A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  The shield wall or getruma used by Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons alike was, as the name suggests and as it was to be used at Hastings, a natural defensive formation but, like the Roman testudo (the Latin word Asser uses) or ‘tortoise’, could be used on the march. Alfred had also deployed it offensively at Ashdown, advancing only when the wall had been ‘formed up in orderly manner’ (ordinabiliter condensata).11 Lines in the song of the Battle of Brunanburh indicate that in the contest between sword and buckler a poorly seasoned lime-wood shield might be hacked through by a well-tempered blade, and it was in any case desperate work to keep the line as comrades fell to right or left, felled by the sword or ‘killed over the shield by spear’ or arrow, for the Bayeux tapestry shows shield men wielding spears. At the Battle of Maldon in 991 Ealdorman Byrthnoth required his men to hold their shields properly to form the ‘war hedge’ and it is clear that shire levies must have received training if they were to join professionals in this specialized battlefield technique.

  At Edington Alfred’s men drove the enemy from the field after hard fighting and pursued the fugitives to a fortification presumed to be Chippenham. Not all the enemy found refuge in time and, again according to Asser, Alfred killed men, horses and cattle that he found outside the fort. After a siege of just fourteen days Guthrum capitulated. In the treaty that followed he offered hostages; Alfred offered none. Guthrum agreed to accept baptism, taking the Christian name Æthelstan, with thirty of his chief men. Alfred stood as his sponsor and the new converts wore their white baptismal robes for the following eight days. This was an impressive ceremony of submission by any measure. Even so it has been pointed out that Guthrum was now accepted into the circle of Christian kings. If he had accepted Christianity, however, presumably many of his followers were still pagans. From the terms of the agreement it seems that Guthrum and his band were now a permanent element in the new political geography of England.12 He had agreed to leave Wessex and withdraw to his lands in East Anglia; in fact he fell back only to Cirencester, just over the border in Mercia. It was not until a full year later that he finally withdrew to East Anglia, where he settled and ‘shared out the land’.

  The following year another force rowed up the Thames beyond London as far as Fulham on the Mercian side of the river. If it had been intended to join up with Guthrum and deliver a deadly blow to the Anglo-Saxon presence its leaders thought better of the idea. The fleet made its way back down the Thames and throughout the 880s its army campaigned in the lands of Francia.

  The Danelaw

  In the winter of 872 Burgred of Mercia was forced to negotiate a peace deal with the Danish main force now at Torksey in Lindsey. Late the next year, a detachment of the army had rowed down the Trent, past Nottingham, and seized Repton in Derbyshire, the great Mercian royal minster, burial place of kings and fortified residence. Here they proceeded to fortify three and a half acres (1.5 hectares) with ditches and a 130-metre semicircle of earthworks that incorporated the Anglo-Saxon church and used the river as the base of the ‘D’. With this as their base they raided the surrounding countryside. After a reign of twenty-odd years Burgred abandoned the rearguard defence against the barbarian invaders and fled England; two years later he died in Rome, where he was buried in St Mary’s church in the English borgo.

  And yet, suggests John Blair, perhaps these pagans ‘recognized the cultic and symbolic prestige of their victims’ holy sites’.13 Excavations led by Martin Biddle at Repton revealed not only the camp bounded by the Trent and its earthworks, but also Scandinavian-style graves from the 870s, including skeletal remains of a Viking chieftain of high rank buried with an amulet and a Thor’s hammer pendant. The body was close to the relic crypt of the church and surrounded by the remains of 250 other young male bodies in what is now the vicarage garden. At the village of Ingleby nearby there is a site of cremations, indicating pagan rites, and on the hillside fifty-nine barrows.

  The increased level of raiders and invaders from the mid-860s onwards produced changes in the human geography of eastern England across the regions we know as Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, the East Midlands and East Anglia. Scandinavian and specifically Danish place names are numerous, but their occurrence is sporadic. So the extent and depth of the changes is difficult to estimate. Even burial practices, though diverse, are not conclusive. We find inhumations with and without grave goods: sometimes in church grounds, sometimes in specially raised barrows, as at Heath Wood Ingleby; sometimes Anglo-Saxon style swords feature in apparently Scandinavian graves. These and other factors may simply indicate the influx of a conquering elite imposing name changes on a subjected population. If there had been a large movement of peasant farmers from Denmark into lands cleared by a ‘Great Army’ or by warlords, then one would expect some trace in the archaeological record. So far there are few Viking grave sites, whether of great men or lesser folk, and nothing like enough to support the thesis of a massive, or even substantial, population shift across the North Sea.

  In the absence of archaeological back-up another avenue of research for what one might call the missing ethnic factor has been tried in the form of extensive DNA trialling nationwide. Even here, it appears, the results are inconclusive. So, whatever it was that the ‘Danish men’ featured by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle sought in the lands of the English race, it does not seem to have been what Germans of a later age called Lebensraum (‘living space’).

  But they left their mark on the social institutions. Where the English divided their shires into hundreds and measured their tax assessments by hides, the people of the Danelaw, whether conquered English peasantry or ethnic Danes, tended to work in ‘wapentakes’ (apparently from Old Norse vápnatak, meaning a ‘taking [i.e. counting] of weapons’) and ‘carucates’ (a measure of ploughland). A local assembly where assent was signified by the brandishing of arms fits well with one’s image of the invaders.

  Above all, the Danelaw was just that, a territory where Danish, not English, law and customs could be expected to apply, particularly with regard to land rights. However, uniformity was hardly to be expected. Viking war bands were essentially ships’ companies each under its own ship’s master or commander. As the time of raiding passed and the time for settlement came it was surely organized by the military leaders, whose voices were no doubt decisive when it came to decisions as to the details and the distribution of property.14

  Danelaw was never a political entity with a fixed boundary. When King Alfred and Guthrum signed their treaty, one part of Danelaw, that part where Guthrum ruled, comprising parts of modern Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, the whole of Essex, Cambridgeshire and East Anglia, was pretty well demarcated. Any Englishmen who lived here were awarded the same compensation rights or wergilds to buy off feud vengeance as Danes of equal status.

  North of these territories lay the lands of the Five Boroughs (Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Stamford and Lincoln), which were Danish strongholds conquered by Alfred’s son Edward the Elder and his sister Æthelflæd. The area of Northumbria controlled by Viking York, or Jorvik, was fully independent of English control for the best part of fifty years, though subject for a time to the Vikings of Dublin and later the Norwegian prince Eric Bloodaxe. A map to show England at the time of the Danelaw can hardly represent reality. A line drawn diagonally across the country from London up to the region of Chester awards a huge swath of territory to the customs of the incomers. In fact the whole area is best understood in terms of a scatter of separate regional communities, each with its own roots back to the English past and a ruling stratum sharing for the most part a common Danish inheritance.

  East Anglia is a case in point. The cult of Edmund the Martyr was fostered, indeed may have been launched, by Danes ashamed of the perpetrators. There are signs that Guthrum/Æthelstan, who ruled for a decade after his treaty with Alfred, may have ‘gone native’, that is to say may have identified himself with the traditions of English kingship following his conversion. It is also suggested that the Danish ruling stratum con
formed to the religion of the surrounding population inspired by their leader’s example. Archaeological evidence of the cult of St Edmund is provided by commemorative coins struck in the king’s name by East Anglian mints from the 890s to the 910s. They may mark a genuine gesture of atonement for any atrocity of 869/70 or, as Julian Richards has proposed, be part of a policy to mollify smouldering English resentment and pacify any thoughts of rebellion.

  Viking York

  In the following decade a raiding army was ravaging the banks of the Tyne and doing battle with the Picts and the Britons of Strathclyde. Their leader, Halfdan, then descended on York once more and with no effective rivals to his lordship distributed this region of Northumbria among his followers. That year they were ‘ploughing’ and fending for themselves, the Chronicles tell us. This was settlement in progress and, as if to point up the significance of the annal, someone has added at this point in the Peterborough Chronicle a Latin note to the effect that in this year too Rollo, founder of the duchy, invaded Normandy and ruled there for fifty-three years. Halfdan is generally credited as the founder of Viking York.

  To many in the north of England surveying the scene in the 860s, the battle of England must have seemed lost. After 867 the venerable city known to Alcuin by its Roman name of Eboracum, seat of England’s northern archbishops, a great home of learning, and northern Europe’s first post-Roman ‘city of culture’, would be renowned as Jorvik. Until 954 the region of old Northumbria between the Humber and the River Tees witnessed the fluctuating fortunes of a succession of Viking leaders or rulers of a territory of uncertain and shifting boundaries, now generally known as the ‘kingdom of York’. Noting that contemporary sources never use the term, David Rollason has observed in his Northumbria 500–1100 (2004) that there is no evidence that Halfdan’s conquest inaugurated a Viking or indeed any form of kingdom. In terms of cultural continuity he considers that ‘the Viking kingdom of York’ is perhaps better understood as the revival of the separate southern identity of Northumbria (between the rivers Tees and Humber), namely the old kingdom of Deira.

  For a time Guthred of Viking Dublin held sway, to be followed by three shadowy figures until, about 899, it acknowledged a ruler of the house of Wessex. In that year Alfred died, leaving the crown to his son Edward. But Edward’s cousin Æthelwold challenged the succession and looked for allies where he could find them, even among the national enemy, the Vikings. York opened its gates to him and may even have recognized him as king. Why, if York had a well-established line of Viking kings, it should accept a West Saxon malcontent is unclear. From there, he went into Essex with a fleet of ships and was soon recruiting men among the East Angles and raiding into Mercia and Wessex. The sequence of events is confused but the turmoil in the Wessex dynasty could have boiled into a civil war that, because the national enemy was now involved, could have overturned the burgeoning English state. As it was, although Æthelwold lost his life at the Battle of Holme (Holmesdale) in 902/3 the Vikings ‘held the field of battle’. Eight years later at Tettenhall, near Wolverhampton, Halfdan II of York and two other ‘kings’, Eowils and Ivar, were killed, but in what sense the title meant anything more than war chief is not clear. In 937 Æthelstan of Wessex crushed a combined army of Vikings and others at Brunanburh, but when he died two years later Olaf Guthfrithsson re-established a Dublin Viking monarchy there and extended the kingdom’s hegemony back over the ‘Five Boroughs’. It was ephemeral. His successor Olaf Sihtricson was soon ousted (943/4) by Edmund of England, and returned to rule in Dublin. Norse rule in York had barely a decade to run. It was spent in rivalry between Sihtricson and a member of the Norwegian royal house, Eric, called Bloodaxe. For a Viking to earn such a sobriquet clearly called for something exceptional. Briefly king of Norway, Eric is said to have killed a number of brothers. Fittingly he was ousted by a half-brother and driven into exile. A sea raider among the Scottish Isles before coming to York, Erik, the last Viking ruler of York, was driven from the city by the English king Eadred in the mid-950s.

  In the forty years before Eric seized the place we hear of six more warlords who held sway in Deira. Of these, Olaf Sihtricson, who held power in York for two brief periods, was also a ‘king’ of the Dublin Vikings and the Dublin connection recurs more than once. But it is hard to believe that men such as these, including Bloodaxe himself, were rulers of a calibre to make York ‘one of the great cities of the Viking world’.

  Perhaps, Professor Rollason has proposed, we should see York as ‘essentially an ecclesiastical city ruled by its archbishops, comparable to Trier or Cologne’. Wulfhere, the archbishop ejected by Halfdan, was restored to office only six years later, perhaps precisely so that he would direct the governance of the region. In such a context the superb Coppergate helmet, war gear with a seemingly incongruous Christian inscription, might be read as emblematic of the entwined sinews of secular and ecclesiastical power. In 1069 the Normans of the post-Conquest garrison, as befitted their Viking ancestry, set a fire that destroyed the great York library. Maybe, Rollason surmises, the archival evidence that could have confirmed the hypothesis of a church-led administration also perished in the flames. Whoever actually ran the place, Viking York was highly prosperous despite the Byzantine and bloody power politics that absorbed its ‘kings’.

  Archaeology has revealed the construction of substantial defence works, such as the strengthening of the dilapidated Roman fortifications. Excavations from the 1970s in the Coppergate district uncovered the presence of a major commercial and craftworking centre in the fork at the confluence of the Ouse and Foss rivers. By about 900 there was a grid pattern of long narrow plots divided by wattle fences and built up with post and wattle structures, running back from open shop fronts on the street line. Some fifty years later a large rebuilding project replaced these structures with houses, workshops and occasional warehouses built of robust oak squared uprights clad in oak planking. Archaeology reveals that York was importing honestones from Scandinavia, pottery perhaps with wine in it from the Rhineland, even silk from the Far East. Its workshops were turning out leather goods, wooden household vessels, textiles and grave slabs and other stone work in the region’s own characteristic ‘Jelling’ style of decoration, incised in double outline animal motifs. Furnaces and stocks of ore, crucibles and other equipment testified to working in iron, copper and precious metals. There were jewellers working in (imported) amber, shoemakers and skate makers among other artisans. Wells, drainage channels and purpose-built latrines complete the picture of a well-planned new business quarter. Coppergate was part of a much wider piece of town planning, but York was a thriving emporium before the Scandinavian settlement. Elsewhere in the city, for example at Fishergate, there are indications of merchants’ quarters laid out in the late eighth century and the presence of Frisian traders.

  The York mint was busy in the early decades of the tenth century producing coins for the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelstan, who occupied the place for a time in the 930s, and for the Viking Olaf Guthfrithsson, the last but one Scandinavian ‘king’ of York. Moneyers were part of the social elite and descendants of these Norse artisan dynasties were still at work in the time of William the Conqueror.

  North by northeast and the province of St Cuthbert

  It seems the Vikings quickly converted to Christianity. The cemetery of the ‘Viking’ period under the present York Minster shows uninterrupted Christianity at the heart of the city. To the northwest, Northumbrian hegemony over the Britons of ancient Cumbria, a region that in addition to the modern county of that name embraced districts along the northern bank of the Solway Firth in Dumfriesshire, modern Scotland, was disrupted and supplanted by raiders from Viking Dublin and also from Norway. In the tenth century a shadowy succession of rulers, beginning with Owain (c. 915–c. 937) and called the kings of the Cumbrians, is occasionally mentioned by northern sources.

  Any account of the confused and shifting events and peoples in this northern part of England, based as it is on fragmentary ch
ronicle references, disputed place name evidence and isolated archaeological finds, must largely be speculation, though there are some tempting allusions in sagas and bardic literature. The name ‘Cumbria’, related of course to the Welsh cymry, proclaims its British origins, but who these tenth-century kings of Cumbria might be is not clear. One theory starts from the fact that its northern neighbour, the British kingdom of Strathclyde, with its fortress of Alclyde (Dumbarton), was annexed by the kings of the Scots; it proposes that they used their new province as the base for further expansion southward. On this thesis, the title ‘king of Cumbria’ should be seen as the designation for the Scottish sub-kings of Strathclyde. The names of Owain’s successors, Dunmail (Donald), expelled by the English king Edmund in 945, and Malcolm, who died in 997 and was perhaps also the ruler known as ‘king of the Britons of the North’, certainly have a Scottish ring. With the death of another Owain (Owain the Bald) in 1018 the Strathclyde Cumbrian regime was absorbed by the kings of the Scots. The situation would be contested for generations by border warfare that seems to have determined that British Strathclyde should remain Scottish, and British Cumbria remain English.

  An alternative thesis argues that the king of Cumbria was not the Scottish king of Strathclyde under another name but rather an independent British ruler. According to this view, the British population submerged by the original Anglo-Saxon conquests was liberated by the collapse of Anglian Northumbria to reassert its identity under its own line of kings. Central to the debate are the numerous place names in the area of undoubtedly British origin. Were they planted in southward expansion from Strathclyde in the tenth century or were they in fact survivals from the pre-Anglian conquest period? The expert jury is still out, though a layman might suggest that Scottish kings of Strathclyde would hardly name captured or newly founded settlements in the language of their own subject British population.