by Adams, Max;
‡‡‡ In the Early Medieval period it may have been navigable to this point from its issue on Southampton Water.
§§§* Bede HE III.7 The first West Saxon see was established at Dorchester on Thames.
### The 896 entry contains the well-known reference to Ælfred’s construction of ‘warships to be built to meet the Danish ships: they were almost twice as long as the others, some had sixty oars, some more; they were both swifter, steadier and with more freeboard than the others; they were built neither after the Frisian design nor after the Danish, but as it seemed to himself that they could be most serviceable’. Keynes and Lapidge 1983, 90. Few historians would now suggest that this constitutes evidence that Ælfred founded the Royal Navy.
∫∫∫ See above, p. 139.
ΩΩΩ A cognomen first used in Wulfstan’s late tenth-century Life of St Æðelwold to distinguish him from Eadweard ‘the Martyr’ (975–978).
FRAGMENTARY ANNALS
INGIMUNDR—ÆÐELRED AND ÆÐELFLÆD—ANGLESEY AND MAN—ORKNEYINGA SAGA—CONSTANTÍN —MAC ÁEDA—ÆÐELWOLD AND EADWEARD—UNDERCURRENTS
7
The 893 entry in the ‘A’ version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, an almost continuous and breathless narrative of field campaigns, sieges, fleet movements and forced marches over twelve months, runs to more than 1,000 words. From 897, the year after the Host dispersed, until 909 the accumulated entries of more than a decade recorded in the same Chronicle run to just over half that. If the first twelve years of the tenth century appear from a superficial, West Saxon point of view, to have been predominantly uneventful, the focus of historical attention is now drawn inexorably to the west and north. Even here, that long decade can only tentatively be sketched in outline, from annals thin on detail and obscure in their genesis.
Nevertheless, the rebounding impact of great events across the sea at the turn of the century was to have a profound effect on the British political landscape for a century and more. A terse but telling entry in the Annals of Ulster for 902 fires the starting gun:
The heathens were driven from Ireland... from the fortress of Áth Cliath, by Mael Finnia son of Flannacán with the men of Brega and by Cerball son of Muiricán, with the Laigin; and they abandoned a good number of their ships, and escaped half dead after they had been wounded and broken.1
31. NORSE RUNES ON A CROSS SHAFT from St Andrew’s church, Andreas, Isle of Man. Settlement and conquest was swiftly followed by assimilation.
Áth Cliath is Dublin, the Norse longphort on the River Liffey. Here the Norse Vikings made their principal stronghold in 841 and by the end of the century it supported close-packed housing, perhaps on more than one site, indicating its expansion from a mere pirate base (part dockyard, part defensive redoubt, part slave market and production centre) into something resembling its Scandinavian prototypes at Kaupang and elsewhere. The immediate, material fallout from this sudden, overwhelming attack by a combined force of Irish included a large stash of silver, buried at Drogheda in Brega shortly afterwards.* The loss of men and ships was probably of small concern compared with the loss of the Norse Irish capital, their long-held centre of power. Refugees, not just pirate captains and their crews but families, dependents and artisans, fled across the sea in panic. It is impossible to know how many drowned in the dangerous waters of the Irish Sea.
Very shortly afterwards, notices appearing in Insular sources testify to ominous repercussions in the east. The Annales Cambriae entry for the year 902 records that ‘Ingimund came to Mona, and took Maes Osfeilion’. Another contemporary entry, in the Brut y Tywysogion under 903, records that ‘Igmund’ was defeated in a battle for Ros Meilion. The two places are likely to be the same: Llanfaes, a small settlement north of Beaumaris overlooking the Menai Straits on Anglesey.2
A third source, if it can be trusted, provides compelling supporting detail of a series of events played out over the following half dozen years. The same warlord, Ingimund, Old Norse Ingimundr, appears in a set of Three Fragmentary Irish Annals which exist only in third- or fourth-hand form, having been transcribed from lost copies of unidentifiable annals in the seventeenth century; that is to say, we are picking up a pretty cool trail. Even so, historians from F. W. Wainright onwards have seen in Ingimund’s adventures the forging of a new career by the leader of one of the war bands expelled from Dublin.3
The annal describes eloquently, if all too briefly, the departure from Ireland, a defeat in battle against Cadell ap Rhodri† and an appeal to Mercia for sanctuary:
Afterwards Hingamund with his forces came to Edlefrida, queen of the Saxons, for her husband, that is Edelfrid, was at that time in a disease... Now Hingamund was asking lands of the queen in which he would settle, and on which he would build huts and dwellings, for he was at this time weary of war. Then Edelfrida gave him lands near Castra, and he stayed there for a time.4
And so Ælfred’s celebrated daughter Æðelflæd (Edelfrida) makes her belated entry on to the stage in the first years of the tenth century. She was the Wessex king’s oldest child, born perhaps about 870 and married to her father’s godson and ally, Ealdorman Æðelred, in the mid-880s—perhaps to seal the transfer of London to Mercian control after 886. The couple had one surviving child, a daughter called Ælfwynn. Æðelred had proven himself a stalwart ally through the travails of the 890s. Ælfred’s grandson Æðelstan seems to have been fostered at his court, and Mercian and West Saxon policy against the Danish threat had been solidly aligned since the 860s.
Mercian relations with its traditional antagonists in Powys and Gwynedd were conducted independently of Wessex. Under Anarawd, son of Rhodri the Great, Gwynedd had initially been antipathetic to both Wessex and its old enemy Mercia, throwing in its lot with Guðroð’s kingdom in York. But by the 890s Anarawd had abandoned his Northumbrian allies (Guðroðr died in 895, according to Æðelweard) and submitted to Ælfred’s overlordship. Now, with Ælfred dead and a new dynamic force in play from across the Irish Sea, Venedotian‡/Mercian relations were once more subject to ancient tensions.
It is widely accepted that after about 902 Æðelred was in some way incapacitated, as suggested by the Fragmentary Annals, and that his queen effectively took the reins of power in Mercia, mirroring her brother Eadweard’s overlordship of Wessex and the South. That she acquiesced in Ingimund’s request for land on which to settle his exhausted veterans demonstrates her independence of thought: the policy was as much anti-Venedotian as it was a defensive acceptance of the peaceful alternative to invasion. It echoes the expedient strategies of the Frankish kings, settling one band of raiders in the hope of fending off other enemies; buying them into a less aggressive means of supporting themselves. Ingimund’s people are unlikely to have been the only Irish Norse war band kicking about the Irish Sea looking for fresh opportunities in the aftermath of the Dublin expulsion.
Guðroð’s granting of the lands between Tyne and Wear to Cuthbert’s spiritual host had been intended to serve the same purpose: to create a buffer against Bernician antagonists. The land that Æðelflæd now chose to give Ingimundr was territory lying between her heartlands and those of Anarawd: that is, the area around Castra, Chester on the River Dee, which had in the previous decade been the object of Hæsten’s attentions. It is possible that this part of north-west Mercia, now Cheshire, had been depopulated in the past; that a settlement of veterans might in time bring economic advantages by carving productive farms out of unproductive waste and by submission to Mercian overlordship. It is hard to imagine that Æðelflæd passively acquiesced in the displacement of a large indigenous population. Chester itself, with riverine access to the Irish Sea, was evidently a prize worth having.
Had the so-called Lady of the Mercians (Myrcna hlæfdige in the Mercian Register incorporated in several versions of the Chronicle) been a student of more ancient British historical tradition, she might have recalled the cautionary tale of Vortigern, the legendary fifth-century British overlord who received a similar request from Hengest and Horsa, arrivin
g on the coast of Kent in three ships exiled from their homelands. Vortigern gave them Thanet, and they settled their Saxon comrades there before seizing the whole kingdom from its hapless incumbent. Four centuries later, Ingimundr saw the same opportunity.
When he [Ingimundr] saw the city full of wealth and the choice land around it, he desired to possess them. Afterwards [he] came to the leaders of the Norsemen and the Danes; he made a great complaint in their presence, and he said that they were not well off without good lands, and that it was right for them all to come to seize Castra and to possess it with its wealth and its lands.5
Who were these other Norsemen and Danes? The fissile expulsion of the Norse from Dublin had scattered individual war bands and their dependents across the Irish Sea and beyond. Some of these, we know, went north to try their fortunes in Alba; perhaps also in Suðreyar, the Hebrides. Ingimundr may be only one of several Norse warlords who attempted small-scale invasion or settlement of the British mainland. That others attempted to make common cause with the Vikings of York is suggested by both place names and by the sensational discovery of an enormous silver hoard (63 lbs or 29 kg in weight) at Cuerdale on the banks of the River Ribble in 1840. The nearly 9,000 items comprised not just large quantities of hacksilver and other bullion but also coin, much of it minted at York. Encased in a lead box, it looks as though it had been a war chest, assembled either to support the retaking of Dublin or to found a new colony, perhaps on the western fringes of Northumbria. The Norse place name Copeland—‘kaupa land’, meaning ‘bought land’—on the west coast of Cumbria may reflect the acquisition of estates by wealthy veterans of campaigns in the Irish Sea. The route through the Ribble Valley and up over the Pennines connected the Irish Sea directly with sympathetic allies in York.
32. THE CUERDALE HOARD, deposited in about 905 on the banks of the River Ribble, Lancashire. Comprising an immense quantity of silver items, it is perhaps the war chest of a Dublin Norse army.
Did Ingimundr hold his conference with former comrades and prospective York allies somewhere on the Ribble, perhaps near modern Preston? Circumstantial evidence of a displacement of indigenous landowners from Cumbria comes from an entry in St Cuthbert’s Historia:
In these days Elfred son of Brihtwulf, fleeing pirates, came over the mountains in the West and sought the mercy of St Cuthbert and Bishop Cuthheard so that they might present him with some lands.6
This Elfred does not appear in any other contemporary source; but ‘mountains in the West’ suggests that he had fled Cumbria or western Northumbria; and the size of the lands given or sold to him by the Cuthbert community, no less than the twelve vills of a complete Early Medieval shire around Easington in modern County Durham,§ indicates that he had been a high-ranking noble, probably an ealdorman.
Whatever the context of Ingimund’s confidential plan to seize Chester, its details leaked: ‘the queen came to know of it [and] collected large forces around her in every direction’.7 Confrontation was inevitable. A clue to the timing of these events is provided by a brief entry in the ‘C’ or Mercian Register version of the Chronicle, which records that in 907 Chester ‘was rebuilt’.# Its impressive surviving walls show that in the tenth century it must still have enjoyed substantial defences standing from its days as the headquarters of Rome’s famous Legio XX Valeria Victrix. In 894 the Host had camped there and had to be removed by a policy of starvation.
The 907 entry suggests that Æðelflæd had been monitoring increasing tensions among Ingimund’s Norse settlers over several years. Whether she actually got wind of a rebellion, as the Fragmentary Annals suggest, we might doubt. Intuition and experience inclined her to fortify and garrison Chester: to make of it a burh like that at Worcester, from which she could mount both defensive and offensive operations and develop the stagnant economy of north-west Mercia. Mention in the Fragmentary Annals’ account of numbers of ‘freemen’ within the city supports the idea of a properly constituted burghal foundation. In earlier times Chester’s refortification and garrisoning would have been seen by the kings of Gwynedd as a provocative, offensive gesture; now, perhaps, it was accepted as a military expedient against a common enemy. Æðelflæd had fine examples of recent burh foundations at Worcester and, perhaps, Tamworth on which to base her design; even so, neither the garrison nor the new defences∫ could prevent an assault by Ingimund’s combined Norse and Danish forces.
The historian must, regrettably, discount the gory siege narrative contained in the Fragmentary Annals, despite such evocative imagery as cauldrons of boiling ale being poured onto the Norse attackers and the release of all the garrison’s bees as an offensive weapon against them. We must put such colour down to over-exuberance on the part of later scribes, imagining and embellishing. The simple truth is that the Mercian fortress was more than a match for its attackers. That the siege is not even mentioned in the Mercian Register, let alone the main Chronicle, suggests that fame’s trumpet did not sound very far.
Æðelflæd kept her fortress on the Dee. Even so, Ingimund’s veterans had come to stay in Cheshire; and they were not alone. Among the fanciful detail of the Fragmentary Annals is mention of those Irish, the Gall-Ghaedhil of other sources, who had intermarried with or become acculturated by the Dublin Norse. Their impact on the human geography and linguistic history of the Irish Sea ‘province’, as it is often called, was as profound in its way as that of the Norse.
The long-term impact of the Irish Norse arrival on the west coast cannot be in doubt: archaeology, legal and administrative terms, personal and place names supply ample evidence that after the expulsion from Dublin they settled here. It has long been recognized that there is an abundance of Norse-derived names on the Wirral peninsula between the estuaries of the Mersey and Dee and in coastal Lancashire; not just in settlements that survive to the present day: Irby, Kirby, Meols,Ω Thingwall, Croxteth, Aigburth, Tranmere and so on; but also in personal names and the names of landholdings recorded at the time of the Domesday survey. In the same document are distinct patterns of manorial valuations and fines whose numbers indicate an origin with the Scandinavian Ora, equivalent to sixteen English pennies. We find among the lawmen of Cheshire a ‘sacraber’, from the Norse sakaráberi, a prosecutor, and a concept of denial termed thwertnic: ‘absolutely no’.8
Anglesey, or Môn, where Ingimundr had suffered a hot reception in 902, displays few Norse names, but there is a concentration of evidence for Scandinavian activity on its east coast, particularly around the fringes of Red Wharf Bay. Ingimund’s battle with the forces of Gwynedd at Maes Osfeilion, Llanfaes, may well have been precipitated by a landing at this broad, sandy inlet, north-east facing and sheltered from the prevailing winds. At Benllech, close by, there is a record of a ‘Scandinavian’ burial, and a sustained campaign of metal detection has produced concentrations of finds in the area around Llanbedrgoch, two thirds of a mile inland. A hoard of silver arm rings, whose remarkably consistent weight shows them to have been a form of ‘ring-money’, a cross between bullion, ornament and exchangeable cash, also comes from Red Wharf Bay.≈
33. RED WHARF BAY, Anglesey, a day’s sail east of the longphort of Dublin: an attractive and obvious target for Norse raiders and settlers.
While the focus of Early Medieval Venedotian royal power lay at Aberffraw in the south-west of the island, the contemporary archaeology of the eastern tip of Anglesey is rich in ecclesiastical settlement and sculpture, indicative of productive farmland and powerful territorial control. In the ninth century this was no empty land waiting for pioneer farmers; it was wealthy, an attractive target for the Dublin Norse whose longphort lay a day’s sail due west. That the majority of Norse names in East Anglesey are prominent coastal navigation marks is ominous proof of mariners’ interest in its coastline. The modern English ‘Anglesey’ (Önguls-ey, Öngull’s island) for the Welsh ‘Môn’ is itself Norse in origin.
Recent excavations at Llanbedrgoch9 have produced striking evidence for the fortunes of its native community at the t
urn of the tenth century, as a secular counterpart to the monastery at Portmahomack and the possible minsters at Flixborough and Brandon. Like an earlier site some miles to the north at Din Llugwy, the inhabitants of Llanbedrgoch combined a conservative, native round house tradition with rectangular halls typical of Germanic or Scandinavian architecture. A kidney-shaped ditch and bank enclosure, which had been constructed perhaps during the fifth or sixth century, contained houses and a hall, a smithy and a stone-lined spring cistern (the upper fills of the latter included a penny of King Eadmund [939–946]). To the north of the pool lay a paved and kerbed road surface. During the ninth century the enclosure was rebuilt with a defensible stone wall and re-cut ditch. The buildings were also refurbished during the ninth or tenth century with either sill beam or stone wall foundations, sunken floors and sufficient constructional detail to demonstrate that they were substantial and well-engineered structures, with affinities to Scandinavian-style buildings elsewhere in the Atlantic west.
Llanbedrgoch seems to have enjoyed a long life, continuing into the late tenth century or later: its character fits within a context of wealthy rural agricultural élites, what in Anglo-Saxon England would be the thegnage caste and in Wales was the maenol. Mark Redknap, its excavator, suggests that it would have lain at the heart of an agricultural estate with outlying dependent farms and farmers; that, perhaps, it was sufficiently prestigious to have earned the title llys, a ‘court’.∂ He further suggests that it was ideally placed for the collection of tolls on traffic entering or exiting the Rivers Dee and Mersey on their way to and from Dublin and Man. The inhabitants of Llanbedrgoch survived by adapting to circumstances.
Archaeologists investigating such sites spanning dynamic historical periods are sensitive to possible evidence for cultural disruption, of violence, even. At Portmahomack the presence of shattered sculpture and deposits of catastrophic burning rather speak for themselves. Equally redolent of violence is the discovery, at Llanbedrgoch, of five skeletons ‘casually’ interred in shallow graves in the upper fills of its enclosure ditch.10 Burial disposition suggested to the excavators that at least two of the bodies had had their hands tied, and there was sufficiently clear pathology on one of these to suggest sharp-object trauma: evidence of murder. Naturally, the excavator has been cautiously drawn to the inference that Norse raiding may have precipitated a sudden, forced change in ownership; but one must allow other, less dramatic scenarios. Execution with prejudice is not an irrefutable marker of invaders; Early Medieval justice could be brutal, and violence was not the exclusive preserve of ethnic incomers.