A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  Disposable land was an essential tool of kingcraft – the currency in which the great men who served a king in peace expected payment, as well as the traditional inducement to attract warriors to his following in the days when warfare among the English kingdoms had ensured a supply from among the defeated. For Alfred this course was not open, but on occasion it seems he would appropriate church lands recovered from defeated Vikings.

  Justice under law

  The administration of law was grounded on the oath of an oath-worthy man solemnly given before God and accepted as valid. Charged with a crime, a man acquitted himself not by a trial on evidence but by giving his own oath and finding oath-helpers to bear out his statements and claims and his good faith. To lose one’s oath-worthy status was to risk falling out of the law and be at the mercy of anyone with a claim against one’s property or a grudge. But the powers of law enforcement were limited and in the most extreme crime, that of murder, the maintenance of order depended on the enforcement of a code of vendetta or feud supervised by the king according to strict rules of compensation based on the scale of wergild (or ‘wergeld’) payments. The laws of King Alfred, which also incorporate those of his predecessor King Ine, are represented by the stately ‘domboc’ (‘law book’) set down in about 893. They have been described as ‘the product of deep thought, intensive research, and great political vision’,23 an expression of ideological aspirations perhaps, rather than practical guidance for judges.

  Legislation was not necessarily promulgated by the king in written form and judgement was validated more by the word of the king (per verbum regis) than by any text. In a celebrated case Alfred delivered judgement by word of mouth while washing his hands in his private chamber. The king, however, seems to have conceived law as a written text, for he remarks in his preamble that he had ‘ordered to be written’ (awritan het) many of the laws that his forefathers observed, and how he had not presumed to set down in writing many of his own. His code survives in just six manuscripts, the earliest of them dating from 925–50.

  Alfred considered an ability to read English an essential requirement for a man in authority if he were to make sound judgements. Cases determined in local assemblies by ealdormen or reeves were to be referred to the king if they were disputed by the litigants. He was liable to intervene at random if he considered any judgement unfair and would order the judge to apply himself forthwith to ‘the pursuit of wisdom’ at risk of losing his job. The reading might be records of legal cases heard, or more likely it meant reading in ‘those books that it is necessary to know’. For ‘wisdom’ in Alfredian terms, as described by Asser, was that which taught a man to care for truth and seek the common good rather than his own personal advantage. Rather than lose the king’s favour, illiterate ealdormen, reeves and thegns would apply themselves to the mastery of the unfamiliar discipline of reading and learning, following, if need be, the king’s advice to find someone to read books aloud to him ‘by day and night, at any opportunity’ – the very way Alfred the boy had memorized the poetry book offered by his mother.

  Alfred’s London

  London comprised the old Roman civitas within the walls, the ‘burh’ of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the extramural settlement, the port of Lundenwic, which had a population of about 5,000 and covered some 148 acres (60 hectares) on the north bank of the Thames, running westward from Chancery Lane to Trafalgar Square. The first recorded Viking attack here is in 842, the second about 851: coin hoards have been unearthed for the first date at the Middle Temple and for the second a ‘purse-hoard’ of Northumbrian coins was found near the Royal Opera House. Other hoards have been unearthed near Waterloo Bridge (872) and within the city walls, dated to 880. Found in the early 2000s it contained coins of the special London Monogram type, which Alfred probably issued to mark his resumption of control of London after Ceolwulf’s departure. Then for the year 886 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records ‘gesette Ælfred cing Lundenburh’, in other words he occupied Roman London and made it habitable again. In this year, too, ‘all the English people who were not in captivity to the Danes submitted to him’. By 893 and again in 895 the ‘citizens’ (burgwara) of London were sufficiently numerous to mount a body for effective military action. In 898 the king presided over a meeting, attended by among others his son Edward, the archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop Wærferth of Worcester and Ealdorman Æthelred of the Mercians and his wife, Alfred’s daughter Æthelflæd, that confirmed the ‘instauration’ of the borough and the establishment of a grid plan of streets between what is now Thames Street and Cheapside. Digs in the early 2000s revealed just such market streets running off a central spinal thoroughfare. The archaeology indicates that from 900 onwards the main business and residential quarters were within the city walls. In other words, by the end of Alfred’s reign, London had ‘entirely changed its shape and focus’24 away from the Aldwych Strand back into the Roman walled city.

  Preparations for the return of the heathen and defence of the realm

  For much of the 880s the Viking raiders were harrying the northern lands of West Francia so that, in the lament of the chronicler of St Vaast, ‘the Christian folk [were] brought to utter ruin and desolation.’ These same years saw the kingdom of the West Saxons engaged in public works programmes and military reorganization. Three English kingdoms, Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia, had been removed from the map. Alfred planned a system of defence round his borders and land. His plans rested on the known tactics of the enemy, best practice overseas and antecedents in the English tradition.

  Asser writes of ‘the cities and towns that he restored, and the others he built where none had been before . . .’, though he does not claim that Alfred was the first to build such towns and fortifications. In the 1970s archaeologist Martin Biddle, excavating the ‘Roman’ burh of Winchester, revealed rectilinear street patterns adapted to military defence and trade. The basic pattern comprised a main street, with parallel back streets linked at right angles to the high street by side streets, and a perimeter boulevard running round inside the wall. Similar planning has subsequently been detected in other Alfredian foundations such as Wareham, Wallingford and Oxford. It is argued that such sites stand at the beginning of the continuous history of the medieval English town. The once flourishing cross-Channel trade of early ninth-century Hamwic was a thing of the past when Alfred came to the throne, probably in part because it was an undefended site. Thanks to him and his new urban developments, however, a vigorous internal market was to spring up.25

  The Viking raiders generally avoided battle. Their preferred tactic was to seize some defensible site as their base of operations and plunder the surrounding region before the English could mobilize forces and then to retreat behind the fortifications until the English should disperse – or they made good their escape under cover of night. It is probable that Alfred knew of the fortified bridges that Charles the Bald had built on the River Seine and similar defensive works, though they were hardly more advanced than the fortified burhs known in eighth-century Mercia.

  The basic text here is the Burghal Hidage. It gives a list of some thirty ‘burhs’ (defended settlements or fortifications), each with its own garrison and established around Wessex, Sussex and Surrey in such a way that no place of importance was more than a day’s march from the nearest and that every navigable waterway, Roman road or major track way penetrating Wessex was commanded. Even the best landing beaches were accessible from a garrison in a burh. The system was reinforced by army tracks (herepaths) skirting estate boundaries for the muster of local contingents. Some burhs seem to have been intended as towns from the start, others were emergency forts, hurriedly thrown up as part of a crash building programme. Quite apart from the actual construction, huge quantities of gravel, flints and timber had to be shifted on site before work could begin, calling for high logistical capacity and administrative skills. It has been estimated that labour on the defensive banks for the burh at Wallingford alone would have required more than 120,
000 man hours.26

  The actual labour force would be recruited at the expense of local landowners, as indicated above, under the convention known by historians as the ‘common burdens’, apparently first established by the Mercian king in the mid-eighth century, when monks were obliged to fulfil it, much to the horror of St Boniface. The so-called ‘trinoda necessitas’ (or, as Eric John proposes, ‘trimoda . . .’; or ‘three mode necessity’), required those liable to supply work on bridges, fortifications (‘burhbot’) and troops for the levy. Alfred exploited the system as fully as possible and after him it was stretched to embrace ship-building.

  The ‘Hidage’, based on the hide, an ancient unit of land considered sufficient to support one peasant family, designates the number of ‘hides’ assigned to each burh for its structural maintenance and defensive manning. A formula specifies that one man was to go from every hide and dictates the length of wall that such a force was expected to defend. Altogether the document calls for some 27,000 men to be employed in the maintenance and defence of the forts. One man from each hide; the idea seems simple enough but recruiting and managing men in such numbers could only have been done by thegns who commanded the loyalty of the men and already took services from their land.

  Maybe Alfred’s programme of town fortifications, which perhaps included the late Saxon work on Exeter’s Roman wall, was also coloured by childhood experiences in Rome. In 846 a Saracen fleet had sailed up the River Tiber and attacked the city; the residents at the foreign schools – Franks, Saxons, Lombards and Frisians – helped defend the fortifications. After the raid a high wall, completed in 852, was built round the basilicas of St Peter’s and its vicinity; the area enclosed was known as the Leonine City. The postern gates were surmounted by an inscription recording its builders, among them the Posterula Saxonum. Nearby, hostels housed the Saxon community in a compound known as their burh (borgo). No doubt the inscription over the Saxons’ postern had been pointed out to Alfred and his father on their visit to Rome in 855, along with accounts of deeds of prowess by the school’s trained bands back in 846.27

  The other essential element in the defence strategy was the creation of a standing army. Alfred reorganized the kingdom’s military resources, starting from existing West Saxon military traditions of the ‘fyrd’ or army. The West Saxon fyrd was not a levy en masse but a mobilization of king’s men and their retainers – the king’s following arrayed for battle with, in summer, local territorial forces from the shires. This meant landowners and their personal followings led by ealdormen, reeves and local king’s thegns, operating either as divisions in the king’s army or as local defence forces. Raising these forces as need arose took time, and by the time they had arrived on the scene the enemy was probably gone. Alfred ordained that the force be divided in two, one half active for military service while the other remained to work on the land; he doubled the length of the service, probably from forty to eighty days, establishing in effect a fighting force available through most of the campaigning season. These seems to have been a standing elite that amounted to a King’s lifeguard: no king of Alfred’s line fell in battle, despite their exposed position of command fighting at close quarters in the middle of the shield wall.28

  In the autumn of 892 famine threatened in northeast Francia. The Vikings made their way to Boulogne, where the Franks provided them with 250 ships so that they could cross the Channel ‘in one journey, horses and all’. These were heterogeneous war bands of diverse allegiances under an experienced leader like Hæstan, who came ‘with eighty ships in the mouth of the Thames, and built himself a fort at Milton’. In that same season ‘the other host’ was at Appledore. Wessex was ready. In the 870s the raiders had campaigned through the heartlands more or less at will. Now a yet larger force made hardly any serious penetration of the frontiers.

  After a faltering start, the Alfredian defence system worked, in the words of Richard Abels, ‘precisely as planned’. The enemy was able to land because there was an uncompleted burh on the Lympne. They set up fortifications under the watchful eyes of an army in the field and the new, year-round garrisons of the burhs. In land, instead of towns and settlements open to attack, they would find garrisoned burhs fortified with earth banks and palisades, proof against storm assault. To lay a siege now meant being attacked from neighbouring garrisons or the field army division of the fyrd. To leave the garrison in place was out of the question. From Maidstone Alfred could monitor the enemy through pickets along the Downs while patrols could pick off raiding parties. Alfred’s ability to maintain his troops in the field proved decisive. However, his physical distance from the centre of military action in 893 meant that the exploits of his son Edward as field army commander, recorded fifty years later in the chronicle of Ealdorman Æthelweard but unmentioned by the official chronicle, may have seemed more dramatic.

  Alfred had designed his system of burhs not so much to prevent conquest as to minimize the possibility of raiding. As a result he was able to fight Vikings simultaneously on the east, west and north frontiers of the kingdom. His son Edward was able to use the system for aggression, conquest and settlement.

  A king’s navy

  King Alfred ordered the building of a fleet of ships – it seems that his son Edward had about a hundred in 910 – England’s first royal navy. The ships were to be built to a new design that he stated ‘could be most serviceable’. They were commanded and crewed by Frisians and English, although the actual ship designs owed nothing to Frisian example. The Chronicle reports they were twice as long as the Danes’, were faster and, having more freeboard, steadier in the water. This presumably offered a firmer fighting platform in hand to hand combat: during an encounter in 882 two ships’ companies were slaughtered, whereupon two more surrendered. As with the system of burhs, Wessex arranged for the financing of its ships. Specific estates thought capable of raising the necessary funds were designated ‘ship sokes’ and each was required to provide a warship and provision its crew.29

  Thanks to demonstration sailings by Edwin and Joyce Gifford in the mid-1990s of half-scale models built after ten years’ research, we have a good idea of how Alfred’s longships may have performed. Built in the Sutton Hoo manner (a vessel unearthed at Graveney in Kent, dated to about 900, indicates that Alfred’s naval architects may have been aware of that tradition) but with up to 60 oars, they ‘could have carried a complement of 140 men at speeds of up to 12 knots when sailing and 7 knots under oar’. Since Alfred’s coastal burhs were rarely more than 25 miles (40 km) apart, the Giffords estimated that squadrons could have reached any stricken beach within two hours of receiving the alarm. Given the improved signalling facilities and coastal fortifications we may have another part of the explanation for the decrease in Viking successes. The Anglo-Saxon state put high store on its naval defence. According to William of Malmesbury, King Edgar (957–75) patrolled the coasts of Britain on the look out for pirates on an annual basis. His account indicates that Edgar maintained three fleets, one each on the east and west coasts and one in the north. Presumably each flotilla returned to its home waters under its own commander once it had sailed its stretch of coastline. Admittedly it is highly improbable that the king regularly circumnavigated Britain, but it was hardly less impressive that he was reported to have maintained a standing navy. At his death the Chronicle said that while he lived ‘no fleet however flaunting of itself was able to win booty in England.’ Writing in 1996, M. Strickland argued that the navy was ‘the arm to which the Anglo-Saxons attached great, if not supreme significance’.30 Indeed, the English may have set a trend. A longship found at Hedeby in the late 1990s, with space for sixty-four oars, suggests that Alfred’s model found imitators.31

  A warship could make a spectacular gift to the king ‘who had everything’. Bishop Ælfwold of Crediton (later the see of Exeter) bequeathed a longship of 64 oars to Æthelred II. Earl Godwine gave a great ship to Edward the Confessor. Emperor Henry III asked England for a flotilla of ships to support him in his
campaign against Count Baldwin V of Flanders.

  Threnody of triumph

  Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons, died on 26 October 899, aged either 50 or 51, after a reign of twenty-eight years – a momentous epoch in the history of England. By holding the line against the Viking Danes, Alfred prevented the establishment of a pagan power on one of the pillars of European civilization. Triumphant in the field, he structured a national defence in depth, organized the reform of the demoralized clergy as leaders of a programme of education, commissioned or himself carried through translations into English of major works of history and philosophy, and almost certainly inaugurated the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

  His reputation seems to have faded somewhat after his death. No other English king bore his name. But it was he who brought Wessex and West Mercia through the decades of danger. There was little likelihood of his subjects following the fashionable reinvention of Vikings, begun by gallery curators in the 1970s, as over-aggressive traders and salesmen pressing their wares on somewhat unappreciative customers.

  Archaeological digs from the 1960s on may have revealed new dimensions of this Viking trade, but they have also heightened awareness of Winchester as the ‘traditional’ capital of Wessex; by identifying Alfredian towns and fortifications on the ground they have also substantiated Alfred’s activities as defensive strategist. Ealdorman Æthelweard, the king’s distant kinsman who died a century after him, dubbed him ‘the Magnanimous’, ‘unshakable pillar of the people of the west a man full of justice, active in war, learned in speech and, before all, instructed in divine learning . . .’32