The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  These four kingdoms were bigger than Welsh kingdoms by now, but had many similarities all the same. The values of small-scale militarism are equally visible in our written sources. Beowulf, the longest Old English poetic text, stresses loyalty and heroism, and royal hospitality and gift-giving, much as Y Gododdin does. Beowulf ’s date is contested between the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, but its imagery fully fits other early texts. One example is Felix’s Life of Guthlac, a saint’s life of the 730s, which depicts its Mercian aristocratic saint as having been the leader of a war-band in his youth in the 690s, ‘remembering the valiant deeds of heroes of old’, who razed the settlements of his enemies with gay abandon and accumulated immense booty before changing his ways and becoming a monk. As late as the 690s (or 730s), that is to say, it was possible to be a small-scale independent freebooter, and to get credit for it, in that Felix writes it up with some enthusiasm. But kings themselves did not operate on so large a scale yet. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in a passage plausibly drawn from an earlier text, recounts the death of King Cynewulf of Wessex in 786: he was surprised in his mistress’s house by his rival Cyneheard, his predecessor’s brother, and killed before his entourage reached him; his entourage then fought to the death around him, despite being offered their lives; the following day Cynewulf’s army besieged Cyneheard in return, and after a failed negotiation Cyneheard and the eighty-four men with him were themselves killed; again, his men would not desert their lord, and Cynewulf’s avengers would ‘never serve his slayer’. The text heavily stresses the imagery of loyalty, but it is also important to note that an army of less than a hundred, contained in a single stockade, was determining the fate of a whole kingdom as late as the 780s.

  Linked to this is a restricted set of royal resources. Kings had rights to tribute in food from their territory, but the evidence we have for this tribute implies, as in Wales, that it was pretty small, and perhaps only owed when the king or his entourage turned up to eat it. As late as 700, it is hard to say that Anglo-Saxon kings were resource-rich: they had enough gold and jewels to leave impressive burials like Sutton Hoo, but not necessarily enough to reward more than a small entourage or army, except in lucky years when they plundered an enemy. They also controlled land, and Bede makes it clear that by the 730s they used this to reward a military aristocracy, but there were the usual early medieval risks to this; Bede also says that if a king ran out of land his younger aristocrats would leave the kingdom.

  These patterns were likely to keep kingship simple, royal administration sketchy, and kingdoms small, as in Wales. But in other respects the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were beginning to develop. For a start, they occupied the lowland areas of Britain, which are agriculturally richer, can sustain a higher population, and are also closer to the Continent. Archaeology shows us that the late seventh and early eighth century saw a notable increase in exchange between England and the Continent, centred on a series of trading ports which were soon controlled by kings, Hamwic (modern Southampton) in Wessex, London in Mercia (the Mercian kings conquered down to the lower Thames in, probably, the 660s, and quays along the Strand in London have been dated to the 670s), Ipswich in East Anglia, York in Northumbria (see below, Chapter 9). These ports soon developed their own local artisans, and can simply be referred to as towns, the first urban centres of Anglo-Saxon England; but they remained closely linked to kings, who were privileged recipients of their products, and who took tolls from them. Such tolls were available to kings throughout Europe, but in England, where kings were so small-scale, they were an important addition to royal resources.

  Secondly, kings were closely supported by their aristocracies. We perhaps should not put too much weight on the imagery of loyalty in Beowulf or the Cyneheard narrative (after all, the men who died with Cyneheard had themselves been disloyal to King Cynewulf), but it is at least arguable that adult aristocrats who did not, or could not, stay loyal to kings had a difficult time, for they often ended up as ‘exiles’, as texts call them, without evident patronage, rather than simply finding welcome in a rival court. Kings and aristocrats were also linked by a slow development in power over land. Early Anglo-Saxon land-units do not seem to have been landed estates with a single owner and his or her dependent tenants, but, rather, territories from which kings and maybe also their aristocrats could take tribute, which as we have seen could be small, although it is also likely that unfree dependants on these estates paid rather more. Between the late seventh century and the tenth, these territories turned into estates, with rents and services which were much higher, benefiting kings and aristocrats alike, as we shall see in Chapter 19. It may well be that the politics of landed gift that Bede describes was not very old in the 730s, and that it was one of the first signs of this slow change. But the development of landownership would only be steady if political systems were strong and kings powerful. It was thus in the interest of aristocracies to accept increases in royal power, as they developed.

  A third change was that the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms converted to Christianity. We know a lot about this because it was the central topic of Bede’s history. Bede (lived 673-735) was a monk at the linked monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow in northern Northumbria; he was a highly educated intellectual, and not obviously a political dealer (though he knew kings and bishops). He painted the conversion as a heroic narrative. It began with Gregory the Great’s Roman mission to Kent in 597, and expanded to several kingdoms including Northumbria in the next generation, but retreated after Edwin’s death; it was then revived by an Irish mission from Iona to Northumbria after 634. After the death of the pagan Penda in 655, Christianity was accepted, at least by kings and their immediate entourages, almost everywhere. It was then consolidated by two key events: in 664 the synod of Whitby marked the acceptance in Northumbria and elsewhere of the Roman date for Easter and, more widely, of Roman (rather than Irish) institutional structures for the church; and in 669, after a plague had killed most of the bishops of England, Theodore of Tarsus arrived from Rome as archbishop of Canterbury (668-90), and restructured the episcopacy as a collective hierarchy covering all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Church councils on a Continental model began in 672, and the Anglo-Saxon church was more and more evidently an organized body.

  Bede saw these developments as self-evidently good, and divinely ordained. The conversion process was doubtless more political and more ambiguous than that, but his picture of a church victorious by the 670s is convincing, and is backed up by other evidence as well. Both bishops and an ever-growing network of monasteries grew prosperous as a result of royal gifts, documents for which begin to survive from the 670s; one could say that the church was the first beneficiary of the new politics of land, perhaps even before the aristocracy. By the early eighth century, if there was any aspect of Anglo-Saxon society that was by now parallel to that on the Continent, it was the church. This hierarchy was much more solid than that of the Welsh world, or, as we shall see, the Irish world; it was essentially a Continental import, and it looked to Francia and particularly Rome for inspiration. And it linked all the kingdoms for the first time. Bede, indeed, saw the conversion as of a single people, the Angli, a word which he tended to understand generically, as the ‘English’ rather than the ‘Angles’. It is not clear that many other people shared his vision of English common identity until Alfred in the late ninth century. But the network of bishops, between one and three per kingdom, covering every Anglo-Saxon polity and no Welsh-ruled areas, and looking systematically to a single archbishop at Canterbury, was at least a potential support to kings who wished to extend their hegemony outside their kingdom. This support was all the more potentially useful in that bishops in England seldom engaged in any political activity independent from their kings; the one exception, the Frankish-trained Wilfrid (d. 709), bishop of Ripon and York at different times, was thrown out of Northumbria by both Ecgfrith and his successor Aldfrith (685-704). They did not bring to the Anglo-Saxon polities any of the secular political ceremonial of Contin
ental kingdoms; royal government remained simple, probably based on assemblies, until late in the eighth century. Anglo-Saxon kings did begin to legislate, however: first in Kent, with the laws of Æthelberht, the first king to be converted, around 602, followed by three successors later in the century, and then in Wessex, with the laws of Ine (688-726) around 690.

  The possibilities for an expansion in royal authority that are represented by these developments were first taken up by three Mercian kings, who ruled almost without breaks for over a century, Æthelbald (716-57), Offa (757-96) and Cenwulf (796-821). They were not closely related, and their successions were not straightforward, but they built systematically on each other’s power-base. For a start, they conquered; for most of their reigns, all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except Northumbria (and after 802 Wessex) recognized their hegemony. Secondly, more systematically than ever before, they took steps to absorb many of these kingdoms into Mercia. The king of the Hwicce is already by 709 called subregulus, ‘sub-king’, in documents, which for two more generations alternates with regulus on the one hand and minister on the other, and then after 789 becomes stably minister or dux. The king of Essex had a similar trajectory between 812 and around 835. Kent was absorbed with greater violence, for it threw off Mercian rule in 776, but then after 785 Offa was back in Kent, and acted directly as its king with no intermediary, except between 796 and 798, just after Offa’s death, when the local dynasty briefly took back power. Cenwulf put his brother in as king, and Kent was never independent again. Mercia thus steadily expanded; Charlemagne, Offa’s contemporary, regarded him as the only real king of the southern English.

  This physical expansion was matched by much clearer evidence for some sort of administrative infrastructure. Royal charters to churches from the mid-eighth century begin to exclude from their cessions three ‘common burdens’, army-service, bridge-building and fortress-building, which were still due to kings; although army-service was doubtless traditional, the other two burdens seem to be new, and had to be organized. In the ninth century, the list of royal officers who no longer had to be entertained by the recipients of these cessions became quite long; the king had a rather larger staff by now. The traditional association of Offa’s Dyke, the 100-kilometre earthwork that delimits the borders of Wales, with King Offa seems certain, and the construction of this, crossing relatively remote areas as it often does, would also have required considerable organization. Offa reformed the coinage, and was one of the first Anglo-Saxon kings south of the Humber to put his name on coins. Mercia was by no means the richest part of England; that remained the east coast, where the ports were, and where an exchange economy was developing in the eighth century; but Offa controlled that coast by now, and he could begin to take systematic economic advantage from it. And kings now used church councils, following Frankish example (see below, Chapter 16); a sequence of councils, presided over by kings, is documented from 747 to 836, and many of their decisions were secular. One of them, in 786, hosted a papal legation, and its acts are notably wide-ranging. This network of measures and procedures indicates a structure for royal power which, in Offa and Cenwulf’s time, could be called a state.

  This build-up of royal power was not inexorable. For a start, although, after Theodore of Tarsus, the church hierarchy linked all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, this was modified when Northumbria gained its own archbishopric at York in 735, perhaps to ward off Mercian influence, and when Mercia gained its own at Lichfield in 787. In the latter case, Offa had had trouble with Canterbury, which was too much associated with Kentish autonomism, and he found it safer to create an archdiocese under his own control, at least temporarily (in 803 the south was reuni fied under Canterbury). Secondly, the eighth century was a period of wars between rival branches of the royal family for kingship in Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria alike. In Mercia, this had no structural impact until 821, but thereafter political infighting undermined Mercian hegemony. The wide stability of the last three generations was lost, and was not picked up by any king until Alfred, in very different circumstances (below, Chapter 19). Charlemagne might recognize Offa as an equal (in diplomatic formality, at least), but Anglo-Saxon kingship was as yet much smaller-scale and less stable. It was also based on profoundly different roots, with no Roman infrastructure to build on, unlike in Francia. Conversely, it was at least moving in the direction of Frankish political structures. The Mercian kings probably did this entirely consciously; Francia was so much more powerful that it would have made complete sense to do so as much as possible. Alfred and his successors would follow Offa’s example too.

  Ireland, which was never under Roman rule, had certain parallels to Wales and England in the fragmentation of its political structures, but here political decentralization was even more intense. No one knows how many kings Ireland had at any one time, but 100 to 150 is a widely canvassed estimate. Each ruled a túath or plebs, the Irish and Latin words respectively for the ‘people’ of each king; plebs means a local community in Continental Latin, but here it can equally well be translated as ‘kingdom’. These ‘kingdoms’ or ‘peoples’ varied very greatly in size and importance, but each was closely linked to a king, and was often named for the king’s family, the Cenél Conaill, the kindred of Conall, or the Uí Dúnlainge, the descendants of Dúnlang. Using the characterization already set out in the Welsh context, they can firmly be seen as tribes. Each had a fairly simple social structure, even the large kingdoms (the small ones may only have had a few family groups each): a network of free kin-groups owed clientship dues to a network of lords, who similarly owed dues to the king (himself related to many or most of his lords). These dues were generally in cattle, and were based on temporary patron-client relationships between independent landowners. Only the unfree were permanent dependants. Irish sources are unusual, for they are in large part law tracts, the private handbooks of lawyers; they are strikingly, often impossibly, detailed about tiny differences in status, obligation and legal category: there were supposedly up to fourteen ranks in free society, for example. How these minutely differentiated relationships really worked on the ground usually cannot be said. They were certainly very simply policed; most kings might have a steward to collect dues, a war-band to enforce and an annual assembly of the túath to deliberate, and that was all. But lawyers were one of a set of island-wide learned professions, along with poets and pagan priests (after Christianization, the latter were replaced by clerics), with a separate hierarchy and professional education. The elaboration of lawyers’ law could thus run far ahead of its applicability, although, conversely, skilled judicial expertise was rather more widely available than in most societies as simple as these.

  Irish kingdoms were themselves arranged in hierarchies, with lesser kings owing tribute and military support to over-kings, and sometimes there were three or four levels of kingship. The lower levels of these hierarchies were probably fairly stable, for the smallest túatha had no prospect of going it alone successfully, and a permanent clientship relationship to a larger túath was the safest course of action. These ‘base-client peoples’ (aithechthúatha in Irish) were all the same seldom absorbed into larger groupings; this did happen sometimes, for some kingdoms did expand, but most small peoples survived for the whole of our period, as far as we can tell. This stability has sometimes been seen as the product of the archaism of Irish society, for the law tracts are graphic about the rituals and rules governing kingship. Críth Gablach, the major eighth-century tract on social status, states: ‘There is, too, a weekly order in the duty of a king: Sunday for drinking ale . . . ; Monday for judgement, for the adjustment of túatha; Tuesday for playing fidchell [a board game]; Wednesday for watching deer-hounds hunting; Thursday for sexual intercourse; Friday for horse-racing; Saturday for judging cases’ - an impossible set, of course, but probably a reasonably accurate characterization of the bulk of royal tasks. Kings had taboos, gessa, too: an eleventh-century poem lists those of each of Ireland’s five provinces, Ulster, Connacht, Meath, Leinster and M
unster, and tells us, for instance, that the king of Tara could not break a journey in Mag Breg on a Wednesday or enter north Tethba on a Tuesday. All the same, even if the endlessly fascinating arcana of Irish kingship tell us a lot about the ritual force of tribal communitarian bonds, they do not explain why it was that an ambitious over-king could not sweep them away. Here, the best explanation is that Irish kings did not yet have an infrastructure suitable to rule directly over more than a small area, so that the cellular structure of tiny peoples had to be left to run itself. The patron-client bonds between kings were also less stable at the higher levels; no king could gain a hegemony over the whole of Ulster or Leinster for more than very brief periods, as revolt would soon break out and coalitions would crumble. Kings were fighters (a task curiously omitted from Críth Gablach’s list), and not much else.