Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  Alfred, as soon as he was able, moved to invoke these powers. At Easter, which fell very early that year on 23 March, he further strengthened Athelney’s natural defences by building a fort. He was helped to do this by the ealdorman or governor of Somerset, while the men of ‘that part of Somersetshire which was nighest to it’ also joined in the raids against the Viking occupiers which the king now launched from his island fortress. But these raids were a mere morale-boosting exercise to prepare the way for the full-scale counter-attack which Alfred began to organize.

  And the key to the counter-attack was, once again, the shires. Historic Wessex (that is, the kingdom before its expansion under Alfred’s grandfather, Egbert) was divided into five ‘shires’ or, as we would now say using Norman-French rather than Anglo-Saxon, ‘counties’: Somerset itself, Devon, Wiltshire, Dorset and Hampshire. The shires were further subdivided into ‘hundreds’, so called because, in theory though rarely in practice, they contained a hundred ‘hides’ or parcels of land each sufficient to maintain a family. We do not know when the shires and hundreds began. The former are first mentioned in the seventh century and the latter in the eleventh. But they are clearly much older. Perhaps indeed they are immemorial and go back to the folk-moots of the first Saxon settlers in western Britannia. This would explain why their meetings took place in the open air, at traditional assembly points that were often marked by a prehistoric monument, like a tumulus or barrow. One such is Swanborough Tump in the Vale of Pewsey in Wiltshire. Here, as we have seen, Æthelred and Alfred had met with the witan to settle their affairs on the eve of the Viking attack. And here, on a much humbler scale, the free men of the Hundred of Swanborough met once a month to settle their affairs.

  These meetings, and the less frequent but more important shire assemblies, which took place twice a year, were later called ‘courts’. They did indeed try legal cases, both criminal and civil. But they did much more. They kept the peace; levied taxes and raised troops. Finally, their sworn testimony, later systematized as the jury, supplied the basic information about property rights and inheritance without which royal government could not function: even William the Conqueror, in all his power, would depend on such juries to produce the myriad facts on which the Domesday Book was based.

  For the hundred and shire were also, whatever their folk origins may have been, the agencies of royal government. It was one royal official, the reeve or bailiff, who presided over the Hundred Court, and another, much greater one, the ealdorman, who chaired the Shire Court. The ealdorman was the leading man in his shire and one of the greatest in Wessex. He commanded the shire levies, acted as intermediary between the court and the county, and used his authority to settle most local disputes.

  Indeed, the ealdorman was so powerful that it was easy for him to forget that he was the king’s servant and to aspire instead to become a territorial magnate in his own right. Alfred was well aware of the temptation and, in a well-judged interpolation in one of his translations, he denounced the ealdorman who turned his delegated authority (ealdordome) to lordship (hlaforddome) and caused ‘the reverence of himself and his power to become the regular custom of the shire he rules’.

  Alfred fought this tendency. So did his successors. So too, perhaps, did the people. The result was that the paths of government in Wessex and Francia started to diverge. In Francia, the nobility, like Alfred’s ambitious ealdorman, soon took over the king’s former powers in the localities and privatized justice, taxation and the raising of troops. In so doing, they interposed themselves between king and people: the people of a district were now their lord’s, not the king’s. In Wessex, this never quite happened. Here, instead, the partnership between king and people, into which rough and ready egalitarianism of the early Saxon settlers had developed, held. This partnership, with its sense of all being in it together, would make it easier for Alfred to impose heavy demands on his people as the crisis drew out over years and decades. It also provided, in ‘the self-government at the king’s command’ of the shires and hundreds, and the collective self-consciousness which they fostered, the means for Alfred to begin his fight-back against Guthrum.

  III

  The planning of the campaign, once again, started at Easter. Over the following weeks Alfred sent out messengers from Athelney in all directions. They went to lords in their halls and to meetings of the common folk at their outdoor Hundred Courts. Seven weeks after Easter (11 May) all was ready and the signal was given. Alfred himself set out from Athelney and marched east towards the rendezvous at Egbert’s Stone. There he was met ‘by all the people of Somersetshire, and Wiltshire and that part of Hampshire which is on this side of the sea [that is, excluding the Isle of Wight]’. These were the forces of three out of the five shires of Wessex. It is unclear why the other two, Devon and Dorset, failed to send troops. Dorset may have been incapacitated by taking the brunt of the Viking occupation. But the Devonians were probably assigned to coastal defence. Earlier that year, Viking reinforcements had tried to land in Devon.The ealdorman Odda had driven them off with heavy losses and captured their sacred raven banner. But other landings must have been anticipated.

  Alfred had chosen the rallying point carefully. Egbert’s Stone has been recently identified as yet another prehistoric tumulus, high on the hills above the River Deverill on the edge of Salisbury Plain in western Wiltshire. It is close to the spot at which Somerset, Wiltshire and Dorset all meet, and it was here that Alfred’s grandfather, Egbert, had marched his soldiers after a decisive and final victory over the British people of Cornwall. But Alfred was not just evoking Wessex’s past glories. His campaign was also a kind of crusade: he was a Christian king and his enemies were pagans. Hence the launch of the campaign around Easter. This suited military realities. But it coincided as well with the most important feast of the Christian year, the feast of resurrection. The coincidence was not lost on his troops:

  when they saw the King, receiving him not surprisingly as if one restored to life after suffering such great tribulations, they were filled with immense joy.

  The day after the rendezvous, Alfred struck camp at dawn. The army followed the course of the river north-east beyond its confluence with the Wylye to Iley Oak, the traditional site of another Wessex Hundred Court. It lies in a bend in the river and offers ample room for a force of about three thousand to bivouac. In the morning they would go out to meet Guthrum and his Vikings, marching up over Battlesbury Hill on to the high ground of Salisbury Plain.

  For Guthrum had moved his forces to another royal estate at Edington (Ethandun). And it was there, probably on the hill above the village, that the two armies met. We cannot be sure, because there has been no systematic excavation of the site. But chance finds have turned up a number of bodies of the right date, some of them badly mutilated. That is not surprising. For the battle was to be both savage and bloody. There was too much at stake on both sides for it to be anything else. Guthrum knew that, for his takeover of the kingdom of Wessex to succeed, he had to kill Alfred outright. As for Alfred and the men of Wessex, they knew that this was probably their last chance of independence: if Guthrum won, Viking domination of Wessex and England would be complete. So both sides were hoping for a decisive result. They were not to be disappointed:

  Fighting fiercely with a compact shield wall against the entire Viking army, [Alfred] persevered resolutely for a long time. At length he gained the victory through God’s will [and] destroyed the Vikings with great slaughter.

  Alfred’s victory at Edington was complete, and decisive. The broken remains of Guthrum’s army fled back to their fortified base at Chippenham. Alfred pursued them, cutting down the stragglers on the way. Then he laid siege to the fort. After two weeks, the Viking leader surrendered. But this time Guthrum was in no position to equivocate. He promised to withdraw from Wessex and he confirmed his promise by agreeing to be baptized. The baptism occurred three weeks later. Alfred stood as Guthrum’s godfather, which made the Viking his moral and political depend
ant. And the ceremony took place at Aller in Somerset, only three miles east of Athelney, which avenged Alfred’s darkest hour.

  The battle of Edington was the turning point in Alfred’s life and one of the great turning points of English history. Alfred, fighting at the head of the shires, had established himself as a great war leader. And Wessex was saved, for the moment at least. But the future of the rest of England still hung in the balance.

  Alfred’s victory at Edington bought him almost a decade and a half of peace. But Alfred did not sleep on his laurels. Instead he embarked on a considered and ambitious programme of military and moral rearmament. As a result, Wessex was able, not only to survive a third Viking challenge, but also to expand until, within half a century of Alfred’s death, it ruled, directly or indirectly, all Britannia.

  The foundation of all this was Alfred’s transformation of his kingdom into a society on a full-time war footing. He built a navy, with bigger ships constructed to his own design. There were early technical problems. But they seem to have been overcome and the sixty-oared vessel he pioneered became the standard unit of the Anglo-Saxon navy. He also reorganized the fyrd or army, ‘so that always half its men were at home, [and] half on service’. This enabled him to put troops into the field at almost any time. Most effective of all, however, was his scheme of fortification. In the first Viking attacks in the 870s, Guthrum and his men had been able to range great distances throughout Wessex at will and virtually unopposed. Alfred’s fortifications were designed to prevent any repetition.

  The result was an undertaking on a massive scale. Thirty burhs or fortified settlements were built, strategically sited so that nowhere in Wessex was more than twenty miles (or a day’s march) away from one, and 27,000 men were assigned to defend them. The figure was based on the assumption that four men were needed to man each pole (five and a half yards) of rampart. The circuit of each burh was measured (very accurately) and the number of its garrison calculated accordingly. Finally, each burh was assigned an endowment of land to maintain its garrison, on the basis of one hide for each man.

  The document in which all this was set out, known as the Burghal Hidage, survives in a slightly later form, which probably dates from the early tenth century. The Burghal Hidage demonstrates the tremendous bureaucratic achievement of which Anglo-Saxon government was capable. But it also shows that its bureaucratic competence was firmly harnessed, as Alfred’s high Christian concept of kingship required, to the common good. For these burhs were not private castles, owned by some lord or bishop and manned by his retainers. Instead, they were fortified communities, founded by the king, defended by his people, and defending and protecting them in turn.

  Moreover, the significance of the burhs went beyond their defensive capacity, since many, though not all, developed into real towns. Once again, this seems to have been Alfred’s intention from the beginning. For burhs like Winchester, which Alfred was to make into the capital of Wessex, were laid out as proper planned new towns, with a set, regular street pattern. Such places quickly became market centres and, most importantly of all, mint towns, where the king’s coin was struck according to centralized patterns and fixed weights and fineness. The result of this rapid urbanization was a virtuous economic cycle in which everybody benefited. Trade boomed and with it taxes; the king got rich and his people grew prosperous, while the word ‘borough’, as we pronounce it today, started to assume its modern meaning of a self-governing urban community under royal patronage. In short, probably more by design than by accident, Alfred had turned the burhs into the urban equivalent of the hundreds, or, in the case of the largest of them, of shires in their own right.

  And the burh of burhs was London. It was already the largest town and the commercial powerhouse of England. As such, it had been the jewel in King Offa’s crown and the fiscal key to Mercian power. But it suffered the common fate of eastern Mercia and passed under Viking domination. This lasted, almost certainly, for fifteen years, from 871, when the ‘great summer army’ took up winter quarters there, to 886, when Alfred felt strong enough to take it. The result was a turning point in the history of the City – and of England.

  The original Anglo-Saxon settlement, known as Lundenwic, was not based in the abandoned Roman city but further west at Aldwych, from which it sprawled out along the line of the modern Strand. Alfred moved most of the population back within the Roman walls, which he rebuilt and refortified. He also constructed another burh at Southwark, which is still known as ‘Borough’ today.

  All this entitles Alfred to be regarded as the second founder of the City. But in what capacity did Alfred, king of Wessex, thus act in former Mercian territory? Alfred answered the question by giving charge of the refounded City to the ealdorman Æthelred. Æthelred, however, was not ealdorman of any of the historic shires of Wessex; instead, his charge was Mercia, or rather the rump of the kingdom to the south and west of Watling Street which had escaped the Viking conquest. How and when Æthelbert and Lesser Mercia passed into Alfred’s sphere of influence is unclear. But Alfred moved to cement the relationship personally, by marrying Æthelbert to his masterful eldest child, Æthelflaed, who proved to be every inch her father’s daughter. He also did so juridically, by starting to style himself in his charters ‘king of the Angles and of the Saxons’ or ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’. Could a claim to be King of All the English be far behind?

  For that, de facto, was Alfred’s position with the Viking destruction of all the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. And the position, it seems, was recognized de jure in the aftermath of his capture of London, when ‘all the English people that were not under subjection to the Danes submitted to him’. Was there a formal ceremony? Did it involve oath-taking? We cannot know. But at this point the idea of a common ‘English’ identity, first (mis)understood by St Gregory and powerfully expounded by Bede, started to assume concrete political form.

  Its first expression, appropriately enough – since Guthrum’s defeat had been the making of Alfred – was in a treaty with King Guthrum which was agreed between 886 and Guthrum’s death in 890. After his defeat and baptism in 878, Guthrum and his host had retreated east. Here Guthrum had found the kingdom he craved by becoming monarch of the Danes of southern England. He was called king of East Anglia. But the actual boundaries of his kingdom were much wider, embracing all England east of Watling Street and the Ouse and (probably) south of the Humber. Guthrum and Alfred thus negotiated as equals in power. But the preamble to the treaty defines their kingship differently. Guthrum’s is the territorial kingship of (greater) East Anglia; Alfred’s, in contrast, is national: he is the king ‘of all the English nation’ (ealles Angelcynnes) and his witan is Council of the English Nation too.

  ‘Of all the English nation’. These few words contain the germ of a national political idea. But, in the circumstances of 886, in which the Vikings held half England and still threatened to take the whole, it was only an idea. Nor is it clear how many shared it, or thought that its realization was inevitable or even desirable. But, whatever their number, Alfred determined to increase it by a sustained programme of writing and publication. An earlier generation called the result scholarship. It was, of course. But it was also propaganda – for Alfred and for England. And the king was his own Minister for Information, and, as in everything else he did, a highly effective one.

  But first Alfred had to address his own inadequacies. For most of his adult life, the king was literate only in Anglo-Saxon. That was enough for most practical purposes. But, for the task which he now had in hand, Alfred required access to the surviving riches of Classical culture which only a knowledge of Latin could give. His first, interim, solution was to get some of his more learned clergy to read Latin texts with him, translating and expounding as they went. This could have been the lazy man’s way out. Alfred instead treated the experience as one-to-one language teaching and benefited accordingly. His pious biographer, Asser, presents the result as a miracle, in which, on 11 November 887, Alfred learned
to read Latin at a stroke. We can discount the miracle, but accept the idea that by this stage the king felt confident enough to tease the good bishop by doing the translation himself. We should also take the date – a year after the occupation of London – seriously too. Alfred was now ready to launch his propaganda campaign.

  It was announced in the Preface to his translation of St Gregory’s Pastoral Care. Why, Alfred asked himself, had not the scholars of the pre-Viking golden age of Anglo-Saxon England translated the key works of Christianity into ‘their own language’? Then knowledge of them would have survived into his own, post-Viking, iron age, when (he recollected of the time he came to the throne) there were very few ‘who could … even translate a single letter from Latin into English’ and not ‘a single one south of the Thames’. Moreover, by translating, they would only have been following a long line of distinguished precedents:

  Then I recalled how the Law was first composed in the Hebrew language, and thereafter, when the Greeks learned it, they translated it all into their own language, and all other books as well. And so too the Romans, after they had mastered them, translated all through learned interpreters into their own language … Therefore it seems better to me … that we too should turn into the language that we can all understand certain books which are the most necessary for all men to know.

  His present translation would, Alfred hoped, set the ball rolling.

  Finally, with characteristic attention to practical detail, Alfred set out how his text should be distributed: each bishop would be sent a copy, together with a pointer or aestel, worth the vast sum of fifty mancuses or the equivalent of six and a quarter pounds of silver. The book and its aestel must never, Alfred further stipulated, be separated and must be set up in church together. This, I think, makes clear how Alfred intended each copy of his book to be used: it was to be set up openly in church so that it could be used for public readings and instruction – for which, of course, the aestel would come into its own. Interestingly, a remarkably similar procedure (though without the precious aestel) was to be used by that later practical visionary, Thomas Cromwell, to disseminate the English translation of the Bible in Reformation England.