In Search of the Dark Ages

by Michael Wood

  The loss of education signified a decline in rulership. As Charlemagne had recognised, learning is power, and the relation of education and language to political life is central to Alfred’s second revolution. It had become essential to restore the language, and it is interesting to see how this recovery of literacy complements the extension of the West-Saxon empire after Alfred’s time.

  Latin had been the instrument of government and of literate culture, but, says Alfred in the preface to his translation of the Pastoral Care:

  So general was its decay in England that there were very few on this side of the Humber who could understand their rituals in English or translate a letter from Latin into English; and I believe there were not many beyond the Humber. There were so few that I cannot remember a single one south of the Thames when I came to the throne.

  Alfred pointedly ignores the Mercian tradition of scholarship built up under Offa which was still vigorous enough in the ninth century to provide Alfred with the scholars he needed to make his translations for him. But he felt disinclined to praise the Mercian achievement. He was an ambitious man with a purpose. His aim was simple enough. He would translate from the Latin into Anglo-Saxon a handful of books he thought it ‘most needful for men to know’.

  The books he chose all had relevance for his time. There was Bede’s story of the conversion of the pagan English to Christianity, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People; Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, a handbook for bishops explaining their duties (though reading Alfred’s additions it is difficult to avoid the impression that he saw the jobs of kings and bishops as similar – a king should also teach his flock). There was a work of history written by a Spanish priest Orosius in order to explain the fall of the Roman empire which early Christians had believed was founded, in the divine scheme of things, to propagate Christianity and usher in the millennium. Orosius showed that history is full of terrors and that humanity suffers, and his narrative must have appealed to Alfred in that it went beyond a traditional Anglo-Saxon heroic view of the past and tried to make sense of the human condition in Christian terms: a potent message for the war years of the 890s. Other works were philosophical, St Augustine’s Soliloquies and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. To these books we might also add the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle itself, the story of Alfred’s own dynasty and their unbroken success story leading up to the battle of Edington. Even today, you could do worse than be left with this handful of books with their wealth of moral and historical knowledge.

  I began amid the manifold troubles of this kingdom to translate into English the book called in Latin Pastoralis and in English Shepherd’s Book, sometimes word for word, sometimes according to the sense as I learned it from Plegmund my archbishop, Asser my bishop …

  So they and their other helpers made the translations in a kind of seminar, speaking the text out loud, working it into Anglo-Saxon which a secretary would note down. Copies were then made in the scriptorium of the Old Minster in Winchester and sent to all the bishops in the kingdom. The copy of the Pastoral Care in the Bodleian, Oxford, went to Worcester and charred fragments of the original ‘office’ copy survive in the British Library: two copies written in Alfred’s lifetime under his direction.

  Why do it? Why did a middle-aged, sick man who acquired literacy only painfully in later life feel impelled to take on this laborious task? Partly, of course, there was the influence of the Church. By Alfred’s time the Church had a considerable say in the style and even the ideas of kingship, and it was thought paradoxically that a king who promoted learning (and, ipso facto, Christianity) would prosper at home and in warfare abroad. But there must be more to it than that. Although their clerical biographers liked to claim otherwise, men like Alfred and Charlemagne were not ruled in every aspect of their lives by the Church. They were men of pragmatic intelligence, and they understood that if your concept of kingship is wider than tribal relations, if you wish to make law, impose taxes, create longer-term provisions and obligations in social life, then you must correct the language. Otherwise your meaning is unclear, your purposes are not understood and justice goes astray.

  To embark on such a systematic programme of instruction at such a time was the act of a remarkable man, practical, resolute, and ruthless: he took on himself not only the strain of defence but also concern for the future lives of his subjects. That is why, alone among English kings, he is ‘the Great’, and why he has rightly never lost the esteem of the English-speaking world.

  ‘BOTH FOR THE LIVING AND FOR THOSE YET UNBORN’

  Because of modern archaeological discoveries we are now coming to understand more about Alfred, not merely as a warrior, or even as a thinker, but as a far-sighted man who was capable of carrying out long-term administrative reforms which had the widest implications. When near his death he composed his preface to the Consolation of Philosophy, he had come a long way from the neurotic and impulsive youth of Ashdown. Through the fire of Athelney and Edington he did more than become a man. He became a man who saved the essential Englishness of our culture and language.

  What I set out to do was to virtuously and justly administer the authority given me. I desired the exercise of power so that my talents and my power might not be forgotten. But every natural gift and every capacity in us soon grows old and is forgotten if wisdom is not in it. Without wisdom no faculty can be fully brought out, for any thing done unwisely cannot be accounted as skill. To be brief I may say that it has always been my wish to live honourably, and after my death to leave to those who come after me my memory in good works.

  SIX

  ATHELSTAN

  The very celebrated king who by the Grace of God ruled all England, which prior to him many kings shared between them.

  From a list of relics given by Athelstan to the Church of St Peter in Exeter

  OF ALL THE characters in this book, Athelstan will be the least familiar to the general reader, merely another name from the satirical history, 1066 and All That. But in the Middle Ages he was more famous than any of the people referred to here. For the twelfth-century antiquarian harking back to a golden Anglo-Saxon past, Athelstan was the great king par excellence, an English Charlemagne whose court was a byword for glamour, glory and gold. After the Norman Conquest there were popular sagas and stories about him. In the fourteenth century he figured in several Middle English poetic romances and was the protagonist of one, Athelston. He even trod the boards of Shakespeare’s stage, in Thomas Dekker’s Old Fortunatus, revelling with ‘the great Cham of Tartarie’ before Elizabeth I during Christmas 1599. (This was ironic because the Tudors claimed to have restored the ancient British line which Athelstan had subjugated.)

  The reason for the king’s long-lasting fame in popular tradition and his relatively poor showing in modern history books make a fascinating story. The explanation might lie in the nature of his accession, for like Offa, he came to the throne in dubious circumstances, but unlike Offa he did not rewrite history to justify the fact. As a result the traditionalists of the West-Saxon royal house in the churches of Winchester, the men who shaped the historiography and the genealogies of the Alfredian royal line, seem to have maintained an ambivalent attitude to him and played down his achievements in favour of the true Alfredian Edwardian line. Indeed were it not for the historian William of Malmesbury having excerpted parts of a now lost life of the king in the 1130s, we would know very little indeed about the king’s military achievements, or of the great prestige he had in Europe. As it is, we know enough of his deeds to see that his reign was of central importance in the development of the Anglo-Saxon ‘state’.

  Athelstan is also of particular interest to us because, although it would be fruitless to try to write a biography of him in modern terms, a number of ‘biographical’ artefacts survive which bring us close to his life. For instance, many of the books and some of the treasures he owned and gave away as gifts can still be seen today. A contemporary painting of him exists – the first of any English monarch.
We know he was a connoisseur and collector of books, art and relics – in fact he has been called the Pierpont Morgan of his age! From these works, and his inscriptions in them, we can find out something of his beliefs and tastes. We have too his personal comments taken down by a secretary during the process of law making, the drawing up of law codes, which perhaps give us a truer insight into the difficulties medieval kings had in promoting justice than the ideal enunciated by Alfred. These passages in the laws show that Athelstan is the one Anglo-Saxon king, who, for cast of mind, will bear comparison with Alfred. We could wish to know more of a man who so dominated his age, but the fragmentary evidence we have is enough to demonstrate that if Offa gave form to the idea, and Alfred laid the foundation, Athelstan turned their aspirations into fact, a kingdom of all the English.

  A ROYAL BURIAL MYSTERY

  To uncover the tangled web of intrigue behind Athelstan’s accession in 925 we go first to Malmesbury in Wiltshire, on what was then the border between Wessex and Mercia. This is where Athelstan is buried. In the tenth century it was a burh in the Alfredian system of forts, a fine natural stronghold on a steep hill in a loop of the Avon. Here was one of the most famous monastic sites in Anglo-Saxon England with three churches built in the seventh and eighth centuries. The place had been a great centre of learning, and its monastic library had in part survived the Viking raids. Athelstan was especially devoted to St Aldhelm who was buried here in 709. Claiming the saint as his ancestor, Athelstan gave the church land, rebuilt the monastic buildings, commissioned a costly shrine for the saint, and gave it Breton relics along with a piece of the True Cross sent him by Hugh the Great, Duke of the Franks. As he had instructed in his will, Athelstan was interred here. But the burial was unusual since almost all the kings of the Alfredian line were buried in Winchester or Glastonbury. Why wasn’t Athelstan?

  ATHELSTAN’S BIRTH AND ANCESTRY

  He was born around 895, the first child of Alfred’s eldest son Edward, the future king. Before his death, Alfred had given his young grandson regalia of kingship, a Saxon sword and belt, with a royal cloak. But such gestures did not mean much in a world where succession crises were the stuff of royal life. Athelstan’s mother was noble, perhaps Mercian, but whether she was married to Athelstan’s father is doubtful and certainly Athelstan was not ‘born in purple’, that is, when Edward was king. Edward later married twice, and these wives were successively acknowledged as queen where Athelstan’s mother had not been. Later legends grew up in plenty about this, with tales that the king’s mother was a beautiful shepherdess who foresaw in a dream that her illegitimate son would one day be king of England. But at the time it was widely known that Athelstan’s birth was doubtful. In Germany, for instance, it was said that Edward’s other sons and daughters were the children of queens of royal descent, whereas Athelstan’s mother was not of high birth; she was ‘an inferior consort’, that is, not a wife. 139

  SUCCESSION CRISIS

  Athelstan was brought up in the house of his aunt Aethelflaed, Alfred’s daughter, who was married to ealdorman Aethelred of Mercia, so his background and his contacts were Mercian not West-Saxon, and this explains much of his success. His education was also Mercian, presumably in the school attached to the monastery at Worcester, and he is the first king of his line who we know was literate from childhood. It is possible that his father intended Athelstan to be a ‘Lord of the Mercians’ rather than king of England, for according to Winchester sources (one of which omits Athelstan’s reign altogether) Edward had made Aelfweard, the eldest son of his first queen, king in his own lifetime. This seems confirmed by a later king list which gives Aelfweard a reign of four weeks. So it would appear that our history books have failed to mention a West-Saxon king. Edward died on 17 July 924, and Aelfweard lasted only sixteen days after him, though whether or not his death was through foul play we have no means of knowing. A succession crisis now developed. Evidently the West-Saxon councillors were more disposed to favour another of Edward’s sons (perhaps Aelfweard’s next brother Edwin) but the Mercians felt Athelstan was their man and at a great meeting at Offa’s old centre of Tamworth attended by the Mercian bishops and all their magnates, they elected him king. Athelstan was the oldest and the most experienced in warfare of Edward’s sons; perhaps he was the obvious candidate, but events took time to resolve themselves. It was not until the summer of 925 that he was generally accepted as king, the West-Saxon councillors having overlooked the other brothers and elected him. Even so, Athelstan narrowly escaped an attempt to seize and blind him which took place in Winchester with the alleged connivance of his brother the atheling Edwin.

  Over thirteen months after his father’s death Athelstan was crowned. He was now in his thirtieth year. Remarkably, there seems to have been a careful effort to preserve the legitimate Alfredian succession. The story brought back to Cologne by a German ambassador in 929 was that Athelstan was a kind of caretaker king, bringing up the princes born to the true queens, and in Malmesbury there was a tradition that Athelstan deliberately remained celibate and brought up the young athelings, his half-brothers, grooming them for the kingship and then raising them as joint-kings in his lifetime, as his father had done. But even this did not stop attempted coups against Athelstan.

  In 933 Athelstan’s brother Edwin, who may have had the title of ‘king’, was involved in some political disturbance and drowned while escaping to exile in France. In the event the sons of Edward’s second queen succeeded in their turn, so just as the West-Saxon royal family in the ninth century had made provision for the succession and the integrity of the royal property, Athelstan in his turn seems to have protected the blood royal and literally husbanded the patrimony. His burial at Malmesbury rather than at Winchester or Glastonbury is a symbol of his anomalous position in the royal house. But even the most grudging of the Winchester hard-liners would have to admit that he did them proud.

  ‘CONSECRATED WITH HOLY OIL’: THE COUP LEGITIMISED

  The coronation at Kingston on 4 September 925 was therefore as much a public demonstration of the result of a power struggle as a smooth changeover stage-managed by the West-Saxon establishment. As we saw with Offa and Alfred, no early medieval king ever simply succeeded to his kingdom as a matter of course. You might be born of the royal line, be the acknowledged heir even, but you still had to be made into a king. When the personal power of the previous king ended with his death, more often than not ‘hungry athelings began to prowl’ as one modern scholar has put it. Athelstan’s coronation in 925 showed he had won the ‘political’ victory; the other prowlers would remain athelings, although ‘born in the purple’. Not surprisingly then, Athelstan’s advisers, the men who had backed him against his brothers, followed the line of ninth-century Frankish thought on kingship by anointing him, by making the king (like a bishop) in a special way consecrated to God; emphasising that the man and the job were not the same thing, and that the job carried great responsibilities. The Carolingians thought that anointing was indispensable to kingship, that you were ‘anointed to rule’, and that if you were not anointed, you were ‘a sword without a handle’. The bishops therefore played an important role in augmenting the power and charisma of kingship, and it was natural that in Athelstan’s case, with his disputed succession, his bishops should adopt Carolingian practice, both to boost and to bind him.

  Of the coronation church at Kingston, archaeology has yielded few details. It lay in a typical Carolingian-style complex consisting of royal and episcopal palaces on a great royal estate with a sheep farm, mills and a stud. The church was built of stone, probably on the continental pattern with a western balcony-chapel on the second floor where the kings could be shown to the people. A version of the actual order of service used by Athelstan survives in Paris in the National Library, and shows that the king was consecrated as ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’, anointed with holy oil and bestowed with the royal regalia, finger ring, sword, crown, sceptre and staff: in pictures he is later portrayed with crown and
sceptre. Athelstan also made a threefold promise: to keep his people in peace, to forbid robbery and wrongdoing by all men, no matter how high in society, and to promote justice and mercy through the rule of law. These were not merely pious hopes; they touched on the biggest social problems Anglo-Saxon kings faced in the tenth century.

  Before he left the church, Athelstan performed other symbolic acts, which were not actually part of the coronation ceremony. First he restored to the cathedral church of Canterbury an estate in Thanet which had been taken from them during the emergency requisitioning during the Viking wars: a tacit acknowledgement of the help afforded him by the head church. Then at the high altar he freed a slave called Eadhelm and his children, a public act of royal humility and generosity often performed by Dark Age kings for the good of their soul.