by Ed West
But this is if you could get your hands on food, for starvation was a frequent event. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded grimly:
975 ‘Came a very great famine.’
976 ‘Here in this year was the great famine.’
1005 ‘Here in this year there was the great famine, such that no one ever remembered one so grim before.’
During the worst of these, a group of forty or fifty people were seen jumping off Beachy Head in Sussex while holding hands. And one of the oldest surviving English jokes says as much about their tragic lives as their humor.
Q: What makes bitter things sweet? A: Hunger.
Another Anglo-Saxon joke goes like this:
Q: What has two ears and one eye, two feet and 1,200 heads, one belly, one back, one pair of hands and one neck?
A: A one-eyed garlic seller with 1,200 heads of garlic.
You probably had to be there.
Almost every July the food ran out, and the poor would often feed themselves on ergot, the fungus that grows on rye bread and which in bad times was the only thing available. Unfortunately, this produces an effect similar to a bad acid trip, and medieval famines were probably not the best environments to experiment with recreational drugs; ergot-eaters would describe feeling anxious and dizzy, with a burning sensation in the arms and legs, strange noises in the ears, and uncontrollable twitching. A somewhat more enjoyable-sounding subsistence food of the time was ‘Crazy Bread’, a mixture that included poppies and hemp.
Life was often so bad that fathers would sell children younger than seven into slavery, and there was even a word in Old English for people who volunteered to give up their freedom, which at least ensured you got fed as a part of the livestock, since one man was worth eight oxen. Slaves, also called ‘live money’, still accounted for over 10 percent of the population by 1066, and 25 percent in more remote areas like Cornwall, so it wasn’t quite the social democratic paradise that anti-Norman historians make out. In fact it was the Normans who phased out slavery, replacing it with the somewhat better condition of serfdom (which was still pretty awful, obviously).
Slaves were often poor people who had gone down in the world, or they were native Britons (or as the Saxons called them, ‘Welsh’, which means ‘slave’ as well as ‘foreigner’), but sometimes they were there as a punishment, which was more practical than prison.11 In the case of incest, the man convicted went to the king as his slave and the woman to the local bishop. Sleeping with another man’s slave was also a crime: anyone who deflowered a virgin slave of the royal family had to pay fifty shillings, a huge sum; if she was a slave of the royal flour mill, it was half this amount, and for an under-slave, the lowest class, only twelve shillings.
Bishop Wulfstan, a cleric and lawmaker at the turn of the millennium who was fond of delivering damning sermons on how everyone was going to hell, painted a grim picture of life when he slammed Englishmen who ‘club together to buy a woman between them as a joint purchase, and practise foul sin with that one woman, one after another, just like dogs, who do not care about filth; and then sell God’s creature for a price out of the country into the power of strangers.’
Even for free people poverty was the norm; the vast majority in 1066 lived in the countryside, which for most people before the modern era meant a life of relentless toil and misery. It was also a closed world, and unless they were forced into joining the army, or fyrd,12 most men would rarely even visit the next village, let alone other parts of the country. People even two counties away might speak incomprehensibly to them, and since violence was far more common than it is today, a stranger would by law have to blow a horn before entering a village to show he wasn’t up to no good.13
Most free people were classified as ceorls, that is peasants, from where we get the word ‘churlish’. Dressed in the simple tunics worn by most—there were no buttons at the time—they worked the land, and often owned a small plot, although fields would not be enclosed for centuries to come. The common meadow was ploughed in strips of a ‘furrow’s length’, or furlong, 22 yards wide and 220 yards long; this would become the length of a cricket pitch as that game evolved in the medieval countryside to become the quintessential sport for the English man of leisure; furlong is also still a measurement used in horse racing.
There were various different classes of peasant, each signifying an extra gradation of misery and burden, such as the wonderfully named drengs in the north of England, free peasants who only had to give military service in exchange for land. Below them were the lowly geburas, origin of the word ‘boor’, who had ‘a formidable burden of rents and services’14 and had to work two days a week for their lord, plus three days a week during harvest and between Candlemas (February 2) and Easter. A gebura also had to plough an acre a week ‘between the first breaking-up of the soil after harvest [late August] and Martinmas [November 11], and to fetch the seed for its sowing from the lord’s barn’. In total he had to labor on seven acres a year for rent, on top of extra ‘boon work’, and also be a watchman from time to time. In return for this he got ten pence a year at Michaelmas [September 29], 23 bushels of barley and two hens at Martinmas, and a sheep or two pence at Easter (two pence was obviously worth a bit more back then). And they were relatively privileged; compared to actual slaves, who could expect a punch in the face every Michaelmas if they were lucky, they were living the dream.
And shepherds got some perks in return for their two-days-a-week obligation, including twelve night’s dung for Christmas. It might not sound like a great present from a twenty-first-century point of view, but they were happy (probably).
Above the coerl were the thegn, the Anglo-Saxon nobility, of whom there were about four to five thousand men. To be considered of this rank one had to own not just a relatively nice house and five hides of land, but also your own church; but even a thegn’s house wouldn’t have been what one thinks of as a medieval pile, as most people lived in buildings made of wattle and daub, and it was only in the twelfth century when the wealthy began living in houses built of stone. The Romans had left large stone buildings, but many people considered them to have been a race of giants, and some actively avoided Roman ruins as they thought them haunted.
Even free men had certain duties towards their lords. Everyone was required to do physical labor and to take up arms. If the country was invaded, they would be required to join the fyrd, although most people would try to get out of this so that their crops didn’t rot or something awful didn’t happen to their women folk while they were away. It was this fyrd which was called in the summer of 1066 as the threat of foreign invasion materialized.
CHAPTER TWO
Ethelred the Unready
The origins of the disaster ultimately lie with the complicated love life of King Edgar. The great-grandson of Alfred the Great had come to the throne after his brother Eadwig had died at just nineteen; Eadwig had ruled for four years and was best remembered for missing his own coronation because he was in bed with a ‘strumpet’ and the strumpet’s mother. Edgar was just sixteen when he became king and seems to have had a similarly active interest in the opposite sex. After his first wife died in 963 he carried off Wilfrida, a nun from Wilton Abbey, making her his mistress; as atonement for this the king was made to do penance for seven years by not wearing his crown and fasting twice a week, hardly a death-defying punishment (in fact now considered to be superb health advice and the basis of a fashionable diet).
However Wilfrida escaped from her convent and went back to her lover, and eventually they had a daughter, Edith,1 although for whatever reason it didn’t last and soon Edgar found love again. (Edith would later become a saint after a holy but short life). According to legend the widowed Edgar now heard about a young woman called Elfrida who was famously beautiful and so sent one of his noblemen, his foster brother Ethelwald of East Anglia, to go out to report on whether the story was true. Ethelwald found that she was indeed very beautiful and so married her himself. Edgar naturally wasn’t too ple
ased about this, and came to visit, killing his love rival in a hunt and marrying Elfrida.
It wasn’t the most auspicious of starts to a relationship, and Elfrida would later be accused of witchcraft, a power which supposedly allowed her to take the form of a horse. She was allegedly seen by a bishop ‘running and leaping hither and thither with horses and showing herself shamelessly to them,’2 although strangely no one else corroborated the bishop’s story.
By now the last Viking-controlled areas of England had been absorbed, and under Edgar the country already had the basis of a legal system and a fixed currency, as well as counties that roughly correspond to today’s.3 However the smooth-running of the state depended on having a stable, healthy and not unhinged man on the throne, and Edgar alas died aged just thirty-one; the previous monarchs had passed away at nineteen, thirty-two and twenty-five, so he’d done relatively well to get that far. He left two sons by two different wives, one of his heirs violent and angry and the other meek but useless.
The crown passed to his elder son, Edward, who was aged only thirteen or at most sixteen. Edward was known for having uncontrollable rages and would strike fear into everyone around him and ‘hounded them not only with tongue-lashings, but even with cruel beatings’4, while his younger half brother, Elfrida’s son Ethelred, ‘seemed more gentle to everyone in word and deed’.
However Edward’s reign didn’t last very long, and ended as they tended to in this period, violently. After four years on the throne he was stabbed to death during a fight, after being dragged from his horse in a courtyard. No one’s sure if it was premeditated, or as a result of a spontaneous brawl outside a royal residence (spontaneous brawls were frequent in medieval history). According to one unlikely story Elfrida5 herself stabbed him, and the wicked stepmother immediately put her own son on the throne; he was apparently so ungrateful at having been made king that she hit him over the head with a candlestick. After this Ethelred was left with a phobia of candles for the rest of his life, which must have been debilitating when it was the only source of artificial light.6
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle said of Edward’s murder that ‘no worse deed than this for the English people was committed since they first came to Britain’, and inevitably in death Edward ‘the martyr’ became more popular than he was in life. After an initial hasty burial, the former king was reinterred at Shaftesbury convent where a couple of unfortunate crippled peasants were apparently cured after visiting his remains; after some further miracles by his grave, he was dug up a second time and buried at the more prestigious abbey church.
His cult mainly grew because of the awfulness of his brother, hopelessly ineffective half the time and viciously brutal the rest. Ethelred became known as ‘the Unready’, literally ‘badly-advised’ in Old English, a pun on his name, which meant ‘well-advised’. He is best remembered for paying the Vikings to go away in an enormous protection racket called Danegeld, and, as Rudyard Kipling wrote with the benefit of nine hundred year’s hindsight, ‘That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld, And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!’ Ethelred never did.
As well as the Danes, it was also a time of intense conflict within the realm. A chronicler called Byrhtferth wrote: ‘Strife threw the kingdom into turmoil, moved shire against shire, family against family, prince against prince, ealdormen against ealdormen, drove bishop against the people and folk against the pastors set over them’.
Historians of the time are harsh to Ethelred. Apparently at his coronation Bishop Dunstan supposedly ‘could not restrain himself, and poured out in a loud voice the spirit of the prophecy with which his own heart was full. “Inasmuch”, he said, “as you aimed at the throne through the death of your own brother, now hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God: the sin of your shameful mother and the sin of the men who shared in her wicked plot shall not be blotted out except by the shedding of much blood of your miserable subjects, and there shall come upon the people of England such evils as they have not suffered from the time when they came to England until then!”’ It must have been very awkward.7
On the day Ethelred was crowned ‘a bloody fire was seen in the sky’, according to the Chronicle, signalling what a disaster he would be. Another incident from the start of his reign taken as a bad omen was the disaster which befell England’s first and at the time only two-storey building, the royal house at Wiltshire, which collapsed during an assembled royal get-together, leaving only the local bishop standing in a Buster Keaton–style wreckage.
Hanging over the king was the cult of his murdered brother, which grew ever more popular during his reign, encouraged at every opportunity by Ethelred’s enemies (that is, most people). The twelfth century chronicler William of Malmesbury said of Ethelred: ‘the king was always ready for sleep and it was what he did best.’ But his reign was also one of seedy and squalid murder, with a death toll in his court so high George RR Martin would balk at it. During his rule so many leading courtiers and noblemen were stabbed, blinded or hacked to death, with the king’s permission or tacit agreement, that when a Danish pirate claimed the throne many Englishmen gave their support—and when you’re losing in a popularity contest to a Viking you know you’ve really hit rock bottom.
The Vikings (again)
The first Viking onslaught, perhaps triggered by population pressure in Scandinavia and the invention of new sailing technology, hit Britain in AD 786 and accelerated with the ‘Great Heathen Army’ of 865. Large areas of eastern England had since been settled by Danes who had ruled semi-independently in York until the 950s—some 40 percent of villages in Yorkshire have Norse names so presumably there were a lot of them.
But Scandinavia continued to produce huge numbers of excess violent men to sail the seas, restlessly travelling the world to find new lands. In the east the Swedes settled along the rivers flowing down to the Black Sea where they created the first states in the region; the locals called them ‘rowers’ or Rus, and so their kingdom was named Kievan Rus, and later Russia. In the West, around the turn of the millennium Leif ‘the Lucky’ Ericsson became the first European to set foot in the Americas, a fact celebrated every October 9th on Leif Ericsson Day in the Scandinavian-dominated Upper Midwest states.8
Leif’s father Erik the Red had also been an intrepid explorer who discovered Greenland, and on top of this seems to have been an all-round awful human being. Erik’s own father had been exiled from Norway for a murder and Erik followed in his footsteps, forced to leave the country for ‘some killings’ and so heading to Iceland, which was where desperados at the time turned up. He then had to flee from the main settlement in Iceland after killing another man and afterwards once again from this more remote western colony where he murdered yet another three guys. He ended up in Greenland, a name he gave to attract settlers despite its most conspicuous characteristic being snow and ice (Iceland was already taken as a name and they could hardly call it Icierland).
However the Vikings by this stage were already being pacified, and the days when you could just merrily move house after murdering people were numbered—for Christianity was finally taking root. Even Erik’s wife, the incomprehensibly named Thjodhildr, became a Christian and would not sleep with her husband until he abandoned the old gods, which was ‘a great trial to his temper’ apparently; their son Leif would also become a Christian. Since the time of Alfred the Great, when the Vikings were notorious for cruel and convoluted pagan torture rituals, the Danes and Norwegians had slowly embraced the new faith, although it hardly seemed to make them better behaved. What mainly happened is that the veneration of their goddess Frejya was adapted into worship of the Virgin Mary, and the word Thor was replaced with Jesus on statues; other than that the religion’s pacifism seems to have largely passed them by.
Driven out of England, the Vikings had also successfully established themselves in Ireland, which was hopelessly divided between countless different microkingdoms, although the Norwegians (whom the Irish called ‘the fair foreigners’) spent m
uch of their time there fighting the Danes (known as ‘the dark foreigners’).9 The Norwegian Vikings had established a number of cities there, chief among them Dublin in 988, which soon became the centre for their slave trade. Many Irish people were captured and sold off to the Middle East, while others were forcibly taken off to Iceland with Viking men; roughly half of Icelandic mDNA, which is passed through the female line, is Irish in origin.10 The Dublin slave market was also where many unlucky English people would end up before being sold off to far flung places to live God-awful lives of misery.
During this period the Vikings travelled far, and many of their domains remained Scandinavian for some time. The Isle of Man, in between England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, was Norwegian until 1266, and the island’s parliament, the Tynwald (from thing, a Nordic council) is the oldest on earth. Likewise with the Orkneys and Shetlands, which had been heavily colonized by Norwegians and today use many Norse words in their dialect.
According to the thirteenth-century Historiae Norwegia, the Vikings wrestled control of the islands from their two indigenous inhabitants, the Picts and a mysterious group called the Pape. The Picts, the author thought, were only a bit taller than pygmies and they could do amazing things in the morning and evening but at midday they lost all their strength and hid in underground caves. The author also believed that the Pape were Africans who practised Judaism, so one can’t be entirely confident in his primary sources.
The Scandinavian lands were also now forming into states. Norway had been united by a sort of semi-mythical king, Harold Finehair, who got his nickname after he fell in love with a princess who would not marry him until he was king—so he vowed to not cut or comb his hair until he had done it. Finehair went on to have twenty sons, although that number was somewhat reduced by fratricidal killing.