by Robert Lacey
When St. Augustine and his Christian missionaries arrived in 597 a.d. to turn the Angles into angels, Englisc proved remarkably flexible and welcoming to the terminology of the new religion. The word angel itself, along with disciple, martyr, relic, and shrine are just a few of the Greek and Latin words that were happily assimilated into the language. But the invasion that made the decisive contribution to the language was a second wave of Scandinavian trespassers - the Vikings who began to occupy the northern and eastern areas of England in the aftermath of raids that started in the 790s. This new generation of sea warriors came from the same corner of the North Sea as the original Anglo-Saxon invaders, and they spoke a very similar language. In the course of the next century the Vikings managed to overrun Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and Essex. Only Wessex held the line against the fearsome Norsemen, whom the English referred to as “Danes” - - and this was thanks to Wessex’s remarkable young king, Alfred, who came to the throne in 871 after the death of his three elder brothers.
The famous tale of Alfred burning the cakes because he was worrying so much about how to defeat the Vikings entered English folklore in a document written around the year 1000. This would suggest that Alfred was the Winston Churchill of the English at the turn of the first millennium - or, more precisely, perhaps, their George Washington, since Alfred’s retreat with a small band of followers into the swampy refuge of the Somerset marshes resonates with Washington’s historic wintering in Valley Forge. The fate of Englishness hung on Alfred and his little band of stalwarts on the fortified island of Athelney. That was where legend had it that he burned the cakes which a farmer’s wife had asked him to watch - they were probably lumps of dough set out on a griddle pan, over an open fire - and the king’s brooding had fruitful consequences, for not only did he emerge from the marshes with a military strategy which repulsed the Vikings; he also devised an inspirational array of reforms and innovations that were to give decisive identity to the country that was by now known as ”Engla-lond.”
By the year 1000 Alfred had been dead for a century, but he ranked alongside the Venerable Bede as a shaper of England’s developing identity. His greatest inspiration had been to understand how knowledge liberates - that knowledge is power. “The saddest thing about any man, is that he be ignorant,” he once said, “and the most exciting thing is that he knows.” Itching with intellectual and technological curiosity, the king was anxious to work out the exact time of day. So he invented a graduated candle on which you could mark off the hours as it burned - and then, because his palaces were so draughty, he devised a ventilated cow’s horn lantern to put over the top and stop the candle blowing out. At the age of nearly forty, in the midst of what he described as “the various and manifold cares of his kingdom,” Alfred started to learn Latin so that he could translate some of the key Latin texts into English. “It seems better to me . . .,” he wrote “that we should translate certain books which are most necessary for all men to know into the language that we can all understand, and also arrange it... so that all the youth of free men now among the English people . . . are able to read English writing as well.”
The king commissioned scholars to do most of the work, but he checked everything they wrote, and interspersed their translation with his own comments and musings in what was probably a sort of running seminar. He was an extraordinary inspiration, the only English monarch ever to be accorded the title “The Great,” and the greatest achievement of his reign was the creation of the first history of England in the English language, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. By the year 1000 the Chronicle had been running just over a century, the work of monks in monasteries as far apart as Canterbury, Winchester, Worcester, and Peterborough.
In the military and political spheres, Alfred’s achievement was to regain control of Wessex and to start on the capturing of the rest of Engla-lond. Within a few decades of his death in 899, the English writ ran all across southern England and far up into the Midlands, with the Norsemen driven back into the north and east of the country, inside an area that became known as the “Danelaw.” The boundary between the original Anglo-Saxons and this second wave of newcomers roughly followed the line of Watling Street, the old Roman road that ran diagonally across the country from London to Chester. But many English remained living in the Danelaw, and as they dealt, day-by-day, with the invaders whose language was both similar yet awkwardly different from their own, the first and most important variety of “pidgin” English was developed.
Before the Viking invasions, both Englisc and Norse were strongly inflected languages, with the complicated grammatical word endings that persist to this day in German and, to a lesser extent, in French. If an Anglo-Saxon from Wessex wanted to say to someone in the Danelaw, “Have you a horse to sell?” he would ask, “Haefst thu hors to sellenne?” - which would correspond to “Hefir thu hross at selja?” in Norse. The Norseman would reply, “Ek heji tvau hors enn einn er aldr” - meaning “I have two horses, but one is old,” the equivalent of “Ic haebbe tu hors ac an is eald” in Englisc. The two men understood the important words - “hors” and “hross,” “eald” and “aldr” - but they had difficulties when they came to their clashing grammar.(24)
The solution was the rubbing away through day-to-day usage of complicated word endings. Today most modern English plurals are formed simply by adding an s - one horse, two horses - and adjectives remain the same whether singular or plural. Nor are nouns divided between masculine and feminine, as they are in German, French, Spanish, Italian - and in every other European language. Norse also added extra flexibility to English, extending the range of verbal alternatives: you can rear (English) or raise (Norse) a child, and impart subtle distinctions to your meaning by choosing between wish (E) and want (N), craft (E) and skill (N), or hide (E) and skin (N).(25) By the year 1000, a hybrid language had been stirred together by the integration of the two great waves of invaders, and a common tongue existed that was at least roughly understood in every corner of the country.
Language helped and reflected political unification. By a canny combination of marriage alliances and battle, Alfreds children and grandchildren extended their authority into the Danelaw in the early tenth century until they controlled every corner of what we would recognise today as England. After Athelstan, shrewdest of the great king’s grandsons, had himself crowned at Kingston (King’s town), the modern Kingston-on-Thames, in 925 a.d., he grandiosely took to calling himself “King of all Britain,” and he confirmed his authority, over England at least, by defeating an invading force of Scots and Irish in a bloodthirsty battle which the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle celebrated with a burst of Beowulfian verse:
The field darkened
with soldiers’ blood, after the morning-time
when the sun, that glorious star,
bright candle of God, the Lord eternal,
glided over the depths...
They left behind to divide the corpses,
to enjoy the carrion, the dusty-coated,
horny-beaked black raven,
and the grey-coated eagle, white-rumped,
greedy war-hawk, and the wolf,
grey beast in the forest? (26)
In the years following Athelstan’s death in 939, the Chronicle recorded events great and small that made up the history of the now unified Engla-lond. In 962 a.d. there was “a very great pestilence” and “a great fatal fire” in London in which St. Paul’s, the city’s principal church, was burnt down - and then, in 973 a.d., King Edgar, Alfred’s great-grandson, was anointed in Bath in a solemn coronation using a liturgy that remains the basis of English coronations to this day. If Archbishop Dunstan or any of the clergy officiating in Bath had found themselves in Westminster Abbey in 1953, they would have had little difficulty picking their way through the rituals of the coronation ceremony of Queen Elizabeth II.
In the year 978 a.d. the Chronicle recorded a tragi-comic accident in Wiltshire, where the royal council, almost to a man, fell through the floor of a
newly constructed royal manor house at Calne, with the loss of several lives. It was an important entry in the history of English architecture, since it provides the earliest written evidence of a dwelling that was more than one storey high. Certain advances in construction techniques clearly remained to be worked out. But the Chronicle felt it significant to note that while some of England’s doughtiest secular figures fell flailing to the floor, “the holy archbishop Dunstan alone was left standing up on a beam.”(27)
Before leaving the month of February, let us spare a nod for Valentinus - the third-century priest who was martyred in Rome in the reign of the Emperor Claudius and whose feast day was celebrated on February 14, as it has been ever since. The details of St. Valentines life are obscure, and ecclesiastical experts have been unable to discover any reason why he should have become the patron saint of lovers and romance. Historians note that mid-February was the occasion of the licentious Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia, when women sought cures for sterility, while folklorists trace the modern orgy of card-sending and candle-lit dinners back to the old country belief that birds commence coupling on February 14. Either or both of these explanations may be correct, and they would seem to illustrate the cleverness with which the early church appropriated heathen superstitions for its own purposes. But there is no Christian reason why St. Valentine should be the only saint in the calendar whose feast is celebrated with universal ardour today.
March: Heads for Food
Nowadays we talk about the man or woman in the street. In the year 1000 the average was represented by the man with the spade - or, in this month’s calendar illustration, the man with the rake, the mattock, or pick-axe, and the apron full of seeds. The cultivator and his family were the backbone of the land.
The month of March heralded the arrival of spring. Winter was finally loosening its grip, for March was the month which contained the spring equinox. March 21 was the magical day blessed with exactly the same amount of light and dark in the course of twenty-four hours - and this is indicated by two sets of Roman numerals at the bottom of the calendar: nox hor xii (Night hours 12); habet dies hor xii (The day has 12 hours). In January the calendar had listed sixteen hours of night and only eight of daylight, and for February the figures had been fourteen to ten. But from March 21 onwards the sun would annexe more and more of the night, and the cycle of cultivation could get seriously under way. It was the quietness of life in a medieval English village that would most strike a visitor from today - no planes overhead, no swish or rumble from traffic. Stop reading this book a minute. Can you hear something? Some machine turning? A waterpipe running? A distant radio or a pneumatic drill digging up the road? Of all the varieties of modern pollution, noise is the most insidious.
Yet in the year 1000 the hedgerows actually had a sound. You could hear baby birds chirping in their nests, and the only mechanical noise you would hear came from the wheezing of the blacksmith’s bellows. In some villages you might have heard the bell in the church tower, or the creaking and clunking of the wooden cogs in one of the watermills that had been constructed in the last 200 years, and if you lived near one of England’s dozen or so cathedrals, you would have heard the heavy metal cascadings of sound from the copper windpipes of one of the recently imported church organs. But that was all. As bees buzzed and wood pigeons cooed, you could listen to God’s creation and take pleasure in its subtle variety.
The year 1000 was an empty world, with much more room to stretch out and breathe. With a total English population of little more than a million, there was just one person for every forty or fifty with whom we are surrounded today, and most people lived in small communities, a couple of dozen or so homes circling a village green or extending up and down a single, winding street - the archetypal little village or hamlet to which the modern suburban cul-de-sac pays nostalgic homage. The centuries leading up to 1000 a.d. were the years in which people picked out the crossroads, valley, or stream-crossing where they thought they could piece together a living. Villages built around a green may originally have been constructed in a circular pattern to provide protection for livestock against wolves or other marauders. By the end of the first millennium almost every modern English village existed and bore its modern name, and these names can tell us whether the identity of that village was primarily shaped by the Anglo-Saxons or the Danes.
Place names ending in ham, the Old English for “settlement,” indicate an Anglo-Saxon origin - as in Durham, Clapham, or Sandringham. Other Anglo-Saxon endings include ing (as in Reading), stowe (as in Felixstowe), stead (as in Hampstead), and ton (as in Kingston). Viking settlements can be identified by the ending by, which originally meant a farm (as in Whitby, Derby, or Grimsby); and other Danish endings include thorpe (as in Scunthorpe), toft, meaning a plot of land (as in Lowestoft), and scale, meaning a temporary hut or shelter (as in Windscale).
Armed with these pedigrees, we can look at the names of villages along a stretch of marshy Lincolnshire coast to see how the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes rubbed shoulders. The Anglo-Saxons lived inland in settlements like Covenham and Alvingham. But less than five miles away there were Danes living in North Thoresby, or closer to the sea at Grainthorpe. And then there were places where the two heritages mingled. The town of Melton almost certainly started out as the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Middletoun. But when the Vikings came along, they changed Middle to Meddle, and the succeeding years smoothed down Meddle -toun to Melton.(28)
The village where he lived was the beginning and almost the end of the Englishman’s world. He knew that he lived in Engla-lond, and he probably knew the name of the king whose crude image was stamped on the coins that were starting to play quite a role in the village economy. He would have also made excursions to the tops of the nearest hills to gaze out on other villages which he might have visited, and he had almost certainly made his way to the nearest market town along one of the deep, sunken tracks that wound their way between the fields.
As he stood on the hilltop, he would not have seen significantly more woodland than we would today. It is frequently supposed that medieval England was clad in thick forests, but Neolithic Britons had started cutting down trees and growing crops as early as 5000 B.C., and the Romans were major land managers, laying down villas and farms, as well as their roads, across the countryside. Anglo-Saxon plough teams continued the process, so an Anglo-Saxon standing on the top of, say, Box Hill in Surrey in the year 1000 would have looked out on a pattern of vegetation that was little different from that surveyed by Jane Austens Emma eight hundred years later.
That Anglo-Saxon would also have seen one or two of the bright, new stone parish churches that were to become the heart of English village life in the second millennium. England’s earliest Christian missionaries were monks who went out from the cathedral abbeys to preach at the foot of the tall crosses that survive in the centre of a few ancient towns and villages today. The tall cross marked the point where the people of the village gathered to pray, but as the church grew richer, congregations were able to build themselves houses of worship, first in wood and later in stone.
The Englishman’s own home was certainly a wooden structure, based on a framework of sturdy beams stuck into the ground and fastened together with wooden pegs. This framework was then covered in planks or served as the basis for a heavy, basket-like weaving of willow or hazel branches that were covered in “cob” - a mixture of clay, straw, and cow dung that was used until quite recent times for the construction of cottages in Somerset and Devon. Roofs were thatched with straw or reeds, while windows were small gaps cut into the walls and covered with wattle shutters, since glass - the product of beechwood ash fired in a charcoal furnace with washed sand - was a precious, and probably an imported, commodity.(29)
Village communities provided reassuringly constant backdrops for a life. The average Anglo-Saxon could probably recognise every duck, chicken, and pig in his village and knew whom it belonged to - as he knew everything about his neighbours’ l
ives. His social circle would not have filled three or four pages in a modern Filofax, and he would never have needed fresh leaves for updating, since the parents of his neighbours had been his parents’ neighbours, and their children were destined to live their lives side-by-side with his. How else could life be? The closest modern parallel is with the restricted and repetitious circle of friends that surround the central families of radio and television soap-opera characters. In the year 1000, the same Christian names were often passed down traditionally inside families, but there were no surnames. There was not yet any need for them.
In the countryside around the villages, the fields were beginning to take on a shape that we would recognise, thanks to the labours of the ploughman with his powerful but cumbersome train of oxen. They cut the soil deep and long, but they were awkward to turn when the end of the furrow had been reached. So just as the village livestock grazed together on communal pasture, the fields created for arable cultivation were also organised on a community basis, with each unit of ploughland taking the form of a long and comparatively narrow strip.
Aelfric, the Cerne Abbas schoolteacher, got his pupils to practice their Latin by learning a dialogue in which the pupils played the parts of different farm labourers, describing their work to a master who cross-questioned them: