In Search of the Dark Ages

by Michael Wood

  The next day, Monday 12 May if our guess is right, they moved camps to Iley Oak near Warminster where an earthwork shielded by woods offered protection for the army. By now the West-Saxon scouts must have had definite news of Guthrum’s position. That night Alfred and his men prepared themselves for battle, perhaps, as was the custom of the time, fasting, praying and swearing on the sacrament to help each other – a necessary precaution when collaboration with the Vikings had become commonplace. Before the break of dawn they mounted and pushed on over the Wylye and up the old white track that leads up the steep chalk edge onto Salisbury Plain:

  then the band of bold men was quickly made ready, men brave in battle … warriors marched out, bore banners of victory … heroes beneath their helmets at the break of dawn; the shields rang, resounded loudly.

  Judith

  THE BATTLE OF EDINGTON

  Guthrum was camped about seven miles from Iley Oak – by a strange coincidence close to another White Horse carved in the turf centuries before, as at Ashdown. The site had not been chosen by chance. It was an important royal estate, probably with a ditched enclosure and hall; it was owned by King Alfred himself, land which years later he gave in his will to his wife. He must have hunted there, and will have known all the tracks, especially the one which comes across the plain to the Iron Age camp at Bratton with its wide view of the well-wooded land of north Wiltshire stretching as far as Chippenham. At the first glimmer of dawn they rode over the top and down the ridge which had given its name to the royal vill below, Edington (Ethandun, ‘waste down’).

  There, in the words of Bishop Asser,

  he attacked the whole pagan army fighting ferociously in dense order, and by divine will eventually won the victory, made great slaughter among them, and pursued them to their fortress (Chippenham). Everything left outside the fortress, men, horses and cattle, he seized, killing the men, and camped outside the gates. After fourteen days the pagans were brought to the extreme depths of despair by hunger, cold and fear, and they sought peace.

  Although he had defeated the Danes and driven them from Wessex, Alfred knew that they were to remain in the rest of England for good. Despite the bitterness of the war he had fought, his response was therefore to make a pact of reconciliation with Guthrum and enter into friendship with him. This remarkable twist to events brought strong criticism from some hard-line foreign churchmen of the time, but its long-term benefits for Wessex and England were incalculable.

  Three weeks later Guthrum came with thirty of his most important men to Aller, ‘the marshy island’ near Athelney, where Alfred became his godfather and received him from the font. Aller was the closest church to Athelney and as there was not a church at Athelney in 878, it may have been here that Alfred had prayed for victory in his darkest hour, during the spring of that year.

  The baptismal ceremonies were completed the following week at Wedmore, a royal church and hunting estate near Cheddar. Here Guthrum and his chiefs stayed for twelve days and were honoured by Alfred with feasting and gifts. For all Alfred’s conventional piety, he and the Vikings understood each other. He was what they expected a king to be: a hard man, ruthless, a battle-winner, a king with luck, and yet generous both to his men and to those enemies who acknowledged him. He was not at all like the meek Christlike figure of Victorian popular histories. He would, for instance, hang his prisoners at the slightest provocation. No one respected a weak king in the Dark Ages.

  Alfred’s dramatic reversal of fortune – from the hide-out at Athelney to success at Edington – is so extreme that some modern writers have refused to take Alfred seriously, especially as our knowledge of what happened is based on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle account which he sponsored. They have seen his report as an effective piece of dynastic propaganda.

  To an extent there is something to be said for this. In the years after Edington, Alfred’s subjects would have to take on very heavy burdens in terms of taxation and personal service; building a fleet, a whole system of fortified burhs, a mounted expeditionary force and a general levy which mobilised in two shifts. The thegnly class who provided the core of support for the king were required to be geared to war, rather like the men and women who protect the modern state of Israel. However, the people needed to be informed that, in spite of the defeat of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except Wessex, things could and would get better. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle account of the victory encouraged this attitude, and by being circulated to churches throughout the kingdom could convince as many as could be reached that Edington was a decisive victory; they would be assured that they had a future under the royal house of Wessex. Part of Alfred’s purpose may have been to exaggerate his distress during the dark days of Athelney, in order to create an ‘Alfred myth’, as it were, but distress there certainly was, and Edington is not the only battle in the Dark Ages which abruptly and unexpectedly reversed the drift of a whole campaign.

  THE DANELAW

  Later that year as they had promised at Aller, the remains of the Viking army left Chippenham and Wessex for good. They moved back into the area they had devastated in 877 to winter in the old Roman town of Cirencester, where they stayed for the next year. In 879 they went to East Anglia (from where they had begun their attack on Wessex), shared out the land and settled there as farmers.

  In 886 Alfred formally recognised their presence in northern and eastern England in a treaty with Guthrum which sealed the partition of Anglo-Saxon England into areas where English and Danish law ran. We might compare it to the modern partition of Palestine, and its first thirty years (and more) were just as acrimonious. Alfred’s treaty says that the boundary between the English and the Viking zones went ‘up the Thames (to London) and up the river Lea, along the Lea to its source and then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to Watling Street’. To the north and east of Watling Street the political influence of Danish settlers and Danish army organisation predominated. Here Scandinavian law was enacted, and hence this part of England became known as the Danelaw.

  The Danes were a mercantile people, and as early as the 880s they planted towns in the East Midlands where they could buy and sell their produce and import goods. Some of these became the wealthiest centres in England after London and York. The ‘Five Boroughs’ in particular (that is, Lincoln, Stamford, Derby, Nottingham and Leicester) became a kind of Viking republic, ruled by their own ‘army’ councils, with their own lawmen and merchant class.

  The Danish settlement of the east and north of England created a social revolution which permanently affected language and custom. Its marks are still with us today: in the Danish place-names of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire; in the surviving Danish words in farming dialect in the Lincolnshire wolds and the hills of north-west Yorkshire. In time the descendants of these settlers would become part of the Anglo-Danish nation ruled by Alfred’s grandson. But for Alfred this new, vital but violent element in English history was to preoccupy him for the rest of his life. In 878, with the salvation of Wessex behind him, and already at 29 years of age a hard-bitten and successful king, Alfred could for the first time look to the future.

  ‘WHAT OF THE CITIES AND TOWNS HE RESTORED, AND THE OTHERS WHICH HE BUILT WHERE NONE HAD BEEN BEFORE?’

  It is one thing to win a war, another matter entirely to use the peace constructively. There had been great warleaders before Alfred’s day. What distinguishes him from any other Anglo-Saxon king was the combination of his military ability with an originality of mind, a breadth of vision. In the same way that Charlemagne had done on the continent, Alfred added a new dimension to English kingship. His conception of royal authority, developed by his powerful and gifted successors Edward and Athelstan, made acceptable to most people the extension of the tribal kingdom of Wessex into the kingdom of England, with territorial limits roughly the same as they are today. Where Offa’s empire foundered on brutality to the regions, Alfred seems to have been the first king who identified himself with the English irrespective of local affiliations. In sh
ort, it is what Alfred achieved after his victory which raises him to the ranks of greatness.

  Alfred’s first revolution lay in the planning of towns, and our knowledge of what he did has been the single greatest contribution made by archaeology to our understanding of Anglo-Saxon history in the last two decades. There had been fortified centres in Wessex before Alfred, and in building small burhs like Athelney in West Somerset in 878, Alfred was perhaps consciously acting in the tradition of his father. But here the seeds were laid of the great urban expansion in southern England which took place in the next fifty years, a planned scheme of national defence where fortified towns were laid out for permanent settlement, their military strength founded on economic success and a growing urban population. This plan was probably well under way by 890 and had far-reaching effects after Alfred’s death: in fact it is probably the most remarkable achievement of the Anglo-Saxon state.

  Recent discoveries by historians and archaeologists show that the recovery of urban life in England in the tenth century was the result of deliberate royal planning rather than organic growth, the conscious creation of towns as centres for refuge, defence and commercial life. They were called burhs. It entailed laying out completely new rectilinear street patterns and apportioning plots to settlers who were to provide the manning and maintenance of the defences in time of war. We are particularly well informed about the building and manning of the burhs because we have a document called the Burghal Hidage which dates from within twenty years of Alfred’s death. It lists twenty-nine burhs, with the units of taxable land attached to them, and this allows us to calculate the length of wall surrounding the burh and the number of men assigned to its defence. It is also possible to see the wider strategy behind the system; the protection of the whole of Wessex so that no part of the kingdom would be more than twenty miles from a guarded centre with strongpoints on the main river routes inland which the Viking ships with their shallow draughts had hitherto so devastatingly exploited. Sometimes Alfred and his generals imitated the Frankish practice of building double forts on either river bank, completely blocking the passage upstream.

  Several of the Alfredian burhs are still well preserved today, notably Cricklade near Cirencester (where the Thames was diverted to strengthen the defences), Wallingford near Oxford, and in particular Wareham in Dorset. Anyone visiting them cannot but be impressed by the sheer scale of their ramparts. At Wareham the massive western banks were pressed back into service as antitank ditches in 1940! In Wareham the regular town plan also survives, a testimony to the social engineering undertaken by Alfred and his successors; with its two Anglo-Saxon churches, Wareham gives a fine impression of an Anglo-Saxon town with modern urban life still contained within the ninth-century defences.

  At Winchester an important series of excavations during the 1960s showed most clearly the royal direction at the heart of the burghal system. Here the street plan was shown to be a development of Alfred’s reign, with a grid pattern resembling but not following the Roman street alignment which entailed the laying of 15,000 tons of flints. In the cathedral area, the former Roman praetorium, was the greatest collection of Anglo-Saxon royal buildings yet uncovered: the Old Minster, chief church of the royal family, Alfred’s palace, and the churches built by his wife and son. Fragments of decoration from the stone-built royal hall show that it contained figured wall painting of the kind known in Carolingian palaces.

  At the other end of the scale, some of the Burghal Hidage forts were tiny. Lyng, for instance, near Athelney, is credited with only 140 yards of defences. Bishop Asser also adds that Alfred built a causeway ‘of marvellous workmanship’ between Lyng and Athelney and fortified them both.

  Go to Lyng today and these bare facts come to life in the clearest possible way. Lyng is still joined to Athelney by a raised causeway, though the land around is now drained. The long, narrow housing plots on either side of the promontory road preserve the line of the medieval property boundaries, and perhaps even go back to the Anglo-Saxon plan. At the western end of the village, in the orchard below the church, the remains of a massive ditch are still visible, formerly 25 feet deep and surmounted by a palisade. The defences simply cut off the approach to Athelney along the promontory from marsh to marsh, and can still be paced out at 140 yards, precisely the assessment given in the Burghal Hidage. The church on its raised platform may originally also have been built at this time, and its west end would have formed a solid bastion on which to anchor the defences. Lyng never developed beyond a few cottages, nor was it intended to, but it was a refuge for the people of this part of West Somerset, and it is a telling part of the story.

  THE SEIZURE OF LONDON

  London was the largest trading settlement in England. It was also a Mercian city, as it had been in Offa’s day. In 886, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle version sponsored by Alfred, the king gesette London, which means either that he occupied it, or that he settled it (that is, with West-Saxon settlers, as he had done at other burhs). Unfortunately there are other problems of interpretation involved in this, and these have considerable bearing on our view of Alfred.

  As we have seen, until c. 880 Mercia had been ruled by a king, Ceolwulf, who had been set up as a puppet by the Danes in 874 when they wintered at Repton. The West-Saxon chronicler is openly contemptuous of Ceolwulf, calling him a ‘foolish king’s thegn’. This insult may have been a deliberate attempt by Alfred to impugn Ceolwulf’s legitimacy as a king. In fact Ceolwulf’s name could indicate that he was a scion of that branch of the Mercian royal house which produced King Ceolwulf I, though Alfred had every reason to suppress this in the record in order to justify the West-Saxon takeover in Mercian London.

  Ceolwulf died around 880, but not long before that, coins had been produced by a Mercian moneyer in London for both Ceolwulf (‘king’) and Alfred (‘king of the English’). So Alfred clearly had some authority in London earlier than he says in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Had he seized it by violence? Some versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mention a siege in 883. Other writers say the seizure involved fighting, ‘the burning of cities and the massacre of peoples’ (Bishop Asser); Florence of Worcester’s Chronicle, which drew from a source unknown to us, says that Alfred ‘recovered London with its surrounding territories by force, and acquired that part of the Mercian kingdom which Ceolwulf had held’. And although the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle asserts that all the English of London and its area who were not subject to the Danes submitted to Alfred, Aethelweard adds that this had followed ‘savage internal war’ in which Alfred had been unconquered ‘either by guile or open opposition’. Our accounts also all agree that when Alfred had occupied London he entrusted it to his son-in-law earldorman Ethelred of English Mercia. What are we to make of all this? Clearly the fall of London to Alfred followed some sort of struggle, but against whom? Modern historians have been curiously reluctant to think that ‘England’s darling’ might have wrested London from the Mercians, and they assume that the Danes were his enemies. But the situation may have been more complicated than that. For instance, up till his death, Ceolwulf of Mercia may have been able to call on Danish military aid against Alfred if the occasion arose, and it may have done so in c. 880. In this case the chronicle account of the occupation of 886 may deliberately conceal a bitter piece of power politics some years before. We should never forget that to some Mercians in the 880s, defeat by their ancient foes, the West Saxons, may have seemed as unpleasant a prospect as Danish overlordship.

  LONDON RESTORED

  Soon after 886, under Alfred’s rule, the walls of London were repaired, the town was repopulated with new settlers who received regular plots of land bounded by new streets, inaugurating the street plan we know today between Cheapside and the river Thames. Here a network of streets survived unchanged until the Great Fire, and the shape of Alfred’s plots (established between 889 and 898) can still be seen in the A–Z of London.

  Other evidence of Alfred’s interest in London has been discovered by archaeol
ogists on the waterfront around London Bridge. Immediately downstream from the bridge the quay was rebuilt in this period with a boxed structure of heavy timbers erected in front of the Roman jetty which in one place was cut up and removed. At the bridgehead itself (which linked London with the burh in Southwark) the adjoining river-bank was reinforced with a hedgehog of wooden stakes which probably served a twofold purpose: first, to encourage silting and prevent erosion of the bridge supports, second, to make a landing at the bridgehead from the river impossible.

  The archaeological evidence for Alfred’s London is slight, but it conforms with the known fact that the city boomed as a commercial centre in the tenth century, and it encourages us to think that the early markets and the wharfs at Billingsgate and Queenhy the which are only mentioned in the later tenth century, date back at least to the late ninth century.

  ‘THEY CONSIDERED THE YOUTH OF THIS AGE HAPPY, WHO COULD HAVE THE GOOD FORTUNE TO BE TRAINED IN THE LIBERAL ARTS …’

  Alfred’s second great revolution is the one which has most impressed posterity, and indeed it is the one which enables us to get nearer to the man himself. The educational system of Anglo-Saxon England, which was founded on the great monasteries, was virtually totally destroyed by the Viking invasions. Though it has been fashionable in recent years to play down the destructive effect of the Vikings and to stress their role as traders and craftsmen, there is not the slightest doubt that in the ninth century the disruption they caused was tremendous. We do not need to rely merely on the testimony of Alfred’s own words to know that there was a decline of learning. The evidence is clear in the falling standard of book production, in the deterioration of handwriting, the decline of the charter as an instrument of royal government. It is also apparent in the increasingly poor quality of the Latin, the language of government. Manuscripts of the late ninth century and the early tenth are often characterised by ludicrous misconstruings and specious word divisions; popular taste in fiction in churches of the time centred on the most pathetic and threadbare kind of eastern fairy tale – Solomon and Saturn, Marvels of the East, Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle – which lacked any insight about foreign lands and cultures. Most of all a low standard of learning is implied in their audience by the additions that Alfred had to make in his translation of Bede’s History: their world had narrowed so much that the average thegn or cleric in Wessex no longer knew the location of some of the most famous sites in Christian Northumbria.