by Adams, Max;
Between Northumbria, the lands of the Five Boroughs and East Anglia considerable internal variation reflected the historical evolutions of those regions and their fortunes under Danish and Norse rule. Since their legislators did not leave written coda, much of the evidence for direct Scandinavian influence comes from Southern kings’ attempts to rationalize and streamline law across the geographical divide. King Æðelred II acknowledged the problem in his so-called Wantage Code of about 997, written when England was under sustained attack from a new wave of Scandinavian armies.≈ That rationalization did not preclude borrowing from Scandinavian prototypes. In among the punitive fines for various crimes is a bold precedent:
A meeting is to be held in each wapentake, and the twelve leading thegns, and with them the reeve, are to come forward and swear on the relics that are put into their hands that they will accuse no innocent man nor conceal any guilty one.
This is generally held to enshrine the concept of a jury system, unknown in English law before this date but secure in its Scandinavian origins.18 A subsequent clause outlines, also for the first time, the principle that when the twelve thegns of the jury cannot agree, a majority verdict of eight to four is sufficient to secure a conviction. More than a century of Danish and Norse rule and settlement had left an indelible stamp on Insular law and customs.
Regional variations in customary law and administration were not confined to areas of mixed population. In Kent and Sussex much more ancient territorial units survived, of lathes and rapes, six in each county. And across the territories of the Angelcynn the concentration of hundredal courts at meeting places of evident antiquity, such as the Ecgberht’s Stone and Iley Oak mentioned in the account of Ælfred’s Edington campaign of 878, suggests that such institutions emerged from an earlier customary system of local and regional meeting places and folk-courts, perhaps convened on the quarter days to signal an inalienable bond between the invariable turn of the season’s wheel and the lives of thegn, ceorl and slave.
In the British kingdoms of the west, cantrefi (literally ‘a hundred townships’), rough equivalents of the shires, with commotes (‘neighbourhoods’) beneath them, are suggestive of similarities in administration; but exact equivalence is not possible or appropriate. In Scotland, the administrative system is frustratingly obscure, although the davach, perhaps Pictish in origin, seems to have been a measure of land that could support so many oxen. In what became Northumberland a different sort of shire administration persisted, uniquely tied to the rule of its lords at Bamburgh. South of the Tyne, the County Palatine of Durham was formed out of the buffer state created by the community of St Cuthbert.
In the Hundred Ordinance Eadmund, or one of his close successors, legislated for the meeting of a hundred court (hundredgemot) every four weeks at which ‘each man is to do justice to the other’.∂ Its clauses, like those of the Dunsæte ordinance and the Friðgegyldum, are concerned with the apprehension of thieves, especially of cattle, with compensation for victims and fines for contempt of the court. In all aspects of Early Medieval law-giving there is a strong sense of ideology expressed: kings envisaged a model state, with themselves at the law-giving apex of a social pyramid. The ideal may have differed greatly from reality. Rarely, if ever, were kings’ laws and ordinances cited in the judicial cases for which we have evidence.
The kings of the tenth century conceived of a set of unifying, centralizing ideals, if not a single indivisible kingdom, expressed in the confident imagery and inscriptions on their coins, and in their law codes and land grants. But it was an illusory prize, offered anciently by the Venerable Bede to the virtuous, martial king who could map the universality of the Christian kingdom onto the terra firma of political reality. At each throw of the dice the southern overlords of the tenth century believed themselves to have imperium over the Angelcynn in their grasp, only to suffer the frustrations of their forbears. Britain remained resolutely regional in identity and affinities.
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In the aftermath of King Eadmund’s murder in 946, his brother Eadred succeeded to the throne. His first grant, a so-called ‘coronation-gift’ of land in Northamptonshire, made at Kingston upon Thames to a thegn called Wulfric, describes him as ‘king and ruler to the sovereignty of the quadripartite rule’. As the rest of the text makes clear, the four kingdoms and peoples in question were the Anglo-Saxons, the Northumbrians, the pagans (meaning the Norse of Cheshire and Lancashire rather than the Christian Danes of East Mercia and East Anglia) and the Britons of Wales and Cornwall.19 The list of witnesses at this inaugural council shows a continuity of policy: the two archbishops, Oda (the naturalized Dane) and Wulfstan; Ðeodred, the bishop of London; various other bishops and abbots; then Hywel Dda and Morgan, son of King Owain of Gwent (the latter a royal hostage, perhaps), four ealdormen and four Danish jarls, including Urm.
The new king’s attentions were immediately drawn to events in the North. Later in the same year, 946, he was able, in the words of the Chronicle, to ‘reduce all Northumbria to subjection’, after which the Scots ‘gave him oaths and promised to do his will in all things’.20 His imperium was sealed by treaty the following year at Tanshelf, near Castleford (Ceaster forda), an old crossing point of the River Aire some 15 miles (24 km) north of the Don on the traditional border line between Mercia and southern Northumbria. Here Archbishop Wulfstan and all the councillors of the Northumbrians submitted to him. That, at least, is the official version contained in the Chronicle, whose editorial aim was to establish that Northumbria naturally belonged under West Saxon rule and that deviation from that narrative constituted either rebellion or base ingratitude. The truth may be a little more obscure; the politics are not.
Kváran’s expulsion from York in 944 had left southern Northumbria without a ruler. Eiríkr, son of Haraldr, is first mentioned in two versions of the Chronicle four years later; the Worcester manuscript says that by this year the Men of York had accepted him as their king and that Eadred mounted a punitive campaign against the Northumbrians in response. Eiríkr also appears, more allusively, in the life of a Scottish saint, Cathróe (of Metz) who, in the middle years of that decade, happened to be making his way south with the intention of embarking on a pilgrimage to Rome. The account of that journey places the saint at the court of both Constantín (who had abdicated in 943) and Eadmund; so his supposed visit to York, at which he was introduced to Eiríkr by virtue of Eirík’s marriage to one of Cathróe’s kinswomen, must have taken place before 943.21
Placing Eiríkr in York as early as 943 is not in itself problematic—he may have been a protégé of Kváran’s. Archbishop Wulfstan then plays the part of his ambassador at Tanshelf, continuing his own career of professionally ambiguous affinities. Fusing the account in the saint’s Vita with the Chronicle does, however, create two problems for historians. Firstly, there is the identity of Eiríkr, often and conveniently associated with the Eiríkr blóðøx familiar from the sagas, whose running feud with Egil makes for such good reading. York’s Eiríkr is the son of a Haraldr, just as Eiríkr blóðøx was the son of Haraldr Hárfagri. But that anti-hero’s wife was called Gunnhildr, and she is not likely to have been a Gaelic kinswoman of Cathróe. Historians Clare Downham and Alex Woolf suspect a conflation of two historical figures, of whom the York variant was another grandson of Ívarr and, therefore, Irish Norse rather than Norwegian.22 The confusion is not helped by the fact that the Egil of the eponymous Saga turns up at York and reignites the feud with his nemesis.
Whatever complexities underlie the events of 946–947, we know that Eadred took an army north in the year after the convention at Tanshelf and destroyed one of Archbishop Wulfstan’s prize assets, the ancient and wealthy minster complex at Ripon, by fire in a punitive raid.π He did not get away scot-free; the Men of York caught up with his returning army as it recrossed the Aire at Castleford, and destroyed its rear. Even so, Eadred was able to force submission and reparations from the Northumbrians and a promise that they would expel Eiríkr.∆
; That departure did not signal the end of Northumbria’s long-standing relationship with Irish Norse kings, the dynasty of the great Ívarr. The Chronicle entry for 949 blandly records the return of Óláfr Kváran from Dublin, where he had spent the previous few years in competition for the kingship with his cousin, Blákári Guðrøðsson. With the latter’s death in 948 and the convenient expulsion of Eiríkr the same year, Kváran was received in York once more. The arch-operator, Wulfstan, transferred his allegiance accordingly; but he was still attending Eadred’s councils in 949, possibly by this time acting formally as ambassador on Kváran’s behalf.
There is little doubt that kingship in York, or Lincoln, or the Five Boroughs, meant something rather different from its Mercian or West Saxon counterpart. Germanic kingship had emerged from the custom of appointing a leader ‘in time of war’. The development of state institutions giving the king law-making, fiscal and administrative rights was a seventh-century phenomenon that went hand in hand with the emergence of the church as a legitimizing, powerful institution in its own right. The eternal triangle of bookland, church and kingship through which the Insular states functioned depended on that enduring relationship, steeped in rationality and mutual dependence.
In York, it seems, the church survived in robust good health; but its relationship with Norse warlords was ambivalent. The Cuthbert community had persuaded successive kings of York (if that is what they were) of the value of mutual support. The archbishops seem to have been able to effect a similar arrangement for themselves; but it is hard to accept the idea that Rögnvaldr, Óláfr and their like ruled over the lands north of the Humber in the way that their southern counterparts did. They do not appear to have been enthusiastic legislators. They must have overseen or allowed the fragmentation of many very large ecclesiastical estates and, although they often issued coinage from their mints, one doubts whether they possessed the administrative equivalent of the civil service professionalized by the West Saxon kings, with hierarchies of portgerefa, shire reeve, ealdorman and, particularly, of bishop. There is no northern equivalent of a royal secretary like Æðelstan ‘A’. That is not to say that their rule was ineffective, or that they did not see the virtues of the model Christian state. But they left no enduring ruling dynasty; no stable succession holding office by divine right; no written record of their functions or achievements.
In East Mercia and East Anglia it seems as though the hierarchy of lordship followed a model comprising the dependent unfree, free farmers or sokemen, thegns, holds and jarls. The latter, of whom we know more than half a dozen names, appear to have controlled the territoria based on their towns (including the Five Boroughs) as more or less independent fiefdoms, each capable of autonomous military action and economic policy but evidently very often working co-operatively and in mutual support. The distinctiveness of legal and administrative institutions in the Midlands shows not that the jarls sought cultural conquest but that they were capable, effective rulers, economically successful and able to impose a king’s peace on those regions that would become the shires of Midland England. They adapted to and modified indigenous customs and became, in time, patrons of a revived church as well as promulgators of innovative law. We have no record at all of civil war or rebellion during the nearly hundred years of their effective rule. The lords of Goltho and Flixborough were left alone, for the most part, to get on with it.
The greatest of the early Welsh kings, Hywel Dda, died in 950. He was succeeded in Deheubarth, the south and west of Wales, by his son Owain, who was able to retain control of Powys on the Mercian border; but Gwynedd was won back by the sons of Idwal Foel who, two years later, ravaged Gwent: Welsh unification was just as illusory for the dynasty of Rhodri Mawr as a kingdom of England was for that of Ælfred.
In the north, Mael Coluim mac Domnall felt sufficiently confident of his military power to raid as far south as the River Tees, according to a not altogether straightforward entry in the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba for 950.23 The raid, in which the Men of Alba ‘carried off many people and many droves of cattle’, does not feature in the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, whose annalist recorded no entries between the reign of Eadmund and his grandson Æðelred II. The raid was, perhaps, designed to test the military strength of Northumbria. The brevity of the contemporary record may well mask complex internal politics. Two years later the Annals of Ulster record a battle between ‘the Men of Alba and the Britons [of Strathclyde] and the English [the lords of Bamburgh, perhaps]’ against the foreigners (that is, the Irish Norse). If dependable, this is the faint echo of a layer of alliances that historians might otherwise not suspect. If the Irish Norse of this conflict were, in fact, the forces of Kváran and the Men of York, the fallout seems to have been his repudiation by the Northumbrians. Kváran returned once more to Dublin and, after a long martial career, retired improbably to Iona, where he died in 980.
Kváran’s second expulsion from York was followed by Eirík’s return. Whatever complex politics lie behind these events, Archbishop Wulfstan now found himself, for once, the victim. According to the Worcester version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle he was imprisoned by King Eadred in an unidentified stronghold called Iudanburh ‘because he had been frequently accused to the king.’ 24 Eadred’s impatience at his double-dealing, or the factional gossip of his court, had rendered to Wulfstan the same fate as Ripon’s founder, St Wilfrid, under an equally exasperated king in the seventh century. Unlike St Dunstan, he was not able to produce a timely miracle to win back the king’s favour at the last minute.
Eirík’s return to York brought about his re-acquaintance with the colourful career of the warrior-poet and troublemaker Egil Skallagrímsson. In Egil’s Saga, Eiríkr (blóðøx) is exiled from Norway by his brother Hákon, Æðelstan’s foster-son, and makes his way south through Scotland, arriving in York while Æðelstan is still king. Egil, meanwhile, is conveniently placed by the composer of the saga on a ship, also heading for England and intent on renewing his relationship with his former patron Æðelstan.** Instead, his ship founders at the mouth of the River Humber where the crew, alive but battered, manage to get ashore. Now Egil finds that he has landed not in the kingdom of his former patron, who is in any case long dead, but in that of his enemy, for Eiríkr rules in York with his wife Gunnhildr. But he also hears that his brother-in-law Arinbjorn, an intimate of Eirík’s, is with the Norse king in York.
54. IN YORK, the warrior-poet Egil Skallagrímsson and his antagonist Eiríkr were re-acquainted. Mounted warrior from St Andrew’s church, Andreas, Isle of Man.
Without the means to sail home Egil determines to go there and have it out with Eiríkr. He makes his way to Arinbjorn’s house and pleads his case to be reconciled with the king. Arinbjorn agrees to petition on his behalf and, together with ten armed men, they go to the king’s hall. Egil humbles himself before the great warrior, taking Eirík’s foot in his hand and offering up an impromptu verse:
I have travelled on the sea-god’s steed
A long and turbulent wave-path
To visit the one who sits
In command of the English land.
In great boldness the shaker
Of the wound-flaming sword
Has met the mainstay of King Harald’s line.25
Eiríkr is unimpressed; and, moreover, his implacable wife Gunnhildr demands that Egil be executed immediately. Arinbjorn pleads Egil’s case to be heard again the following morning, and Eiríkr acquiesces. Arinbjorn’s advice to Egil is to compose a great verse of praise to the king before morning: it is his only chance for mercy. In the night Egil’s poetic musings are interrupted by a shape-shifter in the form of a swallow, chirping at his window; but at length he composes and then memorizes the praise poem, which he duly delivers the following morning. One imagines a hall bristling with tension and anticipation, crowded and hushed as the two antagonists settle their famous and long-standing feud not with swords and axes but with fine words and reasoning.
Nothing more perfectly captur
es the essence of the Scandinavian world, poised between violent destruction and the creative arts, between blood-rush, love of poetry and cool judgement:
West over water I fared
Bearing poetry’s praise to the shore
Of the war-god’s heart.26
Egil employs the full palette of poetic battle-metaphor and simile in praising the king’s great and bloody deeds. Eirík’s sword is the ‘battle-sun’ or ‘wound-digger’; dead men are Oðin’s forest of oaks, felled by warrior’s axe; corpses are eagles’ food:
Like bees, arrows flew
From his drawn bow of yew.
Eric fed flesh
To the wolf afresh.
Like all great kings in Germanic and Atlantic cultures, Eirík’s bellicosity is matched by magnanimity and the generosity of the ring-giver. He hands out gold by the fistful, like sand; distributes shields and brooches far and wide.
The praise of great poets was prized by warlords across the ethnic and linguistic spectra of the Atlantic west: a universal language of approbation, respect and loyalty. Likewise, the generosity of the poet must be rewarded, if not in treasure then in the gift of clemency. Eiríkr grudgingly accepts Egil’s skilled verses: he may leave with his head still attached. The gift of life, in return, requires more praise from the reprieved warrior-poet:
Ugly as my head may be
The cliff my helmet rests upon,
I am not loath
To accept it from the king.
Where is the man who ever
Received a finer gift
From a noble-minded
Son of a great ruler?27
The aftermath of this legendary encounter speaks, if possible, even more eloquent testimony to the social mechanisms by which native and incomer were able to co-exist and integrate. Egil, leaving Eirík’s kingdom under his grudging protection, exchanges gifts with his saviour, Arinbjorn, whose own reputation must have been enhanced by such skilful diplomacy. They part as good friends. The Saga tells us, then, that Egil’s crew stayed behind, to trade the goods that they had brought with them in Jorvík’s markets under Arinbjorn’s watchful eye. No doubt the artisans and traders of that city were eager to see what exotic goods they had to offer.