A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  Æthelstan not only fixed the English–West British boundary at the Tamar, he expelled a Cornish enclave in Exeter, beyond the river, and held his quasi-imperial great court in the city in 928 and 935. With the marriage of his sister to Sihtric, the Viking lord of York, he asserted claims to Wessex hegemony in the old territories of Northumbria. Two years later, by expelling Sihtric’s brother Guthfrith he established himself as king of all the English, as he was to remain until his death in 939. Yet for all his glory historians have sensed something sinister behind the reign. A remarkable number of his kinsmen found a premature or violent death in suspicious circumstances. Years later, the chronicler Symeon of Durham charged him with arranging the death of his half-brother Edwin, who was sent into exile in Flanders and drowned at sea.

  While, remarkably for a king, Æthelstan never married, he was the best-connected ruler in the Europe of his day through marriages he arranged for his sisters or half-sisters. Edward the Elder left no fewer than nine daughters, of whom Eadgifu, the second born, had become queen of Francia by her marriage to Charles III of West Francia (ruled 892–922, d. 929). In 922 Charles was ousted in a dynastic struggle and incarcerated by his enemy, the Lord of Vermandois, but Eadgifu had escaped across the Channel to England with their baby son Louis. Thus, with a Queen of France in exile as a half-sister and her son the pretender to that disputed crown, when Æthelstan came to the throne in 924 he already had a personal connection with one corner of continental European politics.

  His dynastic diplomacy would not have disgraced the Habsburgs. In 926 Eadhild married Hugh the Great, the Count of Paris, and far and away the most powerful man in West Francia (roughly modern France). Born about 938, their son Hugh Capet would be elected king of France in 987. Æthelstan married his sister Eadgyth to Otto of Saxony in 930. The initiative came from Otto’s father Henry the Fowler, elected king of Germany by the nobles of Franconia and Saxony, though not recognized by Swabia and Bavaria. He needed a ‘good’ marriage for his son and heir to boost his standing and the approach testifies to the high recognition of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom on the Continent. It seems to have been believed that the royal family was descended from St Oswald of Northumbria (see chapter 8). Envoys went between the two courts and Æthelstan sent two of his sisters for the young duke’s approval. It is supposed that the duke, later emperor as Otto I, chose the prettier. But while Eadgyth was apparently considered without parallel for her virtue by the English, and while Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, noblewoman and royal intimate, nun and imperial eulogist, praised her charm, regal bearing and her ‘radiant goodness and sincerity of countenance’, beauty as such does not feature anywhere on the inventory. Given that he married two other sisters into the ruling houses of Aquitaine and Burgundy, it was fitting that The Annals of Ulster should dignify him with the appellation of ‘roof-tree of the dignity of the Western World’.8

  In the spring of 936 a deputation arrived in England to escort Æthelstan’s now fifteen-year-old nephew, Louis d’Outremer (‘from Oversea’), back across the Channel to be crowned in Laon Cathedral by the archbishop of Reims, as King Louis IV of West Francia. His English mother went into retirement at Notre-Dame, Laon. With one aunt married to the most powerful man in France and another to the king of Germany the young monarch might have expected a smooth ride. Unfortunately the half-English king of France was not properly submissive. He moved his court to Laon, away from the overbearing presence of Uncle Hugh in Paris, and then intervened in the region known as Lothringen (roughly modern Lorraine), which angered the nobles of East Francia. Uncle Æthelstan may have lent diplomatic or moral support. But Louis proved adept at European manoeuvring and came to terms with both his European kinsmen; his career seemed in the ascendant when he died, just thirty-three, in 951.

  English connections with Germany continued through the cult of St Oswald well into the Middle Ages, as did more practical links, too. In the 990s Archbishop Egbert of Trier was proud of his English name and liked to boast of his descent from Ecgberht, king of Wessex in the early 800s. It seems that the archbishop was instrumental in the appointment of the English-born Leofsige as abbot of Mettlach on the bank of the River Saar. Praised by a modern German scholar as a ‘Renaissance man’ (‘Renaissancemensch’) before his time, Leofsige was noted as a physician, was something of a versifier and as a patron was responsible for one of the oldest structures in the modern Saarland, Mettlach’s octagonal Alter Turm (‘Old Tower’), built as a funerary chapel for St Leodwin.9

  To the people of his day Æthelstan was a model of kingship: victorious in war; lord of kings; focus of Europe’s most illustrious royal kinship; rich in the wealth of this world and, more noteworthy still, in the wealth of the spiritual world. He was renowned as an expert collector of relics. When Hugh the Great sent to petition for the hand of the king’s sister in marriage the embassy, headed by Baldwin Count of Flanders, the king’s uncle by marriage, was laden with treasures of incredible worth – gemstones and exotic perfumes, horses with golden harnesses. But far above these was the sword of Emperor Constantine the Great, the almost conventional opulence of which was as nothing when compared with a simple iron nail set in the sword’s pommel, for this was one of the nails used at the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Nothing in Christendom could exceed the value of this, except for the spear with which the centurion had pierced the side of Christ as he hung upon the Cross or a portion of the Cross itself.

  These were fitting gifts for a connoisseur of the numinous, one whose agents trawled Europe for relics much as the Getty Museum today does for works of art. In thanks for a favour Æthelstan had granted, a Breton church sent ‘relics, which we know you value more than earthly treasure’; in return the king distributed largesse from his hoard of holy treasure to monastic communities, with a prodigality to match the open-handedness of Hrothgar, ‘ring-giver of men’, from the ancient hall of pagan Heorot.

  In the age of the itinerant royal household, when monarchs must travel their kingdoms to consume the food renders due from their subjects, the imperial court of Æthelstan on the move would have been an impressive sight indeed, though for the localities through which it passed back and forth, from Colchester to Winchester, Tamworth to Exeter, it must have been a serial nightmare of organization. When there were subject kings paying court or an archbishop or two, each with their own retinues, numbers might swell to as many as a thousand to be fed and housed, whether billeted on the locals or in tents and pavilions pitched for the few nights stay before the move on.

  Literate and evidently also of artistic taste, Æthelstan, who claimed the scholar Aldhelm among his spiritual ancestors (he commissioned his tomb) and patronized his young kinsman Dunstan, the future archbishop of Canterbury, died at the height of his power to be succeeded by his brother Edmund, and in turn by their younger brother Eadred. Æthelstan is said to have fathered an illegitimate daughter.10

  Dynasty

  Edmund, who ruled from 939 to 946, was the first king to succeed to the rule of all England, thanks to the heroic reign of his predecessor – but it was an uncertain inheritance and he spent most of his time fighting to make it good. Although he had fought at Brunanburh, he would find it a short-lived triumph. First his brother’s death and then the resurgence of Olaf Guthrithsson of York destabilized the results of victory. In 940 the archbishops of Canterbury and York arranged a peace at which Watling Street was agreed upon as the boundary between Danish/Norse and English territories. In fact, shortly after that Edmund was able to recover the region of the Five Boroughs, a success celebrated like that at Brunanburh with a poem, albeit a short one in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Edmund also received the submission of the Welsh prince of Gwynedd. In the last year of his reign he even enforced a momentary English authority on Strathclyde. He died a violent death, stabbed to death at his royal vill of Pucklechurch as he intervened in a brawl trying to save a court official. There were many suspicious dynastic deaths in the tenth century; Edmund’s was certainly murder, though there is no
evidence it was premeditated.

  The nine-year reign of his successor, Eadred (d. 955), was marked by his eventually successful struggle to force the Danes of York to acknowledge his supremacy. The changes in his fluctuating authority are reflected in various regnal titles in successive charters, which twice designated him as ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons, Northumbrians, pagans and Britons’ and as ‘king of the English’. Probably of equal importance in the eyes of the king (nearing forty, it has been suggested, at his succession and subject to severe illness from about 950), was the move towards church reform inaugurated with his encouragement by his chief councillor, Dunstan, abbot of Glastonbury. A man of ‘forceful personality’, Dunstan was driven from court on the death of his royal patron.

  The new king, Eadwig, was either immature, lascivious and in thrall to a noblewoman set on marrying him to her daughter, or he just wanted to free himself of the domineering churchman. Possibly, of course, he was merely a victim of gossip. He was certainly young, little more than fifteen at his accession and, if we are to believe the scandal, sexually liberated in advance of what the twenty-first century normally expects from the tenth. Dunstan’s biographer, at least, credited the king with a taste for incestuous troilism, reporting that the churchman had to drag the recently consecrated monarch back to his coronation feast from a bedroom session with mother and daughter. Dunstan was ordered into exile, which he passed in Flanders, and Eadwig married the lady (i.e. the daughter). Later the church ordered the couple to separate on the grounds that the match was within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity. It has been suggested that Eadwig and his bride could trace a common descent from King Alfred. Two years into his reign as king of the English, he faced insurrection in Mercia and Northumbria and was succeeded there as king by his brother Edgar. From this power base Edgar succeeded to the crown of Wessex on Eadwig’s death in 959. He ‘discarded two wives as his needs and aspirations changed’, notes Stafford.11

  Ælfthryth, Edgar’s third partner and mother of the ill-fated Æthelred II ‘Unraed’, displaced Wulfthryth (possibly a concubine), who in turn had displaced Edgar’s first wife, the mother of Edward (later king and ‘Martyr’). The king’s marital status was sufficiently confused, even at the time, for some to hold that his third partnership was in fact adulterous. Both in England and on the Continent, kings inclined towards serial monogamy and the distinction between wife and concubine was essentially a question of dowry; it assured the wife of a measure of economic independence. The concubine, like a wife, might give her consent to the liaison but consent could be given in secret and in the last resort this, the vital element in a marriage from the church’s point of view, might depend on the word of the king. On repudiating Wulfthryth, Edgar made her abbess of Wilton, and here their daughter Eadgyth (St Edith) was to live an exemplary life of humble devotion, refusing all attempts to persuade her to accept a position as abbess.

  Known as ‘pacificus’, which may be interpreted as ‘the peaceable’ or the ‘peace-maker’, Edgar, who was inaugurated as king probably at Kingston upon Thames about the year 961 and died in 975, certainly pacified his country with stern, possibly harsh rule. It is also true that there was no attack on his realm from either land or sea throughout the reign. In 973, a year of high ceremonial, he was rowed in state upon the River Dee at Chester by some eight lesser kings – Scottish, Welsh, British and Scandinavian. This may have been the culmination of one of the patrols of England’s coastal waters that Edgar was said to captain. (see chapter 8). Whit Sunday that same year, the king’s thirtieth, also witnessed his quasi-imperial consecration at Bath in an order of service (ordo) devised by St Dunstan that consciously invoked the Biblical concept of priestly intervention in the proclamation of King Solomon. The text on ‘Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet’ has featured in every coronation up to that of Elizabeth II in 1953.

  In a short poem the Parker Chronicle celebrates the king as valorous in deeds of war and notes the date as almost one thousand years since the days of the Lord of Victories, i.e. Jesus Christ set firmly in the tradition of warlords. Two years later different versions of the Chronicle lament the death of the king, ‘friend to the West Saxons and protector of the Mercians’, in whose reign, they recall, no raiding host had been able to win booty for itself. Edgar, King from 957 to 975, claimed supremacy of rule in Britain; in England his reign saw major organization of local government by shires, reorganization in church life and reform in the coinage. It firmly established the idea of a single English state.

  Church, state and reform

  With the arrival of Theodore of Tarsus as archbishop of Canterbury in 669 and his organization of the ecclesiastical structure, the English kingdoms got used to the idea of a supranational allegiance embracing the whole of their part of the island of Britannia. This combined with the emerging concept of an over-kingship, expressed in the Anglo-Saxon word ‘bretwalda’, to prepare the way for the idea of a geographical unity occupied by the ethnic unity of Angelcynn, in a country that Cnut would call Angla lond even though it was by then occupied by a mélange of ethnicities, such as Danes, Norwegians and British as well as Anglo-Saxons. The tenth-century Vikings of Dublin, on becoming Christian, distanced themselves from the Irish church to affirm allegiance to Canterbury.

  Since the time of Bede the Angelcynn had recognized themselves in the Latin term gens Anglorum, which derived ultimately from the usage ‘Anglii’, adopted by Gregory I. Once the decision had been made at Whitby to adopt Christianity, the still strong current of Celtic Christianity and Irish traditions would eventually flow into a common channel of establishment religion. The distinction that apparently seemed important in 662 in some sense faded. This meant that saints from various provinciae or kingdoms came to be venerated as the common spiritual ancestry of the entire English nation. So Saints Chad and Cedd, trained by Aidan of the Irish/Celtic tradition at Lindisfarne on Holy Island, became venerated as the founding fathers of Christianity in Mercia and East Anglia, and those two patriarchs of Northumbrian Celtic tradition, Cuthbert and King St Oswald, found devotees and patrons of their cults across Southumbria. Even Wilfrid of Ripon, that most northern of saints, came to have a shrine at Canterbury.

  No doubt the rituals and creeds of the Roman church’s tradition, the authority of its bishops and the local allegiances built on England’s evolving parochial structure knitted the Christian church into the fabric of English life. Whereas in the eighth century the founding and endowment of religious buildings had been largely the business of kings and nobles, John Blair has noted that 300 years later such patronage was increasingly the work of people of ‘middle-ranking’ status. The actual local church building was treated as community property in a way that modern parish clergy might envy, though clergy at the time could have mixed feelings on the subject. Pastoral letters complain of thoughtless behaviour in church, careless talk, eating and sometimes excessive drinking – the building was clearly a popular venue! In the Canons of Edgar, priests are warned not to carry arms on the premises – certainly not in the altar enclosure. But at the deep level of magic where pagan and Christian blend, the English saints – some of Irish antecedence, others, like Wilfrid, with Roman allegiance – provided a structural network, like the rafting laid down to receive the foundations of a fenland abbey, for the church in England and in the community as ‘nodes and links in a network which connected royal power to local piety over most of [the country]’. To this we can add the conviction of Anglo-Saxon churchmen that saw themselves and their compatriots as ‘a people of God, a new Israel’. For such an elite, ‘whose predecessors had passed through the desert of the Viking invasions’, the long tenth-century vernacular poem based on the book of Exodus would have been full of resonance.12 Sadly for them, many would live to see the return of the wilderness years with the renewal of the Danish raids after the reign of Edgar the Peaceable.

  The monastic revival

  About the year 950 an upheaval began in the English church that would last fo
r the next thirty years as reforms were introduced that would reshape monastic life and so the cultural life of the country at large. This followed reforms heralded on the Continent by the founding of the abbey of Cluny in 910 and most powerfully expressed in the monasteries of Flanders and Lotharingia/Lorraine.

  The English reform was managed by three men: Dunstan (924–88), a Somerset man, from a rich landed family with estates near Glastonbury; Æthelwold (?905–84), Winchester-born and in his youth at the court of Æthelstan; and Oswald (d. 992), son of a rich family of Danish descent; all three were subjects for important near-contemporary biographies. Less prominent but nevertheless important was Oda, archbishop of Canterbury from 942 to 958 and Oswald’s uncle.

  Dunstan spent his early years at Glastonbury exploring a library still rich in classical as well as ecclesiastical texts and, so said the envious, too interested in the pagan texts for the good of his soul. Being bright, he naturally had enemies. A copy of the works of the Roman poet Ovid, then at Glastonbury, now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, contains a finely drawn monumental figure of Christ with the monk Dunstan crouching at his feet. A note on the page tells us it was drawn by Dunstan himself and there are claims that he designed metalwork. In addition he was renowned as a singer and musician and seems to have exploited the effect of the aeolian harp (the sounds caused by the wind blowing through the strings of a free-standing instrument). Versatile, gifted and well born, he was prominent at the court of King Edmund and entered the church only at the urgings of an uncle, Ælfheah, bishop of Winchester. About 943 the king appointed him abbot of Glastonbury and it was now that Dunstan inaugurated a new era in English church life, rebuilding the monastery and introducing a revised Rule of St Benedict. Some time later Æthelwold joined Dunstan at Glastonbury, before going on at the request of the new king, Eadred, to reform the dilapidated monastery at Abingdon.