The situation in the region northwards from the Tees to the River Tyne is a little easier to unravel. It would come under the sway of the monastic community of St Cuthbert. Rich in lands gifted by King Guthred, whom they believed owed his peaceful throne to their intervention, in 875 the community had set off with its patron’s corpse from Lindisfarne in search of more secure premises. Its peregrinations, first to Norham in Cumbria, then to Crayke and eventually to Chester-le-Street, became woven into the tapestry of the community’s tradition. The brethren of St Cuthbert, far from being a ‘band of ragged exiles clinging to their precious burden’, were in fact ‘rather, a prosperous religious corporation responding to political change by making a series of planned moves between estates which they already owned’.15 After twelve years of peaceful prosperity (883–95) at Chester-le-Street, the bishop and community made their final move to Durham. Thus the core of the later palatinate and the powers of its prince bishops was planted in the huge estates acquired by followers of the humble saint in the wake of the Viking invasions. They reflect the territories of the former kingdom of Bernicia south and north of the Tyne. North of the Tyne in the early 900s we find a dynasty of earls ruling from the former royal palace of Bamburgh: the Annals of Ulster calls the first of them ‘king of the North Saxons’. They held their lordship up to the Norman Conquest, as we note in chapter 12.
8
THE WESSEX OF ALFRED THE GREAT
It was the Wessex of Alfred the Great that prevented Anglo-Saxon Christian civilization from being submerged by what one might call pagan ‘cultural norms’. The Battle of Edington of 878 was the decisive turning point for England – some would say for Christian Europe. Others have argued that the survival of the English language itself could have been in jeopardy. But no serious historical commentator would contest that had Wessex gone under, so would the kingdom of the English or, as Alfred came to call it, ‘the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’.
When he first used the term, in a charter of 885, the idea of a united kingdom even of the West Saxons was still comparatively new, as was the family in power. Alfred’s kin could show descent from Cerdic (it was a condition of the kingship); they also claimed Beowulf’s Scyld Scefing among their ancestors, who in turn descended from Sceaf, a supposed fourth son of Noah. Apparently Alfred kept a little handbook by him with a genealogical note on West Saxon kings. On the other hand, his grandfather Ecgberht was the first of their branch of the dynasty to occupy the throne. In fact, one biographer of Alfred suggests that Ecgberht’s background was ‘essentially Kentish’, his father apparently ‘among Kent’s last independent kings’ before the old kingdom became a sub-kingdom or province of Mercia. Following Ecgberht’s defeat of Mercia at Ellendun in 825, Mercian hegemony in southern England was broken. Ecgberht’s son Æthelwulf now led an army down into Kent and expelled its last king, Baldred, so that it became the great eastern province of the West Saxon kingdom.
The old rivalry of Wessex with Mercia was fading. About 852–4 the Mercian king Burgred (852–74) had married Æthelswih of Wessex, Alfred’s sister, following a successful joint campaign with Wessex against the Welsh. Then about 867 Alfred’s brother Æthelred effectively inaugurated a monetary union by adopting the Mercian type of lunette penny. A common currency based on coins minted exclusively at London and Canterbury now circulated from Dover to Chester and from Exeter to Lincoln.1
The making of a king
Alfred was born between 847 and 849 at Wantage in Berkshire, according to Asser, the youngest of the five sons of King Æthelwulf (839–58) by his wife Osburh, who died when he was still a boy. She was of noble birth and through her father could claim part-Jutish ancestry – ‘useable’ antecedents for a prince who would one day rule in Kent. With four brothers ahead of him there must have been doubts that he would in fact become king. Was he originally intended for a career in the church? He was declared heir only at age fifteen.
Yet his public life began early: aged six he was witnessing charters and participating in the activities of the court. He was soon learning the business of the hunt, the handling of weapons and the beginnings of horse mastery. He was also hanging around the falconers in the royal mews, where he no doubt learnt the English manner of carrying the falcon on the left wrist and, in handling, of grasping the bird across her back to reduce the danger of injury from flapping wings.2 As a father, Alfred would insist that his children, and the noblemen’s sons sent to be fostered at his court, learn to read and write in English and Latin before they mastered the manly skills associated with the hunt. For literature was a passion – a passion that extended as much to the courtly epic and the minstrel’s lay as to the history and philosophy and the Psalms that he himself would translate. A famous anecdote, which his biographer Asser presumably heard from the king himself, tells how Alfred’s mother promised a beautiful book of English poetry to whichever of her sons could first understand and recite it. The boy, who could not yet read, took the volume to his tutor, had him read it aloud, memorized it and claimed the prize. It no doubt came easily, for he was already memorizing the lays and epics declaimed in his father’s mead hall. Later Alfred, the scholar king, evidently prided himself also as a worthy lord in the heroic manner. Bishop Wulfsige of Sherborne, wishing to flatter the king, used the language of the epic scop to hail him ‘the greatest treasure giver of all the kings . . . ever heard of’.
Rome and Alfred
Simon Keynes has shown that references in a manuscript in Brescia confirm that Alfred twice visited Rome as a boy. On the first occasion, in 853, it would seem he was sent as a harbinger of a visit planned by his father; the pope, we are told, ‘decorated him, as a spiritual son, with the dignity of the belt [cingulum] and the vestment . . . customary with Roman consuls’.3 The boy was to remember the impressive ceremony as a royal consecration. Æthelwulf’s victory over the Vikings at Aclea in 851 was still being feted in Europe in the Annals of St Bertin at Troyes. Two years later the boy prince returned, this time as part of his father’s entourage. Together with ‘a multitude of people’, they were received with great honour by Pope Benedict III – Alfred as the spiritual son of the papacy, Æthelwulf as a warrior against the heathen and bearer of lavish gifts to St Peter, among them a gold crown four pounds in weight, a fine sword bound in gold, four luxury ‘Saxon bowls’ and much else, including largesse for the citizens of Rome.
Returning from Rome in 856, Æthelwulf and Alfred visited the court of the West Frankish ruler Charles the Bald. Evidently, a marriage had been arranged between Charles’s daughter Judith, a girl aged about twelve, and Æthelwulf, now a man in his fifties. Perhaps because he knew kings’ wives were not treated with special deference in Wessex, perhaps to give any child she might bear added status, or perhaps simply because it was becoming standard practice in West Francia, Charles insisted that the bride be consecrated queen during the marriage service. Archbishop Hincmar of Reims, expert in ritual, officiated at the ceremony. That spring, Danish raiders had penetrated to the heart of France and ravaged Orléans and in August a large force rowed up the Seine to within a few miles of Paris. Charles, possibly accompanied by his English royal guest, led an army against them and did great slaughter but failed to drive them from their fortified base. They were to return.
Arrived back in Wessex, Æthelwulf found himself faced by a general rebellion led by his eldest son Æthelbald. The cause is unknown. Maybe the heir was worried by the new queen’s consecration ceremony. He need hardly fear a second wife as such, but the nubile youngster now installed was a full queen, sanctified by the church. Any son of hers might take priority over him. Æthelwulf retired with his young spouse to Kent. A charter dated November 857 suggests the kind of problems Wessex had to fear from Æthelwulf’s Continental interests: it is a confirmation of a gift of lands at Rotherfield, Hastings, Pevensey and London to Saint Denis, the great monastery outside Paris; in other words the ‘export’ of substantial revenues.
When his father died the following year, Æthe
lbald neutralized any threat from Judith by marrying her (marriage with a stepmother, not unheard of in pagan practice, does not seem to have caused any technical problems for the church, though it scandalized Bishop Asser). King Æthelwulf had maintained the domestic prestige of the monarchy left him by his illustrious father (a tenth-century archbishop of Trier who was proud to trace his descent from Ecgberht of Wessex). He also assured the ascendancy of his house in Kent so that minsters there turned to him for protection, rather than the archbishops of Canterbury. Indeed by the end of the century Alfred, his son, was able to appoint his own candidate to the see. He had a better than average record against the Vikings and he had promoted the standardization of the coinage carried forward by his sons. By his marriage into the Carolingian dynasty he had increased its standing abroad. Yet by his will he confirmed the division of the kingdom, leaving Kent and the eastern dependencies (Surrey, Sussex and Essex) to Æthelberht and Wessex, along with the former British territories of Dumnonia and Cornwall, to Æthelbald (who was to be followed by Æthelred and Alfred in the West).
On Æthelbald’s early and childless death in 860 the surviving brothers agreed that Æthelberht should succeed to the kingdom as a whole, with the prospect of Æthelred and Alfred to follow. Five years after this Æthelberht, too, died childless. Again Alfred ceded the entire succession to his brother Æthelred. When he too died in 871, Æthelred left a baby boy. It was out of the question to have an infant on the throne during these times of Danish raiding and Alfred succeeded as sole king. There would be problems when the baby, Æthelwold, grew to manhood (see page 263).
We must assume that the consular installation ceremony at Rome coloured Alfred’s entire life. He conducted a similar ceremony for his four-year-old grandson, Æthelstan, son of Edward. The child was invested ‘with a scarlet cloak, a belt set with gems and a Saxon sword with a gilded scabbard’. To some present it seemed like a secular consecration. For Alfred one imagines there were powerful associations with the duties of a Roman consul, which he translated in Anglo-Saxon as heretoga (i.e. ‘leader’). He saw himself as championing civilization against the forces of pagan barbarism.
He saw, too, comparisons between Wessex and himself facing the Danes and Rome under barbarian attack centuries before, then yielding to the impious rule of Theodoric the Ostrogoth (d. 520), the heretic Arian Christian. Theodoric’s chief minister was Boethius, a Roman Christian of ancient patrician family who for unknown reasons was arrested on treason charges. In prison awaiting trial (he was executed in 524) Boethius wrote On the Consolation of Philosophy, which Alfred was to translate lovingly. In his view of history Boethius had been a model champion of the moral way withstanding a violent and unrighteous usurper. Similarly he, under threat from the pagan Danes, was a just man, like Boethius, suffering for a righteous cause. He ascended the throne conscious that the aura of a Roman authority was about him and as consciously prepared to defend the Christian Roman legacy in his kingdom of Wessex against the pagan invaders. His new 870s coin types from the London mint show ‘design elements deliberately and carefully copied’ from Roman models.4
Biography and history
The Vita Alfredi Regis Angul Saxonum is a Latin account of the ‘Life of Alfred King of the Anglo-Saxons’ from his birth, through his accession in 871 and up to the year 887 – that is twelve years before the death of its subject and almost twenty years before the death of its named author, the Welsh monk-bishop Asser (d. 908/9). About half the text is a Latin translation of texts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle covering the years between 851 and 887. The single known manuscript of the Vita, made about the year 1000, was destroyed in 1731 by a fire in the Cotton Library in Westminster; various transcriptions and editions made before that time provide the basis of modern editions of the book. Alfred had called Asser to the West Saxon court to be his tutor in Latin, the lessons beginning on St Martin’s Day, 11 November 887. He became a valued royal confidant and divided his time between the court and his monastery in St David’s. He rose in the West Saxon church to become bishop of the rich see of Sherborne and received rich gifts, such as a most valuable silken robe. So it was that the biography of the English king renowned for promoting the English language as a vehicle of history and scholarship came to be recorded by a Welshman writing in Latin. But then Asser was heir to the old British tradition of Latin scholarship reaching back to the time of Gildas. He depicts the king more as saint or pope. James Campbell observed that ‘Asser [wrote] with the zeal of the well rewarded’.
The idea for the project may have been inspired by the ‘Life of Emperor Charles the Great’ (Vita Caroli) written by the German churchman Einhard, who in turn had studied under Alcuin. But there are differences. Asser, writing in England, uses many AD dates, Einhard only one; Asser has anecdotes from his subject’s childhood, Einhard none; Asser lays stress on the importance of the carmina Saxonica (‘Saxon songs’) in Alfred’s upbringing. No such vernacular frivolities feature in Einhard.
Inevitably the Bible (particularly the Jewish Old Testament) provided themes for Christian monarchy. The inauguration of Saul as king of Israel, the example of Solomon as judge and law-maker, the decrees of God himself in the Ten Commandments were all seen as models. But even in military matters the ‘Good Book’ could seem relevant. When he read that ‘King Rehoboam dwelt in Jerusalem and built cities for defence in Judah’ (II Chronicles 11:5) Alfred would surely have found confirmation for his ‘burh’ building programme. Asser himself had an excellent command of the detailed Latin military terminology for defensive war and battlefield manoeuvres. Possibly he had read De rei militaris, the military treatise by the late fourth-century Roman patrician Vegetius and ‘the most heavily used of all classical texts in Western Europe from the 5th to the 15th century’5 that according to David Hill, was known in England. Even the Venerable Bede seems to have based his description of the rampart raised by the Romans against the Picts on it.6 Perhaps Alfred too was familiar with it: Vegetius had much to say on the need for good intelligence gathering, the decisive importance of terrain and the correct use of reserves, all aspects of warfare in which Alfred was expert.
We do not know why Asser, who seems to have begun work in 893, ended the biography when he did, and there are factors that have led people to question whether he in fact was the author. The most extended argument for this thesis in King Alfred the Great (1995) by Professor Alfred P. Smyth. At the moment, though, the balance seems to be in Asser’s favour. For just one example, Asser’s book draws on texts that would have come naturally to a Welsh scholar, such as the ‘Old Latin’ version of the Bible, which was displaced in England by St Jerome’s ‘Vulgate’ text a good fifty years before Alfred came to the throne but was still in use in Wales.7
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (or, better, Chronicles), is a series of annals purporting to record events from the year 494 to 1154. It has been said that ‘Anglo-Saxon history would be virtually impossible to write without it.’8 Being Europe’s only vernacular chronicle of such detail over such a long stretch of time, it has been and is still subject to intense and critical scrutiny (see chapter 9). Probably inaugurated under the aegis of King Alfred, its origins are in fact unclear. The hand of the first scribe has been dated to the very end of the reign. Up to that point, together with the regnal list and genealogy as preface, it is a panegyric to the dynasty’s conquest of southwest Britain followed by its triumph over the Danes. Whoever the compiler was, he could probably rely on ‘back-up knowledge’ of the oral traditions among his audience. If we add Alfred’s law book, which records also the laws of King Ine, we have the testament of a dynasty as notable in the arts of peace as successful in the arts of war.
The value of the Chronicles to the royal house of Cerdic becomes obvious if we look at the other powerful kings and dynasties mentioned in its annals. None of them, not even the kings of Mercia, present us with the same sense of root or of destiny. Moreover, by its coverage, albeit selective, of other kingdoms in the land of the English ‘A
ngelcynn’ the Chronicle does have the aspect of a ‘national’ chronicle. While there is no direct evidence of Alfred’s personal involvement, it is hard to believe that he was not associated with the enterprise. At the very least, Alfred’s encouragement of learning and his deep sense of history support the supposition. After all, he did make additions to Orosius’ Old English translation of world history. What is more, the first part of the Chronicle manuscript, which runs from 494 to 891, was written in the kingdom of Wessex, very possibly in Winchester, Alfred’s favourite town. This record of the Anglo-Saxons and their success against the Danish ‘Great Army’ may well have been intended as morale-boosting ‘propaganda’, as we are told it was placed in Winchester, presumably in the Old Minster, attached by a chain to a reading desk. Moreover, it appears that copies were being sent out to the large churches of Wessex about the year 892 at the time of renewed Viking raids.9
This ‘Winchester’ Chronicle also covers many Continental events during Alfred’s reign and not only events relating to Viking incursions into Europe, where England did have a common interest with the Frankish lands. There were at this time a number of Frankish monks in the fortified monastery founded by Alfred at Athelney, who no doubt kept up with their contacts in Francia and could have been the source of such information. Athelney input could also account for the Chronicle’s well-informed coverage of local Somerset news. This combination of the local, the national and the international adds to the perennial fascination of the source.
A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons Page 25
