The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (10 page)

By 874 the Danish army had further consolidated its hold on the rest of occupied England. Most of Mercia other than the small area to the west of Watling Street was parcelled out between Danish nobles. Thus the whole of England from the Thames to the Humber was ruled by Danes in a federation of settlements called the Five Boroughs: Lincoln, Stamford, Nottingham, Derby and Leicester.

But the other half of the Danish army which had not settled in the north still had their eye on the rich southern lands of Wessex, that is Berkshire, Hampshire, Dorset and Devon, which were slowly recovering from the Great Army’s depredations. After four years of inactivity the rest of that army decided to return to the fray under its king, Guthrum. Accordingly it moved south to Grantabridge (which we call Cambridge) and began to harass Wessex again. It now occurred to Alfred that the only way to stop the Vikings calling for help and reinforcement from their cousins’ fleet in the Channel off France was to defeat the Vikings at sea before they reached land. He therefore sent for the Vikings’ old enemies, the Frisians, and invited them to show the English how to build their style of ships, which had previously been a match for the Vikings. The ships which resulted were faster and longer than those of the Vikings. Alfred can justly be said to be the father of the Royal Navy.

While Alfred laid siege to Exeter, where the enemy was currently holing up, sailors on the new ships were appointed to watch the coast and prevent Guthrum’s Great Army from obtaining supplies by sea. Undaunted by rumours about Alfred’s navy, the Danes sent messages for help to their Viking relations in France, who under their leader Rollo were in the middle of forcing the Franks to grant them what in 911 would become the kingdom of Normandy (or the kingdom of the Norsemen). The new navy’s first encounter was with a massive force of 120 French Viking ships crossing the Channel with some 10,000 men. Fortunately poor weather played into Alfred’s hands. For once the indomitable Vikings were tired out by battling with storms. They were defeated by Alfred’s navy and their fleet destroyed off Sandwich on the coast of Dorset. Guthrum and his army were allowed to ride out of Exeter and travel to Gloucester in Danish Mercia after they had sworn solemn oaths that they would leave Wessex alone.

But the Danes were not men of their word. They soon broke the Treaty of Exeter. Guthrum had drawn up a plan with Ubba, Ragnar Lodbrok’s youngest son who was now king of Dyfed and was laying waste South Wales, whereby they would both attack Wessex. At Christmas 878, believing that the Danes would abide by their oaths, Alfred had told all his thanes to return to their estates. Meanwhile he was alone with his young family in the royal palace at Chippenham, dangerously close to Gloucester. Just after Twelfth Night a messenger brought him the news that an enormous Danish army was ‘covering the earth like locusts’ and on its way to Chippenham.

By midnight the Danish army had occupied Chippenham, and the king and his family had only just escaped them by fleeing to the unnavigable marshes of east Somerset. The submission of most of the West Saxon nobles followed. They were exhausted by the unending war. Many left their lands to flee abroad, ruined by the obligation to feed the occupying army. Alfred the Great, however, would not submit. While the Danes once more divided up Wessex between them he stayed in hiding with a few nobles on the Isle of Athelney in Somerset. This was dry ground at the confluence of the Tone and the Parrett, surrounded by marshes and impassable rivers where no one could enter except by boat. In the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford may be seen a wonderful little artefact of the most exquisite Anglo-Saxon workmanship. Made of enamel, gold and precious stones and decorated with Christian symbols it bears the legend ‘Alfred me fecit’, which means ‘Alfred had me made’ in Latin. Alfred must have dropped the jewel there when he was camping on the island, for 1,100 years later it was dug up on Athelney by a local farmer.

On the island Alfred and his men lived roughly with few of the necessities of life except what they could forage openly or stealthily by raids. The king himself lived in a hut belonging to one of his cowherds. To this period belong many famous legends about him. One day the wife of the cowherd was preparing cakes (scones probably) for the oven and Alfred, who was still only in his twenties, was sitting at the hearth trimming his arrows and dreaming of the day when his country would be free. The goodwife asked the disguised king, whom, in his homespun clothes, she took to be another shepherd cluttering up her house, to keep an eye on the cakes while she went for some water from the spring near by. But Alfred was so lost in thought planning the next attack that the cakes burned quite black without his noticing–to the fury of the cowherd’s wife, who shouted crossly at him as if he were a kitchen boy. The horrified cowherd had not told his wife who their guest was, but he now revealed his identity and she was covered with confusion. But King Alfred only laughed and told her she had been right to scold and that he should have been minding the cakes. Years later when he was restored to his kingdom he sent for the couple and rewarded them for helping him in his hour of need. Alfred continued to resist the Danish by guerrilla raids and built an impregnable fort on the island where his family could be safe. It is said that he even went into the Danish camp disguised as a harper. He wandered from tent to tent playing and singing but also secretly noting the number of men and the position they occupied.

Thanks to Alfred’s perseverance news spread among the West Saxons that all was not lost and that the king was secretly gathering an army of Wessex men on the twenty-four acres of the island. Support for Alfred grew so rapidly that by the seventh week after Easter 878 a huge number of West Saxon men from Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire came out of hiding to meet him at Egbert’s Stone, now Brixton Deverill in Wiltshire.

Alfred met the enemy at Edington near the Danish camp at Chippenham. After a siege of fourteen days he won the decisive engagement of the war. It was said that the Danish standard, a raven with outstretched wings which had been woven by the daughters of Ragnar Lodbrok in a single day, drooped and did not fly before the battle. It was an omen of the defeat to come by the White Horse of Wessex, the emblem which adorned Alfred’s banner. So complete was the rout of the Danes that Alfred was finally able to dictate the sort of terms which pleased him, including forcing the Danes to accept Christianity. The Danes made a treaty, wrote the chronicler, ‘such as they had never given to anyone before’. By the Treaty of Wedmore in Somerset the pagan army had to vacate Wessex and surrender southern and western Mercia to Alfred. Guthrum, the pagan king, would have to be baptized, with Alfred standing as godfather. Guthrum, who was given the baptismal name of Athelstan, thus became Alfred’s adopted son, and there was now a relationship between them which would be taboo to break.

Although Alfred had won a major victory, his kingdom was still surrounded by hostile Danish territory. And that autumn yet another Viking force under a leader named Haesten appeared at the mouth of the Thames aided by Guthrum, despite his treaty with Alfred, and proceeded west up the river to make its winter headquarters at Fulham. Though it disappeared briefly to Ghent after two years of terrorizing Fulham, the Viking fleet then sailed back and forth between England and France laying waste to Kent and besieging the city of Rochester in 884. Only the bravery of Alfred’s army succeeded in frightening it off for good.

Alfred had learned a valuable lesson from the siege of Rochester. His towns needed to be better defended and should be able to function as fortresses. The fyrd also had to be reformed into a more reliable army with a longer period of service. Alfred’s solution was to divide it into two, with one half on active service, the other on home leave. He also created a network of defences in southern England which had never been attempted before, centred on fortified walled towns called burhs (from which derives the word borough). These were built in a girdle round Wessex so that no member of the kingdom would be more than twenty miles from a refuge against the Danes. There were about thirty of them and they ranged from Southwark in the east through Oxford, Cricklade and Malmesbury to Pilton in north Devon and all along the south coast from Halwell in Devon to Hastings in east Sussex.

In tandem with the invention of burhs went Alfred’s reform of local government in Wessex. Made autocratic by the desperate nature of his situation he increased royal power by overriding the ancient boundaries of the hundreds, and divided the country into official shires. Each shire’s government was centred on a burh containing a shire court, the shire and burh being run by one of Alfred’s royal ealdormen, whose powers could override those of the local lord. These men were responsible for implementing royal commands to raise taxes or call out the fyrd and would be expected to find men to garrison the burh in time of war as well as to undertake general public works for the shire such as repairing bridges or the walls of the burh itself. As the house of Wessex took over more of England the shire system spread throughout the country, so that by the beginning of the eleventh century the whole of England south of the Tees was divided into shires.

The local bishop was as important a figure in the shire as the royal ealdormen, who in time saw their powers transferred to the shire reeve, or sheriff. The bishop would help preside over the shire court and would often have partial responsibility for the money supply because, as fortified places created by a charter from central government, the burhs usually contained a mint.

Despite the strengthening of the monarchy under Alfred, like every Anglo-Saxon king since the most ancient times he continued to rule and pass laws with the approval of the institution known as the
witena gemot
, the king’s council. As the Wessex kings took over more and more of the country the witan acquired the character of a national assembly.

By 866 Alfred had become a symbol of hope for the English. He had reconquered their most important city, London, from the Danes–burning many of the Danish settlements there to teach the treacherous Guthrum a lesson. London could once again be the entrepôt of English national and international trade. This was the first time that other Englishmen realized that the Danish occupation was not necessarily a permanent state of affairs, but might one day be reversed. Alfred gave permission for the Danes to remain in a ghetto, the Aldwick (that is, Aldwych, commemorated by the church of St Clement Danes), but he rebuilt London to emphasize its importance as a centre of English life. He founded much of the area of today’s modern city, creating new streets between Cheapside and the Thames and building a palace for himself at Old Minster. Instead of leaving it as the undefended open settlement it had become under the Mercians, running along the side of the Thames in the area now covered by the Strand and Fleet Street, he moved the city back within the Roman walls. He also founded Southwark to protect the river at its shallowest point, as that was the main route into London.

The English Mercians asked Alfred to be their overlord in return for his protection. But the king thought it best to be tactful about ruling their territory, which had such a proud history. He therefore made a Mercian nobleman, Ethelred, the ruler of the Mercians with rights over London, and married him to his daughter Ethelflaed. Many of the Welsh princes thought it wise to follow suit, so he became their overlord too. He was described by a contemporary as ‘king over the whole kin of the English except that part which was under the power of the Danes’. Many authorities see this moment, when Alfred is acknowledged as a leader of the English against the Danes, as an important stage in the advance of the English peoples towards political unity, a unity which had been forged by national danger. Alfred was the first person to call the English ‘Angelcynn’, which means the ‘English folk’. However it would not be until the end of the tenth century in the reign of Alfred’s great-grandson Edgar that the concept of ‘Englaland’ as a political unit would be adopted.

A second treaty, known as Alfred’s and Guthrum’s Peace, between Wessex and the cowed Danes provided a new boundary between Alfred’s kingdom and the Danish territory, or Danelaw. West Saxon Mercia was to consist of the land north of the Thames to the River Lea on the frontier of Guthrum’s kingdom of East Anglia, up to Bedford where it followed the old Roman road of Watling Street before ending at Chester on the Welsh borders. The boundary of Wessex with Danish East Anglia was redrawn at the latter’s expense. Though the area Alfred controlled was large, the Danelaw was larger still, but such was the respect the Vikings had for the king of Wessex that the treaty also secured the rights of English subjects living within Guthrum’s Danelaw so that there was no discrimination against them in law.

As the first king to defeat the Vikings Alfred’s fame spread all over the continent. He was so highly esteemed by the pope as a Christian hero who had driven off the heathen that the Anglo-Saxon school in Rome was not taxed and the pope sent him what was supposedly a piece of the True Cross on which Christ had been crucified–the greatest honour he could bestow. Now that Alfred had secured the kingdom against further external and internal threats the rest of his reign could be dedicated to rebuilding a kingdom whose institutions had been almost destroyed by the Danish wars. Half the royal taxes were donated to the Church each year to rebuild monasteries at home and abroad and so begin the revival of learning, while, since so few of the English people knew any Latin, the king personally oversaw the translation into Anglo-Saxon of books he considered important. Alfred himself translated Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History
, saying it was ‘one of the books most necessary for all men to know’, as well as Orosius’ history of the world. His translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s suggestions for pastoral care in the running of a parish was distributed to every bishop with instructions to make copies of it. Alfred also added notes to his translations where he thought it might help the reader, for he believed that everybody should have access to knowledge whosoever they were. His translation of Orosius contains descriptions of the ninth century’s idea of the geography of northern and central Europe, obtained from adventurous Scandinavian visitors to his court, such as a Norwegian named Ohthere who had lived inside the Arctic Circle, as well as from his own sailors whom he urged to explore the unknown. In order that his people should enjoy what he had sorely missed Alfred paid for scholars to come from abroad–Frisians, Franks and the Welsh–to help him raise educational standards. Asser remembered him remarking sadly that ‘Formerly people came hither to this land in search of wisdom and teaching and we must now obtain them from without.’