In Search of the Dark Ages

by Michael Wood

  Chester-le-Street in 934 was just a cluster of wooden hovels. But here was the shrine of St Cuthbert, moved here to escape the marauding Vikings of Alfred’s day. Here Athelstan prostrated himself before the saint, and prayed for his aid in the forthcoming war. Then, uncovering the saint’s body, he placed a written testament at his head, put a gold arm ring into the coffin, and wrapped the body with eastern silks which can still be seen today in a fragmentary state in Durham Cathedral (where St Cuthbert now lies). Rich gifts were promised if the outcome was successful; if not, the king told his brother to bury him with St Cuthbert.

  The prayers for victory were extra insurance, of course. The army with which Athelstan invaded Constantine’s kingdom to exact fealty and retribution was overwhelming. It was ‘an army drawn from the whole of Britain’ according to the cleric at Chester-le-Street who wrote an account of the war. The Welsh subkings had brought their own contingents to war, as was their due to their overlord. As they rode north they were accompanied by a powerful fleet of West-Saxon and Mercian sailors moving up the coast. Athelstan led his army deep into Scotland, Pictland and Cumbria, ravaging them from land and sea. An expression in a later Irish source indicates that the devastation included a ‘preying’ of stock to compensate Athelstan for the breach of faith. The expedition penetrated as far as Dunnottar, the dramatic rock-fortress of the Picts on the coast south of Aberdeen, and the English fleet reached the northernmost point of the mainland, striking at the Norse settlements in Caithness. There was no battle. The northern kings realised they could offer no resistance and surrendered their kingdoms to the English king. The sequel was only sketchily recorded in the south, but evidently there was a formal ceremony where Constantine and Owain were restored as tributaries in the presence of Athelstan and his allies in the pan-British coalition. Constantine gave his son as a hostage, renewed his submission and exchanged gifts. That done, ‘the peace restored’, Athelstan rode south, taking Constantine with him at least as far as Buckingham, where the expedition watched Athelstan reward one of his army on 12 September, with the consent of Constantine ‘underking’.

  The events of 934 confirmed Athelstan’s position at the apex of the hierarchy of rule in Britain. He was an emperor, a king who ruled other kings. He was, splendidly, ‘basileus and curagulus’ (Greek titles used by the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople) of the whole world of Britain. To a Welsh writer he was a ‘mechteyrn’ or ‘Great King’ (God being the mechteyrn of the universe; Athelstan would have devoutly accepted the analogy).

  ‘DURBAR’ AT CIRENCESTER

  Cirencester 935. The king held a great imperial assembly in the city which was ‘formerly built by the Romans’. Five Celtic kings acknowledged his supremacy: Constantine, king of the Scots, Owain of Cumbria, and the Welshmen Howel, Idwal and Morgan, ‘rejoicing under the wing of royal generosity’. What happened at these ceremonies is as yet unclear. We have the famous example of the 973 coronation at Bath and the submission at Chester when six kings rowed King Edgar on the Dee, but it has always been thought that this event was somehow unique. However, the events in 973 may not have differed so much from other ‘hegemonial’ ceremonies of the period. Excavations at Cirencester in 1965, for instance, discovered an unexpectedly large Anglo-Saxon church west of the present abbey, its massive foundations measuring 180 feet long by 52 feet wide, and which, therefore, is about the same proportions as Brixworth. Most interestingly, at the west end was found the foundation of a formidable structure – a tower, perhaps, with dimensions of about 22 feet by 28 feet. Like Brixworth, the church also had a ring crypt at the eastern end which probably dates it to not later than c. 850. Could Athelstan’s ceremonies then have taken place in this church, and was this westwork used, like that at Bath, for a royal appearance?

  If so, there was a special reason for their being in Cirencester. It was of course a Roman city with visible Roman walls and structures. It was a royal city, with a royal church. But it was from here according to a Welsh poem that the royal stewards collected their tribute from the Welsh. It may even be that the payment of tribute was one of the acts which the subject kings had to perform, in addition to ‘bowing’ to Athelstan, taking him ‘as father and lord’ and swearing to ‘be his co-worker by land and sea’. This, along with the hostages, the baptisms, the enforced attendance at court, was the cement of the empire.

  THE GRAND ALLIANCE: ‘WE WILL PAY THEM BACK FOR THE 404 YEARS’

  It could not go on, of course. It was inevitable now that Athelstan’s enemies would try to overthrow him. But as had been shown in 927 and 934, the Welsh kings and the North British kings could not do it alone. So a plan was formed to combine all his opponents in a grand alliance. The instigator was Constantine, king of the Scots, whom the English remembered as ‘the hoary-headed traitor’. There was precedent for the cooperation of some of these mutually antagonistic peoples. Asser tells of the threat of Welsh alliance with the Northumbrian Danes in Alfred’s day; the Dublin Danes had joined forces with the Scots kings on several occasions. Far back in the early Dark Ages, Penda of Mercia had brought East Angles and North Welsh against Oswy of Northumbria. But nothing of the scope of 937 had ever been attempted. Even the logistical problems seem daunting. Their aim was nothing less than to crush Athelstan with the manpower of the Celtic peoples and the Scandinavian settlements within the British Isles:

  There will be reconciliation between the Cymry and the men of Dublin,

  The Irish of Ireland and Anglesey and Scotland,

  The men of Cornwall and of Strathclyde will be made welcome among us …

  The Men of the North in the place of honour …

  The stewards of Cirencester will shed bitter tears … as an end to their taxes they will know death.

  Such were the hopes of a Welsh cleric in Dyfed as the news of the coalition spread. The Welsh would drive out the ‘Iwys’, the West Saxons, and their allies the ‘Mercian incendiaries’, as far as Sandwich, where they first landed. And ‘the foreigners of Dublin’, the Vikings, ‘will stand with us’. These lines are taken from the poem, the ‘Armes Prydein’, the most remarkable statement of the later Welsh heroic age. Here is not the elegiac lament of Catraeth or Pengwern, but a passionate revanchist prophecy speaking for a united Cymry. United, however, the Cymry proved not to be.

  News of such moment must have passed quickly through the Irish Viking ports, Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, to Athelstan’s rich entrepôt at Chester; from the Welsh citadels in Gwynedd and Powys to St David’s and on to English frontier posts like Hereford and Shrewsbury. The manner in which these stories circulated is revealed in an imaginative school exercise written at precisely this time by a Celtic scribe in the south-west. It is a classic Celtic scholastic dialogue, the schoolboy practising his Latin, the teacher asking questions. Asked where he has been, the boy says he has been studying in France, Ireland, and Celtic Britain. And what is the news? ‘A great battle between the king of the Britons and the king of the Saxons’ in which the latter suffers a catastrophic defeat, his friends left slaughtered on the battlefield. ‘God gave victory to the Britons because they are humble and poor and confide in Him; the English however are proud and on account of their pride God humbled them.’

  THE PLAN

  The plan of Constantine and Anlaf of Dublin depended on Northumbrian hostility to Athelstan’s rule. They would not land their forces in southern England but in Northumbria where they knew they had supporters among the Anglo-Scandinavian aristocracy, men like Earl Orm and Archbishop Wulfstan of York himself (a resolute northerner whose story is told in more detail in the next chapter). Unfortunately there are no primary sources to tell us how they combined their armies, and the only apparently reliable fact – that they landed a great fleet in the Humber – has been disputed by many historians, though with no good reason (this detail derives from a chronicle written in York c. 1000).

  THE ATTACK

  The invaders’ line of attack is uncertain. We cannot prove the story of the Humber landing,
but it is probable. We can safely assume that they moved on traditional Viking routes. They certainly established themselves in Northumbria. The lost life of Athelstan quoted by William of Malmesbury says that the Northumbrians ‘gave willing assent’ to the invaders, ‘the natives submitted, the whole region submitted …’, and this fits with an Irish account of cooperation of Vikings within England.

  It was late in the year. The weather was bad. ‘Terrific winds’, wrote one Irish monk in his tables. Anlaf Guthfrithson had still been in Ireland at the start of August when he pressganged a pirate fleet into his service, ‘breaking their ships’. So the invasion came late in the year, and the final battle itself took place some time after 23 September (the exact date is unknown). In their campaign headquarters in York the invaders’ plan seems to have been to consolidate themselves in Northumbria and then disaffect the Danish settlers in the eastern Midlands by ravaging south of the Humber. The lateness of the season suggests that they did not intend to strike into southern England until the next campaigning season. A final conjecture: we have no definite evidence on the movements of Idwal and the North Welsh; was the plan that he should attack Athelstan’s western flank? We cannot say, but the operation was grandly conceived. All depended on Athelstan now. What would he, ‘the thunderbolt’, do?

  ‘ALWAYS BEFORE HE HAD CONQUERED BY TERROR OF HIS NAME ALONE’

  Athelstan played a waiting game. At this point the poem quoted by William of Malmesbury surprisingly accuses him of nothing less than dereliction of duty. It says he ‘spent idle hours’ while the invaders ravaged his land, ‘deeming his duty done’. What could have been the motive for such criticism? It is not impossible that the account was written as an exemplar for one of Athelstan’s less effective successors, and the author obviously wanted to drive home his opinion that a king should be armed and vigilant, ready to immediately protect the ‘farmers and poor people’ who thought of him as their guardian and who were now being afflicted. A king should be, as another tenth-century poet put it, ‘seated on a high watchtower, provident, wise and militant’ keeping a lookout in readiness for war. This passage reminds us how much war was seen as a test of toughness and luck for a king. Vigour too was a prime quality in military expertise and the king was no longer young by the standards of his time. Maybe his contemporaries saw him as a hard-bitten and successful king who was having to display his nerve and his luck.

  We can, though, explain the king’s delay in moving north in terms other than idleness. We know from different sources how difficult it was to raise a large army unless the king travelled through his shires personally. Athelstan’s agents will have told him the size of the invasion force, and he obviously took time to bring together as many West-Saxon and Mercian levies as he could. Unlike Harold in 1066 he was not lured into precipitate action as the news came of the allied mounted columns devastating the crops, burning down houses and driving off refugees, with ‘complaining rumour’ everywhere.

  THE ‘GREAT BATTLE’

  The battle was fought at the end of the year, later than 23 September and perhaps a good deal later. It was fought at a fort called Brunanburh which northerners said was on a hill called ‘Weondun’, ‘holy hill’, where there had been a heathen sanctuary or temple. This site has never been identified, but it may have been among the frontier forts on the southern border of the Northumbrians along the Don valley in Yorkshire. Athelstan eventually made a fast attack, in the tradition of his father and grandfather. The battle opened with a dawn assault around the burh by the English, fighting in separate armies, West Saxons against the Celts, Mercians against Scandinavians. The poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes savage hand-to-hand fighting in regular battle order, the famous but mistitled ‘shield walls’. The Irish Annals of Ulster say the struggle was ‘immense, lamentable and horrible and desperately fought’, so there was no rout. But the well-armed and equipped frontline troops of the southern English won the day. There was a long pursuit until nightfall, the West-Saxon mounted companies cutting down fugitives ‘cruelly, with blades whetted on grindstones’. The allies escaped under cover of night and made their way back to their ships, which were a considerable way from the battlefield. The English losses had been heavy: two of Athelstan’s cousins, two earls, two bishops, and, according to the Annals of Ulster, ‘a multitude’ of lesser men. But the invading army had been destroyed. Five kings, seven of Anlaf Guthfrithson’s earls and a son of Constantine are named by English sources. Among the kings were the Viking king of the Western Isles and Owain of the Cumbrians. Two sons of Sihtric also fell. Anlaf Guthfrithson’s arrival back in Dublin ‘with a few’ is noted early in 938.

  ‘VICTORIOUS THROUGH GOD’

  Not surprisingly the battle was viewed as the great event of the era. According to the chronicler Aethelweard, writing in the 980s, the man in the street still called it simply ‘the great battle’. After it, he says, ‘the barbarians were overcome on all sides and held the superiority no more … the fields of Britain were consolidated into one, there was peace everywhere and abundance of all things’. An exaggeration of course, but Aethelweard clearly saw Athelstan’s warfare as providing the foundation for his nephew, King Edgar’s, peace and the high noon of the Anglo-Saxon empire.

  Athelstan’s contemporaries too were quick to see the battle in a historical perspective. A Norse poet in England saluted the king as ‘noble born son of kings’ (a pointed flattery) and compared the triumph to the coming of the English and the first bretwalda: ‘Athelstan has done more [than him]: now all bow low to him.’ A German cleric resident in Christ Church Canterbury went to the Old Testament and Joshua’s slaughter of the kings of the Amorites for his parallels: ‘King Athelstan … whom God set over the English as king and as leader of his earthly armies plainly so that the king himself, mighty in war, might conquer other fierce kings and crush their proud necks.’

  In the royal court the victory was celebrated as a national triumph. The cleric who composed the Anglo-Saxon poem on Brunanburh placed the deeds of ‘the sons of Edward’ in the long line of the race of Cerdic, kings who had carved themselves a kingdom in Britain. Deliberately recalling Bede on the state of Britain in 731, he already claims the authority of the history books for his statement that this was their greatest victory:

  Never before in this island, as the books of ancient historians tell us, was an army put to great slaughter by the sword since the time when Angles and Saxons landed, invading Britain across the wide seas from the east when warriors eager for fame, proud forgers of war, overcame the Welsh and won themselves a kingdom.

  Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

  ‘KING AND TEACHER’

  At this point let us pause as we did with Offa and Alfred, to see if a picture of the king has emerged, again stressing the danger of anachronism in trying to make ‘modern’ judgements about medieval personality. Recent historians have asked many questions about what was expected of a king in the Dark Ages, and it is obvious at the outset that much of his success depended on the individual force of the man. We shall see this all the more noticeably with Ethelred the Unready. But what impressions would the journalist or anthropologist have of a reception in Athelstan’s court? We have seen Offa taking his food rents, Alfred making his own comments on political power. What of Athelstan? What made the king great apart from his wars, his enriching of churches, his ability to guarantee peace? What made the impression that stuck, so that even after the Norman Conquest, ‘the opinion was firmly held among the common people that no one more just or learned had ever ruled the country’?

  ‘His manner was charming and well disposed to churchmen, affable and kind to laymen, serious with magnates out of regard for his majesty.’ Athelstan put aside the ‘pride of kingship’ only with the poor, to whom he was ‘approachable and serious minded … out of sympathy for their poverty’, a suitable enough sentiment on the part of the rich. His spirit we are told was ‘audacious and forceful, much beloved by his subjects for his courage and his humility and l
ike a thunderbolt to rebels with his invincible steadfastness’ (William of Malmesbury On the Deeds of the English Kings).

  These virtues – fortitude, humility, constancy – appear in so many royal biographies in the Dark Ages that they have almost become clichés, but just like modern princes, Anglo-Saxon athelings were groomed for the job, and our imperfect sources on Athelstan suggest a man possessed of such qualities in good measure. ‘Medium in height, slender in body, his hair flaxen, beautifully mingled with golden threads’ writes William of Malmesbury, Athelstan’s ‘greatness of mind’ was what distinguished him; it was what foreign rulers saw in him, and it was what his followers wanted. He ‘graciously bestowed courtesy on all’ and that was how a king should be; it was not the most important thing, but it mattered.

  But ultimately, as we have seen, it was bravery in battle and generosity after it which still marked out the successful Anglo-Saxon king. And none was more successful in warfare than Athelstan. In his youth he had a reputation for audacity and courage. It was by boldness that he wrested his father’s kingdom from his brothers. Brought up in Mercia he must have fought in most of the campaigns which conquered the Danelaw, and his strength in war later became proverbial. ‘Very prudent, mature, far sighted and hard to overcome in any strife’, Athelstan could rule ‘by terror of his name alone’ he ‘implanted the nations around him with dread’ and ‘instilled terror into all enemies of the fatherland’. In a world where the individual strength of the king and the fear he personally excited mattered so much, it was of the essence that he should be dread-inspiring, ondraedendlic as he would have put it.

  In his last years Athelstan was an elder statesman in the eyes of Europeans and pre-eminent within Britain. His court was a haven for guests, scholars, pilgrims, poets and churchmen. At different times he sheltered the exiled royal families of Brittany and Francia, and Alain of Brittany and Hakon of Norway were his foster sons. Four of his halfsisters married leading Europeans. In 936 he had supported the restoration of the Breton and Frankish royal families (the latter using his coronation service, brought by English bishops). In 939 he even sent an English fleet to Flanders, the first case in history of English intervention on the continent.