Millenium

by Tom Holland

  Perhaps it was not surprising, then, that their neighbours, almost a century after Rollo's baptism, should have persisted in regarding the county ruled by his grandson as somehow sinister and alien: a lair of pirates still. Despite the fact that only Flanders among the great princedoms of the kingdom could boast a more venerable pedigree, the Norman state had never entirely lost its aura of the alien. In Rouen, for instance, the harbour remained as thronged with shipping from across the northern seas as it had ever been; flush with 'profits from the trade borne on the surging tides',22 the port was precisely the kind of stronghold that had always been most treasured by the Northmen. Even away from the Seine, the county remained a place where sea-wanderers might feel at home: in the west of Normandy especially, there were many who still spoke their language; while at Richard's court, a praise-singer from Scandinavia would always be assured of a welcome. Violence, and slaughter, and gloating, and brag­ging: these were the invariable themes of a poem composed by a Northman.

  Elsewhere too, escaped from the limits of song, hints of a primordial heathenism were rumoured to linger. The winter gales which screamed across the woods and fields of Normandy were notorious for being ridden by demonic huntsmen; and leading the hunt, men whispered, was none other than the ancient king of the gods himself. The same demon whose sacred groves in Saxony had long since been torched by Charlemagne was still worshipped by the Northmen under the name of 'Odin': a cloaked and one-eyed figure, the master of magic, a pacer of the realms of the night. Perhaps, in the final years of Richard's rule, it was a certain resemblance to the fabled 'All-father' that helped to explain the awe with which the aged count had come to be regarded: for just like Odin, he was bright-eyed and long-bearded, and it was said that after dark he would wander the streets of Rouen, cloaked and alone, and fight with the shades of the dead. Certainly, when he died at last, the grave in which he was buried appeared almost a spectre itself, conjured up from the mists of his forefathers' past: an earthen mound, looking out to sea.

  Yet if Richard had always kept one eye firmly fixed on the world of the North, then so too, with great skill and patience, had he sought to demonstrate to his fellow princes that he was one of their own number: that he and all his dynasty had forever cleansed them­selves of the ordure of barbarism, and become the epitome of Christian lords. No matter the sophistries deployed by the Count of Flanders to justify his brutal assassination of William Longsword — Richard and all the Normans had been righteously appalled. 'For he was a defender of peace, and a lover and consoler of the poor, and a defender of orphans, and a protector of widows - shed tears, then, for William, who died innocently.'25 That a monk had felt able to compose this eulogy with a straight face had reflected, almost certainly, some­thing more than simple time-serving. William it was, even as he had dyed the frontiers of his county with Frankish blood, who had first demonstrated that taste for founding – or refounding - monasteries, and then for lavishing spectacular donations on them, that would become, under his successors, a positive obsession. By 1000, the holy places desecrated by the fury of the Northmen had long since been lovingly restored; the relics put into safe keeping brought out of hiding; the men of God restored from exile. When the chaplain to the new count, Richard's son and namesake, hailed his master as 'magnanimous, pious and moderate, an extraordinary, God-fearing man!',24 his hero worship came naturally: Richard II was indeed a patron of churches fit to stand comparison with any prince in France. Yet nothing, perhaps, better illustrated the full astounding com­pleteness of the Normans' assimilation into the heart of Christendom than the fact that they too, by the time of the Millennium, had ended up no less prone than their Frankish neighbours to dismiss any­one who lived on the edge of the world as a savage. This, it might be thought, coming from the descendants of pirates who were widely believed to have been forced into exile from their native lands due to their own incontinent taste for rutting, was a truly heroic display of hypocrisy. Of the Irish, for instance, a people who had been Christian for half a millennium, one Norman poet could assert with a cheerful dismissiveness: 'They couple like animals, not even wearing trousers, because they are forever having sex.'23 The wheels of snobbery had turned full circle.

  Not that the Normans' new ruler was done with his own social climbing quite yet. Unlike many other princes, Richard II was assidu­ous in cultivating the King of France. It helped that relations between his family and the Capetians had always been excellent: Hugh Capet's grandfather, it was claimed, had been godfather to Rollo, while one of his sisters had certainly been married to Count Richard I. King Robert, hemmed in all about as he was by enemies, was naturally grateful for support wherever he could find it: Norman horsemen had a formidable reputation, and warriors dispatched by Richard II regu­larly took starring roles in the royal campaigns. And the quid pro quo. Well, for Richard himself, there was always the satisfaction of being regarded as a loyal vassal. That, however, was far from the limit of his ambitions. The Count of Rouen had his gimlet eye fixed on a source of even greater prestige. In 1006, a charter was issued in which he was for the first time termed, not a count at all, but a 'dux' - a duke.26 A truly vaunting self-promotion: for to be a duke was to rank as the superior of everyone save a king. In the whole of France, there were only two other lords who could convincingly lay claim to the title: the princes of Burgundy and Aquitaine. Exclusivity was precisely what gave it such cachet. If Richard's right to the title were widely accepted by his fellow princes, then it would rank, for a descendant of pagan warlords, as a truly remarkable prize.

  Yet the uncomfortable truth was that many of his neighbours remained deeply suspicious of him precisely because they could not forget his origins. Years before Richard laid claim to his grandiose title, hostile Frankish chroniclers had already named his father a duke — 'the Duke of Pirates'.27 Now, with the Millennium, there was a renewed bitterness in the perennial charge of Norman wolfishness. Out on the seas, the Northmen were back on the move. Dragon- ships were docking again in the harbours of Normandy. Her markets were filling up once more with the plunder looted from an ancient Christian people. True, it was not the Franks this time who found themselves the objects of the Northmen's rapacity. But they had only to raise their eyes and look northwards to the realm of another anointed king, a wealthy and famous one, to be reminded of their own agony at the hands of the pirates, and to shudder. For the kingdom of the English was burning

  .

  The British Isles in the year 1000

  Bound in with the Triumphant Sea

  'Middle Earth's doom is at hand.'28 This conviction, which gnawed at many in the lands of what had once been the Frankish Empire, was no less a cause of anxiety on the opposite side of the Channel. That the seas would dry up; that the earth would be consumed by fire; that the heavens themselves would be folded up like a book: here were the staples of many an English sermon. Naturally, those who delivered them tended to hedge their prophecies with anxious qualifications: for they were the heirs to Alcuin and numerous other learned scholars, and knew perfectly well that it was forbidden for even an angel to calculate the timing of the end of the world. Nevertheless, like a child with a scab, they found it hard to let alone. Typical was a sermon which can be dated with great precision to the year 971,29 Scrupulously, despite having taken the Day of Judgement as his theme, its author forbore to make any mention of the looming Millennium. 'For so veiled by secrecy is the end of days,' he warned his flock sternly, 'that no one in the entire world, no matter how holy, nor even anyone in heaven, except the Lord alone, has ever known when it will come.' So far, so orthodox; but the preacher's self-restraint was not to last for long. Indeed, with his very next breath, he was off, soaring away into giddy speculation. 'The end cannot be long delayed,' he proclaimed all of a sudden. 'Only the coming of the accursed stranger, Antichrist, who is yet to appear on the face of the earth, is still awaited. Otherwise, all the signs and forewarnings that our Lord told us would herald Doomsday have come to pass.'30

 
; Except that, to the preacher's audience, it would not have been at all clear that they had. England, in 971, was in a notably well-ordered state. Symptoms of the end of the world appeared safely confined to overseas. The Channel stretched wide indeed. Even as the empire of the Franks was fragmenting amid all the various convulsions of war and social upheaval, the English had found themselves being melded into a single nation; even as the line of Charlemagne was withering away into spectral impotence, a monarchy of unprecedented wealth and power was being entrenched in England. The dynasty called itself 'Cerdicingas', 'the house of Cerdic': a title gilded with all the prestige that only a really stupefying antiquity could provide. For Cerdic, back in the far-off days when the ancestors of the English had first arrived in Britain, had been at their head, a Saxon adventurer with a mere five ships at his back, but who had nevertheless succeeded in win­ning himself a kingdom.

  To be sure, there were many other warlords who had done the same; but it was Wessex, the land of the West Saxons, a realm ruled without break by Cerdic's heirs over all the long succeeding centuries, that had ended up paramount.31 As the first millennium drew to a close, it dominated not only southern England, where its own heart­lands lay, but all the lands where the English had settled, so that even the Northumbrians, who back in the time of Charlemagne had been a proud and independent people, 'were in mourning for their lost lib- erty'.32 In England, running decisively against the grain of what had been happening elsewhere in Christendom, ancient princedoms had been brought, not to splinter, but to cohere and coalesce. The King of Wessex had ended up the King of the English too. The lands he ruled had become a united kingdom.

  This was a bold and brilliant achievement. What had served to render it truly remarkable, however, was that its foundations had been laid in the most unpropitious circumstances imaginable, amid the fire and slaughter and calamity of defeat. Realms such as Northumbria had first lost their independence more than a hundred years previously - and it had not been to the West Saxons. Other foes, far more agile, far more predatory, had been abroad. Set as the English were upon an island, in kingdoms studded with rich and defenceless monasteries, it was hardly to be wondered at that they should have found themselves the targets of the Northmen. They had termed the invaders' Wicingas': 'robbers'. As well they might have done; for the Wicingas, the 'Vikings', had sought to strip their kingdoms bare. Realm after realm had been plundered, dismembered and brought crashing down.

  Even Wessex itself, for a few terrible months, had seemed on the verge of collapse: for in the winter of 878, its king, Alfred, had been ambushed, and sent fleeing into a marsh. This, as a moment when the entire future of a Christian people had hung in the balance, suspended between the twin poles of ruin and redemption, had been a test more perilous than anything ever faced by a king of Francia. Alfred had passed it: he had not buckled, and by refusing to buckle, he had saved his people for Christendom. Emerging from the marshes, he had suc­ceeded in scouring his kingdom free of the invaders; he had planted towns, ringed about with fortifications and endowed with market places for the generation of war taxes, at regular intervals all over Wessex; he had steeled his people for continued struggle. The harvest of these labours, reaped by his heirs over the succeeding decades, had been a truly spectacular one. The Viking overlords who had clung on to power beyond the borders of Wessex had been systematically sub­dued; so too, in the Celtic fastnesses, where the English had never settled, had the Cornish, the Welsh and the Scots. In 937, in a bloody and titanic battle that would long be celebrated as the greatest victory ever won by an English king, Athelstan, the grandson of Alfred, had confronted an assemblage of foes drawn from across the British Isles, and routed them all. On his coins and in his charters, he had laid claim to a title even more resonant than 'King of the English': 'King of all Britain'. Across the sea too, in Ireland, admirers had been brought to acknowledge him as 'the very roof-tree of the dignity of the west­ern world'.14

  But it was not only on the margins of Christendom that men had marvelled. From beyond the Channel, in France, none other than Hugh Capet's father, the mighty 'Duke of the Franks', had sent mes­sengers seeking the hand of one of Athelstan's four sisters in marriage. As a dowry, the duke had dispatched to England a rich collection of relics — including, most priceless of all, the very spear that had pierced the side of Christ. Once owned by Charlemagne, and wielded by him in his wars against the Saracens, this had been a weapon of self- evidently miraculous power.15 All the more fitting, then, that it should have passed into the hands of the Cerdicingas: for so triumphant had been their fightback against the Northmen that their achievement had seemed almost a miracle in itself. Other Christian kings, certainly, had been able to draw from it a most potent and inspiring lesson: not merely that the heathen could be repulsed, but that their defeat might provide a stepping stone to empire.

  Naturally enough, perhaps, it was in Saxony, the primordial home­land of Cerdic, that the victories of the House of Wessex had been tracked most appreciatively of all. In 929, the Lady Edith, another of Athelstan's sisters, had duly travelled there to marry a teenage prince, the future Otto the Great: a man with an imperial destiny indeed. Just like the House of Wessex, the Saxon royal family had already come into possession of a supernaturally charged spear, a Holy Lance of their own; but the presence at Otto's side of a saintly and much-loved English queen had undoubtedly served his people as a yet further re­assurance of the glories ordained for them by God. It was at Edith's urging, for instance, that her husband had embarked on the building of his great monastery at Magdeburg; and years later, with Edith long dead and Otto himself crowned Caesar, it was to the selfsame monastery that he had moved the relics of St Maurice and — when it was not required out on campaign — the Holy Lance itself.

  Meanwhile, back in England, the Cerdicingas had begun to look a trifle provincial in comparison. Athelstan, concerned to secure his subjection of the Cornish, had set about refurbishing the frontier town of Exeter; and it was here, in an abbey church founded by the king himself, that he had enshrined his own holy lance. Priceless relic or not, however, it had soon begun to gather dust: for whereas Magdeburg stood sentinel over vast expanses of heathendom, beyond Cornwall there extended only the sea. No matter that it was the kings of Wessex who had originally blazed the imperial trail; they could never hope to compete in the glamour stakes with an emperor anointed by a pope in Rome. In 973, when Athelstan's dwarfish but formidable nephew, Edgar, who had already been crowned once, decided that he wished to emulate Otto's coronation, the best venue that he could come up with for the ceremony was Bath: a place lit­tered with relics of the Roman past, to be sure, but hardly the Eternal City. Even his next stunt—summoning assorted Celtic princelings to row him down a river - was in truth not quite as impressive as it must have appeared to the gawping spectators watching him glide by: for already, since Athelstan's day, the lordship claimed by the English king over his turbulent neighbours had declined to little more than show. The rule of 'all Britain' had shown itself a will-o'-the-wisp, melting through Edgar's outstretched fingers. The sober truth was that all his attempts to promote himself as imperial served only to emphasise how small scale, in comparison with the Reich, the kingdom of the English actually was.

  Small-scale — but compact as well. This, as developments were to show, was no disadvantage: for it had enabled an experiment in state- building that was to prove as enduring as it was innovative. While the lands ruled by the House of Wessex may have lacked diversity, they made up for it in cohesiveness. The seas that bounded in Edgar's ambi­tions had helped to foster in the lands that he did rule a precocious sense of unity. Even in the most northerly and bloodstained reaches of the kingdom, through which a West Saxon king would only ever travel with a bristling military escort, and where a dynasty of Viking warlords, in the wake of Athelstan's death, had blazed a spectacular if fleeting comeback, the people of Northumbria could still recognise themselves as English. Though they might be distant from the royal
heartlands of the south, they nevertheless spoke the same language as the West Saxons, venerated the same saints and gloried in belonging to the same national Church. Above all — and here, perhaps, was the most startling of all the feats of statecraft achieved by the House of Wessex — they acknowledged the right of the same central authority to administer them, and to poke its nose into theif affairs. In England, there were no equivalents of the Count of Flanders or Anjou. A figure of menacing and even ferocious power a Northumbrian earl might be - and yet he swayed the north, not by virtue of heredity, but as an appointed agent of the king. Further south, and royal control was even more inescapable. The Cerdicingas owned lands everywhere. There was no question of Edgar permitting his nobles to run amok, whether by building castles, or recruiting private armies, or usurping control of the public courts. Whereas in Francia the sight of a mutilated corpse abandoned by the side of a road for birds to peck at was a cause for alarm among travellers, a mark of lawlessness, in England it was like­lier to speak of the opposite: of the long reach of the state. Blindings, scalpings, hangings: all were sponsored with a grim efficiency. Violence was met with violence; savagery with savagery. Even whole counties, if they presumed to oppose the royal will, might be systematically rav­aged. Justice and order were what Edgar, in his coronation oath, had sworn to give the English; and justice and order, by his own stern lights, were precisely what he delivered. That such an iron-fisted man could end up being known as 'the Peaceable' suggested that his sub­jects did not disagree.