In Search of the Dark Ages

by Michael Wood

  THE FINAL BATTLE

  Wulfstan had plenty of time to fret over these thoughts while he paced the compound at Iudanbyrig. Meanwhile Eric’s enemies were combining against him. The events which ended his rule are still shrouded in mystery, and the Norse sources give us few clues. In the main the story of Eric’s death as told in the sagas has all the marks of a tale reconstructed in the thirteenth century. According to Fagrskinna Eric’s downfall was his own hubris: ‘Eric had so great an army that five kings followed him because he was a valiant man and a battle-winner. He trusted in himself and his strength so much that he went far up country, and everywhere he went with warfare. Then came against him King Olaf, a tributary king of King Edmund. They fought and Eric was routed by the army of the land; and he fell there with all his force.’ The Saga of Hakon the Good adds little detail but lends to Eric’s impetuosity the inexorable momentum of tragedy: ‘A dreadful battle ensued in which many English fell. But for every one who fell three came in his place out of the country behind, and when the evening came on the loss of men turned against the Norsemen and many were killed.’ The saga also names some of the famous dead: three kings, Guttorm, Ivar and Harek, Sigurd and Ragnvald, and Arnkel and Erlend, sons of the Norse Earl of Orkney. Where these stories came from is uncertain, but in the main they are probably novelistic inventions of the twelfth century, and it is perhaps significant that the synoptic histories from that time have no details of his death. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is also singularly unhelpful: ‘the Northumbrians expelled Eric, and Eadred succeeded.’ It is only with the York annal which begins this chapter that part of the veil of mystery is lifted, with the lines telling of Eric’s treacherous betrayal and death in the ‘lonely place called Stainmore’ with his son Haeric and his brother Ragnald. (The similarity of these names to Harek and Ragnvald in the saga is immediately obvious.) His betrayer, Earl Oswulf, is obviously the English earl of Bamburgh. His killer, Earl Maccus, is identified elsewhere as ‘the son of Olaf’ and may well be a son of one of the Norse-Irish Anlafs. This information was recorded by Roger of Wendover in the early thirteenth century but must derive from a lost tenth-century York chronicle. So the sagas have got some of the details wrong, but not totally so. That this story was later in circulation abroad as an ordered chronicle, such as I have suggested, is proved by Adam of Bremen, writing c. 1075. Adam cites a chronicle, a ‘Gesta of the English’ for the sequence of kings who ruled ‘England’ for almost a century: Guthfrith, his son Anlaf, Sihtric, Ragnald, and finally the son of Harold who went with an army to England and ‘having conquered the island was however betrayed and killed by the Northumbrians’. The same Latin word for Eric’s betrayal shows Adam had the same source as Roger of Wendover: a Northumbrian historian whose point of view was that the Norse kings of York had been pre-eminent in the tenth century. If only we possessed it today!

  As Sir Frank Stenton has said, the story sounds like the last stand of a deserted king on the edge of his kingdom. Whether the saga tales of a terrible battle are right we cannot say, but it is hard to imagine Eric leaving the security of his residence in York for the wild heights of Stainmore without his warband, and he would never have given up without a fight. Warfare had been his métier since he fought in his teens by the White Sea over thirty years before.

  The other actor in Eric’s drama, Archbishop Wulfstan, was released from his imprisonment, and ‘restored to the episcopal dignity at Dorchester’, but he may never have been allowed back into Northumbria again. According to William of Malmesbury he rejected the proffered pardon and died, a proud and embittered man, two years after Eric. He was buried in the diocese of Dorchester in Wilfrid’s church at Oundle, where the saint had died.

  We hear no more from the anonymous clerk in York who made his few remarkable notes through the 940s and 950s, out of which this story has been reconstructed. The death of the last native archbishop and the passing of the last king of York perhaps took away the point of continuing. The lost History of the Ancient Northumbrians ended with Eric’s death, and was rounded off with the king lists: ‘Ever since, the Northumbrians have been mourning their lost liberty.’ And of course, some of them still do!

  ‘A CERTAIN LONELY PLACE CALLED STAINMORE’

  Go up to Stainmore today. The modern road between Brough and Bowes follows the line of the Roman road which Eric took that day in 954. From the top there is a marvellous view with Edendale sweeping away below, and the Lakeland mountains towards the west. Here was the boundary between the ‘Westmoringas’ and the Northumbrians, the old Glasgow diocesan border, and before that the frontier of the Cumbrians and Northumbrians. The place is marked by the stump of a cross, still called the Rey Cross, from the Norse word hreyrr, meaning ‘boundary’. Some seventy years ago Prof. W. Collingwood identified this as an English-style wheel-cross with figured decoration, and suggested that it was done by an English sculptor and commissioned by sympathisers in York to commemorate their king. Too romantic? If Collingwood was right, then this stump is one of the strangest memorials in Britain.

  Eric’s other monument survives in a more intelligible form. When his wife and family fled by sea from York to Orkney, a poet in their entourage composed his epitaph, the Eiriksmal. It is redolent of the old Scandinavian world, thoroughly pagan, soaked in the shamanistic inspiration of Odin. It is also an anachronism, just as Eric’s rule had been. For despite all the vicissitudes, the future of a united kingdom of England, incorporating the descendants of the Danish and Norse settlers of the ninth and tenth centuries, was decided by Alfred, Athelstan and Edgar, and not by the kings who sat in the royal hall of York, no matter how charismatic they may have been. It is, though, a magnificent anachronism. Hotfoot from the battle on Stainmore, his death wounds displayed, Eric enters Valhalla, the hall of the gods, a hero above heroes. Odin greets him with: ‘Heill thu nu, Eirekr! vel skaltu her kominn! ok gakk i haoll, horskr’.

  ‘Hail to you Eric, be welcome here and come into the hall, gallant king!’

  EIGHT

  ETHELRED THE UNREADY

  Summer has dried the Cheviot tract;

  the Pictish chief rides south

  to cram the steaks his winter lacked

  into his hairy mouth.

  But who comes here? A monk? astride

  an armour-plated neddy?

  and murmurs: ‘Men, the war is off –

  for Ethelred’s unready …’

  Ethelred! Ethelred!

  spent his royal life in bed;

  one shoe off and one shoe on,

  greatly loved by everyone.

  Christopher Logue

  ETHELRED THE UNREADY has acquired the poorest reputation of any English king. Even the villainous Richard III of Tudor tradition, or the capricious King John come nowhere near the image of national degeneracy, incompetence and treachery with which Ethelred’s reign is synonymous. According to the authors of the satirical 1066 and All That he was ‘the first weak King of England and was thus the cause of a fresh Wave of Danes’. Nor is this a modern myth. Even Christopher Logue’s hilarious poem, published in 1977, has its antecedents; this, for instance, is how the usually temperate William of Malmesbury viewed Ethelred a century after his death:

  The king, eager and admirably fitted for sleeping, put off such great matters (that is, opposing the Danes) and yawned, and if ever he recovered his senses enough to raise himself upon his elbow, he immediately relapsed into his wretchedness, either from the oppression of apathy or from the adverseness of fortune.

  But can a king who reigned for 38 years have really been that bad? What were the events that brought about the collapse of Europe’s richest and most prestigious kingship and brought in the young Viking ‘terrorist’, Canute? Was it all due to Ethelred? And in what sense was he unready’?

  HIGH NOON OF EMPIRE

  The decline of England under Ethelred was both astonishing and perplexing because it followed what educated men at the time thought was the golden age of Anglo-Saxon England, the reign of Edg
ar. During Easter in the year 973 Edgar had been ritually anointed and made head of the ‘Anglo-Saxon empire’, a king over many peoples, not just the Anglo-Saxons. This event made a great impression on people. It took place not at the coronation church at Kingston, but at Bath, whose Roman buildings still stood during the tenth century with all their connotations of Rome, Britannia and the imperial past. It was the culmination of the hegemonial imperialism we have seen developed by Athelstan – a British Empire, tenth-century style. There was even a special issue of coins minted at Bath for the coronation. Indeed Edgar’s subsequent reform of the coinage has been associated with the second great event of that year, when Edgar was rowed on the river Dee at Chester by six or eight subkings including five Welsh and Scots and a sea king from the Western Isles. With such a carefully stage-managed piece of political theatre, Anglo-Saxon political ideology reached its apogee. Writers like Abbot Aelfric and Archbishop Wulfstan II, Ethelred’s adviser, looked back on it as a golden age.

  THE VIKINGS RETURN

  Edgar’s strategy in controlling his empire was to enlist the leaders of allied peoples for the purpose of defence. One of the promises a subking swore to his overlord was to be his ‘co-worker by land and sea’, in return for which he could call upon the overlord’s aid when threatened by an enemy. The need for collective defence was once more being forced on the people of the British Isles from the 960s onwards by the reappearance of Viking invaders.

  Edgar and his advisers responded quickly to the renewed threat. The introductions to the king’s charters in the late 960s are full of dire warnings against complacency over threats to peace. In a more practical response, annual naval exercises were held in summer around the coasts of Britain by three fleets of about 120 ships each. (Presumably the kings who rowed Edgar at Chester were participants in these manoeuvres, members of a sort of pan-Britannic alliance.) No one could mistake the purpose here: as the chronicler Aethelweard wrote at this time, ‘no fleet remained here, having advanced against these shores, except under treaty with the English’. Edgar’s Britannia literally did rule the waves.

  ‘979. IN THIS YEAR ON 18 MARCH KING EDWARD WAS MURDERED IN THE EVENING AT CORFE PASSAGE: HE WAS BURIED AT WAREHAM WITH NO ROYAL HONOURS’

  This determined maintenance of the supremacy came to a sudden crisis in 975 when Edgar died unexpectedly at the age of 32. The court was thrown into tumult. Infighting between rival factions of the large royal house came to the surface in the next three years. Edgar’s teenage son Edward was crowned that same year, but the omens which were still thought to attend a lucky king were absent. A comet, which was considered an unlucky sign, appeared in the autumn. The next year the crops failed and famine struck: ‘Hunger reigned over the earth,’ wrote Wulfstan, who later became Ethelred’s archbishop of York. Worse, civil disturbances spread as factions quarrelled. Many of the monasteries which Edgar had founded were destroyed, ‘and afterwards,’ says Archbishop Wulfstan, ‘things went from bad to worse.’

  Like many of his predecessors Edgar had married more than once as well as taking young concubines, so there were two royal mothers who laid claim to the throne on their son’s behalf, and two factions to support them. Early in 978 or 979, Edward was murdered by the retainers of Queen Aelfthryth at the royal residence of Corfe in order that his ten-year-old half-brother, Ethelred, should become king. Edward had been violent, unstable and quick-tempered, sybaritic, petulant and quick to make enemies – indeed a thoroughly unpleasant character – but he was an anointed king, and the Church was quick to find saintly virtues in him and to transform him into another English royal martyr when Ethelred’s reign plunged into disasters. In fact even in Ethelred’s lifetime men seem to have ascribed these disasters to the murder which brought him to the throne. Certainly it was no time for a ten-year-old to ascend the throne of the richest country in western Europe. As if to cover up the deed as fast as they could, the royal advisers consecrated Ethelred ‘very quickly afterwards’, a fortnight after Easter at Kingston, ‘amid great rejoicing of the councillors of England’. But there was a shadow on the horizon. ‘This same year a cloud red as blood was seen frequently with the appearance of fire and it usually appeared about midnight: it took the form of rays of light of various colours, and at the first streak of dawn it vanished.’ Even the most determined rationalist among the ‘confident sages, wise seers, astronomers and sage scholars’ in the West-Saxon court must have taken notice. Like the comet it presaged evil. ‘Throughout the nation the vengeance of the Lord was widely evident.’

  THE RENEWAL OF THE RAIDS

  In 981, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes, ‘for the first time seven ships came and ravaged Southampton’. Most of the citizens were killed or taken prisoner. It was virtually two centuries since the first fateful landings at Lindisfarne and Portland which preceded the wars of Alfred the Great. In 980 Thanet and Cheshire were ravaged. The next year Padstow was sacked and ‘much destruction was done everywhere along the coast of both Devon and Cornwall’. In 982 Portland suffered the same fate, and to make matters worse, there was a great fire in London.

  During the next few years the young Ethelred, not yet twenty, saw nearly all the great men pass away who had guided England through the mid century, some of whom, like Archbishop Dunstan and Aethelwold, bishop of Winchester, were old enough to have known King Athelstan intimately back in the thirties. The loss of such men, and of great secular leaders like the army chief, Aelfhere of Mercia, may have deprived Ethelred of the political and moral advice he needed at this crucial time in his reign. In twenty years’ time he would have Archbishop Wulfstan to advise him, a man versed in the techniques of Carolingian kingship. But by then it would be too late From the latter half of the 980s the Chronicle opens out into a devastating indictment of the Anglo-Saxon government, a tale of treachery, indecision and mindless cruelty by its leaders and especially, it alleges, by Ethelred.

  MALDON

  In this year Ipswich was harried and very soon afterwards ealdorman Britnoth was slain at Maldon. In this year it was decided for the first time to pay tribute to the Danes because of the great terror they inspired along the sea coast. On this occasion it amounted to 10,000 pounds. This course was adopted on the advice of Archbishop Sigeric.

  Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

  So laconically the events of 991 are told by the chronicler. From other manuscripts we know that a fleet of 93 ships under Olaf Tryggvason, later King of Norway, devastated the towns and villages along the eastern seaboard from Sandwich up to Ipswich, which was burned, and then turned south to Maldon. At Maldon they were met by ealdorman Britnoth with his troops, presumably East-Saxon local levies. A life of Bishop Oswald of Worcester, written only years after the event, says that, in spite of their victory the Danes were so badly mauled in the fighting that they could hardly man their ships. In an Ely church calendar the date of Britnoth’s death appears as 10 August. The battle was a small event on the wide canvas of the chronicler, another local defeat which in this case led to the payment of Danegeld. But a poem about the battle survives in Anglo-Saxon, and this, which is perhaps the greatest battle poem in English, reveals another dimension altogether.

  According to the poet the Danes landed on an island off the Essex coast which is thought to be Northey Island near Maldon. It is surrounded by great expanses of tidal mudflats, with narrow deep channels running up to the Hythe at Maldon; a typical island base of the type favoured by Viking armies. This one, says the poet, was joined to the mainland by a causeway which was covered by the sea at high tide, in fact over which the sea ‘locked’ at high tide: a phenomenon which can still be seen at Northey and which despite recent objections surely makes it the likely site of the dramatic events which are described in The Battle of Maldon.

  Britnoth came up with his forces on the landward side, a towering figure of a man, grey-haired (he was then around 65 years old), and as befitted one of the leading English nobles of the old school, he pointedly refused their request for tribute. ‘We will
give you spears for tribute … you shall not win treasure so easily; point and blade shall bring us together first, grim battle-play, before we pay tribute.’ When the tide went out a handful of Saxons held the causeway and defeated Danish attempts to cross and join battle. Eventually, the poet claims, the Danes asked Britnoth to allow them to cross, and amazingly he did so. What are we to make of this? The overconfidence of the hero appears as a literary motif in other hero stories, a grand gesture by the protagonist before his fall, but this does not necessarily make the causeway story a fiction. If there is any truth in the allegation that Britnoth voluntarily allowed his enemies to cross to him, it may be that because of the destruction of Ipswich he did not want to let them escape, he wanted battle. The lie of the land, the state of the mudflats and channels of Maldon, make it improbable that the Danes could simply have brought their army to the mainland in their boats. The Danes had to cross the causeway or there would be no battle.

  At any rate the Danes crossed, the armies ordered themselves and the battle began. Britnoth made an easy target, towering head and shoulders above his men, and the Vikings went for him, killing many of his kinsmen and friends who surrounded him before they cut him down. His death was followed by flight on the part of many of the English army, but the poet raises the whole fiasco to true heroism in recounting the decision of Britnoth’s hearth companions and friends to fight on around his body. As it happens the ideal of dying by the side of one’s lord was something which probably struck a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon as an archaic and primitive practice, a fitting and moving motif for a heroic poem but hardly civilised behaviour in everyday life. But for whatever reason part of the army fought on and was destroyed to a man. The end of the poem tells of the heroic deaths of the group of friends and Essex landowners who died in this forlorn spot, their unavailing struggle ‘for their country’ (as a contemporary said) immortalised in the words of the old retainer Byrhtwold: