellingly, had a grandson of the same name.9

  The king of Alba, the ‘hoary-haired’‡ and now quite elderly Constantín, may have harboured bitter resentment over his humiliating treatment at Æðelstan’s hands; the same might apply to Owain of Cumbria/Strathclyde. A northern and Norse alliance is highly plausible.

  Notably absent from any of the sources is any mention of the kings of Wales: Hywel, Idwal and the rest. Despite the evident opportunity to raise the banner waved so enthusiastically by the poet of Armes Prydein Fawr, they seem to have kept diplomatically at a distance. They may have been tasked by Eadmund with defending north-west Mercia against invasion; they may also have waited to see who would win.

  Four names comprise the material from which all speculation on the site of the battle has been derived: Brunanburh, and variants thereof; Wendun, or Weondun; Dinges mere (where the Norse fleet lay); and Humber. Only the last of these is obviously identifiable. None of the suggested sites for the battle has been able to accommodate all four names. The historian Michael Wood, trusting to John of Worcester’s testimony that Óláf’s huge fleet sailed up the Humber, has made a case for a battle along a traditional and well-attested line between York and the Mercian–Northumbrian border, the setting for many other Early Medieval military encounters. He offers two solutions: Brinswort
h near Sheffield, and Went Hill just south of Pontefract.10 The Roman road crossing of the River Went seems to have been the site of a great battle called Winwæd in 655 between the armies of King Oswiu of Northumbria and King Penda of Mercia.11 For a conflict between kings of the North and South it is an entirely acceptable location, but no more than that, and Wood’s argument is dependent on John of Worcester’s late and isolated testimony of a landing from the Humber.

  The bulk of historical opinion currently favours Bromborough on the Wirral peninsula. It is the only known place name definitively derived from Old English Brunanburh.12 It is, to be sure, a fine destination for an Irish assault: a short crossing from Dublin and, probably, a sympathetic local population of at least partial Norse affiliations. Ingimund’s invasion of about 902 had paved the way. Nearby Chester, if it could be taken, would make a perfect bridgehead for raiding and preparing a northern campaign linked as it was through the Roman road system to York.