Aelfred's Britain

by Adams, Max;

  At last, in desperation, they broke out and, after a fierce engagement, with much slaughter on both sides, marched overland all the way back to Essex. This time, at least, they might retreat north-east into friendlier territory, through the lands of the Five Boroughs, tracking across Danish East Mercia and through East Anglia; Æðelred’s forces were probably able to trace their progress but unable to engage them beyond the line of Watling Street.

  It is an old axiom of military strategy that a powerful enemy should be afforded the means of escape. The destruction of the Host’s ships at Benfleet closed its back door to the Continent. Another plan seems now to have occurred to Hæsten. For the third time in twelve months, and with winter’s dark days approaching, he led his forces overland again and this time, according to the Chronicle, they marched day and night, right along the Mercian frontier. At this speed, perhaps, they might use the metalled road of Watling Street and outrun the fyrð. They reached a ‘deserted fortress in Wirral [Wirhealum: ‘the hollows where the bog myrtle grows’], called Chester’ (þæt hie gedydon on anre westre ceastre on Wirhealum, seo is Legaceaster gehaten).11

  If Hæsten hoped to buy himself time, to refortify and provision Chester, to make contact, perhaps, with friends in Gwynedd and across the Irish Sea in Dublin, he had again underestimated the capabilities of his enemy. Shortly after the Host’s arrival at Chester, Æðelred’s Mercian levies surrounded the old Roman fort and set about implementing an aggressive scorched-earth policy, stripping its hinterland of cattle, grain and horses and sweeping up unsuspecting foraging parties so that the Host should have no provisions for winter. By now, with corn reaped and threshed and trees losing their leaves†† it must have been difficult to keep any army in the field. It seems that the fyrð now withdrew; Hæsten, his options diminishing, marched his army into Wales, hoping to scavenge sufficient provisions for the winter. Here again he was denied, the land having been emptied of cattle and grain; instead, he plundered booty: bullion, jewellery, coin—anything to make this disastrous campaign seem worthwhile and satisfy his veterans.

  The Welsh raid, diminished by a dismissive account in the Chronicle, was serious: the Annales Cambriae record its progress all through Brycheiniog and Gwent. Hæsten led the Host on a final, dispiriting march all the way across Northumbria and East Anglia out of the reach of the levies, to Mersea on the Essex coast, and relative safety, some time in the New Year of 894. Here they were joined by the remnants of the East Anglian fleet which had invested Exeter and which, raiding along the south coast on its way home, had been put to flight by the burh garrison at Chichester.

  Now, at least, the Host had ships again, perhaps even sufficient to carry its forces back to the Continent. But its commanders were not done yet. Once more probing the edges of Wessex and Mercia, testing the mettle of the alliance, the Host left its baggage and camp followers, took to its ships and, during the summer of 894, sailed up the Thames estuary to the mouth of the River Lea opposite what is now Greenwich. The fleet rowed north past Stratford and its tidal corn mills, tracing the western edge of the great forest of Epping; past King Offa’s minster at Waltham (one wonders if it had been pillaged by earlier raiders) as far perhaps as Ware, whose name, literally ‘Weirs’, suggests the highest navigable point, close to Hertford. In 895 they built a new fortress at an unidentified spot, this time with access to their fleet: their escape route. In the late summer of that year the fyrð was sent to dislodge them; it was repulsed with serious casualties including, the Chronicle says, the loss of four of the king’s thegns. The Host’s intention was evidently to threaten London’s rich hinterland.

  Ælfred, finally released from his long watching brief in the south-west, now brought his army across the Thames and camped somewhere on the south-west side of the Lea, ‘while the corn was being reaped’. This small detail evokes a vision of labourers in the fields, harvesting wheat with their saw-edged sickles; of oxen grazing on the stubble, stooks drying in hot August sun; of weary soldiers watching, leaning on their spears under shady trees; of barns filling with winter’s grain—like a bucolic passage from John Stewart Collis’s wartime reminiscences of the 1940s, perhaps.12

  Nothing more perfectly captures Ælfred’s own vision of the duties owed by a king to his people: of the idea of economic security guaranteed by the king’s peace in return for duty and render. Content that the harvest was protected, Ælfred set his mind to a military solution. Inspired, it seems, by the example of Charles the Bald in Francia, Ælfred now sought to block the fleet’s escape. He and his engineers found a suitable spot on the Lea, downriver from the enemy’s camp, and set the fyrð to constructing a bridge that would connect forts built on both banks.

  The threat was sufficient; even before the bridge and forts were complete the Host abandoned their new fortress and once again marched west, this time as far as æt Cwatbrycge be Sæfern:‡‡ Bridgnorth, a key crossing of the Severn in what is now Shropshire, some 13 miles (21 km) south of Watling Street, their likely route. Here they constructed a new fort, most likely on the west bank, and overwintered. Ælfred seems to have used the breathing space to bolster diplomatic efforts to isolate the Host. He sent Æðelnoth, his loyal Somerset ealdorman, to York to broker a treaty with Guðroðr. A year earlier the British chronicler of the Annales Cambriae had noted that Anarawd of Gwynedd ‘came with Englishmen to lay waste Ceredigion and Ystrad Tywi’; with Mercia and Gwynedd in collusion against the weaker Welsh kingdoms the Host’s last hope for a northern and Welsh alliance evaporated.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, its scribe seemingly as exhausted as his countrymen, has the following anticlimactic entry for the year 896:

  on ðysum gere tofor se here, sum on Eastengle, sum on Norðhymbre, 7 þa þe feohlease wæron him þær scipu begeton 7 suð ofer sæ foron to Sigene...

  In this year, the Host dispersed, some to East Anglia, some to Northumbria, and those without stock got themselves ships there, and sailed south oversea to the Seine. The Host, by the mercy of God, had not altogether utterly crushed the English people, but they were much more severely crushed during those years by murrain§§ and plague, most of all by the fact that many of the best of the king’s servants in the land passed away during those three years.13

  It is a salutary lesson for the historian, whose window on the remote past offers mostly the narrow view of great events, to learn that more damage was wreaked by the everyday woes of illness, poor harvests and diseased livestock—by the fates—than by the depredations of the Host. It is little wonder that while the Angelcynn reposed considerable and justifiable faith in their king, they also prayed to their God; and also, perhaps, to those capricious deities who had seemed for so long to favour their enemy: Oðin, Thor, Frey and the rest. Those same gods had run out of patience with the warriors whose apocalyptic thirst for battle, plunder and conquest had not, in the end, brought about Ragnarök, the last battle, and the dawning of a new world order.

  The states of Wessex and Mercia, who had entered the lists against their Scandinavian antagonists so seemingly ill-prepared, had paid a heavy price for their education in modern warfare. They had been forced by extreme circumstances to adapt and to learn. Above all, perhaps, their appreciation of economic, military and political geography had undergone a decisive shift: by the end of the conflict they were more than a match for their enemies. They had mastered their own landscape. Ælfred had won his final victory at the age of forty-seven.## He had successfully exploited the rules of lordship to embark on a most ambitious programme of military reform, maintaining the support of most of his nobility and attracting the loyalty of Mercians, Welsh and many others including, according to Asser, an assortment of Vikings, Gauls, Franks and Bretons.14 Now Ælfred was able to enjoy a few last years of peace in which to set the political and cultural seal on his brilliant military legacy.

  *

  Unimaginable treasures were looted from the minsters and palaces of the Insular kingdoms during the first Viking Age. Metalwork was cut into hacksilv
er, reforged as jewellery, weapons or coin; precious stones were recycled and given new life in distinctly Scandinavian ornaments like oval brooches. Much was set alight or cast into rivers and oceans; much more was buried for safekeeping, and some of those hoards turn up still. The greatest cultural destruction was wrought on the libraries of the monastic schools: York, Jarrow, Portmahomack, Iona and elsewhere. Countless manuscripts were burned or discarded, including single copies of annals whose loss leaves immense gaps in our narrative histories. The Historia of St Cuthbert is a lucky testament to that community’s extraordinary, stoical survival.

  Rarely, very rarely, items were recovered after they had been looted and, in a unique instance, we have the testimony of those who recovered them. The Codex Aureus, a grand illustrated eighth-century gospel book now kept in the Royal Library in Stockholm but undoubtedly Anglo-Saxon in origin, was stolen, probably from Canterbury, in a Viking raid. On its eleventh folio (see p. 219) is a remarkable inscription written in a very elegant Old English hand, which reads as follows:

  + In nomine Domini nostri Ihesu Christi. Ic Aelfred aldormon ond Werburg min gefera begetan ðas bec æt hæðnum herge mid uncre clæne feo; ðæt ðonne wæs mid clæne golde...

  In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I, Ealdorman Ælfred, and my wife Werburg procured these books from the heathen invading army with our own money; the purchase was made with pure gold. And we did that for the love of God and for the benefit of our souls, and because neither of us wanted these holy works to remain any longer in heathen hands. And now we wish to present them to Christ Church to God’s praise and glory and honour, and as thanksgiving for his sufferings, and for the use of the religious community which glorifies God daily in Christ Church; in order that they should be read aloud every month for Ælfred and for Werburg and for Alhðryðe, for the eternal salvation of their souls, as long as God decrees that Christianity should survive in that place. And also I, Earl Ælfred, and Werburg beg and entreat in the name of Almighty God and of all his saints that no man should be so presumptuous as to give away or remove these holy works from Christ Church as long as Christianity survives there.15

  It would be gratifying to know during which raid on Canterbury the Codex was stolen. The only Chronicle record of such an event is in 851. If we can date the theft that early, then the resulting campaign which led to the destruction of the Host at Acleah in that year might well fit the bill if Ælfred, the ealdorman of Surrey, was active in the 850s.∫∫ The campaign of 892 is another obvious possibility. We cannot be sure. We can, however, say a little more about Ælfred and his wife and daughter because, by happy chance, his will also survives.16 It must date from before 888 when one of its witnesses died. For historians it is rich in interest, not just because of its association with the Codex Aureus.

  27. THE CODEX AUREUS, a magnificent bible of Anglo-Saxon origin, acquired by Ealdorman Ælfred and his wife Werburg from the mycel here. ‘In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I, Ealdorman Ælfred, and my wife Werburg procured these books from the heathen invading army with our own money.’

  Ælfred lists his bookland (his heritable estates) at places like Clapham, Sanderstead and Lingfield, all within the shire of Surrey, as well as two in Kent. These are left to his wife and their daughter, together with livestock and crops including 2,000 pigs (so long as his widow does not remarry). The property is to be inherited through his daughter’s children—in other words it would not pass to a new husband. Werburg, his widow, is ‘to take to St Peter’s’ (that is, to Rome) his two wergildsΩΩ by virtue of his birth and his title ‘if it be God’s will that she performs that journey’.

  Ælfred also had a son, Æðelwold, to whom he leaves three hides of bookland and 100 swine, a comparatively small bequest. The son is also to have his father’s ‘folkland’, a clause that has given rise to some debate since it is explicit that the king himself must approve its transfer. There are other, minor legatees. One wonders why the wife and daughter were favoured over the son, unless he were the issue of an earlier marriage, or illegitimate.≈≈ The Codex, we know, Ælfred intended to be returned to Christ Church at Canterbury, that it might never leave there again. In that, at least, he hoped in vain. It is not known how the Codex Aureus ended up in Scandinavia, except that it had spent time in Spain. One doubts if its owner would have appreciated the irony.

  During these last years other, more welcome Scandinavian visitors came to King Ælfred’s court. The celebrated tales of Ohthere and Wulfstan are preserved in an unlikely source: an Old English translation of Orosius’s fifth-century Historiarum Adversum Paganos libri Septem, ‘Seven books of history against the pagans’. Ælfred, advised by his two Continental scholars, Grimbald and John the Old Saxon, and by his senior clerics Plegmund, Wærferth and Asser, had compiled a list of those books ‘most necessary for all men to know’.17 Latin, he believed, was the rightful preserve of clerics and of charters; he wanted the children of his nobles and, inferentially, his administrators, to be able to read and write in their own language so that their counsel and judgement should be better informed through the wisdom and knowledge of their illustrious forbears. The evidence of the Codex Aureus shows that some, at least, of his ealdormen took this seriously and were capable of high standards of literacy; and a number of vernacular prayer books belonging to noblewomen survive from the period.∂∂

  To this end a new generation of literate scribes would produce Old English versions of Bede’s Ecclesiastical history of the English People and its historical sequel, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; of Orosius’s Historiae, Augustine’s Soliloquies and the Pastoral Care of Gregory the Great.ππ The king’s own law code, the Domboc, was inscribed in Old English.

  Ohthere’s account of travels along the Norwegian coast and among the Danish islands of the Baltic was logically appended to Orosius’s account, derived partly from Pliny, of the geography of Northern Europe.18

  Ohthere sæde his hlaforde, ∆∆ Ælfrede cyning, þat he ealra Norðmonna norþest bude...19

  Ohthere told his lord, King Ælfred, that he lived the furthest north of all Norwegians. He said that he lived in the north of Norway on the coast of the Atlantic [Westsæ]. He also said that the land extends very far north beyond that point, but it is all uninhabited, except for a few places here and there where the Finnas have their camps, hunting in winter, and in summer fishing in the sea.

  That Ælfred is described as Ohthere’s lord is an intriguing detail. The Norseman, outside his own land, was lordless and literally outwith the law. It was part of the duty of an Anglo-Saxon king to provide legal protection (his mund ) and bona fides to such men and, therefore, Ælfred was his de facto lord while he dwelt in the kingdom.

  The Norseman was a farmer of reindeer, wealthy in his own land, and a trader along the Norwegian coast and in the western Baltic. He must have brought some of his wares to the West Saxon court as gifts, to open access to wealthy buyers. Equally valuable were his accounts of the geography of the far north (he had sailed as far as the White Sea) and of the trading settlements at Sciringesheal (Kaupang, in Oslofjord) and Hæþum (Hedeby or Schleswig) at the base of the Jutland peninsula. The news-hungry West Saxon court must have been fascinated by his account of the tribute paid to his kind by the hunter-gatherer peoples he called Finnas (the nomadic Lapps). Their furs (bear, otter, marten), valuable ship-rope made from seal and whale-skin, and super-precious walrus ivory, highly prized by ornamental carvers, were the goods that had made Ohthere so wealthy despite the surprising—to the farmers of the Angelcynn—poverty of his own livestock: twenty each of cattle, sheep and pigs raised on the narrow cultivable coastal lands of Norway.

  More exotic still was Wulfstan’s account of travels in the eastern Baltic and along the River Vistula; of a land of honey and plentiful fishing, of the habits of foreign kings and their burial rites and inheritance practices. In a time of war the Angelcynn were, at heart, still curious about the world beyond their shores. Modern scholars have also gleaned much from the detail of th
ese stories, so carefully preserved by the Orosius scribe.*** The Danish ship historian Ole Crumlin-Pedersen has shown that with the technology and type of ship likely used for coastal trading by the two captains entertained at Ælfred’s court (something like the capacious Skuldelev 1, or the Klåstad ship found near Kaupang and dating from around 800), Ohthere’s testimony that he sailed from his home to Kaupang in a month equates to something like a 2-knot net progress into the south-westerly prevailing winds; given better winds, the ships would have made as much as 5 knots on average. Even a single voyage a year, carrying the most valuable freight, would have accumulated sufficient profit for such skippers to justify the expense and risk.20

  The celebrated English historian of the Anglo-Viking period, Peter Sawyer, has studied the implications of both accounts for our understanding of Northern trade and shown how the entrepreneurs of southern Scandinavia were able successfully to exploit both the hunter-gatherers of the north and the voracious appetites of European courts for their produce—not just furs, skins and ivory, but also amber and other precious stones, jewellery and rare natural minerals.21 The trading and craft centres of the western Baltic acted as gateway emporia between Atlantic and Arab markets via the great rivers of the east. If there was passion for raiding and conquest among land-hungry Scandinavians there was, equally, a brilliant aptitude for exploration, trading and manufacture; a curiosity to explore and compass the world not matched until, perhaps, the fifteenth century.