The people of the Viking Age – and the Vikings in particular – often valued coins for their weight as bullion, rather than their face value. But the symbolic qualities of coinage were as readily understood then as they are now. The very power to cause a coinage to be made was a statement in itself – it indicated a willingness, and an ability, to intervene in the means of exchange between people and to regulate the flow of precious metal. It also signalled a desire to engage in behaviours which spoke of elevated political power: all of the coinage of the early medieval period was modelled, to some degree, on the coins produced by Rome, adopted and adapted by the great successor kingdoms that had followed the Empire’s demise in the west. Simply having a coinage minted under one’s own name was to stake a claim on the legendary and exalted status of Caesar. To mint coins was also to adopt one of the outward trappings of an elite club whose members could consider themselves the heirs of Rome – the Christian kings of western Europe. This was probably heady stuff for a Viking warlord like Guthrum.
In late 877 he had been one warlord among many, just another Viking chancer plying his bloody business among the surprisingly spongy kingdoms of Britain; by 879 he was the acknowledged king of an ancient realm, baptized by a king anointed by the pope. Of course, being a member of this club also demanded overt Christianity as a condition of membership, and by using his baptismal name (on a coinage also marked with crosses) Guthrum (as Æthelstan) was making sure this message was distributed as widely as possible. Coins were a particularly useful propaganda tool in this regard: nobody could forget who the king was, not when his name was stamped on every new silver penny.9
In any case, finding himself the ruler of a kingdom in which the majority of the population were Christian and Anglo-Saxon, Guthrum didn’t need to be a Viking Machiavelli to recognize that it would be politic to promote himself as both of these things: if he wanted to be accepted as a legitimate Christian East Anglian king, he would need to be a Christian East Anglian. The thoroughness with which new Viking rulers adopted the outward trappings of their adopted kingdom was manifested with the most spectacular irony during the decade after Guthrum’s death. In the mid- to late 890s, a new coin was designed and produced that bore the legend ‘SC EADMVND REX A’ (Sanctus Eadmund Rex Anglorum): ‘St Edmund, King of the [East] Angles’. Less than a generation after Ivar and Ubbe – the Viking leaders of the micel here – had deprived the last native king of East Anglia of his garrulous head, his memory was being celebrated and his cult promoted by the new Anglo-Viking regime.
This wasn’t a phenomenon confined to East Anglia. In all of the regions that had fallen under Viking dominance, efforts were under way to create models of authority and cultural compromise that were as indebted to the Anglo-Saxon past as they were to Viking novelty. This was a new world, broken and remade over twenty years of war. But what emerged was not a neatly bifurcated England, split between an Anglo-Saxon south and a Viking north. It was more complicated than that, its identities less clear cut, its politics more tangled, its trajectory uncertain.
This is the peace which King Alfred and King Guthrum and the councillors of all the English race [ealles Angelcynnes witan] and the people who are in East Anglia have all agreed on and confirmed with oaths, for themselves and for all their subjects, both for the living and for the unborn, who care to have God’s favour or ours,
1. First concerning our boundaries: up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to Watling Street.10
This is how the treaty of Alfred and Guthrum opens. It was made, not in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Edington, but probably at some point between 886 when Alfred took control of London and 890 when Guthrum died.11 Its first clause is often described as the earliest definition of the southern boundary of what came to be known as the ‘Danelaw’ – that part of Britain in which Danish laws and customs prevailed from the end of the ninth century. Traditional maps of Viking settlement use this glorified boundary clause to ink a border on to the map of Britain, plotting a great wobbly diagonal from London to somewhere near Wroxeter. The overall implication of such maps is clear enough, even while scholarship demurs: this was a frontier, and beyond it the English-speaking people of Britain had passed into the clutches of a foreign people, to choke under the Danish yoke until liberation came from the south.
But the ‘Danelaw’, at least in that sense, never existed; there was no great Viking realm stretching from the Thames to the Tyne. For one thing, the treaty of Alfred and Guthrum makes no mention of any such entity. Indeed, the term ‘Danelaw’ wasn’t recorded until the early eleventh century.12 What the treaty seems primarily concerned with is defining the extent of Alfred’s – rather than Guthrum’s – practical authority. Firstly, it implicitly recognizes Alfred’s status as the de facto ruler of all those lands that Viking armies had failed to overrun permanently, while Guthrum (Æthelstan), notably described now as ‘king’, is associated only with the people of East Anglia, the kingdom to which he had taken his army in 880.
Most of the rest of Britain is abandoned to an undefined sphere of influence, the only clear characteristic of which seems to be that this influence did not belong to Alfred. This was nothing new: East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria (let alone anything further west or north) had never been part of Wessex and had only briefly (and intermittently) fallen under West Saxon influence. They were, however, all areas into which Viking armies had already intruded and assumed a degree of political control. On the other hand, most of the lands south of the treaty border were regions where West Saxon dominance had been acknowledged for decades.
Most, that is, but not all. Mercia, its native rulers broken and dispossessed, had received rough treatment throughout the 870s. Now, by the terms of the treaty drawn up by Alfred and Guthrum, it was carved up with impunity, divided along a diagonal axis, its south-western territories passing into the care of an expanded, ‘Greater’ Wessex. In practical charge of the Mercian rump at this time was a man named Æthelred. It seems that he had succeeded Ceolwulf as the ruler of (unoccupied) Mercia, but unlike his predecessor was rarely referred to as king. (The Welsh on his western border, whom he mercilessly harassed during the 880s, considered him to be such, but their opinion counted for little in Wessex.)
Instead, Æthelred was generally referred to as ‘ealdorman’ in West Saxon sources, or else was given the suitably vague title ‘lord of the Mercians’. By 883 he had acknowledged his subservience to Alfred, and in 886 was given delegated authority in London, a new West Saxon acquisition that had also once been subject to the Mercian kings (being granted authority over something which had historically been a possession was a particularly direct demonstration of dispossession and reduced status – a bit like a neighbour annexing part of your garden, and then giving you the job of looking after it). He was subsequently married to Alfred’s daughter Æthelflæd (becoming, in an echo of the deal with Guthrum, Alfred’s ‘son’ as well as his political subordinate). Whatever ambitions Æthelred may once have had to revive the fortunes of an autonomous Mercia were being rapidly squished by West Saxon power and tied up in clever dynastic entanglements: absorbed by the Alfredian blob.
And so we should recognize that the treaty was never intended to delimit a Viking sphere of influence: not one inch of the land that formed the ‘Danelaw’ was Alfred’s to give, and none of it could have been taken away by him even if he had wanted to. It was, rather, a treaty that enlisted the aid of Alfred’s godson, Guthrum, in the formalization of West Saxon territorial claims that now included half of Mercia as well as all of the land south of the Thames: a land charter for a Greater Wessex. Alfred would spend the remainder of his reign crafting that nation into something new – an inclusive national identity, expressed most obviously in the formulation of an unprecedented royal style. No longer would Alfred be described, like his predecessors, only as rex Westsaxonum or rex Occidentalium Saxonum (‘king of the West Saxons’); instead,
from the 880s onward, he would increasingly be known instead as rex Anglorum et Saxonum, or, as Asser has it, Ælfred Angul-Saxonum rex: ‘Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons’.
A sense of what Alfred was hoping to encapsulate is articulated in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry detailing Alfred’s occupation of London in 886: ‘and to him turned all of the English that were not in thrall to Danish men’.13 Alfred, it is clear, now saw himself as king of all the ‘English’ – an idea also present in the first lines of the Alfred–Guthrum treaty with its invocation of ‘councillors of all the English race [ealles Angelcynnes witan]’. The Angelcynn – the ‘English-kin’ – was an elastic description that would allow him and his dynasty to promote a claim to natural lordship over everyone and anyone who was not considered ‘Danish’ in the former English-speaking kingdoms of Britain. Indeed, in its most grandiose expression, it went even further, encompassing ‘all the Christians of the island of Britain’.14 Clearly, its formulation was politically expedient, creating an artificial homogeneity among the people Alfred now claimed to govern, papering over the annexation of western Mercia and allowing remarkable leeway for future territorial aggrandizement. But it also created something as powerful as it was illusory, an idea that would refuse to go away: it created the idea of a single English people and, by extension, the idea of a natural and contiguous homeland that could be – should be – subject to the authority of a single king. Far from establishing a coherent ‘Danish’ realm in Britain, the Viking wars and the agreements of Alfred and Guthrum that followed had produced something far more enduring. Alfred and the Vikings had invented England.15
This, of course, was just a little England. In the 890s, it comprised only the rump of Mercia and the land south of the Thames. But, in this act of rebranding, Alfred had created a remarkably durable, and elastic, identity. This identity allowed Alfred’s descendants to promote the idea (and perhaps they even believed it themselves) that every act of aggression and territorial expansion directed northwards was a ‘liberation’ of the English rather than the imperial conquest it really was. The translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People into Old English around the same time can be seen as part of this project – a new emphasis placed by the West Saxon court on shared history, rather than regional differences. Of course, for this to work it was essential that ‘Englishness’ could be easily and straightforwardly differentiated from anything else. And it is in this context that we should see the creation of the ‘Dane’ as the catch-all category for ‘foreign johnny’, bandied about with great liberality and very little specificity in the pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.16
Chesterton saw the battle of Edington as a contest for the soul of England, waged between the noble indigenous peoples of Britain and the dead-eyed Viking alien. This, clearly, is also how Alfred, Asser and the Anglo-Saxon chronicler wanted us to see it – a watershed for the creation of a unified English community. But this was almost certainly not how the battle was seen by the people who fought in it. Alfred’s army was led by the ealdormen of the West Saxon shires, but the origins of the personnel who fought for the king are entirely unknown. About Guthrum’s army there can be even less certainty, and it is likely that a part of it (perhaps even a large part of it) was comprised, not of people born overseas, but of Mercians, East Anglians and others of British birth. From a West Saxon perspective such people would still have been Vikings – ‘Danes’ as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle saw them – despite being just as ‘British’ as those they fought.
This, indeed, may have been the case from a relatively early date throughout Britain. Although we know that the micel here did receive outside reinforcements – the ‘great summer-fleet’ (micel sumorlida) that arrived during 870 from overseas and attached itself to the band fighting Alfred and Æthelred in Wessex is a case in point17 – it is not at all certain that these were adequate to compensate for the casualties incurred over long campaigns, or for the attrition caused by those Vikings who may have cut their losses and returned home to farm and family. It seems likely, therefore, that some ‘Vikings’ must have had more local origins,18 and it is not hard to imagine the mechanisms that might have enabled an itinerant army to attract willing recruits. In the first place, there would always have been lordless men, outlaws and exiles, runaway slaves and disinherited sons, all too eager to join a successful war-band and gain a share in the spoils of war. It was still a problem a century and a half later, when Archbishop Wulfstan of York lamented that ‘it happens that a slave escapes from his lord and leaves Christendom to become a Viking [wicing – a rare contemporary use of the word in Old English]’.19 If this was happening in the eleventh century, there is little reason to suppose that it was not happening in the ninth.20
It is also important to remember that warfare between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and their neighbours had long been endemic. Although the nature of warfare may have changed, to a young Anglo-Saxon warrior with a lust for treasure and adventure, joining a Viking raiding army on a campaign in some other part of Britain would not have seemed too dissimilar to the expeditions mounted by men of his father’s or grandfather’s generation. Moreover, it is also likely that – in those regions where Viking warlords had established more formal political control – men who had always owed military service of some sort would have continued to feel that their allegiances were local rather than ethnic; such men were likely to have had few qualms about following a ‘foreign’ king in raids on their neighbours, perpetuating traditions of insular animosity dating back centuries. This tendency would have been magnified if new rulers promised plunder, advancement and security for farms and families – even more so, if they were bright enough to see the value in embracing an English name and the religion of their subjects.
But it was not only the English of the ‘Danelaw’ who could become Vikings in West Saxon eyes. The fifth and final clause of the treaty of Alfred and Guthrum makes it clear that the possibility of members of Alfred’s new Angelcynn skipping off to join the ‘Danes’ was viewed as a real problem: ‘And we agreed on the day when the oaths were sworn that no slaves or freemen might go over to the [Danish] army without permission, any more than any of theirs to us.’21 Indeed, the danger of Alfred’s subjects renouncing their West Saxon loyalties may lie behind Alfred’s treatment of the Wiltshire ealdorman Wulfhere, who was stripped of his lands for ‘leaving without permission’;22 it was not just those at the bottom of society who could be considered an Anglo-Saxon in the morning and a ‘Dane’ by the afternoon. And if further proof of the flimsiness of these ethnic labels were required, West Saxon dynastic politics would eventually deliver it – in spectacular fashion – on Alfred’s death.
13
Rogue Traders
It was a scene of strange incongruity, for in contrast with these barbaric men and their rough songs and shouts, the walls were hung with rare spoils that betokened civilized workmanship. Fine tapestries that Norman women had worked; richly chased weapons that princes of France and Spain had wielded; armour and silken garments from Byzantium and the Orient – for the dragon ships ranged far.
ROBERT E. HOWARD, ‘The Dark Man’ (1931)1
In his appraisal of Alfred’s later years, Bishop Asser was at pains to stress the frustrating lengths to which the king had gone in his efforts to galvanize his subjects into undertaking works for the good of the realm. It is fairly clear, however, from the bishop’s tone in this part of his biography that Alfred had encountered real difficulty in convincing his people that they wanted to spend (or wanted their slaves to spend) their afternoons digging ditches, or raising palisades, or whatever other toil the local reeve had been tasked with delegating. Indeed, when we hear the list of labours that the king required of his people (‘cities and towns to be rebuilt […] others to be constructed where previously there were none’; ‘treasures incomparably fashioned in gold and silver at his instigation’; ‘royal halls and chambers marvellously constructed of stone and wood’; ‘royal residences of maso
nry, moved from their old position and splendidly reconstructed at more appropriate places by his royal command’), it is no wonder that ‘gently instructing’ and ‘cajoling’ soon gave way to ‘commanding, and (in the end, when his patience was exhausted) […] sharply chastising those who were disobedient’ and ‘despising popular stupidity and stubbornness in every way’.2
Evidently, however, all this chastising and despising wasn’t always enough, and the king sometimes needed outside intervention in order to convince his subjects of the wisdom of his building programmes. When, according to Asser, Alfred’s efforts failed to yield the desired results, and ‘enemy forces burst in by land or sea (or, as frequently happens, by both!)’,3 it merely served to teach the people of Greater Wessex a valuable lesson about the unimpeachable wisdom of their king. His wretched subjects ‘having lost their fathers, spouses, children, servants, slaves, handmaidens, the fruits of their labours and all their possessions’ were probably wasting their time if they thought they could expect much compassion from their spiritual and political leaders: Asser was clear about where to place the blame. The laziness, stubbornness, ineptitude and ingratitude of the people had, in the bishop’s eyes, brought affliction down upon their own heads.4 And, as he approvingly noted, at least those who had ‘negligently scorned the royal commands’ now ‘loudly applaud the king’s foresight and promise to do what they had previously refused – that is, with respect to constructing fortresses and to the other things of general advantage to the whole kingdom’.5
Viking Britain- an Exploration Page 21