by Adams, Max;
In killing Idwal, Eadmund may have been exacting revenge for his possible defection at Brunanburh, or for his failure to submit on the new king’s coronation. Idwal does not appear on the witness lists for Eadmund’s charters, whose attendance was dominated by his brother Eadred, by Archbishop Oda of Canterbury (but not Wulfstan of York) and by Theodred, bishop of London. Eadgifu, the king’s mother, was an occasional witness; but there are no subreguli, not even the generally pro-Wessex Hywel Dda. The new king’s council was, it seems, a smaller, more businesslike affair, with less of the imperial pomp of the father and less overtly political, but keeping a tight circle of loyalists on hand. Urm and his fellow Danish jarls did not appear again at the king’s councils until much later in the decade, after Eadmund was dead.
Hywel Dda may not have been an Eadmund insider, but he took the opportunity afforded by his brother’s death to expel his two surviving nephews, Iago and Ieuaf, annexe Gwynedd and Powys and effectively, for the first time, create a kingship comprising the bulk of Wales outside Morgannwg (formerly Glywysing) and Gwent in the south-east (the latter apparently directly subject to West Saxon lordship).42 Hywel was the most outstandingly successful of the Early Medieval Welsh kings, ranking alongside Constantín of Alba and three generations of Æðulfings in playing a key role in the founding of a medieval kingdom. Like them, he understood the rules of patronage, opportunity and alliance; and if, in the Armes Prydein Fawr, he was cast as a traitorous appeaser by some contemporaries, his canny adaptation to the realities of Norse invasion and West Saxon imperium ensured that he survived long enough for his name to be remembered as both Dda (‘the Good’) and as the promulgator of the impressive Welsh Law code of the Middle Ages.
He may have been influenced, in his youth, by Bishop Asser, Ælfred’s most favoured Welsh intellectual. His pilgrimage to Rome in 928 (in imitation, perhaps, of the youthful Ælfred) and his attendance at successive councils convened by Æðelstan exposed him, uniquely, to a wider European milieu. A single silver penny with the inscription HOWAEL REX survives; probably minted in Chester and following a contemporary West Saxon style. It may commemorate his annexation of Gwynedd in 942.43 The law books called Cyfraith Hywel (the Laws of Hywel) exist in manuscripts that date from no earlier than the thirteenth century. Several generations of scholarship have been devoted to determining key questions surrounding these books: are they the result of royal edicts identifiable with pre-Norman Welsh Law; can they be attributed to a single reign; and, if so, can their inspiration be laid at the door of Hywel Dda, as their medieval compilers wished them to be? The answers to all these questions are complicated, but some basic conclusions can be drawn from the modern edition in English by Dafydd Jenkins and a recent analysis and summary in Thomas Charles-Edwards’s magnificent Wales and the Britons.44
Despite some clear but isolated instances in which Welsh Law borrowed from pre-Conquest English Law, the underlying legal philosophy is much more closely linked with Irish Law texts, which survive in voluminous and early manuscripts. The flavour is less retributive than in English legal codes but, as Jenkins points out, there is a striking internal tension between the crude and the sophisticated.45 Homicide is treated largely as a matter for compensation: in common with most Early Medieval societies, Welsh lawmakers were keen to limit the disastrous effects of blood feud. In contrast and influenced, perhaps, by the widespread tenth-century obsession with the social consequences of property crime, theft is more a matter for punishment. Surprisingly, perhaps, robbery with violence attracts lesser penalties than common theft, being regarded as less stealthy. Truth, in the modern legal sense applied in Scottish and French law, for example, would not be recognized as relevant in the Early Medieval legal process. Proof was demonstrated by oath and by the status of the oath-taker.
The laws relating to women, especially with regard to property and divorce, seem strikingly progressive. After puberty a woman ‘is entitled to control what is hers’; after seven years of marriage, separating couples split their property in shares:
It belongs to the woman to divide and to the man to choose. The pigs for the man and the sheep for the woman... Of the sons, two thirds to the father and one to the mother... The man is entitled to the upper stone of the quern, the woman to the lower... To the woman belong the pan and the trivet and the broad axe and the hedging bill and the ploughshare, and all the flax and the linseed, and the wool.46
Land was partible among sons and brothers, so that holdings must inevitably become smaller over time; but mill, weir and orchard might not be alienated from a kindred, nor divided. Appropriately, for a largely pastoral and overwhelmingly agricultural economy, detailed consideration is given to the values of all the beasts of field and waste: poultry, bees, hunting dogs, birds of prey and even cats. Hazelnut, oak, yew, beech and apple trees had specific values; similarly a lengthy list of household equipment and clothes. Even the various parts of the human body were defined and valued, not as items of trade but in case of claims for compensation, theft and damage. These were laws written by and for lawyers; they were not the edicts of a king; how far they reflect actual practice and behaviour is difficult to say. Collectively, they demonstrate an outstanding vigour in Welsh intellectual thought, drawing on very ancient custom: ideologically driven but fully self-conscious and responsive to a real, living world.
*
After the death of Óláfr and the arrival of Kváran in 941, and following the recapture of Danish Mercia in 942, Eadmund pressed his advantage. In the following year Constantín mac Áeda abdicated his throne after more than forty years, retiring to the monastic community at St Andrews in Fife, perhaps as its abbot. His eldest son and presumed heir, Cellach, had been killed at Brunanburh. Another son, Ildulb, seems to have been too young to succeed and one might surmise that Constantín’s retirement was, therefore, forced by his successor, Mael Coluim mac Domnall. Mael Coluim’s father had been Constantín’s predecessor, so he may have been heir presumptive by customary arrangement, but his rise to power might also have been an opportunistic response to Constantín’s failure at Brunanburh. It is impossible to say, but it is difficult to see this middle-aged man emerging from, as it were, nowhere. He would rule Alba for eleven years.
Between the new king of Alba and the twenty-three-year-old king of Wessex lay the territories of Cumbria/Strathclyde under Dyfnwal (the Brittonic equivalent of Gaelic ‘Domnall’), Bernicia under an unknown dux ; and two kings of Northumbria: Kváran and Rögnvaldr. Every version of the Chronicle records that in 944 Eadmund ‘brought all of Northumbria under his sway, and drove out two kings Anlaf Sihtricson (that is, Kváran) and Raegnald Guthfrithson (Rögnvaldr)’. Once again, it is unclear from this account if King Eadmund himself mounted a military campaign; but the later tenth-century chronicler Æðelweard offers intriguing extra detail:
After the passage of the seventh year [of Eadmund’s reign] [Arch]bishop Wulfstan and the ealdorman (dux) of Mercia expelled certain traitors, that is to say Raegnald and Anlaf [Kváran], from the city of York, and reduced them to submission to the king.47
Archbishop Wulfstan had been an ally of Óláfr. If Æðelweard’s testimony is to be trusted, that alliance did not extend to his two successors, whom he was prepared to sacrifice for his own political ends. As for the Mercian ealdorman, Alex Woolf suggests that he may be identified as Æðelstan the so-called ‘half-king’, variously comes or dux in charter attestations between 938 and 956, who seems to have been appointed as regent in East Anglia from about 932.48 Eadmund’s judgement of character and his intuitive sense of when to deploy military force and political pressure are impressive testimony to his education in statesmanship. The Anglo-Saxon chronicler made sure that he got the credit.
A year later, we know, the king himself travelled north on campaign, apparently safe in the knowledge that Northumbria and York, with its power-broking archbishop, were once again securely part of the West Saxon imperium. He visited the community at Chester le Street, where he conferred more gift
s on St Cuthbert and repeated the promises of allegiance which his father had given with such effective results in 934. His army, too, contributed 60 pounds of silver coin to Cuthbert, while:
He himself with his own hand placed two golden armlets and two Greek palls upon the holy body, granted peace and law better than any it had ever had to the whole territory of St Cuthbert, [and] confirmed the grant [of his father’s charter].49
The relationship between saint and royal house cemented, Eadmund ravaged Strathclyde/Cumbria, according to the Annales Cambriae and the Chronicle. Roger of Wendover offers the name of Leolin, king of Dyfed, as a key ally in the campaign and Alex Woolf argues that this must be a mistake for Hywel: so it seems that the old West Saxon ally had been restored to favour.50 Roger also records the grisly fate of the two sons of King Dyfnwal: blinded, so that they could not succeed their father (they may already have been hostages at the West Saxon court). After this brief campaign the Western British kingdom that stretched between Clyde and Eamont was ceded, or let, to Mael Coluim of Alba.
At the end of 945 King Eadmund, at twenty-four years old, could boast that he was, like his distinguished half-brother Æðelstan, overlord of all Britain south of the Forth–Clyde line. Less than six months later, on 26 May 946, he was stabbed to death at Pucklechurch, in Gloucestershire, by a man called Liofa, said to be a thief.51
* Poetic conventions tend to follow simple multipliers like three hundred and three score. The Brunanburh figure might still be an exaggeration. Even so, fleet estimates in the annals on both sides of the English Channel seem to be quite consistent. The fleets of 893 numbered in the low hundreds of ships. Nicholas Brooks offers a very useful summary of the arguments for Early Medieval fleet and army sizes in a famous essay; Brooks 1979, 5–9.
† It was originally thought that the earlier part of this chronicle was written by Florence of Worcester and the later part by his fellow monk John of Worcester; John is now recognized as the author of both, basing his writings on notes compiled by Florence.
‡ From the poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
§ There has been speculation that the historical Egil suffered from Paget’s disease. See a 1995 article by Jesse L Byock: http://www.viking.ucla.edu/Scientific_American/Egils_Bones.htm, retrieved November 2016.
# Pronounced ‘Thorolf’.
∫ 1200 shilling men and 200 shilling men. See above, Chapter 5, p. 176.
Ω If this is true, it implies that either Óláfr had repudiated the daughter of Constantín, whom he is recorded as having married by John of Worcester, or that the earlier marriage is a fiction.
≈ According to the Chronicle account Óláfr obtained Eadmund’s friendship and the latter stood sponsor at his baptism, just as Ælfred had at Guðrum’s, two generations before.
∂ See above, p. 359. The full list of charters attested by Urm comprises: S416; S520; S544; S522a; S550; S633; S659; S674; S679.
π A remarkable self-portrait may survive in the Glastonbury Classbook attributed to Dunstan and held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Bodleian Library, Auct. F. 4. 32 (2176).
∆ And 5 miles (8 km) north of the monastic site at Bardney, from where Oswald’s relics were retrieved in about 906/9. The name only survives from the thirteenth century, when it was recorded as Golthawe, perhaps ‘the enclosure of the (marsh) marigold’. Beresford 1987.
** Two other long halls of almost identical dimensions have been excavated at Sulgrave in Northamptonshire and at Bicester in Oxfordshire. See Hamerow 2012, 47, for the striking graphic evidence of their plans.
†† Toft: a narrow strip of land, fronting on a lane or road, on which a cottage was built, associated with a croft – a parcel of arable or pasture land close by.
‡‡ And therefore to be treated with caution for its applicability to the conditions pertaining a hundred and more years earlier. It is contained in a collection of texts in an Old English manuscript: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 383.
§§ Under the entry for 943, corrected to 942.
THE ILLUSORY PRIZE
CHESTER LE STREET—FALLEN MINSTERS—NEW TOWNS—SHIRES AND HUNDREDS—EADRED, EIRÍKR, WULFSTAN—EGIL SKALLAGRÍMSSON AGAIN—BRITAIN IN THE 960S
12
On the whole, the community of St Cuthbert survived the first Viking Age in good shape. Fleeing its original island home of Lindisfarne in the ninth century with the relics of its precious saint, its leaders supped with the devil in the shape of the Scandinavian Host and forged a new geography and identity south of the River Tyne.
Its bishops played a clever hand as brokers between the native Christian élite and the kings of York and were rewarded with royal protection and valuable estates which secured its economic future. In time, they won the favour of a great southern king, Æðelstan, who lavished gifts on them and promised the loyalty of his successors. The survival of the community’s unique relics and of the famous Lindisfarne Gospels is surpassed in historical value only by the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, a key text in tracing the fortunes of the Insular church from its seventh-century beginnings up until the Norman Conquest.
The small town of Chester le Street, where the community made its home for more than a century after 883 and where, some time in the middle of the tenth century, the Historia was first compiled, might seem an unlikely setting for such a momentous narrative to be written. A Roman fort, Concangis, was constructed here in the first century AD on a rise above the confluence of the navigable River Wear* and the Cong burn which rises in the Pennines some miles to the west. Once a staging post on the Great North Road and a busy coal transhipment port, its industries have moved elsewhere.
52. SUPPING WITH THE DEVIL: mounted warrior on a cross fragment from St Cuthbert’s church, Chester le Street.
Chester le Street, Kuncacester, obeys the fundamental rules of Early Medieval connectivity, forming a node, or interchange on the Insular travel network: a day’s journey upstream from the sea at Wearmouth, the centre of an important early monastic estate. The road that crossed the burn, now buried beneath the town’s Front Street, directly linked the River Tyne and its Hadrianic bridge, the Pons Aelius, to York, Lincoln and London. A few miles to the north another Roman road, known as the Wrekendike, branched off to the north-east towards the old Roman fort at Arbeia, Bede’s monastery at Jarrow and a seventh-century royal harbour close to the mouth of the River Tyne. Not far to the west, running parallel with the Great North Road, is the line of Dere Street which, at Corbridge, meets the Tyne and its own metalled trans-Pennine route, Stanegate, thus linking the Cuthbert community with its important holdings in Cumbria.†
By the time that the Historia was written the Cuthbert community had lost or shed many of their lands in north Northumbria but sat at the centre of a large territorium in what is now County Durham. The Kuncacester establishment was more than just a squatter’s camp: an impressive array of carved crosses (including one depicting a mounted warrior à la mode) survives in fragments to show that the community supported a sculpture workshop; and competent scribes (whatever King Ælfred might have believed about the decline of Latinity) plied their trade here.
At about the time when the Historia was being compiled from records assiduously curated and embellished by St Cuthbert’s clerics, one of them, Aldred, embarked on a project to translate the Lindisfarne Gospels into Old English and, since he did so by interpolating between the elegant lines of the original, the physical record of that achievement endures, as do his invaluable notes on the history of Anglo-Saxon England’s most famous book and the first lengthy samples of written Northumbrian dialect.
Symeon, writing his Libellus de Exordio much later, after the community had moved to its permanent Durham home on a dramatic riverine peninsula five miles upstream, records that in the eleventh century the original ‘wooden church’ at Kuncacester was taken down and replaced in stone.1 Within the walls of the old Roman fort, then, lay an establishment capable of hosting the visits of kings and other dignitaries, of producing sculptu
re, with its own library and scriptorium. The mother church of north Northumbria lay at the heart of its estates, its bishops acting like secular lords receiving and consuming the renders of its tenants, tenaciously defending its ancient rights against all comers. Despite the neglect of its former patron kings at Bamburgh, the theft of its lands by native and foreign warlords and the loss of core territories, the institution founded by King Oswald and Bishop Aidan in 635 rode the tides of fate, adapting to reality and opportunity and expertly navigating the labyrinth of Early Medieval politics.
53. ST CUTHBERT’S CHURCH, Chester le Street, County Durham. The Lindisfarne community made its home here for a century after about 883.
Since their heyday in the early eighth century hundreds of Insular minsters, originally élite communities of high-born monks and nuns following the rule of St Benedict and often playing a pastoral role among the believers on their estates, had exploited their status as central places dominating equally pivotal landscapes: on estuaries; where important roads crossed rivers; at natural harbours; not always on the most fertile land but with access to a range of resources on which their wealth and influence depended. Their entrepreneurial talents led to concentrations of labour and skills: to the founding and maintenance of scriptoria and vellum workshops, schools of sculpture and glazing, specialization in arable and stock-rearing; to mill engineering; to intellectual endeavour and the production, consumption and trading of marketable surplus. When they are excavated, some of these minster establishments look for all the world like small towns.