by Robert Lacey
The best evidence of commerce is a letter of 796 a.d. from the emperor Charlemagne to Offa, the great king of Mercia, complaining at variations in the size of the saga, the woollen cloaks and blankets that Mercia exported to France. Charlemagne asked the king to make sure that the cloths would in future be made to the same size that they used to be.(52) This would seem satisfactory evidence of English woollen cloth being exported to Europe a couple of centuries before the millennium, and from the centuries after 1000 a.d. we know that Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester, Rochester, Dover, and all the principal ports of the southeast were busily involved in the wool trade. Since it is certain that all these ports were healthily in business by the year 1000 exporting something, and since we also know that every Viking longship routinely carried a small quantity of rough woven cloth to trade with, it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that ships from the sheep-rich country of Engla-lond engaged in the same trade.
Following in the tradition of predecessors like Athelstan, Ethelred laboured to integrate the prosperous realm he had inherited. The division of England into shires was the most enduring royal achievement of the tenth and eleventh centuries. As the pattern of the country’s towns and villages took shape, so England’s kings had created administrative units around them - Wiltshire around the town of Wilton, Somerset around Somerton, Hampshire around Hamwic, the modern Southampton, and so on. Staffordshire, Bedfordshire, and Warwickshire were all county units created in the tenth century. In every shire there was a shire court, which administered the king’s law, and it was in the reign of Ethelred that the shire reeve, or sheriff, first came into view as the chief executive officer of local government. In a law code issued in 997 a.d. Ethelred ordered the shire reeve and the twelve leading magnates in each locality to swear to accuse no innocent man, nor conceal any guilty one - the earliest English reference to the sworn jury of presentment, ancestor of the Grand Jury which existed in England until 1933, and which still plays a prominent role in the legal processes of the United States of America.”
Trade, law, administration - Ethelred displayed considerable skill and application at the arts of peace. But it was his misfortune to be king of a rich and easygoing country at a time when yet another wave of Viking bandits was coming out of the east. Viking is a word of uncertain origin, meaning sea robber according to some authorities, and sea trader according to others. Both meanings apply. The successive Viking waves of raiding out of Scandinavia in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries reflected scarcity and disorder at home, while the extraordinary technology of their light and warlike longships enabled them to raid and trade wherever they went.
And the Vikings went everywhere. By the year 1000 they had made themselves the first princes of Russia and Kiev. They raided Spain, and provided the mercenaries who made up the Varangian guard for the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople. In the tenth century, they took over part of northern France, turning themselves from Norsemen into Normans and securing French recognition of the duchy of Normandy. They were the inhabitants of England’s Danelaw. The raiders who started harassing the south and west coasts of Ethelred’s kingdom in the early 980s were following in the footsteps of the invaders against whom Alfred had fought only a hundred years earlier. In 988 a major fleet of longships sailed up the Bristol Channel, landed men at Watchet, and raided arrogantly down through Somerset into Devon.
The Vikings were the fresher and better organised for being able to anchor their ships in the ports of Normandy, where their kinsfolk now spoke French and practised Christianity. When the Pope reproached Duke Richard of Normandy in the early 990s for providing such comfort to the enemies of his English neighbours, Richard agreed to stop giving shelter to longships destined for England. A treaty was signed between Ethelred and Richard, binding each side not to entertain the other’s enemies - the first step in a relationship between England and Normandy that would have huge consequences for both countries. But there was no evidence of the Normans working hard to give effect to the agreement, and over on the northern side of the Channel, the Vikings kept coming.
In the summer of 991 a fleet of ninety-three longships sailed into the Thames estuary and ravaged the ports and villages on the coasts of East Anglia and Kent. Most communities paid large ransoms to be rid of the raiders, but the men of Essex rallied outside the port of Maldon under the leadership of their proud, white-haired leader, Byrhtnoth. The Vikings had landed on an island connected to the mainland by a causeway that was visible only at low tide, and the English could have picked the raiders off as they tried to make the mainland. But the overconfident Byrhtnoth honourably agreed to a Viking request that the visitors might be allowed ashore to line up properly before the fight commenced - and the English lost, with terrible slaughter, the earliest recorded example of English fair play on the battlefield.
It was the first entry in the ledger that includes such gentlemanly blunders as the Charge of the Light Brigade, and Byrhtnoth’s fruitless valour was promptly commemorated in similarly heroic verse. “The Battle of Maldon” was the “Top of the Pops” of the year 1000, a melancholy but stirring hit-of-the-moment that was sung by poets and recited at mead benches in long winter evenings, and it made a folk hero of the old general who “shook the slim ash-spear” at the Viking foe:
Though I am white with winters, I will not away,
For I think to lodge me alongside my dear one,
Lay me down by my lord’s right hand ...
English silver is not so softly won.(54)
England’s eagerness to mythologise a loser reflected the sad lack of any homegrown winners in the tricky business of fighting off the Vikings in the final years of the first millennium. The raids became a national trauma, particularly for people living near the coast. Every summer brought the prospect of the dragonships snaking their way upriver, each vessel filled with thirty or more rapacious thugs.
Archaeological remains show no evidence of the Vikings wearing their fearsome horned helmets, which seem to be the imaginings of subsequent generations, but the swords, spears, and battle-axes that have been excavated are ferocious and well-crafted weapons. The Vikings were clearly masters of the latest techniques of metal forging, and their tactics were as bloodthirsty as legend. They were after gold, silver, and easily moveable booty, but they were also in search of slaves. Fit young men and nubile young women commanded the highest prices in the slave market at Dublin, and the raiders were ruthless in massacring those who had no saleable value - the old or very young.
“And for long now the English have been entirely without victory,” bemoaned Archbishop Wulfstan, “and too much cowed because of the wrath of God, and the pirates are so strong with God’s consent, that in battle one will often put flight to ten. . . . And often ten or twelve, one after another, will disgracefully insult the thane’s wife, and sometimes his near kinswoman, while he who considered himself proud and powerful and brave enough before that happened, looks on.” (55)
King Ethelred’s solution to this debilitating challenge was to try to buy the raiders off, either paying them what was effectively protection money to go away or, in some cases, hiring bands of raiders as mercenaries to serve as defenders against their fellows. These payments became popularly known as “Danegeld,” and many of the English coins bearing Ethelred’s image that have been unearthed by modern archaeologists have been found in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, where the raiders took their protection money and dug a hole to “put it in the bank.”
Ethelred had solid precedent for his policy. In 876 Alfred had paid the Danes to leave Wessex. But whereas Alfred used the time that he bought to get his defences organised, Ethelred lacked the grit and military ability of his famous forefather. Following the Battle of Maldon, he agreed to pay the Vikings twenty thousand pounds in silver and gold, and the raiders duly departed. But they kept returning in the years that followed, ravaging and plundering for months on end before extorting fresh tribute - and Ethelred proved unable to defeat them in battle.
Ethelred’s problems were compounded by the fact that the raiders were in pursuit of more than casual booty. From 994 onwards some of the most effective war parties were led by Sweyn Forkbeard, the king of Denmark, who had territorial ambitions. In one sense, Ethelred’s payments of Danegeld were signs of weakness, and they have certainly been treated as such by most historians, starting with the derisive scribes of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. But the ability of England’s king to raise large sums of money on a regular basis spoke to a prosperous country and an efficient government machine whose value the king of Denmark could well appreciate.
From 994 to 1000, and then on for another dozen years, Sweyn’s forces kept returning to England in ever better organised expeditions. His goal was now total conquest, and as the inhabitants of the old Danelaw observed the contrast in style between Ethelred Unred and the decisive Viking king with his war fleets, loyalties in Essex, East Anglia, and the northeast started to shift in his favour. In modern terms, the annual raids of the dragonships appearing from nowhere, whisking off booty and then vanishing back over the horizon, were like the touchings down of so many alien spaceships, virtually unpredictable and impossible to prevent.
Ethelred tried every angle. In 1002 he concluded a diplomatic marriage with Emma, sister of the duke of Normandy, in an attempt to secure more practical Norman support. He called for a national fast to beseech divine intervention, and in 1008 he gathered the largest navy that England had ever raised, only to see it turn against itself and disperse in mutiny. In a domestic offensive, he married off two daughters by his first marriage to magnates in Northumbria and East Anglia, hoping to check the growing support that Sweyn of Denmark was commanding there.
It was all in vain. In the summer of 1013 Sweyn disembarked at Gainsborough in Lindsey, twenty miles from the mouth of the Trent, and the whole of Danish England immediately accepted him as king. As Sweyn marched south, Oxford and Winchester surrendered as soon as he appeared. When the magnates of the west gave him their allegiance, the citizens of London, the only centre of resistance, surrendered. The alien leader was installed in power, and Ethelred withdrew into exile in Normandy.
King Sweyn I of England did not have long to enjoy his triumph. He died early in 1014. But his son Canute succeeded him, and though Sweyn’s death provoked some revival of Ethelred’s fortunes, the unhappy Unred died in 1016, followed by his son Edmund later that year. The young Canute became the undisputed King of England, and he proved a firm and effective ruler. If the famous legend of how the new monarch had his throne placed in the path of the advancing tide is true, it seems likely that Canute staged the event not to get the waves to halt in homage to his kingly power, but to prove the very opposite: that there are practical limits to the extent of earthly authority.
Canute died in 1035, and thirty-one years later, in the year that everyone remembers, England was definitively invaded by William the Conqueror and the descendants of the Scandinavian raiders who had settled in Normandy. The invasion of 1066 is generally thought of as French, and that was certainly true in linguistic terms. But its roots and self-image went back to the Vikings. So while the years around 1000 saw a flowering of Anglo-Saxon civilisation, they were also scarred by the crude and naked force that would bring that flowering to an end.
June: Life in Town
Ploughland, pasture, and woodland - in the year 1000 the forests were farmed like fields. Wood was the fuel of the times, and it was also the principal building material, the substance of choice for every sort of household implement and repair. Technically the first millennium fell in the Iron Age, but when it came to the texture of everyday life it was much more the Age of Wood.
“Which of you doesn’t make use of my craft, when I make houses and various vessels and boats for you all?” asked the carpenter boastfully in Aelfric’s Colloquy. (57)
The word carpenter is said to have come from the admiration which the Romans felt for the fine and sturdy two-wheeled cart developed by the Celtic woodworkers of ancient Britain - not dissimilar to the cart depicted in this month’s calendar drawing. The Romans called it a “carpentum,” and those who were skilled at making such carts - or who used the wood transported in them - became known as carpenters. (58)
People ate off wood. Anglo-Saxon excavations show many more wooden platters than earthenware plates. People drank from ash or alderwood cups that were turned on a foot-pedalled pole lathe. A leather thong was tied to a pole above the carpenters head, wrapped around the lathe, then run down to the foot pedal. By keeping the thong tight around the lathe and by pedalling hard, the carpenter could get his piece of wood turning in alternately clockwise and counterclockwise directions - a simple but effective piece of self-powered technology that was still in use in English woodworking shops on the eve of the Second World War.
The forest was the mysterious home where the ancient spirits of the woodland lived. People foraged for firewood there. Its leaves provided winter bedding for cattle. Its charcoal pits supplied high-intensity fuel for the blacksmith. The forest was a place of refuge when the Vikings came, and in time of famine it was the larder of last resort. But most of all, in the year 1000, the farmed coppices of England’s woodlands provided timber for the increasing numbers of towns being built all over the country.
The Romans based their occupation of Britain around a few fortified and elegant urban communities, which were resorts and garrisons as much as they were towns. Living in a city, or civis, was the essence of Roman civilisation, and the barbarians who subdued Rome were literally “uncivilised” in that they were not city dwellers. The Anglo-Saxons only took over a few Roman sites like London, Bath, Cirencester, and Lincoln. Their preferred unit of habitation was the village, and England remained predominantly rural until the reign of King Alfred, when the threat of the Vikings provoked his construction of a network of defended settlements known as burhs - the root word of the modern borough.
The classic definition of an Anglo-Saxon town was that it had a defensive wall or stockade, a mint, and a marketplace. Some of Alfred’s burhs were old settlements refortified. Others were new forts set up in locations which later developed into fully fledged towns. An example of this was the town of Oxford, which was of no special importance in Alfred’s reign, to judge from contemporary evidence, but which had developed apace by the year 1000. The tenth-century records of the abbey of Abingdon describe how the citizens of Oxford got together to pay for canal and rechannelling work on the River Thames, so that boats could sail up the river more easily to do business with the town.
Money, and the increasing amount of reliable coinage in circulation, provided the crucial factor in the growth of those towns which developed from Alfred’s military centres into marketplaces. Warwick, Stafford, Buckingham, Oxford - most of the county towns of modern England originated in the tenth century. Roughly 10 percent of England’s population was living in towns by the year 1000, which meant that the country’s farming methods had developed the efficiency to produce a 10 percent surplus - while the town dwellers were generating sufficient profit to purchase the foodstuffs and other supplies they needed.
Eyeing this growth in the money economy with both apprehension and covetousness, Alfred’s successors tried to stake their claim to some regulation - and to taking a cut - of the growing volume of urban business:
I, King Athelstan [ran a decree of around 930 a.d.], with the advice of me Archbishop, Wulfhelm, and my other bishops also, inform the reeve in every borough, and pray you in t
he name of God and All His saints, and command you also by my friendship ... that no one shall buy goods worth more than twenty pence outside a town; but he shall buy within the town, in the presence of the market-reeve or some other trustworthy man, or again, in the presence of the reeve at a public meeting. (59)
This regulation suggests there was a flourishing black economy in Anglo-Saxon England, with businessmen quietly doing deals between themselves, out of sight of the king’s reeve and out of reach of his tolls and taxes - and the disappearance of these laws in subsequent generations suggests that the royal attempts to play trade commissar were abandoned. Free enterprise triumphed, and business expanded accordingly. In 1000 a.d. England’s chief salt town was Droitwich, near Worcester, where the profusion of natural brine springs was exploited by the locals in a profitable complex of saltpans and furnaces. Anglo-Saxon wills show that landowners as far away as Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire were making investments in the salt-making plants of Droitwich, while the records of churches in Westminster, Coventry, and even Paris show Droitwich saltpans and furnaces included in their investment portfolios. (60)
Documents from the town of Winchester in these years show how outside investment was starting to push up urban land values. In 975 the clerics of the Old Minster relinquished a large country estate which was yielding them good food-rents in order to obtain a plot of only two acres inside the city, while tenth-century wills and charters from other parts of the country describe the bishop of Chester owning fourteen houses in the town of Stafford, and the abbess of Barking owning no less than twenty-eight in London. Down in the west country a certain Elfgar of the manor of Bishopsworth outside Bristol owned ten houses in the nearby city. On the assumption that these multiple investments in house property had rental and resale implications, we can conclude that England already had its first property developers. (61)