Aelfred's Britain

by Adams, Max;

  ∫∫ William of Malmesbury relates the story of an attempted coup by the otherwise unknown Ælfred, who tried to blind the new king at Winchester and who subsequently fled to Rome, where he died. EHD Secular narrative sources 8. Whitelock 1979, 303.

  ΩΩ Debate continues about whether its first use was Eadweard’s, Æðelstan’s or, indeed, Edgar’s inauguration. Foot 2011, 75ff. Janet Nelson’s convincing arguments in a recent paper carry the day, so far. Nelson 2008.

  ≈≈ Commissioned to mark the millennium of her construction of the burh here. She is depicted in modest robes with her arm around a youthful nephew, Æðelstan (see p. 271).

  ∂∂ He may not even have got so far as York. Symeon, Historia Regum, reports his expulsion from the kingdom of the Britons, i.e. Cumbria. Charles-Edwards 2013, 521.

  ππ Many of the south Mercian charters which attest such estates are, in any case, under a cloud of doubt regarding their authenticity. Foot 2011, 135.

  ∆∆ See below, Chapter 11: the Amounderness purchase. The matter of Æðelstan’s cash wealth and estates is treated fully in Foot 2011, 148ff.

  *** See above Chapter 8, p. 301.

  ††† Most historians think that this is an error for Owain of Strathclyde; but there was a possibly contemporary king of Gwent named Owain, and it is possible that both kings were originally meant. Charles-Edwards 2013, 512.

  ‡‡‡ I am inclined to discount William of Malmesbury’s lurid, expanded version in which Guðroðr flees to Scotland and Æðelstan slights the defences of York and loots the city. But it is worth reading for the possible insider information on which William may be elaborating. EHD : Whitelock 1979, 307.

  §§§ See below, Chapter 10.

  ### Lapidge, I think significantly, translates Saxonia as ‘England’. The poet is implying a united kingdom, ‘made whole’, of the Saxons. The lands of the Angles – that is, in the east and north, are seemingly excluded.

  ∫∫∫ Perhaps more correctly ‘complete’.

  ΩΩΩ The Æðida cited in Liber Eliensis III.50 as a daughter of Æðelstan looks suspiciously like an error for a sister, perhaps that otherwise unnamed sister given in marriage to Sigtryggr. Fairweather 2005, 356.

  ≈≈≈ The last date on which she appears as a charter witness.

  LAWYERS, GUNS AND MONEY

  LAW CODES—COINS—EADWINE ÆTHELING—ÆÐELSTAN’S NORTHERN ADVENTURE—CUTHBERT’S WISH-LIST—ARMES PRYDEIN —FAWR—EMBASSIES AND REGENTS—ART AND IDENTITY

  10

  Within a year or so of the Peace of Eamont Bridge, Æðelstan and his councillors promulgated a law code at Grately in north-west Hampshire, during a great assembly designed also to consult and to display. Grately was not the site of a royal estate (the nearest, Andover, lay a few short miles to the north-east along a Roman road known as the Portway) but of an Iron Age hillfort, Quarley Hill, whose powerful atavistic symbolism, and good local hunting, may have dictated the location.1 Equally significant, perhaps, is that Grately lay a day’s ride from Winchester: close, but not too close. Some of Æðelstan’s assemblies were attended by up to forty sub-kings, prelates, ealdormen and thegns, not to mention his stepmother Eadgifu, each with an entourage of their own.

  At Grately, one imagines a magnificent temporary township encampment of hundreds of leather tents, awnings and lean-to shelters, ensuring a sense of occasion both portentous and festive. Farriers, smiths, falconers, masters of hounds, clerics, the royal entourage, hostages and ministers congregated in their hundreds. As the Anglo-Saxon state grew in size and administrative complexity, so its assemblies became greater but less agile occasions, taking longer to plan and deliver. For visitors (embassies, fostered exiles, élite merchants, subreguli, churchmen and scholars) they must have succeeded in creating an atmosphere of sublime intimidation. For artisans, traders, local worthies and thieves the meetings of the Witan, the wise councillors of the state, were ripe with opportunity.

  45. YORK: the centre of a Scandinavian kingdom and a powerhouse of the northern church.

  II Æðelstan, or the Grately Code as it is known, sets out ordinances for the treatment of crimes petty and capital;* punishments for sorcery; rules for the exchange and recovery of livestock, for trial by the ordeals of water and iron and the treatment of fugitives. The Witan’s concerns extended to the collection of tithes, and to the charitable treatment of the poor, while the king was also interested in making broad provisions for the economic management of his enlarged kingdom.

  Seemingly inserted from earlier or separate coda, otherwise novel clauses from 12 to 18 deal specifically with the administration of burhs and trade. Burh defences were to be repaired by a fortnight after Rogation days.† Goods over the value of 20 pence were only to be bought and sold inside a town, in the witness of the town-reeve at a public meeting ( gerefena gewitnesse on folcgemote).2 Then:

  Be myneterum... Ðridda: þæt an mynet sy ofer eall ðæs cynges onweald: 7 nan mon ne mynetige buton on port.

  Concerning moneyers: thirdly, that there is to be one coinage over all the king’s dominion, and no-one is to mint money except in a town.3

  A single coinage for a single kingdom: the intent could not be clearer. Another clause deals with the penalties to be meted out to fraudulent moneyers: the severing of the offending hand, or trial by the ordeal of hot iron. And the following clause provides an invaluable list of the mints that Æðelstan has established, or intends to establish, in his towns: seven at Canterbury, three at Rochester, eight in London, six in Winchester, two in Lewes, two each in Southampton, Wareham, Exeter and Shaftesbury and one each at the other burhs.

  The simplest observation to make of this list is that all the named mints lie in Wessex or Kent: so much for a national coinage. London, Canterbury and Winchester are to provide the bulk of the king’s currency. What of York, Chester and the Five Boroughs; what of East Anglia? Historians must turn to the independent witness of the coins themselves. A brilliant analysis by numismatist Christopher Blunt in the 1970s demonstrated just how far the complex reality of managing coin production and trade over such a heterogeneous geographical and political landscape diverged from intention, ambition and law code.4 The regular use of inscriptions on Æðelstan’s coins, recording both the name of the moneyer and that of the mint during the 930s, allows numismatists, almost for the first time, to create a geography of currency for an Insular king.

  Oddly enough, the largest single collection of coins, more than 400, from Æðelstan’s reign comes from a hoard excavated in the ancient Forum at Rome in the nineteenth century, deposited between 942 and 946, while the most diverse belongs to a hoard found on Skye, buried in about 935. The coins from the Roman Forum hoard have been convincingly identified as a consignment of Peter’s pence,‡ sent to Pope Marinus II in the mid-940s. Along with many other individual finds and smaller hoards widely scattered across Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia, these paint a rich and telling picture of political and economic tensions at variance with the unification narrative. Blunt’s stark conclusion was that in the ‘second quarter of the tenth century the coinage of England was still being organised on a regional basis’.5

  By 928, a year after Eamont, a series of coins was issued bearing the abbreviated style REX TOT. BRIT., or a variation thereof. But these coins, portraying a crowned bust on the obverse and a cross on the reverse, were not produced uniformly in all the king’s mints and their chronological span is only about half of a decade. The single East Anglian mint, at Norwich, omitted the regal style entirely; in West Mercia the same series carries the title REX SAXORUM (a mistake for REX SAXONUM). Three unprovenanced series, which seem to have been minted at Lincoln, also omit the REX. TOT. BRIT. style. Mercian mints seem to have avoided use of the bust motif altogether. In York, a single moneyer produced all the coins issued there during the later part of Æðelstan’s reign, displacing a mint which seems to have been under the influence of York’s archbishops. Here, too, portraits of the king occur rarely on coins.

  Detail
ed analysis shows that distinct expressions of regionality were displayed by moneyers in the Western marches, in the area of the Five Boroughs, in East Anglia, Northumbria and north-west Mercia. Outside Wessex the most active mints, those where the level of economic activity required the greatest output of currency, were at Chester (probably second only to London), Shrewsbury, Derby, Oxford and Norwich—judging, at least, by the numbers of identifiable moneyers at each. By numbers of coins, York may have been the second most productive mint. None of these is mentioned in the Grately Code. Blunt also regarded some of the more irregular groups of coins as Scandinavian copies of the official series.

  46. ÆÐELSTAN PRESENTS A BOOK to St Cuthbert: ‘If Æðelstan was, indeed, a Rex Totius Britanniae, he was careful not to proclaim it too loudly outside Wessex.’

  The king was, it seems, successful in keeping foreign coinage out of circulation, even if he could not prevent fraud altogether. And his extension of imperium is impressive: he could impose a single currency over the nations of the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms so that all trade was, effectively, carried out in his name and for his partial profit. That is not, however, the same thing as unification. If Æðelstan was, indeed, Rex Totius Britanniae, he was careful not to proclaim it too loudly outside Wessex.

  The coin evidence prompts a more sceptical view of Æðelstan’s unifying message, that in fact it was by no means welcome in all quarters; that old, and possibly new, regional affinities prevailed. The evidence of the king’s own travels accentuates that view. Just as the moneyers of the central part of his reign were assiduous in recording their names and locations, so a single, meticulous scribe (historians unimaginatively call him ‘Æðelstan A’) recorded assemblies and land grants with impeccable lists of attendees and witnesses, dated and located: we can often pin down the movements of the king and his itinerant court; sometimes minutely so. Between 927, the year of the Eamont convention, and 934 the king could be found at royal estates in Exeter (at least twice), in Sussex, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and once, on a single, exceptional occasion, in Colchester. There is otherwise no evidence of Æðelstan visiting or campaigning north of the Thames or holding assemblies in any of the Mercian burhs, where he might be expected to have had political and economic interests. He does not seem to have ventured into the territories of the Five Boroughs in those seven years. Nor do the charters suggest that he had property transactions to conduct outside the West Saxon heartlands or the south-west corner of Mercia.

  To see Æðelstan’s grand project as unification is to impose much more recent ideas of conquest and dominion on an age in which imperium, the right to boss subject kings and extract tribute from them, to enforce their attendance at court and marry one’s daughters off to them, to be seen to have won gloriously in battle, mattered more than any sense of unifying peoples whose Mercian, Deiran, Danish or East Anglian affinities over-rode the notion that they belonged to an idea of England.

  For a stay-at-home king the alternative means of governing disparate and distant parts of this enlarged imperium was to have his ealdormen and earls come to him. In November 931, at the royal estate of Lifton on the River Tamar, bordering the lands of the Britons of West Wealas, the king’s Witan or council was attended by the Welsh kings Hywel and Idwal, by both archbishops and, among many others, no fewer than seven Danish duces or jarls: Urm, Guðrum, Haward, Gunner, Ðurferð, Hadd and Scule.§ The ancient truism of keeping one’s enemies close at hand was well understood by the heirs of Ælfred.

  If Æðelstan was reluctant to travel far from Wessex, apparently for the most part even avoiding his old Mercian constituents, an entry in the ‘E’ version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 933 may offer a partial explanation. In this year, we are told, Æðelstan’s half-brother Prince Eadwine was drowned at sea. Eadwine was the younger brother of Ælfweard, who had so briefly succeeded his father Eadweard in 924; his mother was Eadweard’s second wife, Ælfflæd. He was, therefore, the king’s half-brother. Eadwine, too young to challenge for power in 924 but now of an age to command an army, might legitimately have harboured a superior claim to his father’s kingdom, having been born after his father became king. In view of Æðelstan’s Mercian loyalties, one suspects that Winchester’s apparent antipathy towards him was a function of Eadwine’s claim.

  Accidents happen at sea; we can read no more than that into the brief entry in the Chronicle. But a Frankish source, the Acts of the abbots of St Bertin, offers more suggestive detail:

  King Edwin, the brother of this same famous king [Æðelstan, was] buried in the monastery of St Bertin. For in the year of the Incarnate Word 933, when the same King Edwin, driven by some disturbance in his kingdom, embarked on a ship, wishing to cross to this side of the sea, a storm arose and the ship was wrecked and he was overwhelmed in the midst of the waves. And when his body was washed ashore, Count Adelolf, since he was his kinsman,# received it with honour and bore it to the monastery of St Bertin for burial.6

  The much later Historia Regum is even more explicit: ‘King Æðelstan ordered his brother Eadwine to be drowned at sea.’7 Eadwine might not have been pushed; but he does at least seem to have been pushed out, and a plausible motive for his expulsion is that he had failed in an attempted coup against his older half-brother. That the Frankish chronicler afforded him a regal title may be significant in that context. His death, convenient or otherwise, removed the threat of usurpation which seems to have kept Æðelstan in such close attendance on, but not in, Winchester.

  Finally secure in his West Saxon heartlands, the king might now flex his muscles. Three other deaths, in close succession, allowed or propelled the king to contemplate actions that would justify his pretensions to be styled Rex Totius Britanniae. In 933, or thereabouts, King Haraldr Hárfagri of Norway, Harald Fairhair, died in what must have been something like his eightieth year, leaving a large number of sons to potentially compete for his kingdom and overseas interests.∫ The loss of such a large personality lent new impulse to the Newton’s cradle of the Atlantic kingdoms. Then, the Annals of Ulster report that in 934 Guðroðr, grandson of Ívarr and recent contender for the throne of York, died of sickness. His dominance over Dublin and the Irish Sea, including the kingdom of Man, ensured that his death injected yet more instability into the multiplicities of Insular politics.

  Another Irish chronicle, that of the monastic community at Clonmacnoise, records a third significant death in the same year: ‘Adulf mcEtulf, king of the North Saxons’.8 Alex Woolf argues that this is a garbled reference to a king of Northumbria, probably an heir to the Bernician lords of Bamburgh who had already intervened in the fortunes of Rögnvaldr and St Cuthbert in 918. Alternatively, it is not impossible that Adulf, or Eadwulf, might have been a native Deiran, holding York for its absentee overlord Æðelstan. One way or the other, his death demanded personal intervention in a year whose fortunes might swing in any number of ways. How might the Irish Sea Norse seek to take advantage; how might Constantín react in Alba? What of the apparently compliant jarls of Danish Mercia?

  We can track the progress of Æðelstan’s second northern adventure, seven years after the Peace of Eamont Bridge, thanks to the meticulous records of his court scribe, ‘Æðelstan A’. In May 934 the king held court at Winchester for the first time, basking in the novelty of domestic security. The land grant whose text survives in the archives of Christ Church, Canterbury to attest this council, seems insignificant in itself: a 12-hide estate at an unidentified place called Derantune, to be transferred to one of his ministers.9 But the list of witnesses present tells us that the grant was only a minor element in a much grander occasion. Both archbishops attended; so too did Hywel Dda, his cousin Idwal Foel (son of Anarawd), Morgan of Gwent and Tewdr of Brycheiniog (all listed as subreguli—tributary kings), no fewer than seventeen bishops and many dozens of ministri and duces. Five of the duces, or earls, present bore Danish names: Ragnald, Ivar, Hadder, SculeΩ and Hálfdan in the English tongue; and it is reasonable to suggest that they held,
if not conveniently the Five Boroughs themselves, then significant territories in Danish Mercia.

  The court now passed into and through those territories. By 7 June, just ten days after the date of the Winchester grant, the whole court had travelled 170 miles (275 km) northwards to reassemble at Nottingham on the River Trent, presumably at one of the two burhs flanking the river. The most obvious road route would have taken them through the fortified towns at Reading, Wallingford and Oxford via the old West Saxon episcopal centre of Dorchester on Thames; thence to Buckingham, Towcester, Northampton and Leicester. It is a substantial logistical feat, which shows that considerable planning underlay the entire campaign. The court must either have been sure of its reception in the towns of the Five Boroughs, or it was accompanied by a military force sufficient to ensure its security in a land where royal patronage did not extend its centripetal web of loyalties.

  The grant that survives from this assembly, with a closely similar witness list to that issued at Winchester, is of great significance in its own right.10 It begins with a pompous preamble, which the king’s scribe seems to have delighted in copying out but which must have been torturous to attend to:≈

  The wanton fortune of this deceiving world, not lovely with the milk-white radiance of unfading lilies, but odious with the gall-steeped bitterness of lamentable corruption, raging with venomous wide-stretched jaws, bitingly rends the sons of stinking flesh in this vale of tears; and although by its smiles it may be able to draw unfortunates to the bottom of Acherontic Cocytus, unless the Creator of the roaring deep lend his aid, it is shamelessly fickle; and, therefore, because this ruinous fortune falls and mortally decays, one should chiefly hasten to the pleasant fields of indescribable joy, where are the angelic instruments of hymn-singing jubilation and the mellifluous scents of blooming roses perceived with inconceivable sweetness by the nostrils of the good and blessed and harmonies are heard by their ears forever. Allured by love of that felicity—when now depths disgust, heights grow sweet—and in order to perceive and enjoy them always in unfailing beauty, I, Athelstan, king of the English...11