A more dynastic set of political assumptions also meant a politics more rooted in the control of specific lands. Aristocrats still needed Königsnähe, ‘closeness to kings’, to keep their power and wealth and to gain more, except, increasingly, in West Francia, but they looked to the royal court from a clearly defined regional base by now, which would not shift geographically except in very rare cases, and which would, if it grew, result only in a greater domination of their own region. The effects this would have on aristocratic identity, and on the structures of local domination itself, we shall look at in more detail in Chapter 21, which deals with the aristocracy. It had an effect on wider-scale politics as well, however. Regional interests had led to the eclipse of the relevance of the West Frankish kings, as we have seen. They also contributed to the readiness of Italian magnates to cope with absentee kingship, and to focus instead on much more localized rivalries. Even in East Francia, the Ottonians had to deal with five separate political networks, Bavarian, Swabian, Frankish, Saxon and (crystallizing more slowly) Lotharingian, with their own identities and loyalties and (relative) lack of interest in their neighbours. Thietmar tells us little about Italy or West Francia, but actually not much about Bavaria and Swabia either, much less than about the most immediate Saxon rivals to the east, such as the Poles. If Otto I had been in Bavaria in the 960s and not Italy, Hermann Billung might well still have staged his critical ceremony in Magdeburg. One long-term result of this localization of identity was that, everywhere, it was not quite as entirely essential as in the past to go to kings, or to dukes or marquises or counts, to gain social status and legitimacy as an aristocrat. At a pinch, one might claim it oneself. In East Francia there was still no contest: significant players needed offices and Königsnähe or its ducal equivalent, and so would they for another century and more. But it would be just possible to imagine the choice by now, even in East Francia. In the West there were already some people in the tenth century who were beginning to go it alone, and there were many more in the eleventh. The parameters of political power itself would change when they did.
The tenth century has had a problem of double vision in the eyes of historians: should it be seen as a post-Carolingian century, prolonging ninth-century political structures and values (although, in the eyes of some, not so effectively), or as a prelude to the often quite different politics and polemics of the centuries after 1000 or 1050? A book which stops in 1000, as this does, is probably inevitably going to pay more attention to the first of these, and I have done so here. But the tenth century does indeed seem to me more ‘Carolingian’ than does the eleventh, including in the fragmented world of West Francia: even a small western principality like Anjou or Catalonia was still using many Carolingian public procedures in the late tenth century, and Tuscany or Saxony, or the Ottonian kingdom/empire as a whole, was using nearly all of them. I do not want to argue here for a simple and unchanging stability, and indeed the last couple of pages have argued the opposite. But the political parameters of the tenth-century world, including its violence, and a fair measure of cynicism and opportunism, seem to me - if one has to choose - to look backwards rather than forwards. Above all, the tenth-century emphasis on the public world of assemblies and large-scale collective rituals would lessen in the future. It was already beginning to disappear in the last decades of the tenth century in West Francia; in Italy it would continue for another century, but disappear quite fast around 1100; in East Francia it would persist for rather longer at the level of the kingdom, but would fade much faster in some of the localities. Assembly politics slowly turned into the politics of royal and princely courts, groups selected by rulers rather than being representatives (however much in practice aristocratic ones) of political communities. A sense of belonging, of loyalty, and of hierarchy would become more personalized as these changes took place, and the lord- dependant relationship would come into the foreground more, gaining as it did a more elaborate ceremonial and etiquette. These are markers of the central Middle Ages, not the early Middle Ages; and they were hardly more than at their beginning in 1000.
One result of that change is that the eleventh century, at least in West Francia but to an extent also in Italy, seldom looked back much to the tenth. History-writing in Italy after 1000 is very localized, and pays little attention to the politics of the kingdom at all; the tenth century only gets remembered in tiny vignettes, such as Hugh’s lustfulness, or Otto I’s saving of his second wife Adelaide from Berengar II. Rodulf Glaber in West Francia, writing only a generation after Richer, is at least interested in the kings of his own time, but before the 990s has almost no information, and it is again expressed in isolated stories, Heribert II’s capture of Charles the Simple, or Lothar’s war against Otto II, or the Arab capture of Abbot Maiolus of Cluny in 972; his highly detailed account of his own times needs no back history to explain matters, and maybe it would not have explained them, to his eyes. This reordering of historical consciousness marks the failure, in the west and the south of the Frankish lands, of the Carolingian political world and its traditional methods of legitimization: too much of the past did not mean anything any more. Only Charlemagne survived, as an increasingly mythic and dehistoricized figure, flanked in some areas of West Francia by Pippin III and Clovis: safe symbols of the distant past, legitimizing the present but not explaining it. The tenth century was thus eclipsed; some of its major players still cannot easily be understood. But this would not have been in anyone’s mind in 1000, when, to a Gerbert or a Thietmar, the world, even if dangerous and unpredictable, was carrying on just fine.
19
‘Carolingian’ England, 800-1000
In 990 or 991, a landowner named Wynflæd made a plea against Leofwine (possibly her stepson) before the English king Æthelred II, about the ownership of two estates in Berkshire. She had a heavyweight set of witnesses, the king’s powerful mother Ælfthryth (see below), the archbishop of Canterbury Sigeric, and a bishop and an ealdorman, the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of a Continental duke or count. Leofwine insisted that the matter be first heard at a shire assembly (scirgemot), the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the county-level placitum in the Frankish lands; this was correct in law, but was also important to Leofwine, presumably, because the twenty-five-year-old king might not easily judge against his mother, even in the period before 993 when she was temporarily not part of his court. The move of venue did not help Leofwine much, however, for after Æthelred formally committed the case to the Berkshire assembly, with his seal and (apparently verbal) instructions, the queen-mother and twenty-four named men and women appeared and swore in favour of Wynflæd’s ownership of the land. It was pointed out to Leofwine that, if the case reached the oath-swearing moment, he would risk a huge fine, and also the end of ‘friendship’ between the parties (though that had, one feels, long gone). He therefore conceded, handing over the land, in return for the gold and silver of his father, which Wynflæd still had. She was very reluctant to return it; it was this which had probably sparked off Leofwine’s occupation of the land. But the document relating the case (an original text) ends here, and we cannot follow the parties further.
English court cases often ended in deals; Leofwine had done quite well to get this rather half-hearted one, given the odds against him (perhaps he was even in the right over the money, hence the court being prepared to broker an arbitration). But it is equally important that the deal took place in public, in the Berkshire judicial assembly. By the later tenth century, England, like the Carolingian lands, had a network of public assemblies whose main purpose was to hear disputes in front of a large number of locally powerful people. By law, these should include the local bishop and ealdorman, as usually in Francia; in the event two bishops and an abbot presided over this one, and the king’s reeve Ælfgar was there too (probably he was the shire reeve, the ‘sheriff’, by now the king’s direct representative in the locality, more directly responsible to the king than was the ealdorman). And it is clear just from Wynflæd’s witnesses that the
assembly was substantial in size. It will have consisted of all the local notables of Berkshire who could get there, the ‘good men’ as the text called them, including the aristocracy, the thegns of the county. This assembly heard local disputes, and also did royal business. The case was royal in origin, and was decided as the king would undoubtedly have wished, but his will was carried out by the whole county community. This balance between royal power and collective validation is very Carolingian in style; so is the large penalty for losing an oath. As we shall see, it is likely that there is direct Carolingian influence at work here. But we are also in 990. By now, this sort of regular royal-controlled public politics had vanished in most of the Carolingian lands, either because kings were themselves weak, as in West Francia, or because (as in Italy in particular, but also parts of East Francia) local assemblies and courts by now had a rather intermittent relationship to kings. Charlemagne’s image of how the local judicial assembly should work had come to be perpetuated only in England, even though no part of England was ever under Carolingian rule. This is the paradox which we shall explore in this chapter: first, through a narrative of ninth- and tenth-century English politics; then, through a discussion of political structures and Carolingian influences on them; and finally through an analysis of English difference. For, however influential Continental practices had become, the structures of English society remained distinct too.
We left Anglo-Saxon England in Chapter 7 with Offa (d. 796) and Cenwulf (d. 821) of Mercia dominant south of the Humber. After Cenwulf’s death, however, Mercian hegemony quickly broke down under a series of short-lived kings, from rival families. Ecgbert of Wessex (802-39) defeated the fourth of these, Wiglaf (827-40), in 829 and ruled Mercia directly for a year. Wiglaf recovered his throne in 830, and in 836 could call all the bishops of the southern English to his court, as had the eighth-century Mercian kings, but from now on there were two major powers in the south, Mercia and Wessex. By 840 Anglo-Saxon England was more or less back to the situation it was in in 700, in fact, with four roughly balanced kingdoms, for we must add to these two East Anglia, ill-documented but by far the most economically complex kingdom, and Northumbria, which in the early ninth century under Eardwulf (796-c. 810) and his son Eanred (c. 810-40) had a period of relative internal peace. The Mercian supremacy had firmly developed the structures of royal power, and linked the episcopal network more closely to government; it had also contributed to the definitive eclipse of the smaller kingdoms, with the Hwicce now finally attached to Mercia, and Essex, Sussex and Kent first attached to Mercia, and then, after 825, ruled stably by Wessex. (Only Kent maintained a certain autonomy, ruled as it was by Cenwulf’s brother Cuthred, d. 807, then informally controlled by Archbishop Wulfred of Canterbury, d. 832, and then after 825 governed by three West Saxon sons of kings in turn.) All the same, eighth-century Mercian power had not changed the geopolitics of England, which could easily revert to the older four-kingdom framework. In the mid-century Northumbria fell back into civil war, and Mercia and Wessex were increasingly clearly the major kingdoms, cooperating quite closely on occasion, under Berhtwulf (840-52) and his probable son Burgred (852-74) of Mercia, and Æthelwulf (839-58) of Wessex, who married his daughter to Burgred and helped him fight the Welsh. Æthelwulf had a wider prestige too, for late in life he married Charles the Bald’s daughter Judith; but he was happy to concentrate on controlling southern England. At most he nibbled at Mercia’s boundaries, taking over Berkshire in the 840s, although he retreated from London, leaving it and its wealth as an isolated outlier of Mercian rule.
What changed this political pattern was the Vikings. They raided the English coasts from the mid-830s, just as they did in West Francia and elsewhere; they were particularly active in Kent and East Anglia, and they stepped up their attacks in the 850s, by when they were over-wintering in some places. But, whereas in Francia they always had to leave temporarily when a royal army finally appeared, the scale of insular politics - and armies - was far smaller, and Anglo-Saxon armies could lose to Viking ones, as Berhtwulf of Mercia found in 851 and a Kentish army found in 853. The Vikings had eventually realized that this gave them the chance for more permanent gain, for it was in England that leading Danish Vikings grouped together in a ‘Great Army’, micel here in the Old English of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in 865. The Great Army numbered in the thousands, rather than the hundreds of earlier raiding parties, and was larger than any Anglo-Saxon army; it had a collective leadership, but it acted as an effective conquering force. In 866-7 it conquered Northumbria, killing its two warring kings; in 869 it took East Anglia, again killing its king, Edmund, who was afterwards venerated as a martyr; in 870-71 the West Saxons under Æthelwulf’s sons Æthelred I (865-71) and Alfred (871-99) only just, somehow, managed to hold the Army off for a time; in 873-7 it took half of Mercia, leaving Ceolwulf II (c. 874-8) with only the north-west and the south. In 876-8 it attacked Wessex again and cornered Alfred in the Somerset marshes (the location of the famous, but sadly only eleventh-century, ‘Alfred and the cakes’ story), before the latter managed to call an army together in 878 and defeat the Vikings at Edington in Wiltshire. This was a key battle for Wessex. The Viking leader Guthrum was forced to make peace, and even accepted baptism, retreating to East Anglia, which he turned into a stable Viking kingdom. Thereafter, the wars stopped for over a decade.
Alfred was left in control of all his father’s lands, to which he added London in 886. His kingdom was thus the only one fully to survive the Viking onslaught. And he was probably also, by his death, the only Anglo-Saxon king. Ceolwulf’s successor Æthelred II of Mercia (c. 879- 911), Alfred’s son-in-law, was called king on occasion, but is usually entitled dux or ealdorman in our sources; Mercia was slipping into the status of a sub-kingdom of Wessex, certainly as a result of Alfred’s political choice. The only other autonomous Anglo-Saxon ruler was Eadwulf (d. 912) in Bernicia in northern Northumbria, where the Vikings did not reach; his family’s rule survived off and on up to the Norman Conquest, but they may not have used the royal title. There were Danish kings, of course, in East Anglia and in York (and also apparently collective leaderships in the Five Boroughs of Danish Mercia). We do not know much about their political infrastructures. Kings were certainly less powerful in Denmark than anywhere in England, so they would not have brought strong ruling traditions with them; only the kings of York leave much impression in our (largely West Saxon) evidence, and even then not until after 919, with Røgnvald (d. c. 920) and Sigtryg (d. 927), both from a Dublin-based family. Once the Great Army had moved from conquering to ruling, in fact, it became strategically weaker. It had had to divide up; this fact in itself probably explains Alfred’s survival, for Guthrum did not have with him the Vikings who were establishing themselves in Northumbria; and the Vikings in England not only never united again, but also seem to have ruled less stable polities than the increasingly coherent West Saxon (plus Mercian) kingdom in southern and western England. Alfred may have owed his success in 878 to luck, but he built on this systematically in the next two decades, above all - necessarily - in military preparedness: he seems to have developed a large-scale military levy from the population, and he certainly established a dense network of public fortifications, burhs, throughout southern England, defended by public obligation, which was sufficiently effective to hold off a second large-scale Viking assault in 892-6. Alfred died ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’, or, in the Chronicle’s words, ‘of the whole English people except that part which was under Danish rule’; he may have been the first king to see himself in ‘English’, not West Saxon or Mercian, terms, as his neat footwork with respect to Æthelred of Mercia’s autonomy also shows. But it was the Vikings who made that choice possible for him.
Alfred’s son Edward ‘the Elder’ (899-924) began to counterattack, at first in border wars, and then, after Æthelred of Mercia’s death, systematically. In 911 Edward and his sister Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians (911-18) in succession to her husband Æthelred, moved eastwards, an
d had taken East Anglia and the Five Boroughs by Æthelflæd’s death. In this period Wessex and Mercia were still operating as an alliance of near-equals; but in 919 Edward also fully annexed English Mercia, sweeping aside Æthelflæd’s daughter Ælfwyn. In the 910s, the core of the English kingdom thus took shape, with finality, for across the next century Alfred’s dynasty never lost control of Mercia and eastern England again, except for a brief conquest of the east Midlands in 940 by Olaf Guthfrithson, king of Dublin and York, reversed in 942. Northumbria was a different matter; the English kings and two Norwegian families fought over it for nearly thirty years, 927-54, before the last Scandinavian king of York, Eirík ‘Bloodaxe’, was killed on Stainmore in the latter year. But most of Northumbria was always a peripheral, only half-controlled, part of England across the next two centuries, and indeed for a long time after, and it is arguable that these wars were only really fought for the increasingly rich trading entrepôt of York itself. Edward’s son Æthelstan (924-39) and his successors indeed seem to have regarded successful war against, and hegemony over, kings in Wales and of Scotland as being as important as their rule in Northumbria, as is represented by the increasingly grandiloquent claims in their documents. Æthelstan was ‘king of all Britain’ from 931, ‘basileus of the English and all surrounding peoples’ in 938, and imperator became increasingly common from now on too. Overall, apart from York, one could regard the major shift of the tenth century, the invention of the kingdom of England, as being complete in military-political terms by 919.
The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 Page 58