by Adams, Max;
Haraldr imposed a tax on the islands amounting to sixty gold marks. Einar offered to pay the whole sum out of his own pocket on condition that he should hold all the estates in fee [freehold], and to these terms the farmers agreed since the wealthier ones hoped to redeem their estates later, while the poorer ones were unable to pay the tribute anyway... Earl Einar ruled over Orkney for many years and died in his bed.21
These semi-mythical events are only dimly perceived in the Insular sources. Sigurð’s ravages on the Scottish mainland might just be identified with an attack on Dunottar, the great rocky promontory fort just south of Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire, noted in the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba under the year 900.22 In this battle Domnall son of Constantín,‡‡ king of Alba, was killed, an event of sufficient importance for it to be recorded by the Annals of Ulster. The Alban Chronicle also relates that Pictavia was wasted; and it is conceivable that Scotland might have fallen permanently under Norse rule in the aftermath, with powerful earls controlling the islands to north and west while land-hungry Irish exiles, thwarted in their attempts to wrest the southern kingdoms from the Anglo-Saxons, looked for easier conquests in northern Britain.
That Alba did not fall can be attributed in large part to the long and politically astute rule of Constantín mac Áeda, Domnall’s cousin, who held the kingdom for forty years and who can properly be regarded as the founder of the medieval Scottish state. He was the first Scottish king to interact with a recognizably coherent kingdom of the Angelcynn; capable, too, of mounting a serious military campaign against Northumbria and the southern kingdoms. He was to abdicate in 943 and retire to a life of monastic contemplation as abbot at St Andrews, where he died nine years later.
Under Constantín, in the early years of the tenth century, a distinctive Alban state emerged in the east. If Ælfred had professionalized kingship and royal administration in the south, Constantín seems to have been able to enact parallel reforms in the north, although there is insufficient detail to be certain: no coins were minted in Alba during his reign; no chronicle survives in which a thousand words might be lavished on the events of a single year. All that remain are hints, mere fragments.
36. DUNOTTAR CASTLE, on its rocky promontory in Aberdeenshire—a target for both Norse raiders and Anglo-Saxon kings.
The first significant events in Constantín’s reign seem to reflect a series of campaigns against invading Norse from Ireland in the aftermath of their expulsion from Dublin. In 903 ‘Northmen plundered Dunkeld and all Albania’. But a year later the same Chronicle of the Kings of Alba announces that ‘Northmen were slain in Strath Erenn’§§ and a parallel record in the Annals of Ulster gives the crucial detail: ‘Ímar grandson of Ímar was slain by the men of Fortriu, and there was a great slaughter about him.’23 Ímar is the Goidelic form of the Old Norse Ívarr, the outstanding Viking dynast and scourge of the Insular kingdoms in the 860s.
Constantín was able to draw almost immediate political capital from this victory:
In the vi year## king Constantín and Bishop Cellach pledged to keep the laws and disciplines of the faith and the rights of the church and the gospels, pariter cum Scottis on the Hill of Belief next to the royal civitas of Scone.24
The wording is reminiscent, as Alex Woolf points out, of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle account of the meeting between King Ecgberht and Archbishop Ceolnoth at Kingston in 838; so too is the location, on a royal estate at the tidal head of the River Tay. This was a state occasion, the promulgation of formal relations between church and king, mutually reinforcing legitimacy, rights of patronage and law-making. Each party had aligned its immense powers of patronage with the other. It must be seen, too, as an act of Christian solidarity in the face of overtly pagan military threats, backed by the authority of Colm Cille, St Columba, whose precious relics lay higher up Strathtay at Dunkeld. The future of the Scottish state lay in the south-east, not in exposed Argyll or Fortriu. The tricky phrase pariter cum Scottis has caused much debate among historians. Alex Woolf concludes that it should best be translated ‘in the fashion of the Gaels’: that is, following precedents set anciently in Argyll between the kings of Dál Riata and the abbot-bishops of Iona.25 Alba was a Gaelic rather than a Pictish kingdom.
Even more obscure undercurrents swirling beneath the still waters of its opening decade warn us that the apparently inexorable emergence of three long-lasting polities in England, Scotland and Wales during the tenth century is a simplistic retro-fit. There is nothing inevitable about unification; Britain in the eighth and ninth centuries was intensely regional, not much less so in the tenth. Elements of the old Heptarchy,∫∫ even of smaller regional polities and territorial rivalries, continued to surface during the period when the great dynasts of Wessex, Gwynedd and Alba were rewriting, or suppressing, alternative histories. Under scrutiny the apparently neat façade of national identity shows structural cracks.
To begin with, Constantín could not lay claim to overlordship of the whole of what we call Scotland. Cait (Caithness) seems to have lain entirely outside his control. The Northern and Western Isles belonged to a Norse thalassocracy. The ancient British kingdom of Strathclyde, which temporarily disappears from annalistic records after the sack of Dumbarton in 870, reappears as Cumbria in later centuries. In the time of Constantín its capital lay at Govan, judging by the extraordinary wealth of Brittonic–Norse sculpture at Govan Old Church on the south bank of the Clyde, and the Thing-mound that seems to have stood nearby.ΩΩ Strathclyde was capable of extending its cultural and political reach as far south as the Lake District, formerly subject to Northumbrian overlordship; its armies formed an important element of the confederacy that would face Æðelstan at Brunanburh in 937 and it seems not to have been conquered by Scottish kings until the eleventh century.
*
To the south, Northumbria’s always uncomfortable projection of unity, if it was ever more than a pipe dream of Bede’s and the dynasty of the Idings, did not survive: the kingdom split into its ancient constituent parts. The later pre-Conquest earls of Bamburgh were the descendants of the sixth- and seventh-century kings of Bernicia. When the community of St Cuthbert threw in its lot with the Scandinavian kingdom of York in the late ninth century they were transferring their allegiance away from Bernicia, where their core territorial holdings had lain, to Deira: the kingdom of York.
Even the long-held idea of a wholly Scandinavian kingdom based on York looks a little flimsy under the microscope, at least before the third decade of the tenth century. Several of its kings might have acted as proxies for Danish war bands but the Cuthbert community’s dealings with them show how much power was retained by ancient institutions; and the archbishops of York might even be said to have enhanced their position as territorial and economic power brokers under nominal Scandinavian rule. That southern Northumbria’s political agenda was anti-Bernician and anti-Wessex, rather than pro-Viking, seems a reasonable conclusion to draw from both its dealings with the Host and its apparently enthusiastic adoption of Æðelwold, the ætheling of Wessex.
Æðelwold had emerged after Ælfred’s death in 899 as an alternative candidate for the throne of Wessex. He attempted to attract disaffected elements among the Wessex élite to his banner just as, in 877–878, rival claimants had acquiesced in or sided with the Host’s attempts to decapitate the regime. Failing to gain traction in the south he had escaped, made his way to York and there been either received as king (during what seems to have been a brief interregnum), or at least recognized as a legitimate claimant to the throne of Wessex. A number of coins bearing the name ALVALDUS have been found over the years and are generally believed to have been minted in York for the pretender.26 In 903, according to the Chronicle, he sailed with his fleet to the land of the East Saxons. This ancient kingdom, once inclusive of the modern counties of Middlesex and Hertfordshire, had been claimed by Mercia and Wessex alternately in the eighth and early ninth centuries; its last native king, Sigered, had died in 825.
Ancient antagonis
ms between Essex, its former overlords and the kingdom of Kent across the Thames estuary seem to have rendered it fertile ground for Scandinavian armies seeking a secure base and sympathetic friends. Its muddy estuaries, numberless creeks and tidal islands were perfect hunting grounds and sanctuaries for longships ghosting in and out under sail or oar. Since the treaty between Ælfred and Guðrum it had belonged to the sphere of Danish rule, or at least lay outwith the control of Wessex or Mercia. Now, the West Saxon ætheling took advantage of its strategic position on the Thames estuary to launch a fresh attack on his cousin Eadweard.
He did not strike immediately. Instead he seized the opportunity to exploit more regional antipathy towards Wessex by moving, the following year, into East Anglia where he was able to assemble a much more serious force, capable of invasion. We know, from lists of subsequent casualties recorded in the Chronicle, that his army included, perhaps was jointly led by, one King Eohric (properly Old Norse Eiríkr). Eiríkr, otherwise invisible to us, seems to have been the successor to Guðrum, possibly one of the younger commanders in the wars against Wessex in the 870s or 890s or a son thereof, who had proved himself worthy of leading the East Anglian Host.
East Anglia, probably at this time comprising what is now Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, maintained a strong regional identity, demonstrated not just by its acceptance of Æðelwold’s claims but also by the remarkable emergence of a cult of the martyred, indigenous King Eadmund. In time this cult would be recognized by Eadweard’s successor, Æðelstan, as part of his unification strategy. That the Scandinavian kings of East Anglia took it seriously as an expression of regional solidarity cannot be doubted: from 895 onwards a series of coins, some of whose obverse inscriptions read SCE EADMUND REX (O St Eadmund the King) is widely evidenced. These were no mere memorial tokens: more than 1,800 of them, from more than seventy moneyers, come from the Cuerdale hoard alone.27 They were minted up until about 915 and show the strength of a thriving coin-based market economy in the kingdom: Scandinavian settlement had been swiftly followed by booming trade. Norwich, the old trading settlement at Ipswich and the newer town at Thetford were productive and successful. King Eadmund’s body was transferred from its original burial place to a new church at Beadoriceworth, later Bury St Edmunds, enthusiastically patronized by successive English kings. Towards the end of the tenth century a Life of the martyred king was commissioned.
Æðelwold’s allies in his prospective campaign against Wessex included not only disaffected branches of the West Saxon ruling dynasty, Northumbrian freebooters, glory-seeking members of Essex’s and East Anglia’s senior families and Danish war bands; he was also able to attract to his banner Beorhtsige, son of the ‘ætheling’ Beornnoth. It has been suggested that the name offers an alliterative clue to identifying members of the old Mercian ‘B’ dynasty of kings whose heartlands lay around Breedon on the Hill in Leicestershire.28 This, it seems, was truly an anti-Wessex alliance, which shows how simmering regional tensions might be brought to the boil by the appearance of a candidate capable of uniting them into a credible force.
Credible that army might have been; but the defences of Wessex, Mercia and Kent, thanks to the reforms undertaken by Ælfred and Æðelred and proven in the campaign of 893–896, were deep and solid; so too was the alliance that bound the southern kingdoms by mutual interest. Decades of Scandinavian predations had strengthened them against both external invasion and internal dissension. Land, its power and wealth woven tightly into the political fabric, lay in the control of the king and church, whose lines of patronage ensured its advantageous distribution.
In 904 Æðelwold led his coalition west into Mercia, raiding and testing support for his venture. Very little detail of the campaign is recorded, except that at Cricklade, the highest navigable point on the River Thames, now defended by a burh, the army crossed into Wessex and ‘seized all they could’ before returning home.29 It hardly seems like a sustained attempt to engage Eadweard or his sister Æðelflæd in a do-or-die battle. Eadweard nevertheless pursued the army eastwards, ravaging the country south of the Fens in Cambridgeshire. Intending, then, to retire, Eadweard issued a general order for disengagement which seems to have been ignored by the Men of Kent.
Either caught unawares or pursuing their own ancient rivalries, they engaged Æðelwold’s army in a serious and bloody battle that left many of their senior commanders dead but also accounted for King Eiríkr, the ætheling Æðelwold and countless others of his army. The remainder may have kept the field of slaughter; but the anti-Wessex coalition was finished. Looking back from the end of that century, the chronicler Æðelweard completely ignored Æðelwold’s part in the campaign which he had inspired, recording only a battle at Holme≈≈ under the year 902, against ‘the Eastern enemy’; the same battle is recorded in the Mercian Register as a conflict between Kentishmen and Danes.
*
The sparseness of the Chronicle’s entries for the opening decade of the tenth century acts as a fog blanketing other political undercurrents. Internal and external tensions and noises heard offstage from the Irish Sea, the Continent and the far north, are as the distant thrum of a bombardment beyond the horizon. The almost universal experience of Early Medieval kings was that, after their succession, they must spend several years constructing, or reconstructing, elaborate webs of lordship and patronage fractured or dissolved by the death of their predecessor. Eadweard’s political capital in the aftermath of his defeat of the West Saxon pretender, and with his redoubtable sister and brother-in-law in firm alliance, ought to have been high. He had been groomed for the kingship; his father had constructed a powerful state apparatus, revolutionizing defence and military service; West Saxon and Mercian interests were secure; the enemy was weak. And yet...
The evidence of coinage, so independent and neutral a witness in these centuries, suggests that, unlike the economies of the Danelaw, East Anglia and York, those of Wessex and Mercia were weak in the early part of Eadweard’s reign.30 Silver seems to have been in short supply, either because of the immense cost of Ælfredan military defences and tributary payments, because of economic neglect in Ælfred’s last years, or perhaps as a result of three years of ‘murrain and plague’ in the late 890s. A lack of silver with which to secure loyalties, pay off enemies and purchase landed estates and prestige goods is a strong indicator of relative political poverty, the detail of which is now impenetrable.
London and Canterbury hardly seem to have been operative as mints in this period. Winchester, Eadweard’s heartland, was his only seriously productive mint and, given that no independent Mercian coinage was produced under Æðelred or his wife, we suspect that the West Mercian economy, whose only markets before the revival of Chester were isolated inland, was suffering equal stagnation. A more concrete hint of economic woe in the first decade after Ælfred’s death is contained in a charter account in which land was leased to Eadweard by Denewulf, his bishop at Winchester. The bishop recalls that when Eadweard first gave him the land ‘it was quite without stock, and stripped bare by heathen men’. Now (in perhaps 907 or 908) the bishop was pleased to say that there were 9 full-grown oxen, 114 pigs and 50 wethers [castrated rams] and a surplus of corn, with 90 acres under crops.31 It seems as if the post-war Insular southern kingdoms had been economically exhausted by thirty years of war.
We are presented with an abrupt, acontextual message from the laconic chronicler of Wessex for the year 905:
Her on þys geare gefor Ælfred, wæs æt Baðum gerefa. 7 on þæm ilcan gere mon fæstnode þone frið æt Yttingaforda, swa swa Eadweard cyng gerædde, ægðer wið Eastengle ge wið Norðhymbre.
In this year died Ælfred, who was reeve at Bath; and in the same year peace was ratified at Tiddingford,∂∂ as king Eadweard ordained, both with the Host from East Anglia and with the Northumbrians.32
The Chronicle’s ‘E’ version, from Peterborough, with its more distinctly northern outlook, reinforces the suspicion that Eadweard was weaker than the official accoun
t suggests: it records that Eadweard was ‘compelled to make peace’.33 One wonders, on what terms and with what money?
* The hoard, containing about 5,000 coins, was found in 1846 but has since been lost. Edwards 1996, 177.
† Cadell was king of Seisyllwg; his brother, Anarawd, was king of Gwynedd, of which Anglesey was a core territory, and is regarded as the more likely antagonist.
‡ The adjectival form of Gwynedd.
§ See map on p. 322.
# There seems to have been more activity in Chester than the written sources suggest. Coins were minted here, perhaps in a trading settlement by the Dee, as early as the last years of Ælfred. Lyon 2001, 75.
∫ There is continuing debate about the location of the new defences, which seem to have abandoned or replaced the west and south walls of the Roman fortress and projected the north wall west to the river, and the east wall, likewise, to the south. This would have formed a protected riverfront and considerably enlarged the area of the future town; but excavations have not so far proved conclusive. Ward 2001.
Ω A particularly significant site: the location of a beach market on the north-west sands of Wirral, it has yielded an extraordinarily rich inventory of exotic artefacts from the Early Medieval and medieval periods. The names derive, respectively, as follows: Irby (‘settlement of the Irish’), Kirby (‘church settlement’), Meols (‘sandbank’), Thingwall (‘assembly field’), Croxteth (‘landing place on a bend’), Aigburth (‘Oakwood hill’), and Tranmere (‘crane sandbank’).
≈ Many of the hundreds of arm rings recovered from Viking period hoards conform to a weight standard, known as the Dublin ounce, of about 26.6g.