A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons
Page 16
Roman London may still have retained a degree of official status, with perhaps a Saxon royal hall, St Paul’s and probably two other churches, along with the ruins of various Roman buildings, but at this time business and commerce lay outside the walls in the wic, remembered in the name Aldwych. At the height of its prosperity, in the 750s say, it may have covered as much as 60 hectares along the north bank of the river, roughly either side of the Strand as far as Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery and up to the site of the present Royal Opera House. Embankment timbers, excavated near Charing Cross station, give indications of the run of the waterfront. Much of the trading was probably done here as if on a beachside emporium. Rescue archaeology has recovered trade goods such as pottery and metalwork from Scandinavia, the Rhineland and Normandy; organic remains indicate that Londoners consumed, among other thing, quantities of oysters and eels. In the earlier period at least there was probably a slave market. Bede speaks of a Frisian purchase there in the 680s of a Northumbrian captive traded by Mercians. From the port, goods were distributed up the Thames and its feeder rivers, such as the Medway, but there was also a good deal of road communication with the hinterland. Excavations in the vicinity of the Royal Opera House revealed a network of narrow gravelled streets, including a road some three metres wide laid out in the seventh century and with drains either side. It was regularly resurfaced and continued in use for some two hundred years while the side streets running into it were also pretty well maintained. The gravel (and tons of it would have been needed) came from local pits – documents feature royal officials, for example a Kentish wic gerefa (‘reeve’), regulating merchant activity. London’s mints produced some of the earliest English coins and the whole activity on the site was obviously of major importance in the evolution of the medieval English town and yet Robert Cowie, on whose article much of the foregoing is based, concludes, ‘whether or not the Strand settlement was fully urban remains a moot subject.’19
Archaeology and documentary records indicate a number of major fires between the 760s and the end of the century. Timber, wattle and daub were the principal building materials. Later trade was hit by Viking attacks, the first recorded for the year 842, but military rivalries in the Frankish empire may also have weakened trading partners. What seem to be defensive ditches were dug at this time and numerous coin hoards unearthed at various sites, including the river bed, suggest what one might call wealth displacement in panic mode.
Control of London became a matter of mutual concern between West Saxons and Mercians linked by royal marriages and the sharing of a common monetary system. During the 860s and 870s the output of the London mint appears to have been greater than that of Canterbury, now under West Saxon control. In 874 the Danes drove Burgred of Mercia from his kingdom, replacing him with Ceolwulf II. For a moment Alfred struck coins at the London mint but three years later it was issuing coins in Ceolwulf’s name and continued so to do until 879/80. It is true that when Guthrum retired from Wessex back into Mercia he shared out territory among his followers and ‘gave some’ to Ceolwulf. Yet this ‘foolish king’s thegn’, so judged by the Wessex Chronicle, may have traced his ancestry to Ceowulf I (d. 823): he certainly exercised the powers of monarchy, granting land by charter and issuing coins in a monetary convention that had joined Wessex and Mercia since the 860s; their joint issues of cross-and-lozenge penny signalled a restoration of the silver content in both coinages.
Mercia in decline
In 825 Ecgberht, king of Wessex, defeated Beornwulf of Mercia at the battle of Ellendun (perhaps Wroughton in Wiltshire). The days of Mercian hegemony in the southeast and Mercia as a great power in the Anglo-Saxon universe were numbered. In the follow-up to the battle Ecgberht’s son Æthelwulf drove Baldred, the last king of Kent and a Mercian client, from his kingdom; the Kentish satellites, the ‘Surrey men’, the South Saxons and the East Saxons turned back to Wessex. East Anglia followed and the year ended with the death of Beornwulf in battle against the East Angles. Two years later his short-lived successor was killed, together with Mercia’s five leading ealdormen. Mercia’s period of hegemony south of the Humber was over.
That the kingdom survived at all in more than name was thanks to the next king, Wiglaf, who, forced into submission by Wessex in 829, recovered independence within his borders the following year. He reigned for a further ten years and was succeeded by Beorhtwulf, who disappears from history with his defeat by the Danes. His successor Burgred seems to have attempted to maintain his kingdom’s independence, but was expelled by the Danes and died a pilgrim in Rome in 874 or 875. After him came Ceolwulf II, the last man to bear the title king of Mercia, though despised by West Saxon opinion as a Danish ‘yes man’. For half a century and more eastern Mercia fell within the Danelaw (see chapter 7).
From this point the story of Mercia becomes part of the history of the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons (described more fully in chapters 8 and 9). As part of this development the shiring of Mercia began around the year 900.20 Even so some of the old tribal/kingdom names long survived. The fact that we still speak of the Peak District is as much a matter of geography as tribal memory, but we find the ‘Magonsætan’ mentioned long after the Conquest in the twelfth-century Chronicon of John of Worcester. In 909 Æthelred, ealdorman of Mercia, and his wife Æthelflæd made a significant move to boost the swelling sense of Anglo-Saxon national identity when they arranged for the translation of the relics of St Oswald, held at Bardney since the days of Æthelred of Mercia, king and abbot, to their new minster of St Peter’s at Gloucester. This was a comparatively small church but a notable building with its sumptuous adornments of sculpture and liturgical ornaments, and the translation added the Northumbrian king to the royal saints of Mercia. In the reign of Æthelstan his relics would become part of the halidom of the kingdom of England. As to the kingdom of Mercia itself, a sense of identity evidently did linger: as late as 1007 the Peterborough Chronicle refers to ‘Eadric, ealdorman in the kingdom of the Mercians’ [my emphasis] – more than a century after the death of the last man to bear the title of king.
5
APOSTLES OF GERMANY
When Boniface wrote his critical letter to Æthelbald of Mercia he was no stranger to the middle kingdom and its people; about one third of his surviving collected correspondence comprises letters to or from Mercians or related to Mercian affairs. The archive was probably assembled under the aegis of Boniface’s helper St Lull, who would succeed him in the see of Mainz. Born about 710, Lull seems to have received his initiation into the religious life at the abbey of Malmesbury, with its ‘catchment area’, so to speak, across southwestern Mercia and northwestern Wessex. Lull met Boniface in Rome during the 730s and became one of his two chief assistant bishops (chorepiscopi) and a central figure in the English network in Germany. In the 770s a Northumbrian king naturally turned to him for help with a delegation to Charles the Great; a German bishop asked for his advice; he actively disseminated English learning on the Continent, such as the works of Aldhelm and Bede. Lull was the founder of the bishoprics of Hersfeld and Bleidenstadt. He was just one, if a distinguished example, of the numerous English churchmen active and influential in Europe during the eighth and early ninth centuries. How they came to be there and the role they played in the evolution of European culture is the theme of this chapter. They would have found the prevailing political conditions prevailing in the early 700s quite familiar.
The European background
Western Europe was a patchwork of rival power centres, Christian for the most part but with pagan outliers such as northern Frisia and, east of the Rhine, the remoter districts of Hessen, all struggling for control within their own fluid borders and for hegemony over their neighbours. North of the Alps the dominant power factor was the Merovingian dynasty, established in Gaul by Clovis about AD 500, around the time the Anglo-Saxons were settling in Britain. The dynasty derived its name from Merovech, the legendary hero of the Salian Franks who had settled, probably as foederati
, within the Roman province in the marshlands of the Scheldt and Meuse river basin during the fourth century. He had been conceived, so went the story, by the coupling of his mother with a sea monster who surprised her while sea bathing. When, in 498, his descendant Clovis I converted to Catholicism, the descendants of this monstrous nativity acquired additional Christian charisma.
The conversion was a delayed thank-you note from Clovis to his Christian wife’s god. Two years before, facing defeat by the Germanic Alemani tribe before the battle of Tolbiac, he had invoked the aid of Jesus and triumphed. The Merovingians’ lands were divided between rival factions into an eastern branch in Austrasia, ancestor to the Holy Roman Empire, and later a western grouping called Neustria. The kings, however, were challenged by their own chief ministers (‘mayors of the palace’) as well as by powerful dukes, as in Bavaria and Thuringia. In the early 660s the Austrasian minister deposed his king, a child called Dagobert II, had him tonsured as a monk and sent him into exile in Ireland. Fifteen years of court politicking later, fortune pointed in Dagobert’s direction. One of the factions looking for a puppet candidate contacted Northumbria’s prince bishop Wilfrid for help. The great man complied. He had the Irish contacts and his years in Lyon had introduced him to Merovingian politics. In due course he invited young Dagobert over to Northumbria and then, having equipped him with a magnificent entourage, arranged for his return in style to the Austrasian throne in 676.
All this earned Wilfrid the enmity of the western Merovingian ‘palace’. Two years later, embarking for another journey to Rome, Wilfrid decided to avoid the crossing to Quentovic and took the more easterly route to Frisia. So, fortuitously, he initiated what was to become a major episode in the history of Europe – the Anglo-Saxon mission campaign among the Germanic peoples. Held up in the arrangements for his onward journey to Rome, he put the delay to good use by talking Christianity to the local king. He received a friendly reception thanks, it seems, to the coincidence of a bumper fishing season with his arrival. Thousands were converted, we are told by his admiring biographer. Unfortunately the pioneering mission was short lived. The fishing grounds reverted to normal, the new religion lost credibility and then the crown passed to a fiercely pagan ruler named Radbod.
The Frisian mission was to be at length successfully re-established under St Willibrord today the patron saint of Utrecht, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. There had been a Christian presence in Roman times and a short-lived attempt at conversion in the early 600s but the Frisians, the dominant seafarers of their time in the North Sea, were comfortable with their pagan religion. Elsewhere, east of the Rhine, there had been Christian missions of greater or lesser effectiveness led by Irish monks or peregrini and some by German churchmen.
But this scattered Christian presence was not flourishing nor, from the papacy’s point of view, duly subordinate to Rome. The new missionaries would encounter communities lapsing back into paganism and aristocratic prince bishops jealous of their independence and sovereignty within their ill-defined borders. They would find local clerics tolerating pagan practice within the context of supposedly Christian ritual, dubious marriage liaisons and numerous near heresies. Among these allegiances, beliefs and cult practices, the Anglo-Saxon intervention would prove decisive. St Boniface of Crediton, better known in Germany as St Boniface of Fulda, is regarded as the founder of the German Roman Catholic Church, respected by all German Christians. He and the cohorts of Anglo-Saxon churchmen and women – West Saxons, Mercians and above all Northumbrians – who flooded into Continental Europe can with reason be called pioneers.
In the context of Rome’s dealings with the Anglo-Saxon world, the eighth century was payback time: Augustine’s mission to Canterbury inaugurated a papal policy of expansion; Archbishop Theodore consolidated Rome’s hold with his affirmation of Canterbury’s position in a reorganized English church; and Wilfrid of York, by his appeals to Rome, was expanding the papal curia’s jurisdiction in Western Christendom at large. Now some three generations of English monks, nuns and clergy were to make unquestioning allegiance to Rome the central assumption of the Western church, and so strengthen its position against the claims of the Byzantine emperors to suzerainty over the papal see. To quote Walter Ullmann a classic authority on the early papacy:
In concrete terms strong ties especially between Anglo-Saxon England and the papacy came to be forged at exactly the same time as that at which the imperial [i.e. Byzantine] government had begun to terrorize the papacy.1
Willibrord of Northumbria: apostle of the Netherlands
For the best part of a century churchmen and monks from England criss-crossed the Channel or the North Sea. Many expected to spend most of their lives on the Continent, working among the pagan or recently converted pagan tribes bordering on the territories of the Merovingian Frankish kingdoms. Back in England there was a good deal of interest in the missionaries’ activities, particularly in the conversion of the German Saxons, the ‘Old Saxons’, whom the English considered their kinsfolk.
Wilfrid’s first Frisian venture had failed but then, in 689, Pippin of Heristal, warlord and chief minister of the royal household of the Merovingian king Dagobert III, defeated Radbod and married his son Grimoald to Theodelinda, the daughter of the Frisian chief. Radbod reluctantly came to terms. This was the situation facing Willibrord, son of a devoutly Christian member of the Northumbrian minor nobility, when in 690 he landed with eleven companions, among them Suidbert, Hewald ‘the Dark’ and Hewald ‘the Fair’, on the coast of Frisia. He headed for an old Roman fort at Utrecht, some twenty miles away on the Krom branch of the Rhine mouth. The Romans had known the place as Trajectum ad Rhenum (‘Ford across the Rhine’); in the 620s the Merovingian ruler of the day had conferred a chapel there on the Bishop of Cologne to be used as a missionary base. Nothing had come of that venture.
Now aged thirty-three, by the demographics of his day Willibrord was well into his prime. Sent by his father to Ripon, he had started his career under the influence of St Wilfrid and then, thanks to Wilfrid’s contacts there, it seems, spent twelve years in Ireland at the monastery of Rath Melsigi under Ecgberht, who apparently had once dreamed of himself missionizing the Continent. (The fact that Willibrord sailed to Frisia directly from Ireland seems to have prompted the mistaken idea that he was Irish). From Wilfrid, Willibrord learned his unswerving allegiance to Rome; as a noble, he naturally gravitated to the royal court. He found an aristocracy beyond royal control; a king subject to his chief minister; a church establishment largely autonomous and indifferent to Rome; and a chief minister single-mindedly devoted to the advance of his own power and dynasty.
For Pippin, religion was a natural tool of policy with which to reaffirm Frankish authority over pagan neighbours, and this Englishman with his devotion to Rome was the natural lever in court politics against churchmen attached to the traditional dynasty and their group interests. Rome, where the popes still acknowledged the overlordship of the emperors at Constantinople, was secondary. Indeed, according to Wilhelm Levison, at this time ‘the pope was of little importance to the Frankish church . . . [whereas] the English church was conscious of its Roman origin.’2
This suited Pippin well. By championing the Rome-orientated Anglo-Saxon missions he positioned himself in the eyes of the head of the church in the West as a staunch son of the church, in contrast to the dynastic loyalties of the Frankish church establishment and the ambivalent status of the royal house itself, whose traditional charisma rivalled, for many of their subjects, the spiritual aura of the Roman popes. Pippin and his house, ancestors to the Carolings, would prove stalwart advocates of the new Christian missions and of the papal patrons of those missions. As to the Frisians in the 690s, many, perhaps most, took the new religion resentfully. Baptism was to them less a sacrament to the Divine Being than ‘a symbol of subjection to the Franks’. Radbod himself swore that he would rather spend eternity in the kingdom of Hades with his ancestors than in the Christian Heaven without them. For the m
oment, however, he bided his time.
With his mission established under Pippin’s aegis, Willibrord travelled to Rome for the approval and blessing of Pope Sergius I. What was a natural move for a disciple of Wilfrid was ‘a momentous decision’ in a Merovingian context, but, as indicated, Pippin approved. The Englishman’s visit strengthened his dynasty’s dealings with Rome, which could only be good. Sixty years later the last king of the Merovingian house was to be replaced with papal approval as king of the Franks by his descendant Pippin III.
When Willibrord returned from Rome with holy relics for the new churches that were to be erected in their honour in the newly converted territories, it was to find that his companions had elected Suidbert as bishop. He was now in England being consecrated by Wilfrid. It was less a case of politicking within a divided team, more part of plans to extend the mission. The new bishop soon departed for work in pagan Westphalia, Germany. Driven out by Saxon raiders he retired to found a monastery under Pippin’s patronage; this was the origin of the settlement that became the town of Kaiserswerth. The two Hewalds were martyred while attempting to continue his work in Westphalia. Their shrine is still to be seen in Cologne Cathedral.
Willibrord now made his headquarters at Antwerp,3 under Pippin’s aegis, on the southern border of Frisia. Thanks no doubt to the threatening Frankish presence across the border, by 695 Frisia was ripe to become a new church province. Pippin sent Willibrord on a second journey to Rome, this time for Pope Sergius to consecrate him as archbishop of the Frisians. He took with him gifts from Pippin for the Holy Father and was duly consecrated in the church of St Cecilia in Trastevere on 21 November. He returned to Frisia and the following year received the fortress of Utrecht as his bishop’s palace at the hands of Pippin. An old church within the walls of the former Roman fort became his cathedral. (In 1996 the modern city celebrated its 1,300th anniversary with its patron St Willibrord given due prominence.)