Nor was it only human lives that were bartered in this way.
Ealdorman Ælfred and his wife wander through the camp, their cloaks splattered with mud as they stumble on the uneven ground, tripping on tent pegs, skirting the camp-fires. The air thrums with hammers on iron, axes in wood. Away in the distance a wooden pen holds prisoners, shackled and beaten, staring vacantly towards a place that no one else can see. Ælfred and Werburg try not to look at them, terrified of meeting a familiar gaze. As they walk, their own vulnerability radiates from them, turning every foreign word to an insult, distant laughter to cruel jeers. Suddenly, they find the way blocked by a pair of big men, rising suddenly from the low table where they had been seated, pushing dome-shaped pieces of whalebone across a wooden board. They seem to Werburg to leer with undisguised intent, their thoughts as plain as if they had dropped their trousers. Ælfred stammers and waves his hands and eventually they are pointed towards a nearby tent.
Inside, a fat man sits behind a table strewn with silver coins and bullion. Ælfred speaks a little, haltingly, stuttering the words, and a smirking translator – a Northumbrian from his accent – repeats them in Old Norse. A pudgy hand reaches out, to grab the bag of coins that Ælfred offers, spilling them swiftly on to the table. They are gold – coins made long ago, fashioned by the bishops and the old kings of Kent. Surprised, the Viking takes one up and bites down upon it, bends it in his teeth. In the Viking’s grimace Ælfred spots the dark grooves that score the man’s teeth, blue bands of self-inflicted mutilation; he shudders.21 The Viking draws a knife and picks up more coins, the point picking and scratching at their surfaces with deft movements born of long practice, like a man gouging the stones from cherries.22 He grunts, and shovels them on to the pan of a set of scales that hang suspended from a post beside the table. Slowly he places little barrel-shaped weights on to the other side. After a while he looks up, says a few words in Norse. ‘Not enough,’ the translator sneers.
The tension in the tent rises. The Viking narrows his eyes, looks hard at Werburg and hauls himself upright, reaching out towards her breast. She starts away, Ælfred’s hand moving instinctively to his sword hilt. The sound of a weapon unsheathing near the tent door freezes them both, and the hand that had paused in mid-air continues its progress towards the ealdorman’s wife, closing around the circular silver brooch she wears on her chest, ripping it suddenly from the fabric. He turns it over in his hands, a silver disc, chased with images of running deer and hounds, the detail limned in black. He tosses it on to the table and the knife comes down, point into the wood and the handle hammered down hard. The brooch splits in one movement, the silver sheared through like hard cheese. The Viking adds half of the brooch to another set of scales, adding weights until he grunts in satisfaction. He bends over to root around in a pile of objects on the floor, retrieving a pile of manuscript pages, tied up in string. Rising red-faced, he tosses them to Ælfred who catches them clumsily, and the couple turn to leave. ‘Wait,’ comes the voice of the translator. ‘Doesn’t the lady want her brooch back?’
And they turn, a mangled lump of silver held up in the grinning Viking’s fist.
The Stockholm Codex Aureus (‘the Golden Book’) is a copy of the gospels in Latin. The manuscript is a work of art probably produced in Canterbury during the eighth century, glimmering gilded letters and spiral illuminations recalling other famous treasures of the early Anglo-Saxon Church.23 In the mid-ninth century, however, around a century after the labours of its creators – Ceolhard, Ealhhun, Niclas and Wulfhelm the goldsmith – had come to an end, a new inscription was added:
+ In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I, Ealdorman Ælfred, and my wife Werburg procured these books from the heathen invading army with our own money; the purchase was made with pure gold. And we did that for the love of God and for the benefit of our souls, and because neither of us wanted these holy works to remain any longer in heathen hands. And now we wish to present them to Christ Church [Canterbury] to God’s praise and glory and honour, and as thanksgiving for his sufferings, and for the use of the religious community which glorifies God daily in Christ Church; in order that they should be read aloud every month for Ælfred and for Werburg and for Alhthryth, for the eternal salvation of their souls, as long as God decrees that Christianity should survive in that place. And also I, Ealdorman Ælfred, and Werburg beg and entreat in the name of Almighty God and of all his saints that no man should be so presumptuous as to give away or remove these holy works from Christ Church as long as Christianity survives there.
Ælfred
Werburg
Alhthryth their daughter24
The Stockholm Codex Aureus was bought back by Ælfred around the time that the first Viking camps are recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (the first was established at Thanet in 850 – not, we might note, very far away from Ælfred’s own shire of Surrey, or from the place – Canterbury – at which the book was probably made and to which it was returned). Of course, we have no idea how this transaction really played out, but it is extraordinary evidence: both for the reality of the Viking acquisition of holy treasures (almost certainly through violence or menaces) and for the fact that Viking armies were trading with local people from the moment they started to maintain a longer-term presence in Britain (if not before).
For all that Viking winter camps like Torksey were superficially ‘urban’, they would not – in any known case – develop into lasting towns in England. They may have established some of the habits of urban living, may even have given pointers to West Saxon kings about the value of defensible multi-purpose settlements, but they were doomed to be short lived. In little over a generation, however, Scandinavian settlers – whose constituents hailed from overwhelmingly rural communities – had become strongly identified with the control of places which developed, unequivocally, into ‘proper’ towns, many of which have yielded little or no evidence of prior Anglo-Saxon occupation, and certainly none on a scale or density comparable to the truly urban environments they became.25 At Thetford, Cambridge, Huntingdon, Bedford, Northampton, Stamford, Leicester, Derby, Nottingham, Lincoln and York, metropolitan life was suddenly beginning to bloom from the withered remnants of defunct Roman garrison forts and old Mercian estate centres, even as the wonky gridirons of the West Saxon burh were being stamped down on to the landscape in a creeping northward expansion.
The interwoven causes and effects of the economic growth that followed the Viking irruption can be difficult to disentangle: the relative weight that is ascribed to the West Saxon state versus Viking entrepreneurship – to determined planning and top-down reforms of currency, law and administration versus the free-wheeling enterprise of an unregulated merchant-warrior class – is, to a certain degree, a matter of preference, subject specialism and, perhaps, personal politics. We certainly shouldn’t discount the impact of the new trading connections that Viking armies brought with them, or the redistribution of wealth that their activities had entailed: think of all that Islamic silver, flowing from the Baltic as the human cargo travelled east; imagine the chalices and processional crosses ‘liberated’ from the treasure houses of the Church, melted into ingots. It must all have provided quite the economic boost.
Unwelcome interactions like the one that Ælfred and Werburg experienced may well have continued to be a feature of British life for some time after the period of Viking settlement began in England. Within the ‘Danelaw’, however, it is likely that as communities gradually became more integrated and Viking armies more permanently settled, trading relationships would have grown less exploitative, the differences between newcomers and settled communities less sharply delineated. Regional identities, often definitive in this period, would have rapidly swallowed ethnic distinctions as fashions and languages merged and cultural practices homogenized. People whose families had previously thought of themselves as East Anglians or Northumbrians would doubtless have continued to do so. But in eastern Mercia, in the absence of clear royal authority, narrow
er loyalties would have risen in importance. Mixed communities of Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons would probably have identified primarily with local places around which the economic aspects of their lives revolved, and to which they increasingly looked for political, spiritual and military leadership, and the same may have been true in parts of East Anglia and Northumbria.26 This must be partly conjectural, and the evidence – as ever – is thin. But what evidence there is certainly points in this direction, not least the speed with which ‘Danish’ authority ultimately collapsed in the face of a concerted campaign from the politically unified kingdom to the south.
14
Danelaw
‘I will offer thee another course of law, that we go on the holm here at the Thing, and let him have the property who has the victory.’ That was also the law which Egil spake, and a custom of old, that every man had the right to challenge another to holmgang, whether he would defend himself or pursue his foe.
SNORRI STURLUSON(?), Egil’s Saga (thirteenth century)1
Guthrum–Æthelstan died in 890 and was remembered with something approaching fondness in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.2 Although Viking raids on Wessex had continued throughout the 880s, and tensions had occasionally flared around the East Anglian borders, there had been no serious trouble for Alfred to contend with.3 This all changed after Guthrum’s death, and Alfred spent several years of the final decade of his own life, alongside his adult son Edward, engaged in conflict with new waves of Viking raiders, the most dangerous of whom were a group led by a warlord called Hæsten, who arrived – fresh from harassing the Frankish kingdoms – in 892 and gathered fighters from East Anglia and Northumbria. Once again, Alfred’s kingdom was in grave danger, with Viking armies roaming from Essex to the Severn, and from the Sussex coast to Chester.4 But ultimately the Alfred of the 890s was too experienced a warlord to suffer again the indignities of 878. By 896, the worst of this fresh wave of violence was over, partly thanks to the king’s programme of fortress building and military reforms. Hæsten’s army dispersed – some to East Anglia and Northumbria, others back across the Channel – and the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, sounding more than ever like Marvin the Paranoid Android, was able to celebrate the news that ‘The raiding-horde, thank God, had not totally and utterly crushed the English.’ (The chronicler added, however, as though concerned that this sounded a trifle too upbeat, that ‘they were greatly more crushed in those three years with pestilence amongst cattle and men’.)5
Alfred died in 899. In the course of his lifetime he had seen Britain irrevocably transformed, and he ended his days as the king of a realm defined in ways that his predecessors could never have imagined. His obituary in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle described him as ‘king over all the English race except that part which was under Danish control’,6 a neat summation of the shift which had occurred during his reign – a delimitation of authority which was primarily ethnic rather than territorial. And yet the degree to which those ethnic constructs remained mutable and contestable was dramatically exposed on the king’s death.
Alfred was, as we might expect, succeeded by his son Edward, known to posterity as ‘the Elder’.7 Not everyone, however, was happy to see Edward ascend to the throne. Alfred’s nephew, Æthelwold, did rather poorly out of Alfred’s will, and was evidently disgruntled by the manner in which he had been passed over.8 The younger (and probably the only surviving) son of Alfred’s elder brother, King Æthelred (the man who had prayed so vigorously at the battle of Ashdown in 871), Æthelwold had a decent claim to the West Saxon throne. Instead he had been left with three estates in Surrey, far from the centre of West Saxon power – much less than what even Alfred’s obscure kinsman Osferth was to receive.9 In any case, whatever the rights and wrongs of his grievance, his actions articulated the strength of it without room for ambiguity. With Alfred’s body barely cold, he seized the royal manor at Twynham (now Christchurch, Dorset) and then rode to Wimborne (also Dorset), to the burial place of his father King Æthelred, where – alive to the threat that Edward posed – he ‘barricaded all the gates against him, and said that he would live there or die there’.10
Edward, for his part, took an army to Badbury Rings, the massive Neolithic hill-fort that dominates the landscape of east Dorset. As political theatre these were striking choices. Whereas Æthelwold had laid claim to his father’s resting place, no doubt in an attempt to send a message that emphasized his dynastic claims, Edward’s choice of Badbury Rings drew on older and deeper wells of political legitimacy. Whether or not the Anglo-Saxons identified this place (as later generations would) with Mount Badon – the location of the legendary victory of the Britons over the Saxons in the sixth century11 – the massive earthworks would have spoken in primal terms of power that welled up from another age, the vast earthen ramparts the work of supernatural builders and the mighty kings of old. Not only that, but Badbury was also the hundred meeting place of the district in which it stood: by using it as his fortress, Edward was raising his standard not merely on his dynastic claims, but on an ancient and embedded sense of community, territory and antiquity.
Whether it was this or more pragmatic concerns that eroded Æthelwold’s resolve, it swiftly transpired that his nerve was less robust than his rhetoric. Taking with him a nun he had extracted from the convent at Wimborne (whether or not she was a willing accomplice, we shall never know), Æthelwold ‘rode away under cover of night and sought out the raiding army in Northumbria’,12 where ‘they received him as king and submitted to him’.13 The Annals of St Neots, a later chronicle based (probably) on a lost manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, puts this extraordinary moment in even more surprising terms. There Æthelwold, son of Æthelred, son of Æthelwulf, son of Ecgberht, scion of the house of Wessex, is described as rex paganorum and rex danorum: ‘King of the Pagans; King of the Danes’.14
Æthelwold has been described as one of the ‘“Nearly Men” of early medieval Europe’.15 During the five years that followed his nocturnal flight from Wessex in 899, the ætheling’s flame flared brightly, a brief consuming fire. In that flickering red light we can see the dreams of deeds undone, of destiny unfulfilled – a Viking England united by a man thrice begotten of West Saxon kings, trampling the wreckage of his father’s realm at the head of a great Anglo-Viking horde. It would not come to pass; Æthelwold’s flame would be extinguished in the leeching damp of the East Anglian Fens.
In 902, Æthelwold brought a fleet to Essex and caused the submission of the East Saxon kingdom. Quite where he had come from, whom he had convinced of his regal standing and why they had acquiesced so readily is unknown, but it may be that he managed to convince a substantial faction in the ‘Danelaw’ that his claim to the West Saxon throne – and the divided loyalties of its aristocracy – meant that the conquest of Wessex was once again a realistic prospect. The submission of Essex would have been a blow to King Edward: Essex had long formed a buffer zone between West Saxon and East Anglian control. Later in 902, Æthelwold made his move, bringing an army out of East Anglia and advancing into English Mercia, raiding and burning as he went, before crossing the Thames at Cricklade in Wiltshire and plundering the region around Braydon. This was a raid, not an attempt at conquest, and Æthelwold swiftly led his army (laden down ‘with all that they could grab’),16 back to East Anglia. But the fact that he had penetrated so far into Wessex unopposed had sent an unmistakable message to his cousin Edward. The reciprocal raid came immediately. Edward raised an army and chased Æthelwold into East Anglia, ravaging territory from the Devil’s Dyke (Cambridgeshire) to the River Wissey and the Fens (Norfolk). Edward, however, like Æthelwold, seems to have had little appetite for battle and ordered a retreat. For reasons that remain obscure, however, the men of Kent disobeyed their king and remained in East Anglia.
A measure of Edward’s mounting panic (or, perhaps, of his determination to explain what may have been a monumental blunder) is conveyed by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s insistence that he dispatched no fewer than seven messe
ngers in his desperation to recall the Kentish contingent. It was to no avail. Æthelwold’s armies surrounded the Kentish force at a place called ‘the Holm’ and a savage battle was fought. The most evocative description was provided by the West Saxon ealdorman Æthelweard, who wrote a chronicle in Latin at some point towards the end of the tenth century:
They clashed shields, brandished swords, and in either hand the spear was much shaken. And there fell Ealdorman Sigewulf, and Sigehelm, and a part of the Kentish gentry nearly all-inclusive; and Haruc, king of the barbarians, was there let down to the lower world. Two princes of the English, soft of beard, then left the air they breathed ever before, and entered a strange region below the waves of Acheron, and so did much of the nobility on either side. In the end the barbarians were victors, and held the field with exultation.17
It was clearly a disaster for the men of Kent, although quite how exultant the barbarians can really have been, considering the apparently ghastly death toll and the demise of their king, is open to question. The ‘Haruc’ mentioned by Æthelweard was Eohric, king (it is generally assumed) of East Anglia. Perhaps more significant, however, was the detail supplied by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in its rather more sober (and contemporary) account of the battle: Æthelwold was killed in the fighting.18
The Fens – with their vast skies and level horizons, their dykes and waterways, bogs and meres – are an unfriendly environment to those unfamiliar with them: disorientating and alien. At their wildest they can feel like a remnant of a forgotten world, when mammoth and aurochs wandered the wide plains of Doggerland, the lost land that once connected East Anglia with continental Europe – our own Stone Age Atlantis, drowned beneath the North Sea. The Fens are an unending sea of sedges and peat beds – a paradise, as the Somerset Levels once were, for insects and wading birds, amphibians and water mammals. Like the Levels, the Fens were mostly drained long ago and only 1 per cent of the original wetlands, at places like Lakenheath (Suffolk) and Wicken Fen (Cambridgeshire), still survive.19 This is enough, however, for us to imagine how the region appeared to those who fought and died here a thousand years ago. It would have been an appalling place for a battle, particularly for those who did not know the lie of the land; when lines broke, desperate men would have lost the security of dry land, flummoxed by the blankness of the Fens, floundering into the mire, choking their lives out in the sucking peat bogs.
Viking Britain- an Exploration Page 23
