A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  Bede had been a child in 664 when the Synod of Whitby had debated the issue of the precise dating of Easter (named as a baptized version of the pagan festival of Eostre). To us, the quarrel might seem petty, but for the respective partisans of the Celtic Irish and the Roman Churches it was crucial. For if they could not agree on the date of the Lord’s Passion, what else could they be expected to have in common? And despite the strong presence of the Irish, it was the Roman party that won the day, and Bede grew up in a monastery dominated by Romanism. So it is no surprise that Pope Gregory the Great gets a lion’s share of credit for the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, for it was Gregory who dispatched Augustine to evangelize the Jutish kingdom of Kent in 597. The pope had identified Aethelbert, the king of Kent, as a strong conversion prospect since he had married a Frankish Christian princess, Bertha, and allowed her to keep a chapel in the city of Canterbury, together with a bishop imported from France. Bede’s story is the opposite of a lightning conversion. Originally the king kept the missionary isolated from his subjects on the isle of Thanet. It was only when Augustine and Queen Bertha, praying together, began to attract a following that Aethelbert himself was won over. And it was as a result of their daughter, Aethel-burga, marrying Edwin, the king of Northumbria, that he, too, became a convert. Throughout his history Bede sees, without any starry-eyed sentimentality, what kind of incentives could overcome the deep mistrust and anxiety of the pagan kings when they were asked to desert their traditional gods. In a world full of fighting the prospect of the Lord of Hosts fighting on their side was, at least, worth pondering. And then there was sheer curiosity. Edwin of Northumbria, for example, summoned a meeting of wise men to advise him on the adoption or rejection of the new Church and improbably begins with the high priest of the old religion admitting that his cult has no ‘virtue or advantage’. He is followed by a Saxon noble, who makes the single most touching speech in Bede’s entire history, which is all the more credible for being an argument for conversion based on nothing more than a gambler’s fretful hunch.

  Such seemeth to me, my lord the present life of men here on earth . . . as if a sparrow should come to the house and very swiftly flit through . . . which entereth in at one window and straightaway passeth out through another while you sit at dinner with your captains and servants in wintertime; the parlour being then made warm with the fire kindled in the midst thereof, but all places being troubled with raging tempests of winter rain and snow. Right for the time it be within the house it feeleth no smart of the winter storm but after a very short space of fair weather it soon passeth again from winter to winter and escapeth your sight. So the life of man here appeareth for a little season, but what followeth or what hath gone before that surely we know not. Wherefore if this new learning hath brought us any better surety, methinks it is worthy to be followed.

  It is typical of Bede to put this clinching speech, so startling in its pragmatism, in the mouth of a nobleman. For the Church in Anglo-Saxon England (just as in Ireland and Pictish Scotland) was a natural extension of the aristocracy and was dominated by men and women of high birth. The twin monasteries of Jarrow and Monkwearmouth had been founded in the seventh century by Benedict Biscop, an ex-warrior-lord, a thegn, at the Northumbrian court, who had become a monk after travelling through Frankish Christian Europe. Grandeur mattered to these lordly abbots, conscious as they were of being the next generation of purified Romans. St Wilfrid, the aristocratic bishop of York, deliberately used part of Hadrian’s Wall to build at Hexham a basilica worthy of Roman authority. And their monasteries and churches were decorated with aggressive magnificence (in contrast to the simplicity and austerity of the Irish church). Biscop had brought back from his travels in Italy teams of stonemasons, glaziers and jewellers and shot-silk hangings embroidered with the scriptures and lives of the saints. He also imported a singing master from Rome to teach the monks the chant as sung at St Peter’s. And when one of these princes of the Church travelled he was followed by an imposing retinue, as many as eighty monks, just as if he had been a great lord. Attacked on a beach in Sussex, St Wilfrid’s men swore, in the Anglo-Saxon style, to fight, ‘death with honor or life with victory’.

  The monasteries needed manpower for their most exacting work – copying the sacred texts and histories of the early Church – and places like Jarrow and Lindisfarne were production-lines of books that would ensure the survival of Latin and Christian literature, and they needed an industrial approach to carry it off. It took over 2000 parchment folios to copy the works of Gregory the Great; 500 calf-skins to make a single bible. And although Lindisfarne, founded by the Iona monk St Aidan, was originally a simpler place than Jarrow, it, too, had a jewellery shop that could work on the binding and cases made for its own glorious bible, decorated by the monk Eadfrith. Eadfrith is, arguably, the first English master-artist to whom we can put a name. Along with the many unknown brethren who worked with him on the Lindisfarne bible (inscribing, for example, over 10,000 little red dots around a single folio capital), he brought to sacred art the ancient British feeling for the coiling, curling, spiralling line, first visible in Neolithic jewellery. Remarkably, the same beaked, serpentine creatures that twist over the Sutton Hoo buckle reappear on the densely beautiful ‘carpet pages’ of the Lindisfarne Gospel, a startling testimony to the fusion between pagan and Christian motifs with which the greatest Anglo-Saxon art is saturated.

  The Lindisfarne Gospels were almost certainly intended for the shrine of the abbey’s most charismatic holy man, St Cuthbert, whose life was recorded in a separate work by Bede. It is a biography that exemplified the need of the Anglo-Saxon Church, not just for scholars and figures of authority such as St Wilfrid, but for men who seemed to personify the beatific simplicity of the earliest Christian hermits. Cuthbert came from the same high-status family as St Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop, but although he dutifully obeyed the Roman line that had been laid down after the Synod ofWhitby, his own training had been more in keeping with the Irish tradition of ascetic simplicity, and he spent a great deal of time striding about the Cheviots, tending both human and woolly flocks and visiting the sick and poor. He became a prior at Lindisfarne when he was thirty years old, and his reputation for mysterious saintliness had already provoked comment among the monks of the Northumbrian coast. There was, to begin with, his habit of stealing away and, some said, standing knee-deep in freezing seawater and chanting the psalms – the kind of habit in which innocence and ostentatiousness seemed suspiciously mixed. When he was visiting Coldingham abbey he was surreptitiously followed by a brother who did, indeed, find Cuthbert up to his shins in the rockpools, singing away while the moon shone down. All scepticism melted at daybreak, however, when the saint was seen kneeling on the sand while two sea otters emerged from the water and rubbed their furry bodies on his feet to make them warm and dry.

  Even Lindisfarne was too gregarious for Cuthbert’s meditations, however, so when he was forty he retreated still farther, out to the island of Farne, where he was left alone to grow barley and commune with the puffins. When, in 684, the Northumbrian king, Egfrith, wanted to persuade Cuthbert to return to the mainland as bishop, it was the king who had to make the journey over the choppy waves to Farne in a predictably futile attempt at persuasion. It was, in any case, too late. Cuthbert died in 687. The monks came to fetch his body from Farne and when they reached Lindisfarne, the boat was met by a huge assembly of the pious chanting psalms. Eleven years later, when the brethren of Lindisfarne decided to raise a shrine in his honour and disinterred him from the chapel of St Peter, they found to their amazement that his body showed no signs of decomposition.

  It was because St Cuthbert was so passionately venerated that, in 793, before the men called ‘the wolfcoats’ and ‘the berserks’ could do his remains any harm, the Lindisfarne monks, knowing that precious shrines were a favourite target of the Viking sea-raiders, took his body from Lindisfarne and spent seven years wandering with it, looking for some safer place of refuge. For in
that year, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports:

  dire potents appeared over Northumbria . . . immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning and fiery dragons were seen flying through the air. A great famine followed and a little after that, on the 8th of June, the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne.

  If you look hard enough, it is possible to find some good in any culture (except, perhaps, in certain candidates from the twentieth century), and in recent years, for the best possible motives, historians of the Vikings have been at pains to dispel the mythology that theirs was a sail-and-slash-burn-rape-and-pillage culture. It is known now that it was pressure of population on poor Scandinavian land that got them into their boats in Norway and Denmark and that they came bearing amber, fur and walrus ivory (as well as a bad attitude), and that their sagas were full of epic heroics. It is certainly true that when the Vikings (in the tenth century, for example) settled down as colonizers (and even as farmers) the dynamism of their trade and the beauty of their artefacts perhaps offset their ferocious belligerence. Cities such as Dublin and York thrived under their overlordship, enough for the latter to have recently invented a ‘Jorvik’ theme park, devoted to projecting a warmer, cuddlier image of the Vikings.

  But with the best will in the world, the idea of the early Vikings as speedy Baltic commercial travellers, singing their sagas as they rowed to a new market opening, doesn’t ring quite true. Towards the end of the eighth century the reeve Beaduheard in Dorchester went to meet what he innocently supposed was a fleet of peacefully inclined Norse trading ships. He directed them to the loyal royal estate and was thanked for his helpfulness by an axe in the face. The Vikings were certainly partial to one kind of inventory – people (including women), whom they sold as slaves. A thousand such slaves were taken from Armagh in one raid alone in 869. A burial dated to 879 contained a Viking warrior with his sword, two ritually murdered slave girls and the bones of hundreds of men, women and children – his very own body count to take with him to Valhalla.

  So it seems likely that the inhabitants of ninth-century Britain would have had some difficulty in finding the Norsemen ethnographically fascinating, being too busy defending themselves against dismemberment or being dragged off into captivity. Just because so many of the tales of their early impact on Anglo-Saxon life are alarmingly violent, and because they come from Anglo-Saxon, Church sources, does not necessarily mean they were untrue. Gaelic sources tell much the same story. At Strangford Lough, the ancient abbey closely associated with St Patrick’s earliest preaching in Ireland was completely destroyed. In 795 another of the iconic sites of the Christianization of Britain – Iona – was sacked, and in 806 sixty-eight of its monks were killed. Houses, then, which were vulnerable to attack from rivers, loughs or coastal estuaries had very good cause to take the Viking threat seriously. A small cathedral at Bradwell-on-Sea in Essex, founded in the seventh century by a far-ranging mission from Northumbria, had been built on the foundations of a Roman fortification, and the monks must have been grateful for the solid masonry defences while they waited nervously for Viking raids, which they knew, sooner or later, would strike fast and fierce.

  On the positive side, however, there was one thing that the Vikings did manage to do – albeit inadvertently – and that was to create the need for a consolidated kingdom of England and of Alba, too, which eventually became known as Scotland. This was not what they had in mind when their longships sailed swiftly and lethally upstream. What they had in mind, principally, was loot. The Vikings came from a Scandinavian society that was itself a near-anarchy of warrior lords, making gestures of allegiance to their kings in Denmark and Norway, but for the most part being permitted to operate as freebooters, taking as much land, plunder and captives as they wished. Better the marauder away than the marauder at home. The idea, before the Vikings began to settle themselves in occupied areas of eastern and northern England, was to inflict enough violence on a kingdom for its ruler to buy them off, preferably in hard silver. The principle was crude, but the delivery of the violence was efficient, and it hit the Saxon kingdoms at a time when they were themselves divided both between and within each other. The marriage alliances between the Saxon states had proved, under pressure, to be no guarantee of military solidarity, especially when Viking damage might be thought of as a calamity for somebody other than yourself. In fact, some of the Saxon rulers repeated the mistakes of the Romano-British four centuries before, by actually welcoming the invaders as a useful auxiliary.

  Before he died in 735 Bede had worried a great deal about whether the Christian tree of belief had been planted deeply enough to survive the threats he saw coming from both pagan resurgence in the shape of the Norsemen and the new militant religion of Islam, which had thrust deep into the heart of Christian Spain and France. But even Bede’s pessimism couldn’t begin to imagine the scale of devastation that the Vikings would inflict on Northumbria, not only on Lindisfarne, but on his own monastery at Jarrow, and at Monkwearmouth and Iona, the capture of York and, most painful of all, the burning of the great libraries of the monasteries. When he heard of the annihilation at Lindisfarne, Alcuin of York, the court scholar to Charlemagne, the great Frankish Holy Roman Emperor, wrote: ‘Behold the church of St Cuthbert, spattered with the blood of the priests of God.’

  By smashing the power of most of the Saxon kingdoms, the Vikings accomplished what, left to themselves, the warring kings, earls and thegns in England and the mutually hostile realms of Dal Riata and Pictland in the north could never have managed: some semblance of alliance against a common foe. After two decades of attacks in the north, the Pictish king Constantine I, consciously taking his name from the first Roman-Christian emperor, defeated the Dal Riata and united the kingdoms in 811. Likewise, it took the threat of common, irreversible catastrophe for the rulers of what remained of non-Viking England to bury their differences and submit to the overlordship of a single king, a king of all England. To attract this kind of unprecedented allegiance, such a figure would have to be exceptional, and Alfred, of course, fitted the bill. The Tudors thought him inspiring enough to award him, alone of all their predecessors, the honorific appellation of ‘Great’ in direct analogy with Charlemagne, Charles the Great. And for all the mythology about Alfred, it can’t be said that they were wrong. The Anglo-Saxons called him Engele hirde, engele dirling (England’s shepherd, England’s darling).

  Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the coming of the Vikings.

  When he was born – in Wantage in 849 – the youngest son of King Aethelwulf and the grandson of King Egbert of Wessex, that realm, through the usual combination of war and marriage, had replaced the midland kingdom of Mercia as the dominant Saxon kingdom. The Vikings were still largely thought of as periodic inconveniences, mounting raids, stealing as much as they could from shrines or busy Saxon market towns like Hamwic (the ancestor of modern Southampton), extorting money and then mercifully departing to enjoy the proceeds. But of late their fleets had been getting bigger – thirty, thirty-five ships at a time – and their stays were becoming ominously more protracted. In the 850s they began to stay through the entire winter in Thanet and Sheppey in Kent. In 850 a fleet, which The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle put as high as 350 ships, captured Canterbury and London and sent the Mercian king, Berhrtwulf, packing. Nor could silver be relied on any longer to keep them at arm’s length. In 864 the ealdormen (noblemen) of Kent had duly coughed up but the Vikings had decided to put the area to the sword anyway, just for the hell of it. The following year, 865–6, was the year in which the great Christian kingdom of Northumbria was destroyed at the hands of the biggest Viking fleet Britain had yet seen, with York falling in 867. By 876 the Northumbrian lands were being shared out among their principal chiefs. In 869 it was the turn of the king of East Anglia, Edmund, who, sick of making the usual payments, turned to resistance and suffered decapitation and impalement. It was now obvious to Aethelred, the king of Wessex, and to his only surviving brother, Alfred, that they, too
, could not avoid confronting the Vikings for very much longer.

  Much of what we know about Alfred comes from the biography written by the Welsh monk Asser, invited to the king’s court and doubtless eager to sing his praises. Allowing for idealization, though, the portrait somehow has the ring of truth, even the child already hungry for learning. Asser’s most famous tale of the boy-wonder describes Alfred’s mother offering to give a decorated book of Anglo-Saxon poetry to whichever child could learn the contents. Needless to say, Alfred not only committed the poems to memory but recited them out loud to his mother, half bookworm, half show-off.

  But these were not bookish times. In 868, with the Vikings wintering in Mercian Nottingham, Alfred was married, in an obvious tactical alliance, to Eahlswith, whose mother was a member of the Mercian royal family. By 870 the Danes were in Reading, a direct challenge to the kingdom of Wessex. In 871 the two brothers, Aethelred and Alfred, fought a series of battles culminating in the victory of Ashdown. But before he could enjoy the success, Aethelred died, leaving Alfred the kingdom. The news that a second, enormous Viking army had come to Reading was not reassuring. With the collapse ofWessex apparently imminent, the entirety of Anglo-Saxon England seemed about to go the way of Roman Britain.