Aelfred's Britain

by Adams, Max;

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  The kings of the Welsh, the Norðweallcyn (that is, by contrast to West Wealas, or Cornwall) had submitted to Eadweard at Tamworth in 918, not as conqueror but as the regal power inheriting an imperium exerted over them by Æðelflæd. That, at least, is the implication of the account in the Chronicle. But Thomas Charles-Edwards, the distinguished historian of Early Medieval Wales, offers another possibility. After an apparent Norse attack on Anglesey in 918 and a raid on Davenport, deep inside Cheshire, by Sigtryggr, the brother of Rögnvaldr, in 920, Eadweard moved decisively to reinforce north-west Mercia. In 921 he had a fortress constructed at Cledamuþa, which most scholars accept must mean Rhuddlan at the mouth of the River Clwyd.

  In the same year the Annales Cambriae record a battle at Dinas Newydd—the ‘New Fortress’, which Charles-Edwards suggests may also be identified with Cledamuþa. In that context, of an unprecedented West Saxon move into Venedotian territory, rebellion by Idwal, the king of Gwynedd, followed by defeat and the joint submission of the grandsons of Rhodri Mawr is plausible. It is equally possible, as Charles-Edwards allows, that the battle was fought against forces from Dublin, Man and/or York, or against those Norse who had settled around Chester and the Ribble Valley; that Idwal and his cousins allied themselves with Eadweard against a common enemy, having sought his protection.

  Rhodri Mawr, like Ælfred, Cináed mac Ailpín and Ívarr, is seen retrospectively as the progenitor of a great dynasty. His oldest son, Anarawd, inherited Gwynedd, with its principal royal llys at Aberffraw in south-west Anglesey. On his death in 916 Anarawd was succeeded in Gwynedd by his son Idwal Foel. Rhodri’s son Merfyn inherited the rule of Powys and was succeeded by his son Llewellyn in 900. Cadell, a third son, who had inherited the south-west kingdom of Seisyllwg by virtue of Rhodri’s marriage to a princess of that kingdom named Angharad must, it seems, have acquired Dyfed too before his death in 909, wresting control from the native kings of Ceredigion. His sons Hywel (who appears to have married the last princess of Ceredigion) and Clydog seem to have jointly inherited control of Seisyllwg and Dyfed and, therefore, of the major Welsh cult centre at St David’s. The three cousins jointly submitted to Eadweard in 918 or 921, continuing their alignment with the dynasty of Ælfred.

  There is no further record of Norse military activity against the Welsh kingdoms before 954; now a long period of consolidation in the hands of a single dynasty and active co-operation with the kings of Wessex and Mercia allowed the grandsons of Rhodri to play their own parts in the grand political circus of tenth-century Britain.

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  The grandsons of Ívarr had reconquered Dublin and wrested control of its sister city, York, after 918. Dublin now underwent rapid urban expansion under one Guðrøðr, either a cousin or brother of Rögnvaldr and Sigtryggr. In 919 the latter departed from Dublin ‘through the power of God’, according to an unhelpful entry in the Annals of Ulster. The next we hear of him, he had joined the impious Rögnvaldr in York. In 919, according to a retrospective entry in the Northumbrian annal known as the Historia Regum,∆ Rögnvaldr ‘broke into York’. The arrival of his cousin the following year might be seen either as a request for support or a sibling coup; the same annal is the only source to mention Sigtrygg’s raid on Cheshire. The treaty with Eadweard, of the same year, reinforces the idea that these ambitious Norse kings were content, for the moment, to consolidate their position.

  Rögnvaldr died, according to the Annals of Ulster, in 921, succeeded immediately by Sigtryggr. Rögnvald’s short reign is evidenced in a series of coins: just twenty-three examples have survived, minted at York in those two years; but the numismatist Mark Blackburn estimated from these few survivals that more than fifty dies had been produced for the Norse king, from which many hundreds, if not thousands, of coins must have been struck.12 One set carries a rare bust on the reverse, with an odd Karolus monogram deriving from originals of Charles the Simple (897–922) in Francia; another carries an image of a drawn bow and arrow on the obverse, with either Thor’s hammer or a Tau cross on the reverse: an idolater he may have been, but Rögnvald’s sensitivities to the propaganda potential of ambiguous military/Christian and imperial iconography on his coins suggests a man of greater subtlety and creative energy than his enemies would wish us to know.

  Both before and after Rögnvaldr the coinage produced by Northumbrian kings is dominated by so-called St Peter issues, first appearing in about 905 and then continuing under Sigtryggr. A total of nearly 300 coins has been retrieved so far from hoards and single finds, representing more than 100 dies. These carry the name not of the king but of the city, as EBRAICE or EBORACE CIVITAS, together with the inscription SCI PETRI MO (Sancti Petri moneta) on the reverse. In form they are derivative of coins produced by Ælfred and Eadweard.13 The earlier issues carry a cross on one side; after Rögnvaldr they tend to be accompanied by a sword or hammer. Stylistically and ideologically they have affinities with the St Eadmund and St Martin coin series of East Anglia and Lincoln, and there is a strong temptation to suggest, as David Rollason argues, that these are ecclesiastical issues of the archbishops of York in their roles as economic tsars.14

  A counter-argument is proposed by the numismatist Mark Blackburn, who believes that there is no evidence of large-scale coin production in Europe in this period outwith the fiscal control of kings.15 It is clear that, either way, York was an active and productive economic hub from which the twin faces of the state, secular and spiritual, were apparently doing rather well in the first quarter of the tenth century. But numismatists also detect, in a lack of innovation in the St Peter series and in their continuing decline in weight and literacy, an economy that was beginning to stagnate, either because of instability in the ruling establishment or because of Eadweard’s success in reviving the southern economy, drawing trade and production towards Wessex and Mercia—where Æðelflæd’s revival of Chester led to the establishment of a flourishing mint, pottery production and vigorous trade.

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  Eadweard seems to have made no further attempt, after 921, to penetrate deeper into the Anglo-Scandinavian North. A complete absence of entries in the Wessex Chronicle for three years has suggested to some historians that the king’s health, or at least his martial energy, was in decline. There is no evidence that Lincoln or the old kingdom of Lindsey had fallen to Eadweard’s armies by the end of his reign; Northumbria lay outside his control and, perhaps, beyond his ambitions.

  In his last years, as befitted a king in his late forties, dynastic concerns needed to be addressed. Eadweard had married three times. With his first wife, Ecgwynn, he had a son, Æðelstan, and a daughter, perhaps called Ealdgith.** William of Malmesbury maintained a tradition that Æðelstan was raised in fosterage at the royal court in Mercia;16 if so, the implication, against William’s own partisan testimony, is that he was meant to succeed there as his father’s regent, in preference to Æðelred’s and Æðelflæd’s daughter Ælfwyn. A Frankish and possibly Insular tradition, that only sons born to a king after his succession were regarded as eligible for the kingship, may have precipitated Eadweard’s desire to remarry after Ælfred’s death in 899 and produce an heir more acceptable to West Saxon propriety.

  Ecgwynn was either dead or had been repudiated by 901, by which time the new king had married Ælfflæd, probably a daughter of Æðelhelm, the ealdorman of Wiltshire.†† She bore eight children. Her eldest son, Ælfweard, seems to have been intended as Eadweard’s heir in Wessex. By 920 she had apparently ‘retired’ to the monastic life in a foundation at Wilton17 and Eadweard married for a third time. His new bride, Eadgifu, was the politically expedient daughter of Sigehelm, ealdorman of Kent, a key ally in the south-east. She bore at least two sons, both of whom would ultimately succeed to the kingship, and two daughters. At Eadweard’s death neither of those sons, Eadmund or Eadred, was old enough to be seriously considered for the West Saxon throne.

  A large family presented challenges and opportunities. Royal princesses, potentially wielding consider
able personal power and wealth (the examples of Cwenðryð, at the turn of the ninth century, Ælfred’s daughter Æðelflæd and Eadweard’s third wife Eadgifu are prominent) were also political commodities to be deployed as capital by their fathers, brothers and sons. From the seventh century it had been the practice of the earliest Christian kings of Northumbria to gift daughters (and sisters) to the church and to endow them with large estates from which they could implement dynastic policy via extensive networks of patronage. Princesses were often married to dynasts from other kingdoms and, in the diplomatic pecking order established time out of mind among the European Christian states, the gift of a royal princess as a bride generally indicated submission to the prospective father-in-law. King Offa of Mercia had managed to outrage Charlemagne by offering his son Ecgberht as a spouse to the Frankish king’s daughter, Bertha, and suffered a trade embargo as a result. However, when Ælfred married his daughter Æðelflæd to his ‘godson’ Æðelred, ealdorman of Mercia, it was evidently seen as an act of political superiority; while another daughter, Ælfðryð, dispatched to become the bride of Baldwin II, count of Flanders, may have been a diplomatically neutral bride.

  In that light, the Wessex regime’s disposition of Eadweard’s daughters is significant. By the end of his reign he had made substantial diplomatic progress on the Continent. His grandfather and uncle had notoriously both been married to Judith, the daughter of Charles II the Bald. By about 919 Eadweard had sent Eadgifu, the second of his daughters by Ælfflæd, to the court of Charles III the Simple, the forty-five-year-old posthumous son of Louis the Stammerer. Two others, Eadflæd and Æðelhild, ‘renounced the pleasure of earthly nuptials’, according to William of Malmesbury’s account: the former to take holy orders and the latter in a lay habit.18 Eadweard’s third wife, Eadgifu, saw one of her daughters married off to a more or less eligible Continental, Louis of Aquitaine, while the other was ‘dedicated to Christ’. So high was the current stock of the West Saxon dynasty that Eadweard’s ultimate successor, the perhaps unlikely Æðelstan, was able to distribute the royal gift of his other half-sisters, Eadhild and Eadgyð, respectively to Hugh the Great, count of Paris and duke of the Franks, and Otto I, duke of Saxony and future Holy Roman Emperor.

  William of Malmesbury elaborates on the splendour of the embassy through which Hugh, hearing of Eadhild’s incomparable beauty, sought her hand in 926:

  The leader of this embassy was Adelolf, son of Baldwin, count of Flanders, by Ælfðryð, [sister of] King Edward. When he had set forth the wooer’s requests in an assembly of nobles at Abingdon, he offered indeed most ample gifts, which might instantly satisfy the cupidity of the most avaricious: perfumes such as never before had been seen in England; jewellery, especially of emeralds, in whose greenness the reflected sun lit up the eyes of the bystanders with a pleasing light; many fleet horses, with trappings.19

  The list goes on to include the sword of Constantine the Great, on whose pommel an iron nail from the True Cross was fixed. How could the princess’s brother refuse?‡‡

  Historians are rightly sceptical of this account, which aims to exalt William’s biographical subject, Æðelstan. But such magnificent objects were to be found at the West Saxon court. One of them survives, improbably. A very rare and splendidly embroidered stole and maniple, recovered from St Cuthbert’s coffin in 1827 and now conserved at Durham Cathedral, carry inscriptions which indicate that they were commissioned by Eadweard’s second wife, Ælfflæd, and intended for her ‘pious bishop Friðestan’, bishop of Winchester between 909 and 931. Narrow vertical bands contain figures of the Old Testament prophets, of St James and St Thomas the Apostles, of Gregory the Great and the Lamb of God, among sprays of acanthus leaves and pairs of beasts. Analysis by Elizabeth Plenderleith in the 1950s showed that the designs were stitched on to fine tabby weave silk, using varieties of coloured silk stitching including gold thread.20 If such wonders were intended to grace the shoulders of favoured bishops, it cannot be doubted that the West Saxon court enjoyed access to very high levels of technology and craftsmanship (and craftswomanship), not to mention exotic raw materials from the East. How they came into the possession of the Cuthbert community at Chester le Street is another matter.§§

  Such interactions at the highest level allow us to picture frequent contact between courts as envoys passed to and fro with news, offers, gifts and intelligence of mutual benefit. Kings took a keen interest in trade, as evinced by Offa’s sometimes fraught relations with Charlemagne and by the arrival of notable travellers to the court of Ælfred. Frankish influences on Insular pottery and coinage (Rögnvald’s Karolus monogram, for example) and possibly on ecclesiastical architecture, as well as dress style and more intellectual pursuits, along with periodic pressure for ecclesiastical reform from Rome, were in cultural competition with closer and more obvious influences travelling west, east and south from areas under Scandinavian control.

  Eadweard may not have been as sensitive as his father to the values of literature, philosophy and education; but he knew political advantage when he saw it and proved himself capable of exploiting opportunities as they arose. The Æðulfings of the tenth century were nothing if not well connected and, increasingly, they were drawn into the complex, not to say Byzantine, affairs of the fragmenting Frankish kingdoms.

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  The silence of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle during Eadweard’s last years can be read in a number of ways, the least probable of which is that there were no significant events to record. Impending regime change may have induced caution in the chronicler of Winchester; the court’s intellectual energy might have turned to lassitude with the decline in the king’s health and vitality after his twenty-five years’ rule. The only hint of political trouble that shows on the surface is a note in the often unreliable account provided by William of Malmesbury, drawing on sources now lost, indicating that Eadweard, ‘a few days before his death, subdued the contumacy of the city of Chester, which was rebelling in confederacy with the Britons’.21

  All versions of the Chronicle for the year 924 agree that Eadweard died at Farndon-on-Dee, 8 or so miles (13 km) south of Chester, on the Mercian–Welsh border. The location suggests that William’s account has merit. Whatever tensions were now emerging at the West Saxon court may have been transmitted to vulnerable borderlands where British, Scandinavian and native interests were held in fragile balance by the perceived strength of Eadweard’s formidable, but now ageing, military machine.

  The Winchester Chronicle is terse: ‘In this year passed away Eadweard, and Æðelstan, his son, came to the throne.’22 As it stands, that will not do, because the ‘D’ and ‘C’ (Mercian Register) variants offer significant additional detail:

  King Eadweard died at Farndon-on-Dee in Mercia; and very soon, sixteen days after, his son Ælfweard died at Oxford; they were buried at Winchester. Æðelstan was accepted as king by the Mercians.23

  The Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, with finely tuned hindsight, continued its running commentary on the fortunes of the Chester le Street community’s future sponsors:

  At that time King Eadweard, full of days, and worn down by ripe old age, summoned his son Æðelstan, handed his kingdom over to him, and diligently instructed [him] to love St Cuthbert and honour him above all saints, revealing to him how he had mercifully succoured his father King Elfred [Ælfred] in poverty and exile.24

  Æðelstan’s supposed fostering at the Mercian court## gave him solid support among his aunt’s ealdormen. Winchester and the West Saxon court were, it may be inferred, more or less solidly behind Eadweard’s chosen heir Ælfweard. Had he not died so soon after his father, there must have been a very real possibility of Eadweard’s recently consolidated kingdom dividing on historical and regional lines; even of a civil war. That Æðelstan was not immediately accepted by the West Saxons seems likely from the delay in his inauguration, which took place at Kingston upon Thames a year later, and from the exclusively Mercian witnesses to his first charter issued in 925.25 Kingston look
s like a suitably diplomatic site, on the Wessex–Mercian border at the headway of the Thames and the place where his father had been inaugurated. It was a very obvious statement of legitimacy.

  If William of Malmesbury is to be believed, an objection had been raised that Æðelstan was ‘born of a concubine’—in other words, that since his mother had been married to Eadweard before his assumption of the throne, he was ineligible because she was not then the wife of a king. One detects factionalism beneath the smoothly flowing narrative of the Chronicle: indeed, that smooth flow was substantially choked off between 924, the year of Eadweard’s death, and 931, when the Winchester Chronicle sees its first entry for seven years. On his own death in 939 Æðelstan was not buried with his father and half-brother at Winchester but at Malmesbury Abbey (hence, perhaps, William’s partisan treatment of him). In any event, a potential West Saxon rebellion failed to materialize∫∫ and Æðelstan succeeded to Wessex, West Mercia, and those lands which had been won from Danish Mercia and East Anglia.

  Æðelstan’s inauguration ceremony at Kingston affords a rare glimpse of contemporary conceptions of kingship at first hand. He styled himself rex Saxonum et Anglorum, according to a charter issued on that same day, 4 September 925.26 The formal benediction ceremony has been preserved in a text known as the Second Coronation Ordo.ΩΩ He seems also to have been presented with crown (a Frankish-influenced departure from earlier Insular use of the more martial helmet), ring, rod and sceptre by the new archbishop of Canterbury, Æðelhelm. The king’s responsibilities towards Christianity (represented by the ring), towards widows, orphans and the destitute (the sword) and to ‘soothe the righteous and terrify the reprobate’ (the rod) were given material form. There are references to the two united peoples (West Saxons and Mercian Angles) whom he had been ‘elected’ to rule, and a solemn prayer that the king would ‘hold fast the state’.27