Aelfred's Britain

by Adams, Max;

  St Wystan’s church at Repton, perched on the south side of the Trent overlooking its flood plain, and in the Viking Age directly fronting onto the river, was a royal cult centre of the so-called ‘W’ dynasty of Mercian kings from the time of Æðelbald in the eighth century, and the crypt miraculously survives.Ω The site, part of a probable royal minster complex, was excavated by pioneering urban archaeologists Martin Biddle and the late Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle.14 The camp here is the only Viking fort in England to have been systematically excavated. The mycel here may or may not have destroyed the minster as a functioning religious and economic unit; what is certain is that they did not destroy the church, but improvised brilliantly, incorporating it into a defensive rampart of the classic Viking D-shape, so that its north and south doors became the fort’s impregnable gateway; the church itself their military HQ.

  17. THE CRYPT at St Wystan’s church, Repton: ‘earthy arboreal elegance and candy twist columns’.

  Early antiquarian investigations in the area around the church encountered ancient graves and recovered two swords and a ‘bearded axe’ of Viking type. The massive ditch dug to create the defended enclosure was first located in 1974, much of its course later traced by geophysical survey. When first constructed it enclosed an area of more than 3½ acres (1.4 hectares: tiny by comparison to the camp at Torksey); not remotely large enough to accommodate the entire Host. Within the enclosure several burials were recovered accompanied by weapons—including one exhibiting unhealed battle injuries and another buried with a Thor’s hammer pendant around his neck and a boar’s tusk placed between his thighs.

  In the 1980s excavation of a mound lying to the west of the church, which had been reported and investigated on several occasions over the centuries, dramatically revealed the remains of another 249 bodies interred in the ruins of a stone building. The bones seem once to have been grouped around a single individual in a stone coffin. There can be little doubt, from the coin and weapon evidence, that several of the bodies were those of warriors, the fallen dead of the Host’s campaign—perhaps those slain in the assault on Repton itself. The identity of the individual around whom they clustered has been the subject of much speculation: was it one of the kings of the mycel here—perhaps the remains of Bacseg, who had died gloriously at Ashdown? The archaeologist Julian Richards has suggested that the other bodies were those of monks and nuns belonging to the minster: an example of submission to the conquerors in death?15

  Today the scene of this extraordinary episode, through which the church survived and survives, is a quiet grassy corner of the north Midlands, graced with tombstones and immense lime trees and overlooked by the buildings of Repton’s famous, very English public school. The intimate, almost claustrophobic crypt, with its narrow staircase, its quiet dank air and the earthy arboreal elegance of its candy twist columns, is perhaps the most evocative contemporary space in which one can contemplate the clash of alien worlds: sacred and profane, martial and monastic, exclusive and intrusive.

  Less than 3 miles (5 km) away, in a forestry plantation from the edge of which the spire of Repton’s church can clearly be seen, lies a unique monument to the Host. Heath Wood in the Viking Age was, as its name suggests, open heathland looking down across the Trent valley. At some time in the late ninth century fifty-nine mounds were thrown up over the cremated remains of warriors (some accompanied by swords and, occasionally, shields) and their wives.16 In some cases, perhaps the founding deposits, the mound covered the site of a cremation pyre, complete with animal parts: horses, dogs (as guides to take them to Valhalla?), cows and sheep—possibly the remains of funeral feasting. In others, the cremation must have taken place elsewhere, with a portion of the remains brought to this sacred spot for burial among an élite group: those who would not assimilate with the native Christians and who wished to maintain a distinct identity in death, as in life. Heath Wood is the only Viking cremation cemetery in the British Isles: some small corner of a foreign field that is forever Scandinavia.≈

  The Host’s relations with their new Mercian client, Ceolwulf, have excited some debate. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, with its West Saxon perspective, called him a foolish thegn, but his poor historical reputation is mitigated by several factors. The name suggests that he may have belonged to a branch of the ‘C’ dynasty of the ancient Hwicce and that he might, therefore, have been a descendant of Ceolwulf I (821–823), brother of Coenwulf (796–821). He managed to survive, it is thought, until 879; there is no evidence of any attempt to depose him before that.17 The Annales Cambriae record that in 878 Rhodri Mawr, the powerful king of Gwynedd, was defeated in battle and killed, along with his son, by the Saxons (that is to say, the Mercians) so Ceolwulf II evidently felt sufficiently confident to take on his old enemy and win.∂ No mere foolish thegn, then.

  More significantly, a hoard of coins and hacksilver discovered by James Mather in Watlington, Oxfordshire in 2015,π consisting of 186 coins, seven items of jewellery and fifteen ingots, includes silver pennies minted jointly by Ceolwulf and Ælfred during the 870s.18 Some of these show the two kings side by side: the so-called ‘Two emperors’ style, in imitation of late Roman issues. The alliance forged at Nottingham and sealed by marriage had survived the fall of East Mercia and Burghred’s exile; was thriving, even. One might even go so far as to suggest that Burghred’s ‘retirement’ and Ceolwulf’s elevation were acceptable to all parties, Mercian, West Saxon and Viking, at least for the time being. On Ælfred’s part, the quality of the coinage, up to more than 90 per cent pure silver from an earlier, very debased 15–20 per cent, implies that he had already begun to undertake economic reforms and understood the value (in every sense) of a trusted currency.19 It may also be significant that many of the coins in the Watlington hoard were minted in London, that oft-disputed location on the Wessex–Mercian border.

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  After a year encamped at Repton the mycel here seems to have split into its two component parts. That under Hálfdan, which had been on the move for nearly a decade, moved to Northumbria to pick up the reins of overlordship. The so-called Summer Host, which had arrived to reinforce it at Reading in 871, went from Repton to Cambridge (Grantebrycge) and stayed there for a year. The Chronicle reports that it was led by three kings: Guðrum, Oscytel and Anund.

  Hálfdan’s arrival in Northumbria with the original mycel here was no mere overwintering. The Host ‘overran that land, and made frequent raids against the Picts and against the Strathclyde Britons’.20 The Annals of Ulster record that during this campaign, which may have lasted the whole year, Hálfdan killed a son of Óláfr, a Dublin Viking; that there was a great battle between the Dubhgaill∆ and the Picts. This may be the battle at Dollar (Dolaír) recorded by the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, in which the Pictavian army was annihilated. Constantín mac Cináeda was killed, perhaps in the same battle.21

  18. ‘HÁLFDAN SHARED OUT the lands of the Northumbrians.’ The dales of the North York Moors abound in Scandinavian place names.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 875 is just as momentous:

  7 þy geare Healfdene Norþanhymbra lond gedælde 7 ergende wæron 7 hiera tilgende.

  In this year Hálfdan shared out the lands of the Northumbrians, and they were engaged in ploughing and making a living for themselves.

  Two significant details are added to this bald account by the chronicler of St Cuthbert’s community, then in exile from its island home on Lindisfarne. First, he recorded that ‘Hálfdan, king of the Danes, entered the Tyne and sailed as far as Wircesforda, devastating and sinning cruelly against St Cuthbert’. Second, in a later chapter of the Historia, he recorded that one part of the Host ‘rebuilt York, cultivated the surrounding land and settled there’.22 Wircesforda cannot now be identified, although the topography of the Tyne suggests that Newburn, regarded as having been close to the tidal reach of the river and the site of its lowest ford, fits the bill: it may have been a royal estate from as early as the seventh century, when a famous marriage took
place at a site called by Bede Ad Muram, 12 miles (20 km) inland from the coast.23

  As for the sharing out of land, this episode has provoked considerable debate: did the Danish army dispossess the inhabitants of the Vale of York, driving them off their estates into exile; did they find land that had been vacated during the civil wars of the previous decade and claim it; or did they, perhaps, purchase estates from native lords with the hard cash weighing so heavily in their treasure chests?

  Assumptions about the behaviour of invading armies underlie most attempts to resolve this question. The Historia’s ‘sinning cruelly against St Cuthbert’ may be taken to imply theft of property; but as we have seen there are virtually no Scandinavian names north of the Tees: northern Northumbria, ancient Bernicia, was not settled by Viking veterans. There is a certain military logic in the idea of planting one’s veterans on land surrounding the military headquarters if, as it seems, York’s wall were refortified at this time—the Romans provide a precise precedent with their coloniae. That the militarization of southern Northumbria was materially destructive, there is little doubt: virtually nothing survives of York’s great Anglo-Saxon library.24

  The intentions of the Host and its surviving king seem clear: they decided to make York their home, rather than return to their Scandinavian homeland. The best prospects for their survival and wealth lay north of the Humber and south of the Tyne, in a land where opposition was weak or non-existent. One of the principal drivers for the Scandinavian exodus in the ninth and tenth centuries seems to have been the poor economic prospects of its young male nobility, with critically limited supplies of fertile agricultural lands and few opportunities to acquire them. The lands between Tyne and Humber, long tamed by the plough or cleared of trees for pasture, and with excellent communications, would do very nicely.**

  The place-name evidence, which tells of a Bernicia un-settled by Norse speakers, is just as eloquent for their arrival in substantial numbers south of the River Tees; not just as lords but as free farmers. Telltale suffixes like –by and –thorpe, and the merging of Scandinavian personal names with the Old English suffix –tun (the so-called ‘Grimston hybrids’) testify to the presence of Norse speakers whose founding of new settlements and acquisition of existing farms and estates has left a permanent mark on the Yorkshire landscape.†† Large estates surviving north of the Tyne as ‘shires’ well into the medieval period show that the essential structure of land-holding evident in Bede’s day was fundamentally unaffected by Scandinavian settlement, as we might expect from the absence of Norse names; the opposite argument applies in Yorkshire and the northern counties of the Midlands, where such large landholdings seem to have become fragmented during this period. Smaller estates passed into the ownership of larger numbers of farmers.

  Many of the forty-two ‘Grimston-type’ names occurring in Yorkshire, generally on good fertile land that must already have been farmed for centuries, are probably best interpreted as new holdings carved out of originally larger estates by a first wave of settlers: the veterans themselves.25 Perhaps not just any veterans, but the wealthier or more senior members of the mycel here. Place names ending in the suffix –by, meaning farmstead, are more numerous—more than 200 of them in Yorkshire survived to the time of the Domesday survey of the 1080s. I have already suggested elsewhere that Danby Dale, a valley which cuts deep into the north edge of the North York Moors, with its regular layout of identikit farm holdings, might represent the settling of a self-contained war band.26

  The –bys tend to lie on slightly less favourable land than their Grimston counterparts (one thinks of a Viking equivalent of NCOs: tough, practical, well-organized men capable of turning their skills to hard graft and mutual co-operation; of turning mediocre land into something productive). The –thorpe names, of which 150 were recorded in the Domesday survey, seem to be settlements on the least fertile land; they show a high incidence of desertion and failure in the later medieval period. So it looks as though there was a stratification among the immigrant population reflecting the social orders of the Host and its affiliates. We might, too, be seeing some chronological dilation, with the least attractive land being left over for the late arrivers. And it would be wrong to suppose that all the land settled by Scandinavians involved displacement. A complex pattern of fragmentation, piecemeal acquisition and gradual purchase (the spending of all that ready cash) or inheritance through marriage into local families, has the ring of truth.

  That women formed, or came to form, a substantial stratum of the immigrant population is attested by finds of jewellery, especially brooches, of distinctive Scandinavian or Anglo-Scandinavian style. To date no genetic study has been able to detect a distinct Scandinavian presence in the areas settled by Vikings; but then, the genetic difference between a Jutland Viking and an Englishman or woman whose ancestors had come originally from Angeln or Saxony is not very great. Although many scholars now accept numbers for the immigrant population of the late ninth and tenth centuries in the tens or scores of thousands there are still those who argue for many fewer.

  Some immigrants may have taken the opportunity afforded by the settlement of the mycel here in Northumbria to escape the chaos of civil war in Norway. After a great battle on Hafrsfjord, near modern Stavanger, in 872, Haraldr Hárfagri, Harald ‘Fairhair’, seems to have imposed his rule on the whole of Norway: he is regarded as its first true king. The first wave of Icelandic settlements dates from these decades and we must suppose that such large dislocations of communities, induced by the civil strife that followed Harald’s battle for supremacy, propelled others to seek their fortunes further south and west.

  A striking feature of the ninth-century Scandinavian settlements is the dog that did not bark in the night-time: that is, we do not hear of any form of local uprising either by or against the newcomers. There must have been local conflicts, when a farmer was ejected from his family holding or when disputes over boundaries boiled over into violence. Theft, homicide, rape and especially livestock rustling seem to have been endemic in Early Medieval society. But there is no record of concerted rebellion against Danish rule by a militia; no pitched battle between native and foreign villagers. All the evidence, documentary and archaeological, suggests that after the raiding and conquest came peace and integration, and that the integration was rapid. There is mounting evidence that native and incomer could understand one another.‡‡ This comes, partly, from cognate substitution: an Anglo-Saxon place name substituted by a Norse version which retained the original meaning; partly from words being loaned both ways between Old English and Old Norse; and partly from names that survived side by side in both languages.27 The historian of these developments, Matthew Townend, argues that much of the North was bilingual during the late ninth and tenth centuries and that, crucially, there seems to have been no social prejudice between the two groups, as there was later between Old English and Norman French.28 As for the veteran warlord Hálfdan, the Historia records enthusiastically that after his insults to St Cuthbert on the River Tyne he began to ‘rave and reek so badly that his whole army drove him from its midst’.29 More prosaically, the Annals of Ulster record his death in 877 in a skirmish with the Finngaill on Loch Cuan—Strangford Lough.

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  If the military and cultural fate of southern Northumbria was sealed by the events of 875, a much more fluid situation was developing in the south. The so-called Summer Host, under its three commanders, lay camped at Cambridge, presumably living off tribute exacted from East Anglian bishops, thegns and their tenants and implementing some sort of administration over that kingless realm through its own jarls or compliant indigenous ealdormen. After 870 two generations of East Anglians had no bishop: the institutional church was relieved of most of its assets and, effectively, dismantled.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded under 875§§ that King Ælfred took to the seas and defeated seven ships’ companies, capturing one and putting the others to flight. This small fleet may have been a reconnoitring party o
r a feint, for later in the same year the Host that had been encamped at Cambridge, or a part of it, was able to sail around the south coast and land at Wareham in what is now Dorset, building or restoring a fortification there before local militias could respond. Wareham occupied a key location at the head of Poole harbour: the site an existing convent and royal estate naturally defended by the Rivers Frome and Piddle.

  Ælfred was unable to take Wareham, just as the combined forces of Mercia and Wessex had been confounded before the ramparts of Nottingham. He must then have offered tribute in return for a promise to leave Wessex. The treaty was reinforced, if we are to believe Asser, by the swearing of oaths on Christian relics and the exchange of high-ranking hostages. But the Chronicle is specific in its description of the use of a sacred ring during the swearing ceremony. Ælfred, aware that Christian relics were not held in great esteem by his opponents, invited them, it seems, to swear on their own holy ring (such an object is attested in Eyrbyggia Saga30 and in the Historia of St Cuthbert), to which they had never agreed before. The tenth-century chronicler Æðelweard specifically uses the term armilia sacra, a sacred arm-ring.31

  The Host duly left Wareham in 876; but not, in the event, in great ceremony: they departed secretly, at night, under the noses of the militia, having murdered their West Saxon hostages. They split into two, a mounted party and a fleet of several hundred ships, with the aim of making a rendezvous some 70 miles (110 km) to the west at Exeter. The former Roman town had been the centre for West Saxon control of Devon for more than a century; St Boniface was educated at the abbey there. But it lay at the distant limit of Ælfred’s reach and uncomfortably close to the antipathetic British kingdom of the West Wealas: Cornwall, where Danish forces might expect to recruit allies.