by Adams, Max;
Ælfred’s admiring biographer Bishop Asser saw the same curiosity and endeavour in his more homebound patron and deployed a favourite Anglo-Saxon simile to capture its essence:
Just like the clever bee which at first light in summertime departs from its beloved honeycomb, finds its way with swift flight on its unpredictable journey through the air, lights upon the many and various flowers of grasses, plants and shrubs, discovers what pleases it most and then carries it back home, King Ælfred directed the eyes of his mind far afield and sought without what he did not possess within, that is to say, within his own kingdom.22
Ælfred’s desire for knowledge and wisdom was as much a personal crusade, an attempt to follow the Old Testament example of King Solomon, as it was politically and economically pragmatic. His pursuit of literacy, enthusiastically recorded by Bishop Asser, has something of the convert’s zeal about it. He famously, in writing of the books that he wished to be more widely read, commissioned the production of æstels, or ornamented book pointers, which he gave to his bishops to accompany the volumes of his own translations intended to be placed in their churches. One of these may survive in the beautiful crystal, cloisonné enamel and gold jewel found in 1693 a few miles from Athelney, where Ælfred established a small monastery in thanks for the victory at Edington. The Alfred jewel is now kept in the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. The tooled inscription on the jewel reads ÆLFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN: Ælfred had me made.
28. THE ÆLFRED JEWEL, found near Athelney in 1693—probably one of the æstels or book pointers given by the king to his favoured bishops.
In his bespoke gifts, his book production, in the disposition of estates and preferments and the material evidence of his rule, Ælfred was exercising the political capital of hard-won patronage. The historian James Campbell goes so far as to argue that copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and others of his works, were kept on chains in major church buildings, to be publicly consulted by a newly literate élite.23
The magnanimity of protection afforded to foreign traders and to the kings of Wales and of Danish East Anglia was an expression of the dominance and universality of Christian kingship; of Ælfred’s victories over the twin evils of heathenism and ignorance. His coinage reflects this maturing comprehension of the political tools available to him. Even with his extensive itineraries the king could not be everywhere; the average ceorl, peasant, dreng or thegn would never have set eyes on him except through the image (highly stylized, in profile like a Roman emperor) that appeared on his coins with the words ÆLFRED REX or ÆLFRED REX ANGLOR(UM). Wherever those coins ended up the message was understood: the Christian English looked to one king only. Mercians, owing their loyalty to the redoubtable and highly competent Æðelred, understood very well the meaning of overlordship, its benefits and costs.
At the beginning of Ælfred’s reign in 871, at a time of great crisis, his coinage was heavily debased, not above 20 per cent silver: useful for trade, but as a direct reflection of royal power the content spoke louder than words. During the 870s Ælfred undertook major reforms to bring the silver content up to Continental standards. He issued the joint ‘Two emperors’ series with Ceolwulf II of Mercia and then, after the victory and treaty of 879 and the West Saxon acquisition of London, increasingly confident, he issued the London monogram pennies. In the 880s and 890s the number of moneyers increased rapidly, even as trade with the Continent declined in the face of piracy and economic instability.
Whether the West Saxon administration immediately appreciated the symbiotic potential of the burhs, with their new freeholding market stall holders and customs regimes, to deploy and reinforce the political value of coinage in the economic recovery of the kingdom, is less certain. Before the Viking wars of the late ninth century central places in the British landscape, where people, services, ceremonials and production were concentrated, existed only at the sites of great minsters and royal palaces, in archaeological terms almost indistinguishable from each other, and at the few trading ports engaged in international trade. Villages and towns as we would recognize them did not exist.†††
The processes of nucleation had not begun or were in their infancy. The population of the Insular lands was dispersed: ealdorman, king and bishop were lords who lived off renders and dispensed power by virtue of their progress through estate lands. People did not congregate in large settlements either for defence or for mutual economic benefit. With the secularization of minsters in the eighth century and their increased exploitation of specialized production and trade, the first signs of nucleation are witnessed in the excavated record. Church, barn, hall, cemetery, all exercised a centripetal force on the population and resources of their neighbourhoods.
The trading ports at Lundenwic, Hamwic, Eoforwic and Gipeswic attracted merchants, potters, craftsmen and the economic interest of kings. If lords were still itinerant, their reeves were nevertheless able to exercise elements of direct control over larger numbers of productive people. The nucleating forces were weak but dynamic: as the trading ports declined with the threat of piracy and as the great minsters, also undefended, were picked off, so the burhs began to attract population: at first for mutual defence and service, then for commerce under the protection of reeve, garrison and turf ramparts 15 feet (5 m) tall. The increasingly complex machinery of West Saxon and Mercian government applied similar forces to the royal court. For the first time, under Ælfred, it is possible to argue the case for a state capital.
Winchester had been a substantial Roman town: Venta Belgarum, the civitas capital of a powerful tribe. The urbanizing project which had proven so successful in Rome’s Mediterranean projects was imported almost like a flat-pack into Iron Age Britain. Winchester, like any other town, had its forum, its posh merchants’ and functionaries’ houses (mosaics, bath suites, underfloor heating and all), its sewage system and grid-square streets. In later centuries the towns of Roman Britain were provided with walls, to define their limits and to keep out undesirables. The name Venta was a native British term for a meeting or assembly place—what else could the indigenes call this new phenomenon? The urban experiment ultimately failed in Roman Britain: the toga-wearing élite retired to their country villas, then to their ancient hillforts, and left the towns to fall into ruin.
The centre of Winchester, lying on the west bank of the River Itchen,‡‡‡ betrays the same telltale grid pattern in its streets today. High Street leads directly away from the river, running just north of west. Set back to north and south are parallel roads, linked by cross streets at right angles. The northern limit of the old town is marked by a road called North Walls, which rather speaks for itself. Close to where the east gate would have stood stands a Victorian statue of King Ælfred.
The apparent continuity of medieval Winchester from its Roman origins is an illusion; or, at least, it is partly coincidental. Between about 400 and 600 there is no evidence that Venta Belgarum functioned as a settlement, let alone as a thriving town. In the seventh century a plot in the old Roman town was given by King Cenwealh to found a second episcopal see for the West Saxons.§§§ Like York, Canterbury, Lincoln and London, the ruined Roman town was property in the gift of the king, regarded as suitable for the establishment of a church under royal patronage. At the beginning of Ælfred’s reign it had a small population: the church community, a royal residence and one or two small private estate complexes belonging to an élite benefiting from the king’s personal patronage.24
Like other Roman towns, Winchester was seen as a suitable site for rebuilding as a defended burh in Ælfred’s ambitious scheme of the 880s: metalled road surfaces from an early phase of construction, excavated beneath the Norman castle, have been closely dated to the late ninth century by two coins: an Arab dirham and an Anglo-Saxon penny. The river crossing and the line of the Roman walls dictated that a similar size and grid plan were adopted for the new burh, whose massive ditch and ramparts enclosed the site of a grand basilica known as the Old Minster, burial place of the celebrated St
Swiðun, a former bishop who died in 862.
29. STATUE OF KING ÆLFRED at Winchester, royal burh and sometime ‘capital’ of Wessex; sculpted by Hamo Thornycroft and unveiled in 1901.
Winchester superseded the coastal site at Hamwic as a principal, more secure trading emporium for southern Wessex. Under Ælfred it could not be described as a town in the modern sense; but urban elements were being assembled here, as in London, Oxford and elsewhere. What is now High Street, the main thoroughfare, was Cheap straet, the street of traders and stall holders; and a mint was established to service its market and supplement the royal coffers. With Wallingford on the Thames it was the largest of the Ælfredan burhs, requiring a nominal garrison of 2,400 men. The primary manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was compiled here and by 896 the Chronicle was recording the death of its wicgerefa, the wic reeve Beornulf, as a noteworthy event. When, that same year, a pirate fleet was intercepted and destroyed off the south coast, two of its crews were brought to the king at Winchester, where he had them hanged.### Here also, after his death six days before All Hallows in the year 899, Ælfred was buried in the Old Minster.
*
Eadweard’s accession to the throne of Wessex, his overlordship of Mercia and the Welsh kingdoms loyal to Ælfred, had been anticipated by both: in 898 the heir presumptive was styled Rex in a Kentish charter; he was the principal legatee in his father’s will and a close attendant at court.25 His older sister Æðelflæd was successfully married to Æðelred, the Lord of Mercia. He had been bloodied in battle against the Host. His first marriage, to Ecgwynn, had borne a daughter, possibly Eadgið, and a son, Æðelstan, who had been subject to investiture by Ælfred, legitimizing him as a future king. Eadweard’s new wife Ælfflæd, daughter of the ealdorman of Wiltshire, would bear him seven children. Ælfred’s line seemed secure.
There was, however, another candidate for the throne: Æðelwold, son of Ælfred’s immediately older brother King Æðelred, who had died in the year of nine engagements, 871. Æðelwold may have been a prime mover in the less than fulsome support that Ælfred received from his ealdormen in 877–878, the winter of greatest crisis.∫∫∫ With the old king barely cold in his bed, Æðelwold, with a small force of retainers, his comites, seized royal townships on the River Stour in Dorset at Christchurch and at Wimborne, his own father’s burial place. In response Eadweard brought a force to Badbury Rings, an abandoned but eminently defensible Iron Age hillfort some 3 miles (5 km) north-west of Wimborne.
Æðelwold must have hoped for, or been promised, substantial support from disaffected collateral members of the House of Wessex; perhaps also from Mercia. If so, he was to be disappointed: no help came; no promises were fulfilled. The Chronicle recorded that he stayed at Wimborne, barricaded behind the gates of the minster enclosure, and resolved to remain there ‘alive or dead’. Eadweard waited with his army.
Under cover of night Æðelwold abandoned his redoubt, perhaps embarking on boats that allowed him to escape through Christchurch harbour. Alex Woolf has raised the intriguing possibility that a nun, said to have been seized by the pretender before or during his stay at Wimborne, was none other than Æðelgifu, Eadweard’s second sister, and that the usurper intended her to become his consort.26 But if so, she was inadvertently left behind, and the Chronicle records her ‘arrest’. Somehow Æðelwold was able to lead his force as far as Northumbria where, it appears, a convenient interregnum after the death of Sigfrøðr, the successor to Guðroðr in 895, offered fresh opportunities. At York Æðelwold seems to have been acclaimed as king and passed out of the Chronicle’s orbit for three or four years.
Eadweard ‘the Elder’ΩΩΩ was able to celebrate his coronation at Whitsun in May 900.27 Later tradition and practice suggests that the coronation took place in the church of St Mary at Kingston upon Thames where, in 838, a symbolic conciliatory meeting had been held between Archbishop Ceolnoth and King Ecgberht.28 The church collapsed in 1730; from the rubble a modest, rectangular block of stone was retrieved which, tradition suggests, is the coronation stone of the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon kings. Today it stands surrounded by an ornate iron railing next to the town’s Guildhall.
The site suggests two key aspects of the ceremony, about which there has been much speculation: first that, instead of choosing the perhaps more natural royal burh at Winchester, a site on the Thames symbolized the continuity of the Wessex–Mercia alliance.29 Secondly, Alex Woolf, the historian of Scotland in this period, notes the similarity in time and geography with a great meeting held by Constantín mac Áeda at Scone within five years of Eadweard’s coronation.30 Both sites lie at the natural tidal limits of great rivers: the Thames and Tay. Two other possible sites for important Insular meetings and inaugurations, Govan on the Clyde and Newburn on the Tyne, the latter also close to a tidal reach, inclines one to think that there was something uniquely symbolic about such places. Both Govan and Newburn may have had moot hills close by, the equivalents of Iceland’s Things, Scotland’s Dings (the place name Dingwall, for example) and Man’s Tynwald.
30. THE TIDE STONE at Kingston upon Thames, where Anglo-Saxon kings were anointed on the frontier between Wessex and Mercia.
The accession of Constantín, grandson of Cináed mac Ailpín, in Alba in about 900, marks a significant moment in the history of North Britain. So too, two years later, does the expulsion of the Norse from Dublin, driven out by the Irish overkings of Brega and Leinster.31 Again, the clatter of great events in one part of the Atlantic world echoed across the sea, re-energizing the political dynamics of Britain’s kingdoms. Newton’s cradle was set in motion once more, this time responding to a new set of complex rhythms.
* Hidden in these portentous arrivals and departures, recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is another: this is the last entry by the original scribe of the ‘A’ manuscript; a new hand took over for 893.
† Conceived in 1804 and completed in 1809.
‡ The abrupt cessation of coinage minted at Canterbury after 892 suggests that the Host, unrecorded by the Chronicle, attacked and razed the town that year. The mint did not resume production until after 910. Dolley 1970, 20–1.
§ The kings of the West Saxons and Mercians had been overlords of Kent for the whole of the eighth century; but their power to coerce its inhabitants and ealdormen to contribute the common burdens of fort and bridge building seems to have been limited or non-existent. The fort near Appledore was, it seems, only half-finished when it was overrun.
# He was the oldest surviving son of Ælfred and Ælswið, a year or two younger than his sister Æðelflæd. Born sometime during the 870s, he witnessed his first charter in 892.
∫ There is some evidence that a series of signal beacons linked the Thames valley with the south coast during this period, allowing limited intelligence of enemy movements to alert the levies. Gower 2002; David Hill and Sheila Sharp, in a short essay included in Lavelle 2010, 218ff. The burhs were not generally intervisible; but there would have been considerable advantage in a system linking them by hilltop beacons. The place name element ‘wearð’lookout, watchoften with the suffix ‘dune’ (hill) giving the modern Warden plus the pleonastic Hill, supplies one clue. Weardsetl is an alternative form. The place name element ‘Tot’ is also regarded as a marker for the site of a beacon.
Ω He is not mentioned at all in the Chronicle before Ælfred’s death in 899.
≈ A port on the River Ribble close to the later town of Preston would be consistent with the route of the traffic we know to have existed between York and Dublin in the late ninth and tenth centuries.
∂ By inference: the Chronicle does not name the commanders.
π A passage in Ælfred’s own translation of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care makes it clear that, following the example of King David, he saw restraint of royal power over enemies as a sign of virtue. Keynes and Lapidge 1983, 128.
∆ See Viking Age travel map, p. 281.
** Buttington: probably ‘Bota’s settlement’an Anglian name.
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†† Tree foliage is a valuable, often underestimated source of fodder: particularly elm and holly.
‡‡ It means, unhelpfully, the Bridge to Quatt, a small village 3 or 4 miles (5–6 km) south-east of the bridge. Watts 2004.
§§ An archaic term for a variety of cattle maladies.
## The same age, incidentally, as Nelson when he died at Trafalgar 900 years later fending off another Continental invasion.
∫∫ See above, p. 93.
ΩΩ Wergild: the value of a man for purposes of compensation; otherwise an indication of his worth and social standing. Ælfred was a twelfhynde man, worth 1200 shillings. See above, p. 176.
≈≈ Another charter survives bearing the ealdorman’s name (S1202, between 870 and 899). In it, Ælfred donates an estate to the monastic community at Chartham in the Kent downs, a few miles west of Canterbury, in return for a life interest in land at Croydon.
∂∂ I think it possible that the inscription added to the Codex Aureus was written in the hand of Werburg on behalf of her husband.
ππ Gregory was Pope between 590 and his death in 604. Augustine’s mission to the Anglo-Saxons in 597 was conceived by Gregory after a famous meeting with Deiran slave boys in a market in Rome.
∆∆ Originally hlafweard, a loaf-keeper. Hlafdige, ‘lady’, derives from words for ‘loaf’ and for ‘kneading’: in other words, the providers of a household.
*** The same, scribe, incidentally, who picked up his quill at the 893 entry in the Parker MS of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; but probably not the original translator of Orosius, according to the archivist at the British Library. Information accessed from: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_47967, July 2016.
††† With the possible, as yet unproven, exception of the ancient Roman civitas capital at Canterbury.