by Adams, Max;
41. THE STORY OF THE FISHERS OF MEN—or Thor’s fishing expedition: a cross fragment from St Andrew’s church, Andreas, Isle of Man.
In the aftermath of his famous victory at Corbridge in 918, Rögnvaldr gave Elfred’s coastal estates to two of his senior jarls, Scula and Onlafbald (the latter supposedly struck down by Cuthbert’s wrath in the church at Chester le Street). The Historia records that in this same time one Eadred, son of Ricsige, ‘rode westwards across the mountains and slew Prince Eardwulf, seized his wife’ and then fled to the protection of St Cuthbert at Chester le Street.2 Like Elfred, Eadred was given lands by the community—the very triangular parcel, in fact, that lay in the north-west of the county. Like Elfred, he held his lands faithfully until the arrival of Rögnvaldr, who slew him at the Battle of Corbridge in 918. This huge estate was now given by the Norse conqueror not to one of his own followers, as one might expect, but to Eadred’s sons.
How to unpick this? To start with the realpolitik of the Early Medieval North, we can say that there was historical antipathy between the kings of southern Northumbria—that is, ancient Deira—and the lords of Bamburgh, formerly the seat of the kings of Bernicia. St Cuthbert had been a protégé of the Bernician dynasty of Oswald (now a posthumous cult figure in Mercia); but since the infamous raid on Lindisfarne in 793 the weakness of Bernician royal authority had driven Cuthbert’s community west and south on an epic seven-year tour around their lands, until they settled on their estate at Chester le Street. These territories were the ancient marcher lands between Deira and Bernicia; and it seems that by cleverly sponsoring the half-Scandinavian Guðroðr in the early 880s the community had taken up a buffer position between the two rival kingdoms. A buffer, certainly, but very much as the ally of the Men of York. It was Guðroðr who donated the estates between Tyne and Wear to Cuthbert’s community. The saint had abandoned his former patrons in Bernicia; or they had abandoned him.
His community (in the guise of its bishop) generously allowed two successive exiles, Elfred and Eadred, to enjoy the fruits of these lands in return, we suppose, for military service: for protection. But for protection against whom? First, it seems, against the revived lordship of Bamburgh, whose alliance in 918 with Constantín in Scotland must have seemed threatening to them. Second, against the new and even more unappealing threat (unappealing because the grandsons of Ívarr were, and always would be, unrepentant heathens) represented by Rögnvaldr. Elfred’s background is obscure, although it is quite possible that he was a brother of Eadred. The latter, we are told, was the son of Ricsige—a rare name. A Ricsige was king in York in the 870s, in the days of Rögnvald’s infamous grandfather and of Hálfdan and, therefore, a Deiran client (or puppet) of the Great Host.†
Now, perhaps, we can put the pieces together. Suppose that the ‘prince’ Eardwulf slain by Eadred somewhere in the west was a member of the Bernician royal household, a brother of Ældred son of Eadwulf.‡ It would follow that the community at Chester le Street had employed these senior Deiran warriors as military proxies against their enemies in the north and west, in return for the renders of several large estates. They rewarded Eadred with the lands that protected their north-west flank, and Elfred with the vulnerable coastal strip. But their protectors were driven off or killed during the invasion by Rögnvaldr which the combined armies of Alba and Bernicia could not halt on the battlefield. The community of St Cuthbert now lay dramatically exposed and vulnerable, its lands a prey to faithless incomers and historic rivals.
*
THE ESTATES of the community of St Cuthbert in the ninth and tenth centuries
Rögnvaldr assumed the reins of power at York where there had been, as we suspect from its submission to Æðelflæd earlier that year, an interregnum—a vacuum in military and regal authority. In doing so he might, without too much perfidy, have regained control of lands which his predecessor Guðroðr had ‘given’, or leased, to St Cuthbert. One bloc of that land he divided and gave to two of his jarls as a reward for their part in his victory; the other he allowed to be kept by Esbrid and Ælstan, the sons of the slain Eadred who were, as members of the Deiran royal house, entitled to such magnanimity as the price of their loyalty to the new power in the land. And Rögnvald’s interests in protecting his marcher lands against threats from the north were shared by the community at Chester le Street. Their interests were, at least partially, aligned.
Eventually, as the wheels of dynastic fortune turned during the later tenth century, and as the Historia laconically puts it, St Cuthbert, ‘regained his land’.§ The psychological power of the long-dead saint, and the political power of the militarily vulnerable community at Chester le Street, allowed them to maintain their lands and status through thick and thin, aligning their interests with those who would support them, or leave them alone. They played for high stakes and, by and large, were successful. Sometimes they got through by the skin of their teeth.
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In the search for evidence of such expressions of tension and accommodation, the excavated remains of urban and rural settlement are of limited help. The cultures of north-west Europe built houses much like each other. They raised cattle and sheep in the same ways; they ate pretty much the same diet. Their choices in dress and accessories, as much matters of personal concern then as now, were dictated by fashion, price and availability so that in early tenth-century York, for example, native and Scandinavian alike seem to have made, traded, bought and worn a mix of local, regional and foreign ornaments, trims and fabrics. Cultural imperialism seems not to have been expressed in the domination of foreign tastes over native. The patterns of people’s lives were dictated, for the most part, by local custom and by their distant lords, their humdrum lives played out well below the radar of kingly warfare, treaty and submission.
Richard Hall, the excavator of Coppergate, in reviewing the mass of evidence for Viking Age York or Jorvík, concluded that instead of aligning themselves overtly either with native Northumbrian cultural values, or with those of incoming Scandinavian warlords, its citizens may have consciously adopted both, occupying a cultural centre ground: what Dawn Hadley, the Viking Age scholar, has paraphrased as ‘innate affinities with ambiguity’.3 It is a striking thought: an exercise in delicate cultural fence-sitting, constantly negotiating identity in ways familiar to expatriate communities everywhere. How conscious people were of the significance of their behaviour is another matter.#
42. NORSE RUNES ON A CROSS SHAFT from Kirk Braddan Old Church, Isle of Man.
Only occasionally are we afforded glimpses of the mechanisms by which royal authorities tried to balance such cultural tensions. The Ordinance concerning the Dunsæte survives as copies in two medieval law texts, but most scholars place it in a tenth-century milieu.4 Written in Old English and from a West Saxon perspective, it nevertheless details matters of mutual interest to English and Welsh populations dwelling on either side of a river. The Dunsæte are identified with an area called Archenfield in English and Ercyng in Welsh, which flanked the River Wye between Monmouth and Hereford and which is now part of Herefordshire. The nine brief clauses of the ordinance are a reminder that the paramount interests of the Insular population were vested in livestock:
Ðæt is gif man trode bedrifð forstolenes yrfes of stæde on oðer...
That is: if anyone follow the track of stolen cattle from one river bank to the other, then he must hand over the tracking to the men of that land, or show by some mark that the track is rightfully pursued.5
Other clauses deal with the resolution of disputes, distraint,∫ the nature of oaths and so on. Such are the means by which cross-border relations are managed, ensuring that good fences (or rivers) make good neighbours, diffusing cultural tensions that seem so easy to inflame. More significant, perhaps, is the fact that in the Dunsæte Ordinance Welsh and English were treated equally: six men from each side were to sit in judgement on disputes; penalties for crimes committed by either side were the same, and English and Welsh livestock had the same valu
es: 30 shillings for a horse (equal to that of a man) or 20 for a mare; 12 shillings for wild cattle; 30 pence for a sow; a shilling for a sheep; 8 pence for a pig; and twopence for the lowly goat. Here, largely isolated from the grand narrative of invasion and counterattack being played out hundreds of miles away, local issues were met with local solutions.
More than thirty years previously Ælfred and Guðrum had negotiated a similar set of ordinances, albeit on a larger territorial scale, to manage rights and obligations between their two jurisdictions where West Saxon and Mercian came into contact with the new Anglo-Danish entity in East Anglia. That treaty concerned itself with the legitimate movement of people from one side to the other; with trade relations and the pursuit of fugitives, the bona fides of traders and the warranties required for purchasing horses, oxen and slaves.
Eadweard’s policies, in the confused second decade of his reign when he was, so to speak, fighting fires along a broad front and had little time for formal law-giving, were part expedient and part local accommodation. His so-called Exeter law code, dating to between 906 and 917,Ω refers once to ‘the whole nation’ then to ‘the eastern and northern kingdoms’ in contrast to ‘our own kingdom’.6
In 916, after a successful campaign against Bedford, Eadweard persuaded the defeated Jarl Ðurcytel to depart with his men for Francia, under his protection and ‘with his assistance’.7 However long the Danish warlord had been in the English Midlands, it had not been long enough for him to call it home and, equally, the locals may have been glad to see the back of him; maybe they helped raise the fare. Bedford was its own borderland; its tensions perhaps more overt and problematic than those further north in Northumbria and the Five Boroughs. Early tenth-century statehood was a molten fluid being forged with old tools, but from unfamiliar materials.
Elsewhere, the king’s new peace in the conquered towns of Danish Mercia was more considered and subtle, as Rögnvald’s disposition of his new conquests in the north had been. Eadweard was able to reward his own followers with lands forfeited from jarls like Ðurcytel and in some cases he seems to have allowed Scandinavian lords to retain estates that they had acquired.8 In either case, as the final clause in the Dunsæte Ordinance makes clear, submission to the king, whether by Scandinavian jarls or indigenes, involved handing over tribute and hostages as sureties. Eadweard came to East Mercia not as liberator, but as expansionist overlord.
A corollary to large numbers of hostages and subject jarls arriving at the West Saxon and Mercian courts was that young nobles of Scandinavian or half-Scandinavian blood came to learn the ways of a new milieu; to mix with others of their own status and with the native élite. One imagines lively cultural interaction in both directions. On their ultimate return to whichever Midland territory they belonged, they must bring something of West Saxon or Mercian culture, laws and education with them, not to mention brides; and the same processes probably happened in reverse.
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After the large-scale submissions at the end of a tumultuous year in 918, Eadweard sustained the hectic pace of offensive action and construction, apparently undaunted by the death of his sister and ally. The following year he secured the submission of Nottingham, which he occupied and garrisoned, diplomatically, with both Englishmen and Danes, according to the Chronicle. This was the cue for all the people of Mercia, of both races, to submit and accept him as their overlord.
Turning his attention now to the northern frontier, he had a fortress built at Thelwall on the River Mersey, the westernmost point of the boundary between Mercia and Rögnvald’s Northumbria.≈ A few miles upstream, on the north side of the river, he ordered that the ancient Roman fort at Manchester (Mamucium) be rebuilt and garrisoned.
In 920 Eadweard again went to Nottingham, that key site on the River Trent controlling trade and military access between Mercia’s heart and the North Sea. Now his levies constructed a fortress on the south side of the river, opposite the existing defences, and built a bridge to connect the two sides in the fashion employed by his father on the River Lea and following the precedent set so long ago in Francia.∂ In the same year the king advanced further north and constructed a new burh at Bakewell in the land of the Pecsætan, the dwellers among the Peaks. Then, the Chronicle records:
The king of the Scots and the whole Scottish nation accepted him as ‘father and lord’; so also did Rægnald and the sons of Eadwulf and all the inhabitants of Northumbria, both English and Danish, Norwegians and others, together with the king of the Strathclyde Welsh and all his subjects.9
This passage has stirred the blood of many a patriot historian over the centuries. Some have seen it as the founding charter of an English subjection of North Britain. Most modern commentators treat it with caution: first, because it is the propagandist account of the West Saxon court; and second, because submission to a temporarily superior overlord was an expedient fact of Early Medieval kingship. It is even possible that no such submission occurred at all outside Eadweard’s imagination. More likely, I think, he was able to agree with counterparts beyond the Humber that the status quo of 920 should be maintained, that hostages be exchanged and oaths sworn by all parties to uphold the peace within current territorial bounds. That is to say, Eadweard wished that the northern kingdoms should recognize his recent gains in the Midlands. He was in a strong position to make such a demand; they had little to lose by agreeing.
What, then, was the status quo in 920? In Alba, Constantín had proved himself able and willing to engage in great events beyond the southern edge of his kingdom. If we do not know the detail of his now twenty-year-long reign, we can say that his ambition and capabilities reflect dynastic stability, economic affluence and military competence, even if he had not been victorious at Corbridge. He could, in modern terms, mix it with Dublin Norse and with the kingdom of York; he established and maintained diplomatic relations with the southern English, as well as with the Bernician lords of Bamburgh. Some of his political capital was spent on endowing and patronizing the reformist Irish Céli Dé monastic movement:π he would be buried in their great foundation at St Andrews.
Something is also known of the geography of Scottish royal power in this period. The old core of northern Pictavia in Fortriu, around the Moray Firth, must now have been vulnerable to Norse predation and the threat of invasion. If Scone, in the old territory of Atholl, was a ceremonial and symbolic centre of royal and ecclesiastical power, and St Andrews a royal monastic foundation, then the focus of Constantín’s kingdom must now be placed in Strathtay and Strathearn. A royal palace and chapel stood at Forteviot, in a fertile alluvial landscape graced with grand high crosses (at Dupplin, for example) and craggy fortresses dominating the northern edge of the Ochils, the Gask ridge and Sidlaw hills and looking always towards the broad River Tay. Dunkeld, whose monastery had housed the relics of St Colm Cille, lay higher up Strathtay. Along with apparent political reform came a cultural Gaelicization which displaced the Pictish language, a process shrouded in deep and frustrating obscurity.
Constantín’s political control did not extend to the Western or Northern Isles; nor, probably, to Caithness, Sutherland and Ross. His rule seems also to have coincided with the revival of the ancient British kingdom whose kings had once been based at Alclud, Dumbarton rock. Strathclyde, or Cumbria, survived the destruction of its great fortress in a Norse attack of 870; its kings re-emerged as leaders of a cultural and military revival. If Constantín had invested his political capital along the upper reaches of the Tay basin, the kings of Strathclyde seem to have chosen a site further up the Clyde from Dumbarton on the south side of the river, at Govan. The Old Church here (an uncompromising late Victorian pile overlooking the post-industrial remnants of its once-great shipbuilding yards) contains a collection of Early Medieval sculpture whose only rival, in numbers and quality, is on Iona. The graveyard is huge and roughly circular, perhaps indicating an early foundation. In the Middle Ages this was the site of an important ferry crossing.
Thanks to recent inv
estment the crosses, grave slabs, hogback tomb covers and a remarkable sarcophagus are beautifully displayed, with careful lighting that reveals the subtlety and creative achievement of an energetic, confident royal church. Like York, Govan displays ambiguities of identity: the hogback tombs are a distinct hybrid of native and Norse, pagan and Christian, embracing the tensions between a warrior caste and its pious responsibilities to the church, the playing out of old rules of patronage on a new psychological canvas. A possible Thing-mound called Doomster Hill once stood nearby, before its sacrifice to Glasgow’s nineteenth-century expansion.
43. THE MAGNIFICENT SARCOPHAGUS at Govan Old Church near Glasgow: a royal hunting scene.
The impressive lidless sandstone sarcophagus now housed inside the church, retrieved from the graveyard in 1855 and restored to a place of honour close to the altar, seems to have once housed the body or relics of a king.10 Its relief-carved decorative interlace encloses panels portraying a mounted warrior hunting deer with hounds; an unidentifiable animal trampling another underfoot; a serpent and various four-footed beasts. The dedication of the church is to St Constantine, perhaps reflecting the community’s original, or acquired, affiliation with a cult of the Roman emperor;11 but the style of the carving belongs to the ninth or tenth centuries, expressive of a revival of Strathclyde’s fortunes and of their historical pretensions. By the time that the British kingdom comes once more on to the radar of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the ‘submission’ of 920 its king, Owain, seems to have extended his overlordship as far south as Galloway and possibly into the lands that later became English Cumbria.