Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (11 page)

The king’s edicts invariably took an ecclesiastical tone. The archbishops, of York or of Canterbury, drew up the national law codes in consultation with the king. Only after the arrival of the Normans in England was there any formal separation between Church and State. In a similar spirit abbots and bishops were often part of the war-bands of the great magnates; one bishop of Sherborne, Heahmund, was killed in a bloody battle against northern invaders. He may have fulfilled the former role of the pagan high priest guiding companies of warriors.

There existed large organizations known as minsters, communities of priests and monks that, as the word suggests, ministered to their surrounding areas. Between the seventh and ninth centuries many hundreds of such foundations were planted so that
every district had its minster. They represent the original expression of Christian England, with all the energy and power of first things. They acted as centres of patronage and learning; they maintained trade and agriculture. They organized the surrounding countryside with their constant demand for food rents. They were essentially royal courts, their abbots and abbesses an integral part of the aristocracy, where Christ was overlord. They housed golden treasures, and the relics of the saints. The priests would travel through their areas, preaching; that is why England is still dotted with stone crosses that mark the places of worship.

The religious power of the minsters was gradually lost, as villages and parish churches became the pattern of the land. But the minsters survived. Some of them became great churches and cathedrals. Others took on new life as burgeoning towns. Their names are part of the fabric of the country, in Axminster, Kidderminster, Westminster and a thousand others. Many other towns – Hexham, Barking, Godalming, Oundle, Reading, Woking – are also the direct survivors of these early foundations. England is still filled with minsters.

5

The blood eagle

By the beginning of the ninth century there were in general terms three predominant kingdoms in England; Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria vied for mastery, while around them struggled the smaller kingdoms of East Anglia, Kent, Sussex and Essex. Northumbria was pre-eminent in the seventh century, Mercia in the eighth century, and Wessex in the ninth century. These were sophisticated states with complex systems of administration and taxation, capable of huge communal enterprises such as the building of the 98 miles (158 kilometres) of Offa’s Dyke. In that sense, they resembled their prehistoric forebears. A mass currency was in circulation, with the ubiquitous silver penny or
sceat
, as a result of voluminous trade.

These three kingdoms were eventually forged together by fire and slaughter, and the growth of a unified kingdom can in part be seen as a desperate response to an external threat. In 790 three boats of Norwegian men landed upon the Dorset coast at Portland; an official rode from Dorchester, believing them to be the familiar merchants of that country, and prepared to escort them into the town. They turned around and killed him. They were warriors, not traders.

Three years later men from Norwegian ships attacked the monastery of St Cuthbert on the island of Lindisfarne. The attacks
were as unexpected as they were unwelcome. The monastery was ransacked and many of the monks were put to the sword. ‘Never before has such a terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race,’ a chronicler wrote, ‘nor was it thought that such an inroad could be made from the sea.’ A year later the monastery at Jarrow was attacked. No one had feared such an invasive force because the people of the north had previously come as peaceful traders. They were masters of commerce, as their later settlements in York and Dublin would testify. Long before the raids commenced, there had been Scandinavian settlers in East Anglia. The location of the eighth-century poem
Beowulf
is to be found in southern Scandinavia.

The men of Norway were better known at the time as Norsemen or, in the English sources, as Vikings; the name was also applied to the men of Denmark, but at the beginning the Norwegian warriors were the dominant force. The
víkingar
were ‘the men from the fjords’. They came because their own territories were unsettled by the emergence of new and centralized kingdoms; these kingdoms in turn encouraged the formation of warrior bands ready to kill and pillage. The land of Denmark was also being threatened by Charlemagne, king of the Frankish Empire, further undermining the powers of the ruling elite. It takes only one moment of fear to launch a hundred ships. This was the period, too, when the design of the longboat was perfected. The wind was literally in the sails of the Norsemen.

Another cause can be found for these bloody expeditions. The monasteries of Lindisfarne and Jarrow were not attacked at random; they were chosen as examples of revenge. The onslaught of the Christian Charlemagne on the ‘pagans’ of the north had led to the extirpation of their shrines and sanctuaries. The great king had cut down Jôrmunr, the holy tree of the Norse people. What better form of retaliation than to lay waste the foundations devoted to the Christian God? The Christian missionaries to Norway had in fact set out from Lindisfarne. So its destruction was nicely calculated. It was the beginning of what might be called an anti-Christian crusade. In the year the monastery burned, premonitions passed across the tremulous English sky. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
records that in 793 ‘terrible omens appeared over the Northumbrians
and miserably distressed the people: there were immense lightning flashes, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky’.

Yet these early raids were really only a warning, a seismic shudder before the fire burst forth. The English people were becoming more nervous, and the archaeological evidence suggests that more of them chose the safety of the walled towns. The earliest monastic chronicle was written at this time, to be incorporated later into the first version of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
. The hand of the monk may have been guided by a sense that the world was changing for the worse.

In 830 the raids began once more. The forces of ‘heathen men’ had come for land and slaves and women. They fell upon the island of Sheppey, off the coast of North Kent, in 833. As its name implies, it was filled with sheep and good pasture. That was the prize. The Norsemen were well known for their skills in stock-breeding. Over the next thirty years a score of other attacks took place, from the men of Denmark in particular. Kent and East Anglia were an attractive target; the first sea battle in English history took place off Sandwich, in Kent, when the invaders were rebuffed. But the port at Southampton was ravaged by them. London and Rochester were attacked. The army of Northumberland was defeated in battle. The threat came from all sides.

Some of the warriors were known as ‘wolf-coats’ from their mode of dress and from the howls they sent up in battle. They brandished long kite-like shields, and wielded ferocious battleaxes against their prey. Others were known as ‘berserks’ because they wore no armour and charged the enemy in the throes of blood frenzy. The sagas tell of one warrior known as ‘the children’s man’; unlike his companions, he refused to impale children on the tip of his lance. These men were the terror of England.

The raids were simply the prelude to a true invasion. In 865 a great host of Danes descended upon East Anglia. This was the region their ancestors knew best and where many of them already lived. These men had not come to raid; they had come to settle. It is no coincidence that in this period there was a marked increase in the population of Scandinavia, where land was becoming more scarce.

They came in their thousands, aboard hundreds of ships; each
ship could carry no more than thirty men. They dwelled in East Anglia for twelve months, taking command of the local resources and in particular marshalling a regiment of good horses. They established fortresses, or defensive encampments, from which they ruled the surrounding land. In 866 they rode against York, and took the city. Their control lasted for almost one hundred years. From York they gained mastery of Northumberland. Then they rode south and captured Nottingham. The king of the Mercians appealed to the king of Wessex for assistance, but eventually he was obliged to buy off the enemy.

The Danes had now acquired the two kingdoms of Northumberland and East Anglia. The kings of these territories were executed in the ritual of the ‘blood eagle’, whereby the lungs were ripped out of the body and draped across the shoulders so that they resembled an eagle’s folded wings. The charters, the ornamented books, the diocesan records, of the two kingdoms disappear. It was a time of devastation for the landed proprietors of the soil.

In 870 the Danes set up a great camp in Reading, and began preparations to invade the kingdom of Wessex. At this stage in the history of England there emerges Alfred. He had encountered the Danes before, when his older brother came to the aid of the Mercians. Now he was king. It cannot be said, however, that his first actions were entirely heroic. After a series of defeats, he bought off the Danish forces with coin and treasure. He incurred the wrath and hatred of the monks at Abingdon for purloining their wealth in the process; in their history he is named as a ‘Judas’. The Danes retired to London which they now also controlled. For a period Alfred was reduced to the role of a tributary king, and was obliged to take silver from the Danes to coin his own currency.

Further attacks and incursions were organized by the invaders, who were still intent upon complete mastery of Wessex; it was the largest surviving English kingdom, and thus the key to supremacy. For the most part Alfred’s army seem to have shadowed the forces of the Danes as they conducted raids or acquired more territory and, after one particularly bloody defeat at Chippenham, Alfred was forced to take refuge in the Somerset marshes. Here at Athelney he built a fortress; from his sojourn in the marshes springs the story of his burning the cakes, once known to generations of English
schoolchildren, but it is an eleventh-century fiction designed to emphasize the wretchedness of his plight before his final victory. And a victory came.

In the spring of 878 he rallied the forces of Somerset,Wiltshire and part of Hampshire at a place known as ‘Egbert’s Stone’. He fought a great battle at Edington in Wiltshire against Guthrum, the Danish leader, and the Danes were defeated. Guthrum accepted the outcome, and with several of his commanders was baptized into the Christian communion. Alfred stood as his sponsor in this signal act of conversion, where Guthrum took the Wessex name of Athelstan. In the battle between the pagans and the Christians, Christianity had won. This had become a war about faith as much as land.

Why was it that Alfred and Guthrum could enter such a holy or unholy alliance? They were both of the same blood. Guthrum and the Saxon, Alfred, were great kings in the same sacred tradition. Alfred may have been a Christian leader but he also traced the descent of his royal house from Woden. The Germanic and Scandinavian peoples were deeply related. They had much more in common than anything they shared with the men of Cornwall or of Devon. They were, in a sense, relatives. So they came to an agreement to divide England between them.

Alfred was not in a position to dictate terms. The negotiations took place in the shadow of the Danish forces that were still within Wessex. Guthrum was already king of the land in the east, from the Thames to the Humber, and had no intention of abandoning England. So he kept what he had conquered by force of arms. No doubt Alfred also gave him money. One phrase of the treaty establishes that ‘all of us estimate Englishman and Dane at the same amount’. Equality reigned between them, in other words.

So was set up the region of the country known by the eleventh century as ‘the Danelaw’. This essentially comprised the largest part of northern and eastern England, with a colony of Norwegians in north-western England. The process of settlement was made more intense, with successive waves of immigration from the coastline of north-western Europe being organized by the leaders of the Danish army in England. The chronicles use the phrase of the lands being ‘shared out’, suggesting some high authority. The later settlers were
obliged to take up poorer land than that of their predecessors; but land in England was still available. The Danish farmers were situated by fortified towns or ‘burghs’ manned by the Danish army, from which we derive the term for borough. These forts could be used for the purposes of defence or of public assembly.

The most important territorial divisions of the Danelaw were the five boroughs of Nottingham, Leicester, Derby, Stamford and Lincoln. Those boroughs of course still survive, all except Stamford becoming county towns. Yet the evidence of Scandinavian loan-words suggests that the entire region of north and east was assimilated by the new settlers. There are hundreds of place names of Danish and Swedish origin, the most notable being those that end with -by or with -thorpe. Streoneshalch was renamed as Whitby, and Northworthig became Derby. The plethora of Kirbys or Kirkbys in the area of the Danelaw suggests that ‘settlements by the church’ were recognized by the invaders. The survival of English place names, however, sometimes in close proximity to the newly named settlements, suggests that the native people of humble stock were left undisturbed.