Great Tales from English History: The Truth About King Arthur, Lady Godiva, Richard the Lionheart, and More: 1

by Robert Lacey

  And so, before he died, the Venerable Bede handed out to the monks his store of worldly treasures - some handkerchiefs, some incense and the remains of his beloved peppercorns.

  ALFRED AND THE CAKES

  AD 878

  ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND SOUNDS QUITE A cheery place, as described by the gentle and generous Bede from the security of his monastic cell. But we read of quite another country in the blood-drenched pagan sagas of the age. Winter howls. Ravens wheel over trees that are bent and blasted by the sea winds. Storms crash against rocky slopes. Darkness draws on. It was a perilous and threatening world that lay outside the torchlit circles of Anglo-Saxon settlements. No wonder their inhabitants declaimed courage-stirring poems of defiance of which the epic tale of Beowulf is an early example. Shepherds guarded their flocks against the wolf - ‘grey ganger of the heath’ - and long-tusked boar ran wild in the forests. Vast areas of the country were trackless watery wastelands.

  These inaccessible brackish expanses were the main difference between the English countryside then and now. In East Anglia the Wash flowed into Middle England, a fenland of more than a thousand square miles where cattle had to be rounded up by boat. Half of Staffordshire consisted of peat and moss swamps, and much of the Thames Valley was a marsh. To the west lay the Somerset Levels, acre after misty acre of bullrush and sedge extending from Glastonbury to Bridgwater Bay. Pelicans, herons and the huge European crane took refuge in its wastes, along with fugitives and runaways - and, on one famous occasion, a king.

  He was Alfred, King of the West Saxons, driven into the Somerset no man’s land by the Vikings, the seaborne raiders who had started their attacks on England at the end of the previous century. They came from Denmark, Norway and the Baltic in their sleek and deadly longboats, crossing the North Sea as the Angles and Saxons had crossed it before them, pushed by the same pressures of population and attracted by easy pickings. One day around the year 800, the royal tax collector at Dorchester rode down to Portland to meet a fleet of Norse trading ships that had landed. But when he explained to the visitors how to pay their customs duties, they split his head open with a battle-axe. In the north the invaders captured and burgled the defenceless Abbey of Lindisfarne, drowning the old monks and taking away the young ones to sell as slaves.

  The raids continued, decade after decade - and not just in England. In the course of the ninth century, Viking armies sacked Paris, Hamburg, Antwerp, Bordeaux and Seville. Moving fast in packs of five hundred or more, sometimes shouldering their lean-planked ships overland from river to river, the raiders even reached Russia - whose name comes from the Rus, the community of Vikings who set up their own kingdom in Novgorod, just south of the Gulf of Finland, in 852.

  It was around this time that the Vikings in England adopted a worrying change of tactic: instead of returning home in the autumn, their armies started to settle. They took over the north of England, making York their own Danish-speaking, Danish-run capital, then extended their ‘Danelaw’, as the land they occupied came to be known, south into East Anglia, where in 870 they defeated Edmund, King of the East Angles. Refusing to renounce his Christian faith, King Edmund was tied to a tree and shot to death with arrows, according to one tradition. According to another, he was subjected to the inhuman Norse rite of ‘carving the blood eagle’, whereby the victim’s ribs were cut away from his spine while alive. His lungs were then pulled out, to be spread like wings across his back. In the following century the martyred king’s remains were moved to the Suffolk town of Bedricsworth, which in due course became a centre of worship and pilgrimage under the name of Bury St Edmunds.

  Down in the south-west in Wessex, the last remaining centre of Anglo-Saxon resistance, King Alfred could certainly have expected a grisly end to match Edmund’s. He was a devout Christian - he had travelled to Rome as a boy. When he succeeded his brother in 871, at the age of twenty-three, Alfred was more noted for his learning and piety than for warfare. His name meant ‘elf wisdom’, and while he did enjoy some success in battle his most successful tactic was to buy off the enemy. In return for payments later known as ‘Danegeld’, the Vikings would agree to go home for the winter.

  But the next year they would reappear, and early in 878 an army led by the Danish king Guthrum drove Alfred westwards into the marshes of Somerset. It was Easter time and the King retreated with a small band of followers, dodging from islet to islet through the splashy bogs. They had nothing to live on except what they could forage from the local population - and from Alfred’s desperate plight came one of the most famous tales of English history.

  Taking shelter in the poor home of a swineherd whose wife was baking some bread, went the story, the refugee king was sitting by the fire, so preoccupied by his problems that he did not notice that the loaves were burning.

  ‘Look here, man,’ exclaimed the woman, who did not know that her bedraggled guest was the king, ‘you hesitate to turn the loaves which you see to be burning, yet you’re quite happy to eat them when they come warm from the oven!’

  The endearing story ends with the apologetic king meekly submitting to the woman’s scolding and setting to work to turn the bread; but the account does not, unfortunately, come down to us from Alfred’s lifetime. The earliest manuscript that recounts the burning of the loaves (which turned into ‘cakes’ in the course of many subsequent retellings) was written about a hundred years after his death.

  It is most likely a folk tale, handed on by word of mouth. Much was written about the heroic Alfred in the course of his life, and it seems surprising that such a very good story did not find its way on to parchment at the time. By the strictest laws of historical evidence, the story of Alfred and the cakes must be rated a myth.

  But while myths may be factually untrue, they can help convey a deeper truth - in this case the humbling of the great king hiding in the marshes. So down-and-out that he had to suffer the scolding of a peasant woman, Alfred showed grace under pressure. He resisted the temptation to pull rank and lash out when rebuked - and he also made good use of his weeks in the wilderness. In May 878 Alfred rode out of his fortified camp in the marshes at Athelney, met up with his people and, just two days later, led them to a famous victory at Edington in Wiltshire. Guthrum was compelled to renounce his bloodthirsty Norse gods and to accept Christianity. He withdrew to the Danelaw with his forces, and for a dozen years the Vikings left Wessex largely in peace.

  Alfred made good use of the respite. He built a defensive network of forts and fortified towns known as burhs, from which comes the modern word ‘boroughs’. No one in Wessex was more than twenty miles from a burh where they could take refuge, and many of these military settlements later grew into towns. Taking on the Vikings at their own game, he designed and built a fleet of longships - in later centuries Alfred came to be described as the ‘Father of the Royal Navy’ - and he also reorganised his army. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported in 893, ‘the king had divided his army in two, so that always half his men were at home and half out on service, except for those men who were to garrison the burhs’.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was one of Alfred’s great creations, a history of England up to his own reign, which then turned into a sort of yearly newspaper, regularly updated, recording that year’s events in a forthright and sometimes quite critical fashion. The first updating was in the early 890s, and from then on monasteries around the country added their own instalments to a project that was one of the most remarkable of its kind in Europe. The Chronicle reported battles, famines, floods, political back-stabbing, triumphs and disasters in lively prose - not in Latin but in English, the language, as Alfred put it, ‘that we can all understand’.

  Alfred felt passionately that his kingdom must be educated. ‘The saddest thing about any man,’ he once wrote, ‘is that he be ignorant, and the most exciting thing is that he knows.’

  He put together a panel of scholars and started to learn Latin himself so that he could translate some of the great Latin texts into English
. In a world without clocks, the King was anxious to work out the exact time of day, inventing a graduated candle on which the hours were marked off. Then he came up with the idea of a ventilated cow’s-horn lantern to stop the candle blowing out.

  When Alfred died in 899, Wessex was a thriving and dynamic kingdom, and it is not surprising that he should have become the only king in English history to be known in later centuries as ‘the Great’. But he himself was modest about his achievements. He suffered as an adult from the agonies of swollen veins in and around the anus, the embarrassing complaint we call piles, along with other pains that baffled his doctors. These infirmities seem to have contributed to a strong sense of his own imperfections, and his account of his life ended on a tired and rueful note. Comparing his life to a house built out of whatever timber he could forage from the forests of experience, he described how ‘in each tree I saw something that I required’. He advised others ‘to go to the same woods where I have cut these timbers’ so that they could construct their own house of life, ‘with a fair enclosure and may dwell therein pleasantly and at their ease, winter and summer, as I have not yet done’.

  Reading these words, it does seem reasonable to assume that such a spiritual and modest man would have accepted the reproof of a peasant woman when he let her loaves burn in the wilderness. But Alfred himself would surely expect us to be rigorous about the truth.

  THE LADY OF THE MERCIANS

  AD 911-18

  THERE IS A BATTERED SILVER PENNY FROM KING Alfred’s reign on which is inscribed the grand Latin title REX ANGLO[RUM] - ‘King of the English’. But the claim was only half true. Alfred had been King of those Angel-cynn, the kin or family of the English, who lived in Wessex, and his resourcefulness had kept Englishness alive in the dark days when the Viking forces drove him and his people into the Somerset marshes. The work of extending Anglo-Saxon authority across the whole of Engla-lond, as it would come to be known, was done by Alfred’s children and grandchildren - and of these the most remarkable was his firstborn, his daughter Aethelflaed, whose exploits as a warrior and town-builder won her fame as the ‘Lady of the Mercians’.

  ‘In this year English and Danes fought at Tettenhall [near Wolverhampton], and the English took the victory,’ reported the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 910. ‘And the same year Aethelflaed built the stronghold at Bremsbyrig [Bromsberrow, near Hereford].’

  Women exercised more power than we might imagine in the macho society of Anglo-Saxon England. The Old English word hlaford, ‘lord’, could apply equally to a man or a woman. The abbess Hilda of Whitby (Caedmon’s mentor, p. 45), who was related to the royal families of both Northumbria and East Anglia, had been in charge of a so-called ‘double house’, where monks and nuns lived and worshipped side by side and where the men answered to the abbess, not the abbot.

  The assets and chattels of any marriage were legally considered the property of both husband and wife, and wills of the time routinely describe landed estates owned by wealthy women who had supervised the management of many acres, giving orders to men working under them. King Alfred’s will distinguished rather gracefully between the ‘spear’ and ‘spindle’ sides of his family. It was women’s work to spin wool or flax with a carved wooden spindle and distaff, and the old king bequeathed more to his sons on the spear side than to his wife and daughters with their spindles. But he still presented Aethelflaed with one hundred pounds, a small fortune in tenth-century terms, along with a substantial royal estate.

  Aethelflaed turned out to be an Anglo-Saxon Boadicea, for like Boadicea she was a warrior widow. Her husband Ethelred had ruled over Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that had spread over most of the Midlands under the great King Offa in the late 700s. Extending from London and Gloucester up to Chester and Lincoln, Mercia formed a sort of buffer state between Wessex in the south and the Danelaw to the north and east, and the couple had made a good partnership, working hard to push back Danish power northwards. But Ethelred was sickly, and after his death in 911 Aethelflaed continued the work.

  ‘In this year, by the Grace of God,’ records the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 913, ‘Aethelflaed Lady of the Mercians went with all the Mercians to Tamworth, and built the fortress there in early summer, and before the beginning of August, the one in Stafford.’

  It does not seem likely that Aethelflaed fought in hand-to-hand combat. But we can imagine her standing behind the formidable shield wall of Saxon warriors, inspiring the loyalty of her men and winning the awed respect of her enemies. She campaigned in alliance with her brother Edward, their father’s successor as King of Wessex, and together the brother and sister repulsed the Danes northwards to the River Humber, thereby regaining control of East Anglia and central England. To secure the territory they captured, they followed their father’s policy of building fortified burhs.

  Aethelflaed built ten of these walled communities at the rate of about two a year, and their sites can be traced today along the rolling green hills of the Welsh borderland and across into the Peak District. They show a shrewd eye for the lie of the land, both as defensive sites and as population centres. Chester, Stafford, Warwick and Runcorn all developed into successful towns - and as Aethelflaed built, she kept her armies advancing northwards. In the summer of 917 she captured the Viking stronghold of Derby, and the following year she took Leicester ‘and the most part of the raiding-armies that belonged to it’, according to the Chronicle. This was the prelude to a still more remarkable triumph: ‘The York-folk had promised that they would be hers, with some of them granting by pledge or confirming with oaths.’

  The Lady of the Mercians was on the point of receiving the homage of the great Viking capital of the north when she died, just twelve days before midsummer 918, a folk hero like her father Alfred. She had played out both of the roles that the Anglo-Saxons accorded to high-born women, those of ‘peace-weaver’ and ‘shield-maiden’, and her influence lived on after her death. Edward had had such respect for his tough and purposeful big sister that he had sent his eldest son Athelstan to be brought up by her - a fruitful apprenticeship in fortress-building, war and busy statecraft that also helped to get the young Wessex prince accepted as a prince of Mercia. After his father’s death in 924, Athelstan was able to take control of both kingdoms.

  Athelstan proved a powerful and assertive king, extending his rule to the north, west and south-west and becoming the first monarch who could truly claim to be King of all England. In his canny nation-building could be seen the skills of his grandfather Alfred and his father Edward, along with the fortitude of his remarkable aunt, tutor and foster-mother, the Lady of the Mercians.

  ETHELRED THE UNREADY

  AD 978-1016

  ETHELRED THE UNREADY IS A FIGURE OF fun in English history. It is now considered old-fashioned to classify monarchs as good kings or bad kings, but by almost any measure Ethelred was a bad one. In 978 he inherited the rich and respected kingdom of Engla-lond that had been pulled together by Aethelflaed, Edward, Athelstan and the other descendants of his great-great-grandfather Alfred. By 1016 Ethelred had lost it all, from Northumbria down to Cornwall, in the course of a reign that made him a byword for folly, low cunning and incompetence.

  Perhaps the one sphere in which he deserves some sympathy is his unfortunate nickname, a mistranslation of the gibe made after his death by chroniclers who dubbed him Ethelred ‘Unred’. In fact, unred was an Old English word that meant ‘ill-advised’, and it made a rather clever pun on the meaning of Ethelred’s name, ‘of noble counsel’, rendering Ethelred Unred ‘the well-advised, ill-advised’.

  In Anglo-Saxon ‘ethel’ (also spelt ‘aethel’) denoted someone well born or royal - hence the vast number of Ethel-related names, from Ethelbert to Aethelflaed. All the offspring of a king, down to his great grandchildren, were known as aethelings - ‘throne-worthies’ - and it was from this gene pool that the aetheling who seemed most qualified for the job was selected. It would be many years before the rule of primogeniture, whereby the ki
ng would be automatically succeeded by his eldest son, came to prevail. If the Anglo-Saxon aetheling system still operated today, it might be decided that Prince William was more qualified than Prince Charles to succeed the Queen.

  Ethelred, however, did not become king through discussion or consensus. He owed his throne to murder. One day when he was only ten, his older half-brother Edward - his father’s son by a previous wife - rode through the gates of Corfe Castle in Dorset to quench his thirst after an afternoon’s hunting. The young Ethelred was staying in the castle with his mother, and out in the courtyard a quarrel developed between her followers and Edward. They handed him a drink, then stabbed him to death before he could dismount.

  Did Ethelred, inside the castle, hear his half-brother hit the ground in the courtyard? His mother was suspected of inspiring the stabbing, but Ethelred never investigated the murder that handed the crown to him as a ten-year-old, and it cast a shadow of suspicion over his entire reign.

  The great challenge facing England during Ethelred’s years was a new round of Danish invasions. Having left the island in peace for decades, the Vikings now returned with more rapacious raiding parties than ever. In fact, the raids were so ferocious that the Anglo-Saxons inserted a prayer in their church services every Sunday imploring God to spare them from the terror of the invaders. Ethelred resorted to Alfred’s time-honoured tactic of paying them off, but he failed to take advantage of the time the Danegeld payments gave him to strengthen and reorganise his defences. The King seemed devoid of leadership qualities.

  ‘When the invaders were in the East,’ recorded one of the scribes of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle with ill concealed disgust, ‘the English army was kept in the West, and when they were in the South, our army was in the North . . . If anything was then decided, it did not last even a month. Finally there was no leader who would collect an army, but each fled as best he could, and in the end no shire would even help the next.’