The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West

by Tom Holland

To be sure, there were many other warlords who had done the same; but it was Wessex, the land of the West Saxons, a realm ruled without break by Cerdic’s heirs over all the long succeeding centuries, that had ended up paramount.31 As the first millennium drew to a close, it dominated not only southern England, where its own heartlands lay, but all the lands where the English had settled, so that even the Northumbrians, who back in the time of Charlemagne had been a proud and independent people, “were in mourning for their lost liberty.”32 In England, running decisively against the grain of what had been happening elsewhere in Christendom, ancient princedoms had been brought, not to splinter, but to cohere and coalesce. The King of Wessex had ended up the King of the English too. The lands he ruled had become a united kingdom.

  This was a bold and brilliant achievement. What had served to render it truly remarkable, however, was that its foundations had been laid in the most unpropitious circumstances imaginable, amid the fire and slaughter and calamity of defeat. Realms such as Northumbria had first lost their independence more than a hundred years previously – and it had not been to the West Saxons. Other foes, far more agile, far more predatory, had been abroad. Set as the English were upon an island, in kingdoms studded with rich and defenceless monasteries, it was hardly to be wondered at that they should have found themselves the targets of the Northmen. They had termed the invaders “Wicingas”: “robbers.” As well they might have done; for the Wicingas, the “Vikings,” had sought to strip their kingdoms bare. Realm after realm had been plundered, dismembered and brought crashing down.

  Even Wessex itself, for a few terrible months, had seemed on the verge of collapse: for in the winter of 878, its king, Alfred, had been ambushed, and sent fleeing into a marsh. This, at a moment when the entire future of a Christian people had hung in the balance, suspended between the twin poles of ruin and redemption, had been a test more perilous than anything ever faced by a king of Francia. Alfred had passed it: he had not buckled, and by refusing to buckle, he had saved his people for Christendom. Emerging from the marshes, he had succeeded in scouring his kingdom free of the invaders; he had planted towns, ringed about with fortifications and endowed with marke places for the generation of war taxes, at regular intervals all over Wessex; he had steeled his people for continued struggle. The harvest of these labours, reaped by his heirs over the succeeding decades, had been a truly spectacular one. The Viking overlords who had clung on to power beyond the borders of Wessex had been systematically subdued; so too, in the Celtic fastnesses, where the English had never settled, had the Cornish, the Welsh and the Scots. In 937, in a bloody and titanic battle that would long be celebrated as the greatest victory ever won by an English king, Athelstan, the grandson of Alfred, had confronted an assemblage of foes drawn from across the British Isles, and routed them all.33 On his coins and in his charters, he had laid claim to a title even more resonant than “King of the English”: “King of all Britain.” Across the sea too, in Ireland, admirers had been brought to acknowledge him as “the very roof-tree of the dignity of the western world.”34

  But it was not only on the margins of Christendom that men had marvelled. From beyond the Channel, in France, none other than Hugh Capet’s father, the mighty “Duke of the Franks,” had sent messengers seeking the hand of one of Athelstan’s four sisters in marriage. As a dowry, the duke had dispatched to England a rich collection of relics – including, most priceless of all, the very spear that had pierced the side of Christ. Once owned by Charlemagne, and wielded by him in his wars against the Saracens, this had been a weapon of self-evidently miraculous power.35 All the more fitting, then, that it should have passed into the hands of the Cerdicingas: for so triumphant had been their fightback against the Northmen that their achievement had seemed almost a miracle in itself. Other Christian kings, certainly, had been able to draw from it a most potent and inspiring lesson: not merely that the heathen could be repulsed, but that their defeat might provide a stepping stone to empire.

  Naturally enough, perhaps, it was in Saxony, the primordial homeland of Cerdic, that the victories of the House of Wessex had been tracked most appreciatively of all. In 929, the Lady Edith, another of Athelstan’s sisters, had duly travelled there to marry a teenage prince, the future Otto the Great: a man with an imperial destiny indeed. Just like the House of Wessex, the Saxon royal family had already come into possession of a supernaturally charged spear, a Holy Lance of their own; but the presence at Otto’s side of a saintly and much-loved English queen had undoubtedly served his people as a yet further re assurance of the glories ordained for them by God. It was at Edith’s urging, for instance, that her husband had embarked on the building of his great monastery at Magdeburg; and years later, with Edith long dead and Otto himself crowned Caesar, it was to the selfsame monastery that he had moved the relics of St. Maurice and – when it was not required out on campaign – the Holy Lance itself.

  Meanwhile, back in England, the Cerdicingas had begun to look a trifle provincial in comparison. Athelstan, concerned to secure his subjection of the Cornish, had set about refurbishing the frontier town of Exeter; and it was here, in an abbey church founded by the king himself, that he had enshrined his own holy lance. Priceless relic or not, however, it had soon begun to gather dust: for whereas Magdeburg stood sentinel over vast expanses of heathendom, beyond Cornwall there extended only the sea. No matter that it was the kings of Wessex who had originally blazed the imperial trail; they could never hope to compete in the glamour stakes with an emperor anointed by a pope in Rome. In 973, when Athelstan’s dwarfish but formidable nephew, Edgar, who had already been crowned once, decided that he wished to emulate Otto’s coronation, the best venue that he could come up with for the ceremony was Bath: a place littered with relics of the Roman past, to be sure, but hardly the Eternal City. Even his next stunt – summoning assorted Celtic princelings to row him down a river – was in truth not quite as impressive as it must have appeared to the gawping spectators watching him glide by: for already, since Athelstan’s day, the lordship claimed by the English king over his turbulent neighbours had declined to little more than show. The rule of “all Britain” had shown itself a will-o’-the-wisp, melting through Edgar’s outstretched fingers. The sober truth was that all his attempts to promote himself as imperial served only to emphasise how small scale, in comparison with the Reich, the kingdom of the English actually was.

  Small-scale – but compact as well. This, as developments were to show, was no disadvantage: for it had enabled an experiment in state-building that was to prove as enduring as it was innovative. While the lands ruled by the House of Wessex may have lacked diversity, they made up for it in cohesiveness. The seas that bounded in Edgar’s ambitions had helped to foster in the lands that he did rule a precocious sense of unity. Even in the most northerly and bloodstained reaches of the kingdom, through which a West Saxon king would only ever travel with a bristling military escort, and where a dynasty of Viking warlords, in the wake of Athelstan’s death, had blazed a spectacular if fleeting comeback, the people of Northumbria could still recognise themselves as English. Though they might be distant from the royal heartlands of the south, they nevertheless spoke the same language as the West Saxons, venerated the same saints and gloried in belonging to the same national Church. Above all – and here, perhaps, was the most startling of all the feats of statecraft achieved by the House of Wessex – they acknowledged the right of the same central authority to administer them, and to poke its nose into their affairs. In England, there were no equivalents of the Count of Flanders or Anjou. A figure of menacing and even ferocious power a Northumbrian earl might be – and yet he swayed the north, not by virtue of heredity, but as an appointed agent of the king. Further south, and royal control was even more inescapable. The Cerdicingas owned lands everywhere. There was no question of Edgar permitting his nobles to run amok, whether by building castles, or recruiting private armies, or usurping control of the public courts. Whereas in Francia the sight of a m
utilated corpse abandoned by the side of a road for birds to peck at was a cause for alarm among travellers, a mark of lawlessness, in England it was likelier to speak of the opposite: of the long reach of the state. Blindings, scalpings, hangings: all were sponsored with a grim efficiency. Violence was met with violence; savagery with savagery. Even whole counties, if they presumed to oppose the royal will, might be systematically ravaged. Justice and order were what Edgar, in his coronation oath, had sworn to give the English; and justice and order, by his own stern lights, were precisely what he delivered. That such an iron-fisted man could end up being known as “the Peaceable” suggested that his subjects did not disagree.

  Were preachers merely deluded, then, when they warned the English that the signs of Doomsday were all around? There were many who feared not. When Edgar died in 975, only two years after his jamboree in Bath, the united kingdom of England that he left behind him was still very much a work in progress: none could be certain that it would hold together. As the Witan, the assembly of the greatest men of the realm, met to elect a new king, so a comet began to scorch across the heavens, leading many to dread what it portended. As well they might have done – for the throne was claimed by rival half-brothers. The first, Edward, was vicious, unstable, possibly illegitimate – and in his teens. The second, Ethelred, was the son of the Lady Aelfrida, the most powerful and ambitious woman in the kingdom, and Edgar’s anointed queen – but he was only seven. The vote duly went to Edward. Aelfrida withdrew into an embittered retirement.

  Civil war was avoided; but beneath the surface the rival factions continued to manoeuvre. In 978, three years after ascending the throne, Edward dropped his guard sufficiently to go hunting near Corfe, a stronghold on the Wessex coast where his stepmother just happened to be staying. As he rode through the forest, a group of armed men suddenly confronted and surrounded him; his right arm was seized and broken, and a dagger plunged into his side; the dying king, his foot caught in his stirrup, was then dragged away through brambles and over trackways by his bolting horse. *The corpse, when it was finally recovered, was flung into a bog.36 “No worse deed for the English race was done than this,” it would subsequently be judged, “since they first sought out the land of Britain.”37 The murder of an anointed king, and the failure of his kinsmen to avenge him, could hardly help but appear an ominous sign of the times. A column of fire, it was reported, flickering over the wasteland to which Edward had been consigned, marked the awful spot where his dishonoured body lay; still more frighteningly, even as the ten-year-old Ethelred was being consecrated king, “a bloody cloud was seen, many times in the likeness of flames; and it appeared most of all at midnight; and it was formed of various beams; and then, when it became day, it glided away.”38 Well might his subjects have shuddered; for there were some among them, no doubt, who would have recalled that the appearance of “a great bloody cloud arising in the North, and covering all the heavens,”39 was to be reckoned a certain proof that the Last Day had come at last.

  Yet still it did not arrive. No matter that Ethelred was only a child; no matter that his mother – whether justly or not – stood under suspicion of murder; no matter that he was only the second king, after his half-brother, to inherit the rule of a united England, rather than to have to fight for it: the kingdom did not fall to pieces. Indeed, that Edward’s murder was seen as peculiarly shocking was evidence of just how habituated his contemporaries had become to the rule of law; for the young king, it has credibly been suggested, was “the first man of high blood to have perished as a result of civil strife among the English for more than fifty years.”40 Ethelred’s advisers did all they could to ensure that he would also be the last. Rivalries were consciously dampened. The Lady Aelfrida, who had returned to court purring with triumph, was sufficiently gracious in her victory to ensure that prominent partisans of the murdered king were granted their fair share of the available public offices. Nor even, a year into Ethelred’s reign, did she object to the dredging up of her stepson’s corpse, and its reinterment with full royal honours. In no time at all, visitors to the tomb were reporting spectacular miracles and hailing Edward a martyr: potent testimony to the hold that a king from the House of Cerdic, even one who in life had certainly been no saint, could exert on the English. Hardly surprising, then, that Ethelred should have survived the years of his childhood unchallenged, for he had been left the very last of his famous line.

  Yet ultimately, as was evident from the wretched end of the Carolingians, the pretensions of even the most glorious dynasty were nothing if not raised on solid foundations. Prestige had to be earned as well as inherited, a maxim that the West Saxon kings had always adhered to with a hard-headed literalness. The most precious legacy that Edgar had bequeathed to his successors was not the aura of sanctity with which he had sought to endow himself at Bath, but rather a measure enacted in the same year of 973, one so ambitious that it had provided him with a licence, literally, to coin in his kingdom’s cash. A single currency for a single people: such had been the philosophy of Edgar. Foreign coins, obsolete coins, coins lacking the requisite purity of silver: all had been pronounced illegal tender. Here, at a time when anything up to twenty different currencies might be in circulation within a single county of France, was a truly imperious reform. A lucrative one as well: for not only was the kingdom transformed into a single market, but it was made easier to soak. No wonder that Ethelred should have persisted with the reform. Regularly, from the year of his coronation onwards, he would order all the silver pennies in the kingdom to be recalled, restamped and then – after he had taken a cut – reissued. The penalty for forgery was ratcheted up from mutilation to death. Estates were obsessively quantified, audited and assessed for tax. Here was intrusiveness of a degree fit to be admired in Constantinople or Córdoba. Certainly, nothing remotely comparable to it existed anywhere else in the Christian West. England might not have been a far-spreading empire, nor the seat of an anointed Caesar; but its rulers certainly had cash to burn.

  Yet just as the merchant who travelled from market to market with silver in his saddlebags was taking a risk, so too was Ethelred. Even as the towns founded by Alfred grew and prospered, even as the aristocracy lavished gold and incense and silks on great churches and on themselves, and even as the treasure chests of the king continued to fill to overflowing, still there lurked a nagging question in the back of many people’s minds: what if the Wicingas, the “sea-robbers,” were to return? Of Northmen in England, certainly, there was no lack. The terrible assaults of the previous century, which had seen entire kingdoms appropriated by Viking warlords and parcelled out among their followers, had left the eastern counties densely planted with settlers. Several generations on, and the descendants of these immigrants might still affect a distinctive look: the men, for instance, had a taste for eye-liner, and for shaving the backs of their heads. Most scandalous, to pious English eyes, was their habit of taking a bath every Saturday: a mark of effeminacy held all the more surprising in a people so notorious for their bestial savagery. Nevertheless, there were many natives, jealous of the success with women for which the Northmen had become famed, who were not above adopting some of their more dandyish habits themselves; and integration, with Englishmen and Scandinavians pooling make-up and hair-styling tips, had long been gathering pace. It helped that the immigrants, as a consequence of the treaties forced on their forefathers by Alfred and his successors, were Christian; it helped as well that their language, their laws and their customs were similar to those of the English. Not, to be sure, that Ethelred could afford entirely to lower his guard: for in Northumbria especially, where much of the aristocracy was Scandinavian, treachery was a constant rumour. Yet in general, the West Saxon authorities could rest content in the presumption that the king’s peace benefited immigrants no less than natives. So long as it held firm, the Scandinavians in England appeared unlikely to prove an enemy within.

  It was true, of course, that the sway of the House of Wessex did not extend
to all the Northmen who had emigrated to the British Isles. In Ireland, following their favoured policy of putting down roots beside an estuary, Viking pirates had founded a particularly flourishing stronghold by the “Dubh Linn,” or “Black Pool,” near the mouth of the River Liffey: so flourishing, indeed, that the settlement had ended up boasting the largest slave market of anywhere in western Europe. Unsurprisingly, it was the Irish themselves who provided the Dubliners with their richest source of exports; even so, all those who took to the ocean or lived by its shores had to reckon themselves potential targets. On one notorious occasion, the wife of a Frankish viscount, no less, had been kidnapped and held captive for three years; only the intervention of the Count of Rouen himself had served finally to set her free.

  By the 980s, the English too, particularly in the west of the country, were suffering a steep rise in the number of raids being launched against their coastline. The experience of being bundled on to a slaver’s longboat was a predictably unpleasant one: indeed, an ordeal to be wished only on one’s very worst enemy. “He was subjected to insults and urinated upon, and then, stripped naked, forced by the Vikings to perform the sexual service of a wife”:41 so gloated one Norman poet, contemplating the fate of a rival, an Irishman, who had been abducted by pirates. Gang-rape – “the practice of foul sin upon a single woman, one after another, like dogs that care not about filth”42 – was common. No wonder that churchmen in England should regularly have compared the Devil himself to a slaver, one “who leads his prisoners as captives to the hellish city, in devilish thralldom.”43 Yet even as they raised their voices in pious protest, and even as Ethelred dispatched ships on patrol into the Irish Sea, the truth was that the slave trade could provide profit as well as loss. The supply chain that linked the Vikings to the fabulous wealth of al-Andalus had opened up opportunity for English merchants too. Just like the Dubliners, they even had a ready supply of Celts on their doorstep – the “Weallas,” or Welsh, whose very name had long been synonymous with “slaves” – and a booming port, ideally located for the export of human cattle. “You could see and sigh over rows of wretches bound together with ropes,” it was said of Bristol, “young people of both sexes whose beautiful appearance and youthful innocence might move barbarians to pity, daily exposed to prostitution, daily offered for sale.”44 An exaggeration, of course: for barbarians tended not to be moved to pity by the spectacle, nor the merchants of Bristol either. Indeed, by the Millennium, the port was coming to rival Dublin itself as the entrepôt of the western seas, with a record of trading slaves to the Caliphate and beyond, to Africa, that betokened a brilliant commercial future.