by Robert Lacey
October: War Games
The wavy line which marks the background to this calendar drawing for October invites us to contemplate a range of hills, from whose heights descends a tumbling river. As the river reaches the foreground, it turns into a lake on which two waterfowl splash happily, unaware that they are sitting targets for the falcons on the huntsmen’s wrists. It is an ambitious picture, in which landscape, the threat of death, and the atmosphere of a late autumn afternoon’s hunting are all packed tightly into a few lines sketched on a sheet of parchment, and the exaggerated size of the lumbering bird in the foreground might suggest that the artist has made some error of perspective. But the drawing of the bird is quite accurate, for a thousand years ago England’s wildlife was more exotic than it is today. Our huntsmen’s quarry is the huge European crane, a common sight in England until it was hunted to extinction sometime in the sixteenth century. (110)
Hunting in the year 1000 was still a democratic pastime. Every free-born Anglo-Saxon had the right to enter the forest and bring home game for the pot. But these well-dressed huntsmen have a rich air about them - and their horse is equally well dressed. The hunting restrictions which the Normans introduced after 1066 were one of the principal sources of friction between the native population and the new regime, and the fat horseman with his friend the falconer prefigure that social conflict. The power, magic, and pleasures of full-scale hunting were stolen by the upper crust, and it was in the eleventh century that the peculiarly English connotations of hunting as a class-sensitive activity became attached to the country pursuit that is still enjoyed in most other societies by ”haves” and ”have-nots” alike.
Medieval hunting was both a metaphor and a preparation for war. It kept horse and rider fit, and, more significantly, it fostered the camaraderie of the warrior band. It was like a training session. The lord and his retainers went out hunting together to network, plot, and rehearse future acquisitions as the twentieth-century corporate raider sets up deals over golf. Between 950 and 1066 England was the most fought-over kingdom in western Europe. Its merchants were trading and its farmers were producing the food that was needed to sustain an expanding population. But this very prosperity made the country prey to leaner, tougher predators. Forget Merrie England. Think gangland Chicago in the 1930s, or the drug gangs of south Los Angeles today.
Power politics in the year 1000 can best be understood by observing how gangs and Mafias operate. Though frightening to outsiders, the structure of the gang offers cohesion, protection, and a sense of belonging to its “family.” Its hierarchy is both intimidating and reassuring, and while the leader may operate on the basis of fear, he scares his followers less than the alternatives in a lawless and chaotic environment. The successful Godfather also provides the weak and needy with a form of welfare in exchange for their loyalty - or “fealty” as it was called in the year 1000. The mark of King Athelstan’s authority was an oath of allegiance sworn by every boy in tenth-century Engla-lond (slaves excepted) when they reached the age of twelve: “In the first place, all shall swear in the name of the Lord, before whom every holy thing is holy, that they will be faithful to the king.”
The fact that this oath was administered by the local sheriff, who rode round the countryside as the embodiment of law and order, conjures up comparisons with the American Wild West - another embryonic society that was anxious to strengthen its fragile laws and to curb the powers of the lawless and over-mighty. In the year 1000, it was the job of the king’s shire reeve to visit every community at least once a year and to administer the oath in a ceremony whose religious content was significant. The sheriff’s visit frequently took place in October after the harvest had been gathered in, and one can imagine the boys of the village apprehensively assembled for their first taste of adult responsibility.
“Even as it behoves a man to be faithful to his lord” ran the royal instruction, ”without dispute or dissention, openly or in secret, favouring what the lord favours and discountenancing what he discountenances, so, from the day on which this oath shall be rendered, no one shall conceal the breach of it on the part of a brother or family relation, any more than in a stranger.”
This was the key promise, for it made it your duty as a loyal member of your community to turn in anyone who was not behaving himself - Guardian Angels meet Neighbourhood Watch.
This oath, later known as the “frank pledge,” was part of tenth-century England’s increasingly organised system of government, by which the shires were subdivided into “hundreds” - groupings of a hundred households, more or less. These hundreds were subdivided in turn into the smaller, local “frank pledge” groups of roughly ten or a dozen households, in which each member was held accountable for the good conduct of his fellows. The essence of the frank pledge system was that it transformed obeying the rules from a matter of impersonal obedience into personal loyalty, which was then extended up the ladder in a series of easily comprehensible steps to the principal lord, whose authority was endorsed by God.
In the Danelaw of northeastern England, the hundreds were generally known as “wapentakes” from the Old Norse vapnatak, meaning just what it sounds, “weapon-taking,” since this was what loyalty and government all boiled down to in the year 1000 - the rounding up of men and weapons. It is the unmentionable reality of civilisation that it depends on fighting. All the great societies have been based on military success, and in the final analysis, the Anglo-Saxon king was the leader of the war band.
It was as military leader that the king had most need to play the part of the ruthless gang boss, since his principal lieutenants were all gangsters themselves. That was their qualification for the job. The greatest lords were the greatest thugs, for the English aristocracy, like the military elite of every European country in the year 1000, was a cadre that had been trained to kill. To be noble was to wear a sword and throw your weight around, and in 1012, the pious Alphege, archbishop of Canterbury, discovered to his cost what could happen when the war dogs got drunk.
The archbishop had been captured by the Danes the previous year and had been held hostage in conditions of apparent civility. He had got close enough to his captors to convert and baptise at least one of them, until one night at Greenwich when the assembled crowd of noblemen, the cream of the Danish king’s generals and courtiers, got started on a consignment of wine which had arrived “from the south” and which evidently called for special celebration. The evening’s fun culminated with the Danish aristocracy pelting the unfortunate archbishop with a hail of cattle bones and skulls from the beef on which they had been feasting. Alphege bore up valiantly under this savage horseplay, until he was struck by one blow too many and fell on the floor bleeding - finally succumbing when his skull was crushed by the blunt end of a battle-axe wielded by the very nobleman whom he had converted and blessed the previous day.
These were the ruffians who were idealised by the poems of the time. The warrior was a hero, and the comradely ethos of the warrior fraternity provided the running theme for epic sagas like Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon. This was no Camelot. The chivalry of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table was a fable developed a century and a half later, based on the possible existence of a British chieftain named Arthur who fought in the dark confusion which followed the departure of the Romans, and it is unlikely that the sixth-century Arthur operated on any particularly chivalrous basis.
The fundamental rule of warfare in the year 1000 was to avoid battle wherever possible. Whole summers could be occupied by armies manoeuvring to avoid each other. The basic mistake of the white-haired Byrhtnoth at the Battle of Maldon had been to seek confrontation. Battle in the first millennium was rather like a deadly rugby scrum - with both sides wearing the same colour shirts. There were none of the distinguishing liveries and coats of arms developed in later centuries, and in the confused melee the warrior probably distinguished friend from foe by looking into their faces. Armies were small - a few thousand men constituted an excepti
onally large host - so that most protagonists would have known their own side by sight. In this comparatively intimate environment, you stood less chance of being killed than in modern mechanised warfare, but to be wounded was a more serious matter, since the smallest wounds could prove fatal in the absence of proper medical care.
In the front line stood the youngest, strongest, and most expendable warriors, forming a defensive row with their shields held chest high in front of them, touching or overlapping. Their spears protruded from the chinks in this formation that was known as the “shieldwall” or “war hedge.” Behind this front rank were ranged the more lightly armed and mobile second rank, whose job was to plug holes in the shieldwall and act as liaison between the front line and headquarters that lay straight behind them. This was the leader, armed and armoured like the rest of his men, on foot and surrounded by his own personal bodyguard, the “house-carls” or hearth companions who made up his personal retinue. In times of peace, the king’s hearth companions were the nearest equivalent to a police force: they administered his laws and enforced his royal authority.
The tactics of engagement were almost ritual. The two sides drew up their forces in opposing “shieldwall” rows, taking advantage of any geographical features such as water or woods to protect their flank. In the case of Harold and the English on 14 October 1066, they occupied the high ground on Caldbeck Hill to the west of Hastings, as the Normans advanced across the saltmarshes and struck inland from the sea.
Hostilities opened with a mutual throwing of spears and a random loosing of arrows, probably accompanied by loud jeering and shouting to get the blood up. English soldiers handled sturdy bows of yew, ash, or elm, which could propel an iron-tipped arrow as far as a hundred yards: excavations have uncovered English arrows with personal markings which suggest that bowmen tried to retrieve their arrows after a battle, since each beaten iron arrow tip represented quite an investment.
The Anglo-Saxon foot soldier also brought his own throwing spears to the field, along with his sword and shield. He was an all-purpose, multifunction warrior, and the Anglo-Saxon army was the last army in western Europe to fight as one homogeneous host. It was not divided into separate divisions of cavalry, infantry, and bowmen - unlike the Normans - and this was one of the reasons why the Normans won at Hastings and the Anglo-Saxons lost.
Our best evidence of what an Anglo-Saxon army looked like comes from the Bayeux tapestry, stitched in celebration of the victory sometime in the next sixteen years or so - not in Bayeux, but most probably in Canterbury by English embroiderers working to the commission of William the Conqueror’s kinsman Odo, bishop of Bayeux. The tapestry shows King Harold’s house carls wielding their formidable battle-axes, but most of the English are armed and dressed exactly like their Norman foes, wearing suits of ringed mail from head to knee and pointed helmets that feature a protective bridge of metal jutting downwards to shield the nose. Today this heavy, nose-guarded helmet is the distinguishing mark of wicked Norman soldiers in Robin Hood movies, but in the years around 1000 the nose-guarded helmet was, in fact, worn by Saxon, Viking, and Norman alike.
The major and decisive distinction which the Bayeux tapestry does make clear about the two sides at the Battle of Hastings is that the Normans rode horses, while the English fought on foot. From the time of King Alfred, if not earlier, the English army would ride, horses in order to reach the battlefield - but once at the field, those horses would be led away. The animals played no part in combat, but were kept tethered nearby, ready to hasten a speedy withdrawal or, more hopefully, to assist in the pursuit of a fleeing foe.
The first time that an English army ever faced mounted cavalry was in 1066, and accounts of the battle of Hastings suggest that the shieldwall initially held up well against the charges of the Norman knights on their destriers - the muscular and nimble chargers, specially bred for battle, which made the Normans the most formidable fighting force in Europe. Two rival military technologies battled for control of the rich and sophisticated civilisation of Anglo-Saxon England on that October Saturday in 1066, and the new technology won. Tired by the successful northern campaign they had just fought, travelling up to Stamford Bridge to repel the invading army of the Norwegian Harald Hardrade, the English foot soldiers were ground down by the Norman cavalry as the afternoon wore on.
A mile away, nobody heard a thing. Without gunfire or explosions, early medieval battles were a series of muffled confrontations enlivened only by the metallic clash of sword on sword and by the war cries - “Dex Aie” (“God’s help”) from the Norman side and “Out! Out!” from the English as they repulsed attackers from their shieldwall, probably uttering their call in what we would consider a North Country accent. (111)
Both Harald Hardrade and William of Normandy had landed in England in the autumn month when war was most popular in the years around 1000. No army went campaigning in the winter if it could help it, and during the summer every able-bodied man had work to do on the land. By October, however, your soldiers had finished gathering in the harvest, while the countryside was dotted with barns full of grain - the ideal moment for raiding. From the farmers point of view, a particular hazard of being raided and having your storerooms ravaged straight after the harvest was that you could not only starve through the winter, you would lose your stock of seed corn as well. One serious autumn raid could mean ruin for generations to come.
It is hardly surprising that so many sports and pastimes related to war in the year 1000. Riding and archery had obvious practical applications, while the strategies of the chessboard provided a metaphor for the manoeuvrings of the battlefield. Developed in the East, chess reached Spain and southern France thanks to the Arabs. It is not certain when it arrived in England, but a Swiss poem of the 990s describes the moves of the queen and how the game ends when the king is in check-mate. In the year 1000 the queen was actually one of the weaker pieces on the board, and the game was even slower and more long-drawn-out than it is today. It was not until the fifteenth century that the queen was given the extraordinary range of moves which made her the superpower of the board, when the game was so revolutionised that it was sometimes renamed New Chess, Queen’s Chess, or La Dame Enragée.
There were no playing cards in the year 1000. They did not appear in Europe until the fourteenth century. But we have evidence of people playing backgammon as well as noughts and crosses [ticktacktoe]. With the nights getting longer, the Anglo-Saxons stretched their ability to keep themselves amused, and they derived particular fun from riddles which were often quite poetic - as their poems could be riddle-like:
Multicoloured in hue, I flee the sky and the deep earth.
There is no place for me on the ground, nor in any part of the poles.
No one fears an exile as cruel as mine,
But I make the world grow green with my rainy tears.
The answer to this puzzle, composed by the seventh-century scholar St. Aldhelm, was “a cloud.” Beloved of King Alfred, Aldhelm’s verses were sung with harp accompaniment to draw people into church, and his riddles survive in a tenth-century manuscript in the library of Canterbury Cathedral.
Down in Exeter, a still more comprehensive collection of riddles survives in the Cathedral Library - the Exeter Book, an eleventh-century volume whose much-scarred cover seems to have done service as a cutting board for bread and cheese. To judge from the brown ring-like stains on its first folio, it was also used as a beer mat, and some of its riddles have a quality to match:
I am a strange creature, for I satisfy women ...
I grow very tall, erect in a bed,
I’m hairy underneath. From time to time
A beautiful girl, the brave daughter
Of some fellow dares to hold me
Grips my reddish skin, robs me of my head
And puts me in the pantry. At once that girl
With plaited hair who has confined me
Remembers our meeting. Her eye moistens. (112)
The answer? A
n onion. What other answer could there be? The riddle for a milk churn delighted in similar double entendre:
A man came walking where he knew
She stood in a corner, stepped forward;
The bold fellow plucked up his own
Skirt by hand, stuck something stiff
Beneath her belt as she stood,
Worked his will. They both wiggled.
The man hurried: his trusty helper
Plied a handy task, but tired
At length, less strong now than she,
Weary of the work. Thick beneath
Her belt swelled the thing good men
Praise with their hearts and purses. (113)
These earthy tenth-century jokes were copied onto parchment by monks in their finest hand, and they show that the Anglo-Saxon male had a lusty sense of humour. But what do we know about how the women felt?
November: Females and the Price of Fondling
We have reached November - nearly the end of the year - and there has not been a single drawing in the Julius Work Calendar that shows women working, playing, or fulfilling any role, trivial or important, in the life of Engla-lond in the years around 1000. Nor will December remedy the matter, since, like every other document that has come down to us from those times, the Julius Work Calendar was the work of male sensibilities operating in a world where language and the structures of thought itself were framed in unquestioningly male terms.
The Old English for a human being was mann. All human beings were menn, the term being used for both sexes, in the same way that women are today supposed to be included in the meaning of such words as “mankind.” One eleventh-century document talks of the descendants of Adam and Eve as “descended from two men,” and while this displayed a mental framework that may strike us today as gender-insensitive, it also contained a certain assumption of male-female equality. One charter of 969 a.d. discussed land near Worcester that had been held by a man called Elfweard: “Elfweard was the first man ...” ran the document. “Now it is in the hands of his daughter, and she is the second man.” (114) Thirty wills survive today from the late Anglo-Saxon period and ten of those are the wills of women, each of whom was a significant property owner, with the same rights of ownership and bequeathal as any man. In the year 1000 the role that women played in English society was more complex than surface impressions might suggest.