by Adams, Max;
Cwenðryð’s entrepreneurial spirit is cast in a much more sinister light by a tradition which held that she had done away with her infant brother, Cynehelm, Coenwulf’s only legitimate heir, when he was seven years old. The crime, according to William of Malmesbury—writing in the twelfth century when the story was still circulating—was revealed miraculously (a dove carried a message to the pope, who spilled the beans) and the dead boy was elevated to the status of a martyr. His shrine at Winchcombe became a popular site for pilgrimages, and his fame assured him a bit-part in the Canterbury Tales.##
A series of charters recorded between 821 and 827 show that although Cwenðryð was able to keep her lucrative abbacies, she was successively relieved of other possessions in Kent and Middlesex, part of a diplomatic initiative by King Beornwulf to pacify Archbishop Wulfred and, perhaps, to weaken the power of his own rivals.21 Reading between the lines, it looks as though the see-saw of political initiative had tilted in favour of an independent Canterbury.
The rapid succession of four kings following the death of Coenwulf in 821 is an indication of instability in the ninth-century Mercian state.∫∫ A second indication is the speed at which King Ecgberht of the West Saxons, twenty years into his reign, was able to shake off Mercian superiority and assert his independence during the following decade. The reverse in fortunes appears sudden and dramatic. An entry in most surviving versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 825 is eloquent in its laconic account:
þy ilcan geare gefeaht Ecgbryht cyning 7ΩΩ Beornwulf cyning on Ellendune 7 Ecgbryht sige nam 7 þær wæs micel wæl geslægen...
King Ecgberht and King Beornwulf fought at Ellendun and Ecgberht was victorious and great slaughter was made there... then he sent his son, Æðelwulf, from his levies [fyrð]... to Kent with a great force and they drove King Baldred north over Thames, and the Kentishmen submitted to him, and the men of Surrey and Sussex and Essex... And the same year the king of the East Angles and the court turned to Ecgberht as their protector and guardian... and the same year the East Angles slew Beornwulf, king of the Mercians.22
The location of the battle at Ellendun, unidentified but seemingly in Wiltshire south of Swindon, suggests that Beornwulf was the aggressor, possibly with the aim of reinforcing his own, thin domestic credentials. Mercia’s inability to maintain a stable leadership continued. An ealdorman, Ludeca, succeeded Beornwulf. In 827 he too was slain alongside five of his ealdormen, leaders of the shire levies. We do not know if this was West Saxon or East Anglian aggression, or civil war, but the loss of so many high-ranking leaders in the space of six years is the plain-speaking testimony of an unfolding dynastic catastrophe. Ludeca’s successor, Wiglaf, from a line whose power base seems to have lain around Repton in modern Derbyshire (the so-called ‘W’ dynasty of Mercian kings) came to the throne with his kingdom on the ropes. In 829 he was driven out by King Ecgberht. In triumph, the king of Wessex issued a series of silver coins from London, with REX ECGBERHT on the obverse surrounding a cross; and LUNDONIA CIVIT[AS] on the reverse: to the victor the economic spoils.23 In the same year Ecgberht was able to lead his levies to Dore in what is now South Yorkshire (very likely then the boundary between the kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria) and receive the submission of the North. By 830 he was claiming overlordship over parts of Wales. Offa’s Mercian empire lay shrunken and outflanked.
The compilers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, reflecting on these events during a peaceful interlude in King Ælfred’s reign in the early 890s, noted under the year 829 that Ecgberht was the eighth king to enjoy the status of Bretwalda—that is, to wield imperium over all the other kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons. It is an overtly propagandist declaration: the first seven entries on the list were taken directly from Bede, writing in 731.24 Conveniently missing out the powerful eighth-century Mercian overlords Æðelbald and Offa, this is a self-conscious West Saxon attempt to legitimize the primacy of Ælfred’s line, to draw on the golden age of the seventh century and prefigure its inevitable success in saving the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms from Viking invasion.
Historians have a way of smoothing out unsightly wrinkles. A year after what was, ostensibly, the decisive moment in the rise of Wessex, Wiglaf had been restored and was striking his own coins at London. Mercia survived, albeit with the loss of its authority over East Anglia, Kent, Sussex and Surrey.
* Hartness, later Hartlepool; see endnote 4.
† Ceorl: pronounced churl; a ‘free’ farmer subject to the lordship of a thegn or dreng. Wifman: literally a female man; a housewife.
‡ Charles the Younger died after suffering a stroke in 811.
§ Miðgarðr in Old Norse: Middle Earth.
# As I write, much-anticipated fresh excavations have begun on the island, close to the later medieval priory ruins.
∫ There are twelve Tarbat or Tarbert names across Scotland and two in Ireland. Each one locates a narrow strip of land, an isthmus, separating two nearby stretches of open water. Several can be demonstrated to have been the sites of historical portages.
Ω Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at York University; he is also widely known for his campaign of excavation at Sutton Hoo.
≈ Circular or D-shaped enclosures are diagnostic of Early Medieval monastic sites— or of temporary Viking forts.
∂ C14, a radioactive isotope of carbon absorbed by all livings things, decays at a more or less consistent rate. Charred wood, in particular, can be roughly dated by measuring the amount left in its cells after burning.
π Æðelbald (716–757); Beornred (757) and Offa (757–796).
∆ Since the earliest days of the Insular church the independence of monastic houses had been challenged by the assertion of papal authority through its bishops.
** The most favoured location for this lost site is the magnificent seventh-century basilica at Brixworth in Northamptonshire.
†† Quoenðryð in contemporary charters.
‡‡ Winchcombe, once the centre of an important and wealthy shire of the same name, is now a small town in north Gloucestershire.
§§ Thanet, now part of Kent, was still an island, separated from the mainland by the Wantsum channel and the River Stour, through which ships passed between the English Channel at Richborough castle, and Reculver. Both were former Roman forts now occupied by monastic settlements, sited in key locations to exploit maritime traffic and onward trade to Kent’s hinterland.
## In the Nun’s Priest’s Tale.
∫∫ Ceolwulf 821–823; Beornwulf 823–825; Ludeca 825–827; Wiglaf 827–829 and 830–839.
ΩΩ The ‘7’ symbol was used in manuscripts to denote ‘and’.
CENTRAL PLACES
LUNDENWIC—A VIKING TRAVEL MAP—BRITAIN’S VULNERABILITY—RAIDS INTENSIFY—THE FRANKISH EXPERIENCE—TRADE AND —PRODUCTION—MINSTERS AND THEIR ESTATES—VIKING SHIPS AND SEAFARING
2
Amerchant arriving at the trading port of Lundenwic around 830 would sail or row upstream on the flood tide, coasting past the crumbling stone walls of the ancient Roman city where St Paul’s church (Paulesbyri to contemporaries) and perhaps a royal residence stood—but not much else. The abutments of the Roman bridge might still have been visible, but the only crossing was by ferry. Just upstream of the mouth of the River Fleet the Thames takes a sharp southward bend towards what was once Thorney Island, for over a thousand years the site of Westminster Abbey and before that, perhaps, a Saxon minster. Between the two, along what is now the Strand, between Aldwych and Charing Cross, lay the busy wharves of Middle Saxon Lundenwic.
Founded by King Wulfhere of Mercia in the late 600s and described in 731 by Bede as ‘an emporium for many nations who come to it by land and sea’, it was not, perhaps, the great port it had once been.1 In those days, with a population in the low thousands,* it was substantially the largest settlement in the British Isles, one of only four contemporary settlements that we might recognize as something like a town with planned streets, close-set houses divided by narrow passages, warehouses,
smithies, workshops, wells and all: noisy with the clang of smith’s hammers and the calls of longshoremen; reeking of tanners’ steeping vats and domestic waste. Its overall functioning was the responsibility of the king’s portgerefa, the port-reeve, whose erstwhile colleague had committed such a fatal faux pas on the coast of Dorset in the 780s. Through his reeve, the king charged tolls on arriving cargoes and administered the sometimes complex justice and trading rights of the many interested parties who made money there: regional noblemen, bishops, the abbots and abbesses of the great minsters; Frisian, Frankish, Danish and possibly Arab merchants, not to mention its indigenous or itinerant craftsmen and those farmers who supplied the settlement with meat and other provisions.
6. LINDHOLM HØJE: the memorial fleet of a seagoing culture, overlooking Denmark’s Limfjord.
In its eighth-century heyday Lundenwic, geographically part of the kingdom of the East Saxons, passed from Mercian to Kentish to West Saxon hands and back again: its value as a source of revenue and prestige and its prime location facing the Continental ports of Francia, Frisia and Denmark were constant sources of tension and opportunity. By the reign of King Offa (757–796) Lundenwic had already achieved its greatest wealth and extent.
The river frontage lay some 80–100 yards (73–90 m) inland from its present position; the Thames was a wider, slower river then and the Roman road running west from the city along the line of what is now Fleet Street and the Strand was set back from the river by less than 100 paces.† The main settlement lay to the north-west of this road, densest in the area of Covent Garden and with its north-west limit somewhere in the region of today’s fashionable Neal’s Yard. To the south-east of the road a natural terrace led down from the Strand to the foreshore, part of it revetted with piers and wharves where deep-draughted cargo vessels might tie up, and another part no more than a beach (the strand) where shallow-draughted boats might be pulled up above the tide and where temporary markets, very much a feature of these centuries, would have been held periodically.2 A church may have stood close to Lundenwic’s south-west edge on the site later occupied by St-Martin-in-the-Fields, on the corner of what is now Trafalgar Square. The port’s north-east corner seems to have coincided with the east side of King’s College and the Temple.
The shorefront deposits of Lundenwic lie buried some 16 feet (5 m) beneath the modern ground surface of the Victoria Embankment, a pleasant public park whence one might, these days, catch a pleasure boat, but whose commercial wharves are long gone. Across the river, on the Surrey side, a landscape of fen and water meadow was punctuated by natural gravel islands on which isolated settlements like the minster of Bermondsey benefited from access to the arterial Thames and its Roman road links to the north, east and west.
The recovery of Lundenwic’s past from brief passing mentions in contemporary sources,‡ but primarily from excavation, has been challenging and protracted. Until the 1980s scholars could not agree where Middle Saxon London stood. Archaeological investigations had concentrated on large commercial developments within the walls of the old Roman city from where, apart from the very evident presence of a church on the site of St Paul’s cathedral from its founding in 604, the seventh and eighth centuries were effectively missing. The contemporary interior of the city seems to have been largely uninhabitable marsh between natural prominences at Ludgate Hill and Cornhill along the River Walbrook.
In 1984 two archaeologists, Martin Biddle and Alan Vince, independently suggested that the Saxon town lay to the west, where place names like Aldwych (literally ‘Old wic’, a farm or trading site) were suggestive of a pre-Conquest presence and whence occasional fragments of Middle Saxon pottery had been retrieved over the years. Piecemeal interventions, sometimes nothing more than watching briefs undertaken as the bulldozers moved in, gradually assembled a case confirmed by the discovery in 1985 of sixth- and seventh-century burials and rubbish pits on the site of Jubilee Hall in Covent Garden.3 Now, these fragments combine to paint a lively picture of a thriving settlement, fleshing out the notices of travellers like the missionary priest Boniface in the early eighth century, Bede’s testimony, mentions in charters and coins minted here over the two centuries before Ælfred’s refounding of the city in the 880s.§
Lundenwic may have owed its origins to the convenient beach, its proximity to a minster church and its location near the old Roman city. But at some point in the late seventh century it was formally reorganized, its thoroughfares relaid on a grid pattern with house and warehouse plots of equal size sharing an axial orientation at right angles to the river. The same phenomenon can be seen in Godfrið’s foundation at Hedeby in Denmark, at Dorestad on the Rhine, at Hamwic close to Southampton and elsewhere, including Norse Dublin.
Like other trading ports Lundenwic lay undefended by palisade or garrison. Aside from a stream that bounded its south-west edge, Lundenwic lay grotesquely exposed, its weak domestic defences wholly inadequate against determined assault from the river. But its apparent decline after the end of the eighth century was not initially catastrophic, despite a series of fires from whose ashes it rose again. More likely, a range of economic factors was in play, not all of them obvious from the archaeological or historical record. West Saxon kings who managed to win control over Lundenwic may have promoted their own mercimonium,4 or trading port, at Hamwic at the mouth of the River Itchen on Southampton Water, to its detriment. Subtle shifts in trading networks, in production and profit margins, may have undermined its commercial power. Charlemagne’s short-lived economic blockade in the 790s cannot have helped.5 In Francia, a civil war between Louis the Pious and his sons from the late 820s seems to have disrupted the flow of royal patronage on which the great trading ports on the Continent relied for their continued success. The European silver supply was affected by events further afield, in the Abbasid caliphate. Other, even less tangible, elements can be dimly traced in the rise of rival centres of trade and production: the minsters.
A series of major seaborne raids that began in the 830s and lasted for twenty years and more sealed the fate of the great trading sites of north-west Europe. Dorestad, Quentovic, Lundenwic, Eoforwic (York), Hamwic and others never recovered from the attentions of those Scandinavian entrepreneurs for whom the ports became the destinations de choix to go a-Viking. Attacks on the Thames-side settlements in 842 and 851 finished Lundenwic, and the former Roman capital lay more or less deserted until the early 870s.6
*
Twenty-first-century citizen and visitor alike know London’s geography largely through the topological masterwork affectionately called the Tube map. People stare at it on giant posters long after they have found their destination. Thousands carry a miniature version in their pockets or bags. The Tube map is an abstraction of a vastly complex reality, in which travellers have only to orient themselves with the nearest access point that connects them to their destination: an underground railway station. No commuter much cares how deep the lines run, how they twist and turn to avoid natural streams, sewers and foundations, or how the system is maintained. Those stations, or nodes, are linked by linear routes of unvarying sequence: from Lundenwic’s heart, at Covent Garden, one takes a northbound train on the Piccadilly line one stop to Holborn, changes to the eastbound Central line and two stops later arrives at St Paul’s, in Londinium.
Like a Roman itinerary, on which places of interest were marked along theoretically straight roads, the Tube map invites its users to visualize, or at least recognize, a simple set of linear sequences, one for each colour-coded branch of the network. The stylized thick blue ribbon of the River Thames is the only concession to geographical reality. Thus, the District line, which runs 30 or so miles (48 km) from Richmond in the west to Upminster in the east, serves sixty such nodes, which schoolchildren and commuters alike learn by heart: Kew Gardens, Gunnersbury, Turnham Green, Stamford Brook, Ravenscourt Park, and so on, in unvarying succession from west to east. Trains may be late, or cancelled; but Baron’s Court will always come before Hammersmith.
Where lines intersect, commuters transfer from one branch to another: from District line to Piccadilly, Victoria or Northern line, and so forth. Branches run far out from the centre into what purports to be bucolic countryside. The map serves a population of more than 10 million people and an area of more than 600 square miles or 384,000 acres. By contrast, Lundenwic covered 150 acres, less than half a square mile.
In attempting to make sense of the geography of the Viking Age, to envision how Scandinavian raiders and traders mastered a world of coast and open sea, of river and hinterland, it is worth imagining that world as a network like the Tube map (see p. 50). Consider, to begin with, Britain’s complex, island- and estuary-ridden coast as a long, thin conceptual rectangular route whose inshore waters constitute something like a maritime Circle line: on the ground it traces a path very unlike a circle, but like its underground counterpart the coast acts as a continuous loop on which bored passengers might fall asleep and still conveniently arrive at their intended destination—eventually. Imagine that theoretical rectangle, the outline of British inshore waters, as a line on which vessels encounter a sequence of possible destinations and intersections: harbours, churches, river estuaries; royal fortresses. Imagine, also, the route of the River Thames (a theoretical dead-straight line running right to left, east to west) intersecting with that line at a point between Shoeburyness and Sheppey. This is a maritime/riverine interchange.