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

by Chris Wickham

  The coherence of the English kingdom is perhaps best expressed in one of the witnesses to its late tenth-century defeat, the poem known as The Battle of Maldon. This text celebrates the fight to the death by Ealdorman Byrhtnoth of Essex and his entourage against the newly invading Vikings at Maldon in 991. Byrhtnoth, an ally of the family of Æthelstan ‘Half-king’, had been one of the major figures of the kingdom since the start of Edgar’s reign and an important patron of Ely abbey; his death came as a considerable shock. The poem is written up in the best heroic style by an anonymous poet, probably (though this is debated) shortly after the battle. Byrhtnoth’s troops have the same personal attachment to him that heroic warbands had in earlier poetry, but there are differences. One is that he has with him a county levy from Essex, heir to the collective defensive levies set up by Alfred, as well as a core group of personally loyal dependants. Another is that the men who fight on, with proud speeches, around their dead leader are from different parts of England (a Mercian aristocrat, a Northumbrian hostage, as well as men of Essex) and also from different social classes (a simple peasant, an old retainer): they are intended to represent a cross-section of English, not just Essex-based, identity and loyalty, and they explicitly fight not just for Byrhtnoth but for ‘the kingdom of Æthelred, my lord’s people and his country’. This kingdom-wide identity (at least in the vision of the Maldon poet) briefly unravelled in the chaos of the early 1010s, when, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle grimly claims, ‘in the end no shire would even help the next’, but it revived after that. There was no permanent regional breakdown in at least southern England, no equivalent to the increasingly separate marches, duchies, counties of the Continent. Nor did private lordships develop; the shire and hundred assemblies controlled nearly all justice right up to the Norman Conquest. By 1066 even Northumbria was beginning (although with difficulty) to be incorporated into the political system. Of course, there were local differences, and also local loyalties and rivalries. But, as Domesday Book shows, the wide geographical spread of the landowning of the tenth-century ealdormanic élite continued throughout the eleventh century as well, and in 1066 that spread is equally visible for the next level down, the thegns, the basic aristocratic stratum of the country. That landowning, fully matched by the spread of lands of cathedrals and monasteries, held the country together. The newly minted tax system simply added to this pre-existing coherence.

  England may have been Carolingian in its aspirations; but the long-lasting solidity of the political settlement of Edward the Elder’s reign has so little parallel on the Continent that we cannot ascribe it all to the Carolingian lesson so systematically learned. What its roots really were must remain speculative: we do not have enough evidence for late Anglo-Saxon England to be sure of any argument of this kind. I would myself, however, associate it with a ninth-century development entirely separate from Viking conquest and Alfredian ideology: the formation of exclusive rights to property. We saw in Chapter 7 that early Anglo-Saxon land-units can best be seen as territories from which kings and some aristocrats, and, thanks to royal gift, churches and monasteries, took tribute, which could be quite light. In such territories, which were often substantial, covering the territories of a dozen later villages or more in some cases, a variety of people could live, from aristocrats to peasants, with, it seems, a variety of rights of possession; only the unfree seem to have paid heavy rents and services to lords or masters. That was the situation in the late seventh century, when our documents (all of them initially gifts by kings to churches) start. By 900, though, a list of rents surviving from Hurstborne Priors in Hampshire shows a village with much more serious obligations: here, the ceorlas, free peasants, had to pay money and produce in rent, and also do labour service, ploughing and sheep-shearing. These detailed requirements show tight control, and they are the first signs of what would become the standard landlord- tenant relationship in England: for the ceorlas of Hurstborne are best seen as tenants of the bishop of Winchester, the holder - we can now say owner - of the land. By the late tenth to early eleventh century, this sort of relationship seems quite generalized in the west Midlands and Somerset, too, for this is the broad area of origin of a text, called the Rectitudines Singularum Personarum, describing the standard dues owed by several strata of dependants on an unnamed estate, apparently as a guide to good estate-management. By Domesday Book in 1086, such an estate pattern characterized the entire country, in the former Viking-ruled lands no less than in the west and south. The global wealth deriving from rents and services was by now both great and capable of being described in detail.

  These changes represent a revolution in land tenure, in which not just unfree, but also free, peasants ended up paying not just tribute to lords and rulers, but rents to landowners; these rents, importantly, were much heavier as well. The absence of any documented resistance to this process indicates that it was slow, certainly starting with the unfree (who were numerous), but then probably extending steadily to different groups of the free, first at the centre of land-units, and then coming to include their fringes and outliers, whose inhabitants paid lower rents and services well into the central Middle Ages. The more influential inhabitants of early Anglo-Saxon territories for the most part, by contrast, ended up not as tenants but as lords. Territories split up as time went on; a land-unit covering a dozen later villages might turn into twelve smaller units, which we can now call estates, each covering a single village territory. When held privately, these estates were characteristically in the hands of thegns, whether they held the land outright (in gift from the king, their former territorial lord, perhaps), or in lease from a church; the latter relationship is particularly well documented on the lands of Worcester cathedral, which kept its leases and recorded them in two eleventh-century cartularies. We cannot easily date the main period of the shift from land-units to estates, for the terminology of our documents remains much the same; but the break-up of larger units into village-sized blocks seems, from documentary evidence, to be a feature of the ninth and tenth centuries. This is also the period of a generalized concentration of settlement in the Midlands and central-southern England, into the villages at the centre of each of these blocks; this was a slower process, but probably a related one. The Hurstborne document, however isolated, would thus mark a change that was by then widespread, even, maybe, already nearing completion: the creation of a landscape of estates, one which had for long been typical of Continental western Europe, but which had not existed in England since the departure of the Romans.

  This shift is as ill-documented as it was fundamental; my characterization of it in the last two paragraphs has to be seen as hypothetical. But its consequences are more visible, and several of them are important. One is that disposable wealth was sharply concentrated, and in fewer hands: those of kings, greater and lesser aristocrats and churches. As a result, an exchange economy, and more elaborate patterns of production, are notably more visible in the tenth century than in the eighth. In the eighth, exchange was still focused on a handful of ports, Southampton, London, Ipswich, York. In the tenth, York expanded dramatically, in part thanks to the international links of the Viking world (as we shall see in the next chapter), but so also did a network of inland centres, Lincoln, Thetford, Stamford, Chester, Winchester, and, to a lesser extent, a wide set of the burhs or boroughs of Alfred, Edward the Elder, and their Danish opponents, in particular the network of county towns, Leicester, Worcester, Shrewsbury, Oxford. This can be seen as a capillary urban network, at least one per shire and often more. And, in productive terms, wheel-thrown pottery with relatively wide distribution patterns begins to appear in the decades around 900, first in the east Midlands, at Stamford, Thetford, St Neots, and then elsewhere; references to wool, England’s central medieval export strength, begin to appear by the end of the century too. The tenth-century kings greatly increased the money supply, and exchange was sufficiently widespread for the tax system of the 990s to assume that taxes could be paid in silver coin. That wealth m
ay have been creamed off to Denmark, at least initially, but it was still wealth. The infrastructure for its extraction from the peasantry evidently existed fully by then. Rare excavations of thegnly residences, at Raunds in Northamptonshire and Goltho in Lincolnshire, also show concentrations of wealth that were invisible in the eighth century; so do late Anglo-Saxon private churches, which were for the first time becoming numerous, and which after 1000 were increasingly built in stone.

  This concentration of wealth was all the greater because of its geographical completeness, the second consequence of the estate-formation process. Most of England split into village-sized estates, or perhaps half-or quarter-villages; any space for a free landowning peasantry virtually vanished. This pattern was less regular in parts of the Danelaw, in particular the east Midlands, where some more independent peasant groups persisted (many were called sochemanni, ‘sokemen’, in Domesday Book, indicating that they had rights to seek justice with, it seems, some autonomy from lords, even when they were tenants); the Danelaw, from Yorkshire to East Anglia, also had more fragmented estates, which in itself gave more space for peasant landowning, and which allowed for reduced subjection on estate outliers. But even there, the process of estate formation seems to have had the same sort of timescale; and even there, the percentage of landowning peasants was lower than on most of the Continent. England had thus moved from being the post-Roman province with least peasant subjection, in 700, to the land where peasant subjection was the completest and most totalizing in the whole of Europe, by as early as 900 in much of the country, and by the eleventh century at the latest elsewhere. The lordships of France based on private justice did not develop in England, but they hardly needed to; peasants were already entirely subject to lords tenurially, and many were unfree (unlike in France: see Chapter 22) and thus had no rights to public justice either.

  A third consequence is that this crystallization of landed power, with the substantial increase in dues from peasants that came with it, greatly favoured kings. Kings had had rights of small-scale tribute from most of the land-area of their kingdoms - all the land which they had not already conceded to churches. When this turned into rent, churches and indeed lay aristocrats all found their local power (and their own wealth) more certain, in the village blocks they controlled, but kings were still the main beneficiaries. By the tenth century, kings ended up with a high proportion of the land under their direct control. Although that proportion was higher in some areas than in others, the tenth-century kings of southern England controlled, overall, a far higher percentage of the land-area of their kingdom than did Charlemagne; the Frankish king/emperor was certainly much richer than they, but only as a result of his rule over ten times the land-area of the realm of Æthelstan. English kings thus had a uniquely favourable position in Europe: they could be enormously generous, creating a new aristocracy or giving it hitherto unknown wealth, whether on a large scale (Æthelstan ‘Half-king’, Ælfhere of Mercia) or a small, while still maintaining overall dominance, as a result of the extensive lands they still owned. They thus kept the strategic upper hand, which was further safeguarded when taxation came in. Royal courts and royal power, as we have seen, remained central even in the mid- and late tenth century, characterized as it was by royal minorities and the oligarchy of the queen and her leading aristocrats; this centrality was greatly aided by royal dominance over land. No one in early medieval Europe was ever as generous as Eadwig in his documented land grants of 956-9, but his successors were not weakened, and Æthelred II rolled back the tide of generosity when he took offices and often private property off the ealdormanic élite again; Cnut’s conquest displaced more aristocratic families, and William I’s did even more completely. Kings could thus remain crucial to all political calculation in England, simply because of their undiminished powers of patronage. It is this, above all, that marks England as different, and marks out its trajectory as separate from that in any of the Carolingian successor states. The ‘politics of land’ here definitely favoured royal power, and, eventually, central government.

  This was further reinforced by another special characteristic of England, already referred to: the tenth-century kings’ continuing relationship to free society. One consequence of the exclusion of the peasantry from landowning might have been that they were also excluded from any relationship to the public world, as indeed happened in West Francia, and often elsewhere in the Carolingian world too. In England, as we have just seen, more of them were tenants of the king than was the case elsewhere; royal dependants seem to have had more rights than other tenants (this was still so later in the Middle Ages), and they were at least not subjected to private lords. But the traditional public obligations of all free men persisted as well. The national emergency of Alfred’s reign required a wider military participation than was by now necessary on the Continent, and burh defence was added to it; these public commitments continued without a break, alongside the more skilled military strike forces of the aristocracy, whenever national defence required. Similarly, even shire judicial assemblies had space for the free peasantry, and the basic law for the hundredal assembly indeed presumed that their attendance was normal; this public role for the free continued without a break thereafter, as it did not in most regions of the Carolingian world.

  England’s development thus remains paradoxical. It became the European country where aristocratic dominance, based on property rights, was most complete, while also being the post-Carolingian country where kings maintained most fully their control over political structures, both traditional (assemblies, armies) and new (oaths, taxation). But the paradox seems to me expicable, nonetheless: it is the consequence of both the oligarchical compact that allowed the West Saxon conquest of the rest of southern England in the 910s, and the crystallization of property rights that took place in the ninth century and into the tenth. England’s history as the longest-lasting state of medieval Europe began there.

  20

  Outer Europe

  Anskar was a missionary sent by Louis the Pious to evangelize the Danes and Swedes, which he attempted off and on between 826 and his death in 865. His saint’s life, written by a well-informed younger contemporary, Rimbert, is a rare account of an unsuccessful conversion process. In Denmark, Anskar might have got somewhere, thanks to the patronage of kings Horic I (827-54) and Horic II (854-c. 870), not Christians but not unsympathetic either. But the mission only had patrons (both royal and aristocratic), not any powerful and committed converts, except among some of the merchants of Hedeby, and in the confusion after Horic II’s death it folded. In Sweden, Anskar’s main attempt, probably in the 840s, involved a meeting with King Olaf at the trading town of Birka, in which Olaf said he could not accept the mission without asking his own gods through drawing lots, and without asking the assembly (placitum in Rimbert’s Latin) ‘for it is the custom for [the Swedes] that any public business is more in the will of the unanimous people [populus] than in [that of] royal power’. The lots were negative, but an elder in the assembly argued that the Christian god might help in the face of dangers at sea, and the populus agreed to accept the mission. Olaf agreed to ask another assembly in his kingdom to accept it as well. This assembly politics seems to have been more powerful in Sweden than in Denmark (though there were certainly assemblies there too), but we must note that in both kingdoms the discussion was only about whether to accept a Christian mission, not about whether actually to convert en masse, which did not happen in either. Even if kings were personally Christian, as Håkon I (c. 934-61) was in Norway, they could not easily demand conversion from their countrymen, and Håkon is praised for not trying to do so in a probably contemporary poem. The wider conversion process only began in the late tenth century in Denmark, and later still in Sweden and Norway: it was, in part, a consequence of stronger kingship, although, by Continental European standards, only a little stronger.

  When trying to understand European societies outside the ex-Roman and Carolingian kingdoms of the West and South (
and, eventually, their Anglo-Saxon offshoot), we need to recognize the weakness of political structures straight away. Royal politics did not delineate the history of the Scandinavians or Slavs with any consistency until the late tenth century. Indeed, it is not clear, despite the certainties of external texts like the Life of Anskar, that rulers had any consistent ‘kingly’ titles; jarlar, jarls or earls, were independent powers in the northerly Trondheim district of Norway until after 1000, for example, and the Slavs seem to have had a very eclectic set of titles for rulers. It may be that there was as yet no clear distinction between ‘kings’ and leading ‘aristocrats’ in either, that is, between independent rulers, nominally dependent but autonomous rulers, and more subject political leaders; aristocrats, too, were probably leaders of followers rather than landlords of tenants for a long time. In Wales, Scotland, and Ireland before 800, as we saw in Chapter 7, rulers were regularly called ‘kings’, but the reges of our sources ruled tiny kingdoms (except in Scotland), and their power was more easily assimilated to that of the small-scale rulers and leading aristocrats of Scandinavia than even to Anglo-Saxon kings, never mind Frankish ones. Some of these regions were beginning to move towards more centralized political systems with stronger rulers by the very end of our period, 950-1000: Poland, Bohemia, the core lands of what is now Russia, and Denmark. Conversely, this process of ‘state- building’ was still highly incomplete in Norway, Scotland, Wales and Ireland; and in Sweden (as in some of the smaller Slav communities) it had hardly started.