Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  Alfred’s practicality also extended to his approach to the art of translation itself. For his books were intended to be, not academic exercises, but things that were useful and were used. This meant in turn that Alfred had to prevent his readers from seeing the late Roman world of Gregory or Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy Alfred (like Queen Elizabeth I) also translated, as foreign to their own experience and therefore irrelevant to it. Instead, he cut his Roman cloth, very thoroughly, into English dress. The ‘senate’ becomes the ‘Roman witan’ and ‘magistrates’, ‘ealdormen’. Most ingenious is his rendering of Boethius’s reference to the fleetingness of the fame of even the conqueror Fabricius. Alfred guessed that the name of the Roman hero would have meant nothing to his target English audience. Instead, he went to the root of the name in faber (‘smith’) and, for the unknown Roman, substituted a reference to Weland the Smith, the Germanic smith-god whose smithy the men of Wessex believed to have been a neolithic barrow on the Berkshire Downs. ‘Where now’, Alfred’s inspired translation read, ‘are the bones of the famous and wise goldsmith, Weland?’

  It was also Alfred, or a member of his intimate court circle, who commissioned the national book of record known as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Its chronicle form is deceptively simple (and has deceived many historians). In fact, it is a highly sophisticated piece of historical special pleading, to be put on a par (in approach if not in method) with Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Like Bede, the Chronicle is a providential history of the Anglo-Saxon people: of their conquest of Britain, of their conversion to (Roman) Christianity, and of their quest for political union. The novelty of the Chronicle lies in the role it assigns to Wessex. In Bede, we see the torch of the bretwalda-ship (or overlordship) passing from the southern kingdoms of Kent and East Anglia to the strong hands of his native Northumbria. The Chronicle picks up the story in the ninth century. In so doing, the intervening, century-long Mercian supremacy of Æthelbald, Offa and Cenwulf is ignored; instead, following his victories of 829, the Chronicle hails Egbert of Wessex, Alfred’s grandfather, as the eighth bretwalda. Finally, the marriage of Æthelwulf, Alfred’s father, into the sacred house of Charlemagne, Æthelwulf ’s pilgrimage to Rome and Alfred’s own mysterious anointing there, confer divine sanction on the House of Egbert and mark out Alfred as the eventual heir to its glories.

  ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,’ wrote another great Englishman, George Orwell. Alfred was determined that the future should be England as a greater Wessex, with his own issue on the throne. But the language of the Chronicle is just as important as its subject matter. For, as we would expect from Alfred’s general approach, the Chronicle is not written in Latin, like the chronicles produced elsewhere in Europe, but in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular. And that changed everything. The Chronicle was not written by churchmen for churchmen. Instead, it is a king talking to his people in the language that they understand and his people talking to themselves. The Chronicle is, in short, the greatest cultural achievement of Alfred’s reign and a symbol of national independence and identity that was so powerful that not even the Norman Conquest could extinguish it outright.

  Alfred’s kulturkampf (cultural struggle) began in the years of uneasy peace. But it continued during the Third Viking War of 892–6. The war was as hard-fought as previously. But it was fought differently. For this time the Vikings, after an initial foray, were never able to cross large sections of Wessexian territory. The burhs, it seems, had done their work well.

  So, too, had Alfred. Three years after the end of the war, Alfred died on 26 October 899, aged only fifty. He still ruled over only part of England. But, as he so clearly intended, his legacy was the permanent unification of the country. The actual work was the task of his sons and grandsons. But it was Alfred, who, in the crucible of the Viking invasions, had forged an idea of England that was more than simply cultural and linguistic, it was political as well. Or rather, uniquely in Europe at the time, it was a combination of all three.

  In other words, Ængla Land was to be a nation-state, Dark Age style.

  Chapter 4

  Triumph and Disaster

  Edward the Elder, Æthelstan, Edmund I, Eadred, Eadwig, Edgar, St Edward, Æthelred II, Swein Forkbeard, Edmund Ironside, Cnut, Harold Harefoot, Harthacnut

  AFTER ALFRED’S DEATH, HIS SON, King Edward the Elder, and his grandsons, Æthelstan, Edmund I and Eadred, continued Alfred’s policy of uncompromising resistance to the Vikings. Soon they were able to turn the tables and go on the offensive. One by one the Viking kingdoms and lordships were defeated or forced to submit until in 920, at Bakewell in Derbyshire, Edward was acknowledged as overlord by all the surviving powers in northern Britain: Scots, Vikings and Angles alike. With this final piece of the jigsaw in place, Edward, who had already assumed direct rule in Mercia and received the submission of the British princes of Wales, now appeared, not only as king of Ængla Land, but as a veritable emperor of Britain.

  There was resistance, of course, to this vast growth of West Saxon power, and not only from the Vikings. The Northumbrians had the proud and separate history recorded in Bede and were as reluctant as many of their descendants today to take orders from the south. And the same applied, even more strongly, to the Scots. The result was that the death of each West Saxon monarch was followed by a rebellion and a reassertion of northern independence. But each in turn was put down and the victories – Æthelstan’s at Brunanburgh in 937 and Edmund’s in the east Midlands in 942 – were celebrated by The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in sanguinary verse. Edmund was hailed, in language taken from the old sagas, as ‘lord of the English, guardian of kinsmen, loved doer of deeds’, while his elder brother Æthelstan was ‘lord of warriors and ring-giver to men’. But there was a political message too. The army at Brunanburgh was a joint force of Mercians and West Saxons; the achievement of each was celebrated, and the battle seen as the greatest victory since both peoples’ ancestors had conquered Britain:

  Never was there more slaughter

  on this island, never yet as many

  people killed before this

  with sword’s edge …

  since from the east Angles and Saxons came up

  over the broad sea. Britain they sought,

  Proud war-smith who overcame the Welsh,

  glorious warriors they took hold of the land.

  The message was clear: united we stand in a new, consolidated Ængla Land.

  Administrative unity, too, was soon imposed on all England south of the Humber. Like Alfred’s resistance, the reconquest from the Vikings had depended on the building of burhs – such as Hertford, Leicester, Nottingham and Huntingdon – to push the disputed frontier forward and to hold land taken. These burhs quickly followed the path of the southern burhs and became prosperous centres of population and trade. But they were made the administrative centres of new shires as well. These were modelled on the shires of Wessex and were likewise divided into hundreds. The difference was that they were largely artificial creations, imposed by a powerful and centralized administration and paying little or no regard to former regional and tribal boundaries which had existed before the Viking invasions.

  I

  This story of more or less unbroken success received a rude shock after the death of Eadred in 955. He was succeeded by his nephew, Eadwig, the elder son of Edmund I, who was crowned at Kingston a few months later. But, aged only about fifteen, Eadwig had his mind fixed on something other than ceremony and, at the feast which followed the day after the coronation service, the king suddenly withdrew. St Dunstan, the outspoken and reforming abbot of Glastonbury, who had had the ear of both Edmund and Eadred, was deputed to bring him back. Dunstan marched into the royal bedchamber, where he found the king in a threesome with his future wife and mother-in-law, while ‘the royal crown, which was bound with wondrous metal, gold and silver gems, and shone with many-coloured lustre, [lay] carelessly thrown on the floor’.

 
; It was an inauspicious beginning. Within two years, Mercia and Northumbria had transferred their allegiance to Eadwig’s younger brother, Edgar, and Eadwig’s power was reduced to England south of the Thames. Two years later still, Eadwig died on 1 October 959 and was succeeded as king of all England by Edgar.

  Edgar had won support by presenting himself as being as serious as his brother was irresponsible. And, once he had succeeded to his whole inheritance, he continued to win golden opinions. One of his first acts was to appoint Dunstan as archbishop of Canterbury. Edgar and Dunstan, who was a frequent attender at court, then went into partnership to enforce the programme of monastic reform which Dunstan had begun as abbot of Glastonbury. Each had his particular concern. Dunstan wanted to impose the order and discipline made possible by the rule of St Benedict. Edgar also saw the political possibilities of the reformed monasticism.

  Most important, symbolically, was his purge of the two great adjacent minsters in his capital at Winchester, the Old, where Alfred was buried, and the New, founded by Edward the Elder. In 964, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes with some surprise, Edgar ‘drove’ the existing clergy out of the two minsters, and ‘replaced them with monks’. Two years later, in 966, he refounded the New Minster and his munificent gift was recorded in an unusually long and magnificent charter, written in book form. The frontispiece shows Edgar wearing the crown with four fleurons, which Eadwig had cast aside, and presenting the book-charter to Christ in Majesty.

  By gifts such as these, Edgar was serving another god: he was promoting the idea of a united Ængla Land. Monasteries like Winchester were national institutions; they held land all over the country; they were centres of a self-consciously English culture and, above all, they were royal. Endowed by the king and reformed under his patronage, they were so many counterbalances to the overweening local power of ealdormen and other aristocrats. Naturally, some of the ealdormen were resentful. But, faced by the united front of king and archbishop, they had no choice but to submit to the reform programme, which carried all before it. At the beginning of his reign there was only one properly constituted Benedictine monastery, Dunstan’s at Glastonbury; by the end there were twenty-two.

  Another illustration of the ordered, reforming power of Edgar’s government is the currency. Since Offa, as we have seen, the quality of the Anglo-Saxon coinage had tended to be high. But the Viking invasions had brought chaos here as everywhere else. In about 973 Edgar felt strong enough to issue a reforming ordinance. Thenceforward, every six years all the silver pennies in circulation were called in and melted down, and reminted with new designs. The reminting was done in local burh-mints. But the designs and dies were centrally supplied to the moneyers by the king. This arrangement not only ensured uniformity and maintained standards, it also allowed for a sophisticated management of exchange rates by increasing or decreasing the silver content. No other government in Europe would have been able to conceive or carry out such a programme, which continued to the end of Anglo-Saxon England and beyond. It gave England a currency that was unmatched in quality in Europe, and it laid the foundations for an enviable national prosperity.

  But just as striking is the inscription on Edgar’s coins. It read: EADGAR REX ANGLO(RUM), ‘Edgar, king of the English’. And where there are English, there is an England, or Ængla Land, as the Anglo-Saxons called it. The unification of England, as we have seen, was the work of Edgar’s immediate predecessors, starting with his great-grandfather, Alfred the Great. Now, seventy years after Alfred’s death, his great-grandson Edgar came to Bath to be crowned on Whit Sunday 973. Almost certainly, he had already been crowned long before, perhaps as king of the Mercians. But now, in a vastly grander ceremony, he was to be anointed king of the English; honoured as emperor of Britain, and revered as a second Christ.

  Hence the choice of Bath for the ceremony. For here there was a unique combination of a Christian abbey next to the largest, most impressive ruins of Roman Britain. It was an incomparable setting and the ceremony matched the occasion’s significance. St Dunstan himself, as archbishop of Canterbury, acted as ecclesiastical master of ceremonies and Edgar performed his part devoutly and decorously. First, he swore a threefold oath, administered by Dunstan: to keep the Church of God and the Christian people in true peace; to forbid rapacity and iniquity in all ranks; to do justice equitably and mercifully. Then he was acclaimed by the people as their king and anointed, as the choir sang the anthem ‘Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon King’. Next he was invested with the insignia of kingship: the ring, the sword, the crown, the sceptre and the rod. Finally, there came the coronation banquet, at which no one, we are told, drank more than he could hold. The king presided, wearing an imperial diadem of laurel interwoven with roses, while the queen had her own separate table.

  Immediately after the coronation, Edgar sailed with his fleet to Chester, where, in an acknowledgement of his imperial overlordship, he was rowed on the Dee by six or eight British, Scottish and Irish kinglets. To symbolize his kingship of England and overlordship of Wales, Scotland and the Western Isles his fleet would, every year, sail round the whole island of Britain. Finally, even the strange delay in this second coronation was turned to advantage since, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported, the king was in his twenty-ninth year – the same as Christ when He, ‘the lofty king/guardian of light’, had begun His public ministry. Edgar’s reign thus represents the apogee of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy with its idiosyncratic fusion of Germanic, Roman and Christian traditions.

  Edgar’s coronation ceremony impressed contemporaries – as was intended – and it is the first English coronation of which a full account survives. It also impressed foreigners as well since its text, almost unaltered, was used for coronation ceremonies as far afield as Normandy, Hungary, Milan and perhaps Poland. Even the French coronation, which had at first so influenced the West Saxon, now adopted the magnificent structures, rhythms and rhetoric of Edgar’s service. What is most remarkable of all, however, is that the substance of Edgar’s service has endured in England to the present, so that the same rituals were enacted and often the same words (in English rather than in Latin) rang out in Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953 when Elizabeth II was crowned queen, aged twenty-seven and a week after Whitsuntide.

  II

  Only two years after the ceremony in Bath, Edgar died, still only in his early thirties. Immediately there was trouble, since, for all the political sophistication of England, there were no fixed rules of succession. Edgar left two surviving sons: the elder, Edward, by his first wife, and the younger, Æthelred, by his third, Ælfthryth. Edward was crowned king at Kingston. But Ælfthryth, who had shared in the triumph of Edgar’s second coronation at Bath, felt that her son should have taken precedence. The opponents and advocates of monastic reform, the political hot potato of the day, also took sides: the former supported Æthelred and the latter Edward. The result was one of the darkest deeds in Anglo-Saxon history. On 18 March 978, only three years after his accession, Edward was attacked and killed at Corfe in Dorset by his half-brother’s retainers, probably on the orders of his stepmother. Edward seems to have been a violent and unattractive young man, but the manner of his death meant that he quickly joined St Edmund as one of England’s two most popular royal saints. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle commemorated the transformation from sinful king to royal martyr in verse:

  Men him murdered,

  But God him glorified.

  He was in life an earthly king;

  He is now after death a heavenly saint.

  Despite the horror at the assassination, the murder succeeded in its purpose and Æthelred became king.

  Æthelred II had one of the longest reigns in English history and is still remembered today as one of our most disastrous kings. This is largely because of his nickname: ‘Æthelred the Unready’. The proper Anglo-Saxon form of his nickname, however, was Unraed, that is, ‘badly advised or counselled’. It is a pun on his name Æthelred, which means ‘noble counsel’, and
it is a product of hindsight first appearing almost a century after his death.

  It is also unfair, at least for the earlier decades of the reign. True, his brother’s murder tainted his accession and Æthelred himself sowed wild oats in his youth. But, by the 990s, England was enjoying something of a golden age of church-building, and legal and administrative reform. It had also developed a politics of astonishing maturity. There was a rich and powerful aristocracy, whose ranks included scholars and eccentrics as well as soldiers and statesmen. At its apex stood the royal court. This too was peopled with familiar figures: there was a scheming queen mother, an ambitious, foreign queen consort and an unpopular and, as it turned out, treacherous royal favourite. The witan, which looked more and more like a proto-parliament, solemnly debated the issues of the day but rarely came up with a solution. Taxes rose to unheard-of levels. There were scandals, faction-fighting and palace coups. Give or take the odd murder or mutilation, it is a picture that could come from any time in the next thousand years of English history, till the death of aristocratic politics in the second half of the twentieth century.

  Nevertheless, the essential charge against Æthelred II remains. In his reign, England faced a renewed Viking attack. His ancestor Alfred had made his name and his dynasty’s reputation by the courage and resourcefulness with which he had seen off the first. Æthelred, in contrast, failed either to muster an adequate response himself or to inspire others to do so. The result was more than a personal failure. For, without adequate royal leadership, the English achievement of the tenth century turned against itself and the country became a rich, tempting and finally defenceless prey.