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

by Chris Wickham

  Edward and Æthelflæd’s conquest of midland and eastern England was above all a West Saxon conquest. It involved the West Saxon aristocracy, quite as much as the kings, and in the next generation the families of ealdormen of East Anglia and also, significantly, Mercia were predominantly of West Saxon origin. A surviving Mercian-focused affinity seems to be both visible and quite effective when successions were tense or disputed between brothers, as in 924 or 957-9, in each of which the Mercian-supported brother ended up as king, but the West Saxons had the strategic edge, and their aristocratic placements underlined it further. The Wessex dynasty thus created a Reichsaristokratie, as the Carolingians had done, and as their Ottonian contemporaries did not manage. None of Æthelstan’s successors - his brothers Edmund and Eadred (939-46, 946-55), Edmund’s sons Eadwig and Edgar (955-9, 957-75), Edgar’s sons Edward ‘the Martyr’ and Æthelred II (975-8, 978-1016) - were over eighteen at their accessions except Eadred, but, almost uniquely in history, this did not result in a weakened political system. The influence of queen-mothers, notably Edmund and Eadred’s mother Eadgifu (d. after 966) and Æthelred’s mother Ælfthryth (d. c. 1000) was very considerable, which helped the continuity of royal power, as often in Francia. But the loyalty of the leading ealdormen was as important. Under Eadgifu (that is, Edmund, Eadred, Edgar) the family of Æthelstan ‘Half-king’ (d. after 956), ealdorman of East Anglia from 932, came to dominate in Mercia and East Anglia; Eadwig’s brief reign saw the emergence of a rival family, that of Ælfhere, ealdorman of Mercia (d. 983). These two families, both West Saxon, thereafter shared power, along with a handful of other inter-related ealdormen. We can see them as an oligarchy, ruling through a succession of young kings with, apparently, considerable coherence. And they needed to be coherent. If the English political system broke down, they could not hope to remain as powerful, given the geographical range of their landholding and office-holding, extending as it did in each case across much of southern, central and eastern England, thanks to Edward the Elder’s conquests and to royal generosity thereafter.

  Not that this coherence necessarily meant amity. Eadwig in particular seems to have tried to shift alignments; his reign was marked by extraordinarily large-scale royal gift-giving, and new families appeared as a result. Eadgifu and Æthelstan ‘Half-king’ responded by setting up Edgar in Mercia against him, apparently without violent conflict however, unlike in contemporary succession disputes in Francia; the two brothers reigned together for two years until Eadwig died, and his protégé Ælfhere actually joined Edgar, presumably in order not to lose his own Mercian clientele. Edgar and his supporters then patronized a large-scale monastic reform movement, which after 964 converted even cathedral churches into monasteries, under Dunstan of Canterbury (d. 988), Æthelwold of Winchester (d. 984) and Oswald of Worcester and York (d. 992), all of them monk-bishops; free-standing monasteries were also founded and patronized by kings and aristocrats, including the rival Fenland houses of Ramsey (968) and Ely (970). The landed politics of these increasingly rich houses was itself controversial, and the reign of Edward the Martyr in particular saw trouble, with aristocrats taking, or taking back, monastic lands. Edward was actually murdered in 978, in obscure circumstances, a bad start to the reign of Æthelred II and his (but not Edward’s) mother Ælfthryth. But none of these tensions resulted in more than sporadic violence, and the ealdormanic oligarchy survived into the 990s. Æthelred II was by then strong enough to end it. Ælfhere’s probable brother-in-law and heir in Mercia, Ælfric, was expelled for treason in 985; when Æthelwine, the powerful son of Æthelstan ‘Half king’, died in 992, his sons did not succeed him in East Anglia; by 1006, all the old families were gone, most of them permanently. It was Æthelred II, then, who decisively broke with the 930s-940s political system of Æthelstan and Eadgifu; his later protégés were all new. Unfor tunately, they also seem to have been less effective. Æthelred’s reign also saw the return of Viking raiding, sporadic from 980 and serious after 990; from 1009 the invading armies were ever more successful, and English defences ever more feeble. In 1013 King Svein of Denmark (d. 1014), who had led some of the earlier raids, engaged in a full-scale conquest of England, which was completed in 1016 by his son Cnut (1016-35).

  The wars and instability which the southern English had managed to avoid for a century returned a hundredfold in the 1010s. The sense of political collapse that is so visible in the bitter pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for these years has few parallels in the whole of English history since. But Cnut nonetheless managed to inherit a rich and stable kingdom from Æthelred. We must not underestimate the stresses and factions in that kingdom, and maybe the difficulties in making an English identity stick in the face of more local loyalties. All the same, it had achieved, in the generations since Edward the Elder, a structural coherence that could outlast the destruction of its ruling élites by Æthelred and the military ineptness of their successors. The rest of this chapter will look at how and why this occurred.

  The structures of government did not change much in the early ninth century, except that royal entourages seem to have become more complex in that period, with increasing numbers of officials travelling the country and having to be fed. Major shifts seem to have begun with Alfred. Exactly how this worked will never be fully known. Anglo-Saxon sources are never generous, including by early medieval standards; even those for Alfred, although more numerous than for the reigns of his father and his son, are very much the mouthpiece for Alfred himself, who was not only the patron of writers but an author in his own right, well aware of the possibilities of political spin, and visibly skilled in covering cynical political calculation with a moralistic veneer. What is clear, however, is that Alfred was very influenced by the political values of the Carolingian court. He sought intellectuals from Francia; we have a letter from Archbishop Fulk of Reims rather reluctantly granting Alfred’s request for Grimbald of Saint-Bertin in 886. Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne was available in England, and was one of the models used by Alfred’s Welsh protégé Asser in his own Life of Alfred. That text, written in Alfred’s lifetime, creates an image of Alfred heavily influenced by hagiography, including an illness (piles) which protected his youthful chastity, and another debilitating disease which undermined him in later years (the illnesses may well have been real, but their role in Asser’s text parallels hagiographical writing), as well as a heavy emphasis on Alfred’s learning and spiritual commitment. Alfred was indeed unusually well educated, even by Carolingian standards; he thought it essential to sponsor translations into Old English of some of the fundamental Latin Christian works of the early Middle Ages, such as Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, to make them accessible to the Anglo-Saxon élites, and three of these translations are his own work. Alfred’s often fairly free translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy shows a king fully familiar with a biblical and theological conception of kingship, pragmatic (kings need resources) but also self-aware (when the rich and powerful go abroad and meet people who do not know them, they realize how much their position is owed ‘to the praise of foolish people’). Alfred looked systematically to the Bible; his law code goes further even than those of Charlemagne in its insertion, as a preface, of a set of extracts from the laws of Moses in Exodus, which were evidently intended to have at least meta-legal force. This sort of literary royal ideology was unparalleled in England before Alfred’s generation, but it has direct roots in the thought-world of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald.

  The Carolingian reform programme thus took root in England during just the decades in which it was running out of steam in Francia. But Alfred also borrowed political practices from the Frankish world. One of the clearest is the collective oath of loyalty sworn to the king, which is the first law in Alfred’s code, and which looks straight back to Carolingian legislation (Alfred states just before that law that he ‘dared not presume to set down in writing at all many of my own [laws]’ but this is typical Alfredian disinformation); one of the tenth-centu
ry developments of this law, Edmund’s code of about 943, quotes directly from a capitulary of 802. In England, indeed, that law was interpreted rather more harshly than in Francia, for the next century is scattered with cases of aristocrats who lost all their land for breaking their oath, something that rarely happened in either the Carolingian or the Ottonian world. The great emphasis on the oath in the Wynflæd-Leofwine case seems related to this too. The detail of Alfred’s own government, including his army reforms, looks back to the Anglo-Saxon past rather than over the Channel, as far as we can see. But the precedent he set allowed his tenth-century successors, as they developed the increasingly coherent and self-confident southern English state, to draw from Frankish example wherever necessary, alongside extensions of indigenous practice. Edward the Elder and his successors spread the pattern of West Saxon shires across Mercia, obliterating the old Mercian regional divisions (in a particularly overt act, perhaps dating to the 920s, the old Mercian royal centre of Tamworth was actually bisected by the boundaries of Warwickshire and Staffordshire, thus marginalizing it for ever after); the burh network of Wessex was extended to Mercia already in the 910s, although it seems increasingly likely that the Mercians had had a similar system of fortified centres before as well. Conversely, the new subdivision of the shire, the hundred, seems to have been a Frankish import, not a West Saxon one, and it too was established in the tenth century. Tenth-century assembly politics (the king’s own large consultative assembly, the shire assembly, the hundredal assembly) similarly had Anglo-Saxon - indeed, common Germanic - roots; but the increasingly visible judicial activity of these bodies, and their association with royal direction, the king’s seal and attached instructions, betrays Frankish influence. So does royal legislation, as already implied; Alfred’s revival of it in itself probably shows his awareness of Carolingian law-making, and the numerous codes of the 920s-1020s resemble Frankish capitularies, sometimes quite closely. As with Edmund in 943, when Æthelred II in 1009 decreed a three-day fast in great detail in his seventh code, as a response to the great Viking invasion of that year, he was directly echoing Charlemagne.

  These Frankish influences are not surprising. (More surprising is how seldom they were noticed before the 1970s.) Carolingian Francia was so much more powerful than any English kingdom, and its governmental technologies were so much more sophisticated, that, once the idea of borrowing developed, it could continue for a long time. We must add to this the increasing integration of the tenth-century West Saxon dynasty into Continental politics. Edward the Elder was the first Anglo-Saxon king to engage systematically in marriage alliances abroad, and his daughters ended up married to Charles the Simple, Hugh the Great and Otto I; Æthelstan intervened in West Frankish politics, sheltering his nephew Louis IV in his years of exile, and sending armies twice to the Continent. The English kings were increasingly regarded by the Franks as political players, and mutual interest increased: Asser and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle include an account of the 887-8 Frankish succession crisis; Flodoard and Thietmar both include (a few) English events in their chronicles. Cultural relationships developed as well. English clerics sometimes spent time in Continental monasteries, as Oswald did in Fleury and Dunstan in Ghent (Æthelwold, too, sent a monk to Fleury to learn local practices); Continental intellectuals came to England in their turn, from Grimbald in the 880s to Abbo of Fleury in 985-7. Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023), who wrote several law codes for both Æthelred II and Cnut and some compilations of his own, was also a rousing social and political critic in the Hincmar mould, and his work is clearly influenced by the idiom of Carolingian correctio. The later tenth-century monastic reform in England was sister to that of Gorze, or that favoured by the abbots of Cluny (see below, Chapter 21), and the new English national monastic rule, the Regularis Concordia, drawn up by Æthelwold in the late 960s, both explicitly drew from contemporary example in Ghent and Fleury and owed its wider ambition to the unification of monastic practices set in motion by Louis the Pious after 816.

  This international dimension, so visible in tenth-century England, does bring a paradox all the same. For tenth-century Francia, as noted at the start of the chapter, was by no means still Carolingian in its aspiration. In Alfred’s time the values of Charles the Bald and Hincmar were still alive, but they were far weaker on the Continent by the time of Æthelstan or Edgar. Carolingian institutions, rituals, values came to England not (or not only) through the observation and emulation of practice, but through books. Wulfstan owned a copy of Ansegis’s capitulary collection, and it is likely enough that one had existed in England since Alfred’s time. Alcuin (himself Anglo-Saxon, of course) was certainly well known, Theodulf and Amalarius were available, and Hincmar may have been as well, at least second-hand. But it is still striking that the English took this literature so seriously. This may in part have been the legacy of Alfred’s highly moralized kingship; it must also have been a spin-off of the self-confidence of the tenth-century political community, whose members, however fractious, were the creators and maintainers of the largest, strongest, and most internally stable polity in Britain since the Romans left, and proud of it too.

  Tenth-century English government was both more and less coherent than that of the Carolingians. Although Old English, not Latin, was the main language of legislation and much theology, implying a desire for wider dissemination in the country, the English court seems to have used writing less; royal orders seem to have been largely (although not always) verbal across the century, and writs, written orders, only clearly survive from Æthelred II’s reign. For all the elaboration of tenth-century law-making, it is never explicitly referred to in our surviving court cases, and one has to look hard even to find implicit echoes; it often matches the political theology of Charlemagne’s reign, rather than his practical institutional changes, although Æthelstan and some of his successors did consciously innovate in their laws. The sophistication of English government, often written up in recent years, has to be set against the relative roughness of some ‘administrative’ practices: when the inhabitants of Thanet robbed some York merchants in 969, Edgar simply ravaged the island; Æthelred II similarly sacked the diocese of Rochester in 986, and, later on, Harthacnut (1040-42) sacked Worcestershire in 1041 because two tax collectors had been killed in Worcester cathedral.

  Conversely, there is clear evidence of royal strength. The importance of oaths to the king enormously widened the scope of ‘treason’ in the period, and it seems to have been easier in England than elsewhere for people to lose their lands and lives because of the king’s displeasure. Monastic reform was very heavily dependent on royal authority, and enhanced that authority in its turn. And in the 990s Æthelred II, in order to pay off the Vikings, instituted a tax system that in a few years was capable of generating considerable sums; this went way beyond anything the Carolingians ever attempted (Charles the Bald had begun the same process, but only tried it twice). How the Anglo-Saxon state managed such a task, given the detailed assessment which was necessary for it to run at all, without a very developed writing-based administrative infrastructure (as it seems), and in a period of continuous military defeat and demoralization, cannot be explained at present. But it was successful; eleventh-century English taxation was more elaborate than any other post-Roman state managed in the West until after 1200, and it generated, among other things, the most systematic governmental survey before the late Middle Ages, Domesday Book of 1086. Taxation was organized harshly; people who could not pay it lost their lands to people who could pay in their stead, and collective rejection of taxation brought reprisals, as at Worcester in 1041. The late Anglo-Saxon state, here as elsewhere, was heavy-handed and not notably benign. But taxation continued. It further increased royal wealth, and thus power, by the time that Cnut’s conquest allowed the money raised to stay in England, and it made possible the enduring solidity of the English state that was conquered, first by Svein and Cnut in 1013-16, and then by William I in 1066.

  The tenth-century En
glish kingdom had a rich aristocracy, as we have seen, one that saw its identity and political future as very much tied up with the success of the West Saxon dynasty. In Wessex, and also in English Mercia, it had deeper roots, but in much of the country it was entirely new, for its wealth in Danish Mercia and East Anglia derived from Edward the Elder’s conquest in 911-18 and partial expropriation of the political élites there, whose power in turn had presumably in most cases been new as well, a product of the Viking conquest of 869-78. It is interesting to realize, however, that despite the great importance of that conquest as a catalyst for the creation of a southern English state, the effect of the Vikings themselves on the country is very difficult to see. It is not clear that either Danish or (in north-west England) Norwegian settlement was very extensive; Scandinavian place names are dense in many areas, particularly Danish Mercia and Yorkshire, but this seems mostly to indicate the renaming of estates by new owners, not a mass peasant immigration. A distinctively Scandinavian material culture is also hard to find in the archaeology; the settlers seem to have become Christian fairly quickly; even Danish law, whose existence is implied by the later use of the term ‘Danelaw’ for northern and eastern England, seems, in the rare compilations that mention it, to have been much like Anglo-Saxon law elsewhere. There must have been some clusters of people with a Danish culture and identity in later tenth-century England, and there were certainly plenty of aristocrats with Danish ancestors (Oswald was one), but, overall, the eastern ‘Danelaw’ was probably less different from Wessex and English Mercia than Northumbria was from either. What the Vikings left for the West Saxon incomers was a more complicated and fragmented estate structure, with more space for a landowning peasantry (although even this may predate the Great Army’s conquests); and, in the southernmost part of Northumbria, the notable cosmopolitanism and openness to long-distance links of tenth-century York. For the rest, it is the West Saxon aristocratic stratum, overlaying the Viking period, that remains the most visible, at least south of the Humber.