Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (12 page)

The Danes brought trade and prosperity to the areas under their control. It is not at all surprising that in the eleventh century the three most wealthy shires were Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire, which had all been part of the Danelaw. York itself was one of the richest and most flourishing cities in the kingdom. It was guarded by strong walls, and excavations have revealed streets of narrow and tightly packed wooden houses complete with workshops and warehouses. Jewellers and metalworkers lived beside workers in wood and in textiles. And everywhere there were merchants, trading with Ireland, with France and, of course, with Scandinavia. They were engaged in the business of pepper, and of vinegar; of fish, and of wine; of salt, and of slaves.

After the treaty was concluded with Guthrum, Alfred had the opportunity to rebuild the defences of his kingdom against any further incursion. Throughout southern and western England he set up a system of fortified towns similar to those established in the Danelaw. An elaborate network of these towns was created
to ensure that no one lived more than 20 miles (32 kilometres) from a refuge. It was the beginning of the first true or systematic urbanization within England, springing from the urgent military necessities of the moment, since the Roman epoch. Within a hundred years most of the burghs had become fully ordered towns with courts and markets.

Iron Age hill forts such as those at Hastings and Southampton, and early Romanized settlements like those at Bath and Winchester, were restored with stronger walls. New towns were built, employing a grid system of streets that still survives in towns such as Wallingford and Cricklade that are sited by the Thames. Alfred knew the importance of guarding the major rivers that flowed through his land. Each burgh had a large force of defenders, placed there with their families. In addition Alfred began the formation of a permanent navy to deter any further hostilities from Scandinavian war-bands. An early warning system of beacons, set on hilltops, was put in place. His territories, therefore, were militarized in a great programme of public works.

But, for a while, Alfred’s protection did not seem enough. In 896, six years after the death of Guthrum, another Danish king invaded East Kent with a force of 4,000 or 5,000 warriors; they had brought their women and children with them, and their purpose once again was to settle. Alfred led his army into the region and forced them to retreat to their encampments. But he then became aware of a greater threat. The arrival of these new settlers destroyed the uneasy peace between the English and the people of the Danelaw; ships from East Anglia and from Northumbria sailed around the coast and attacked the northern reaches of Devon. Another Danish contingent besieged Exeter. All the parties of the Danes colluded. The plan was to force Alfred to concentrate in the west, while the new invaders took over Kent and Essex.

In the course of the next few months Alfred defeated the Danish forces in the west, while sending reinforcements to the support of south-east England. The chronology of what became known as Alfred’s ‘last war’ is not entirely clear, but the result is not in doubt. The invading Danes gave up their attempt to acquire the territories of the south-east and instead settled among their
compatriots in East Anglia and Northumbria. They may have been bribed to leave Essex and elsewhere. They may have bowed to the inevitability of the strong defence set up by the system of burghs. In any event, Alfred had defended his kingdom.

Yet he also defined his kingdom. He generally termed himself ‘the king of the Angles and of the Saxons’, but one of his newly minted pennies uses for the first time the legend ‘Rex Anglo’. With the pagans settled on the very borders of his land, he did his best to assert English identity. He was a Christian king in the face of heathen warlords. The Danes had attempted to extirpate the spiritual civilization of the English; Alfred would do everything within his power to cultivate English learning and the study of English history. Even as he was creating the system of burghs and building a navy, he was fostering a programme of translating major Latin texts into the West Saxon vernacular. He wished to commission books ‘which are most necessary for all men to know’. He is one of the very few kings of England who himself wrote books. He translated Pope Gregory’s
Pastoral Care
, the
Consolation of Philosophy
by Boethius and the
Soliloquies
of St Augustine; he caused to be translated Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
and
Histories against the Pagans
by Orosius, thus defining the context for his devoted scholarship. The English, at least according to their sacred historians, were the people of God.

In the reign of Alfred’s son, Edward the Elder, the English began to conquer the territories of the Danelaw and to absorb its people into the larger society. The Danes were more vulnerable because they had settled; they were no longer the roving war-bands that had threatened Alfred, and they had always been more skilled at attack than at defence. In 917 and 918 Edward’s soldiers marched out into the Danelaw, building fortresses as they moved forward. They seized Derby and Nottingham; then the men of Lincoln submitted to King Edward. By 920 all of the country south of the Humber had recognized him as overlord. This was a true conquest, since the rulers of Wessex had never before been lords of the eastern lands. The battles were remembered for many centuries, and it was said that the purple pasqueflower grew in the meadows where Danish blood had been spilled.

The people of the Danelaw were converted to Christianity
within two or three generations, and their old burial customs were forgotten. They were in any case so close to the Angles and the Saxons in custom and character that they effortlessly mingled with them. The English language is filled with Scandinavian words such as ‘sky’ and ‘die’, ‘anger’ and ‘skin’ and ‘wing’, ‘law’ and ‘birth’, ‘bread’ and ‘eggs’. There is scarcely a phase of human activity that has not been deeply influenced by Danish nomenclature.

The memory of the Danish occupation survived. The Orkney islands and the Shetlands were in fact not surrendered to Scotland until the latter half of the sixteenth century, and Norwegian was still being spoken in the Shetlands at the end of the eighteenth century; the island accent is still much closer to Norwegian than to Scots or English. In the middle of the nineteenth century the people of Northamptonshire, according to a local historian, maintained ‘a traditional remembrance of their oppression’. In Cornwall, at the end of the same century, a colony of red-headed people were called ‘Danes’ with whom the local population would not marry. Samuel Pepys was informed that the west door of Rochester Cathedral was covered with ‘Dane-skins’. All this suggests that the viciousness of the early invasions and battles had left a deep and abiding mark.

After the partial unification of England by Edward there followed a line of powerful kings whose names have faded from the collective consciousness of the English; yet the memory of one of them, Athelstan, was revered for many centuries. His name means noble stone, like the throne in Kingston upon which in 924 he was crowned and anointed with holy oil. In the fourteenth century he was still invoked when land was granted:

He was the son of Edward the Elder, and became heir to a great dynasty; he was intent, however, upon augmenting the kingdom that he had inherited. He defeated in battle the king of York and his ally, the king of Dublin; Dublin and York were the twin engines of a Norse trading empire that was now coming to an end. Athelstan seized York, and subdued Scotland. The forces of
the north then launched a counter-attack, but in 937 were decisively beaten at a place known only as Brunanburgh. ‘From this period,’ a chronicler wrote, ‘there was peace and abundance of all things.’ Many years later the period of Athelstan’s struggle was still known as ‘the great war’, just as the First World War is now remembered.

Alfred had been generally characterized as king of the Angles and of the Saxons, but Athelstan was hailed as king of England. His family became linked by marriage with the kingdom of France and the province of Aquitaine as well as the empire of Germany. Poets and scholars flocked to his court; he established one coinage for the entire realm; he refurbished many of the towns. He called truly national assemblies of bishops and lords. He imposed strict controls over buying and selling; he set out a code of laws. ‘I have learned that our peace is worse kept than I should like it,’ he wrote, ‘and my councillors say I have borne it for too long.’

There is a painting of him in the company of St Cuthbert, the holy man known as ‘the wonder-worker of England’. It is the first English royal portrait, and shows Athelstan wearing an imperial crown. Towards the end of his reign he styled himself
monarchus totius Britanniae
, and the
Annals of Ulster
declared him to be ‘the roof-tree of the dignity of the western world’. The tomb of this now forgotten king is to be found in Malmesbury Abbey. In life he wore his hair in ringlets entwined with threads of gold.

By the tenth century the polity of the Anglo-Saxon realm had taken an enduring shape. If the monarch was to guarantee order and stability, it was necessary for him to act in a formal and deliberate manner. He assembled a council of religious men and of wise men. He created structures of authority to supervise the exploitation of royal land and the dispensing of royal justice. A bureaucracy already existed, issuing what became an unbroken succession of charters and writs. (The charters can still be used in unravelling the English landscape.) They came in the first place from the king’s scriptorium, staffed by a handful of priests, but the emergence of a centralized monarchy prompted the growth of new institutions and procedures. So from this foundation there would spring a civil service, a judiciary and a parliament. The nation was becoming conscious of its own identity. That is part of the story of this volume.

It was taken for granted that every man must have a lord. Lordship was no longer dependent upon tribal relations, but on the possession of land. Mastery was assumed by those who owned the most territory. No other test of secular leadership was necessary. Land was everything. It was in a literal sense the ground of being. Land granted you power and wealth; it allowed you to dispense gifts and to bend others to your will. It was inevitable that, under the reign of a strong king, the hierarchy of the country would also be strengthened; the divisions would be sharper, the evidence of status more pronounced. When in 1086, according to the chronicles, ‘all men of property in England’ swore an oath of allegiance to William the Conqueror they were following an established procedure.

The landless man was either a slave or a pauper. He was not to be trusted. This represents the crucial difference between medieval and early modern England. The names of slaves are given for the first time within a document of 880; ‘Almund, Tidulf, Tidheh, Lull, Lull and Gadwulf’ are being transferred to land belonging to the bishop of Winchester. Slavery was in fact a legal punishment inflicted on those, for example, who could not pay their fines. A penniless farmer might sell his children. It has been estimated that 12 per cent of the English population were slaves. So land created economic subjection. Slaves, like oxen and sheep, were known as ‘live money’.

By the time of Athelstan the country was divided into shires, hundreds and vills or townships, precisely in order to expedite taxation. The shires of England were unique, their boundaries lasting for more than a thousand years until the administrative reorganization of 1974. The earliest of them date from the late seventh and early eighth centuries, but many of their borders lie further back in the shape of the Iron Age tribal kingdoms. So the essential continuity of England was assured. Hampshire is older than France. Other shires, like those in the midlands, were constructed later; but they are still very ancient.

The shire was originally a military district, but it also served royal purposes as a centre of taxation and a source of justice. Each shire had a court, and a
burgh
or major town; it could muster its own army, and was ruled on behalf of the king by a shire-reeve
whose name became sheriff. The shire was then divided into ‘hundreds’; each hundred was supposed in theory to support one hundred households or to supply one hundred fighting men in times of war. The hundreds were further subdivided into ‘tithings’ made up of ten households. The administration of the entire country could be devolved upon small groups of individuals who led the ‘hue and cry’ against thieves and who were responsible for each other’s conduct. It was the essential basis of local government in England for at least the next thousand years.

The men of the hundred met in the open air at ancient places of assembly, and some of the hundreds are named after a prehistoric tumulus or barrow in the immediate neighbourhood. Hundredsbarrow and Loosebarrow, for example, are to be found in Dorset. The hundred of Doddingtree in Wiltshire is ‘Dudda’s tree’. The hundred of Brixton is derived from ‘Brihtsige’s stone’. This suggests that the roots of the hundreds go very deep, and that they reflect the primeval organization of the country. Since they still survive unaltered, although now rarely used for administrative purposes, they are another indication that we live in a prehistoric landscape. The rural district council is very old indeed.

In the tenth century the lie of the land was being changed. The country had been generally divided into very large estates governed by king, noble, or bishop; these estates of many thousands of acres are likely to have been the original territories of a tribe, their boundaries preserved by the burial mounds of ancient leaders. Yet in the reign of Athelstan they were being fragmented. Parcels of land were being granted to the clients of the king, or noble, in reward for service; an approximate size of the grant was 600 acres (243 hectares), upon which the new proprietor built his residence and organized his agricultural workforce. In the tenth century the new lords were known as thegns; they became the lords of the manor in the fourteenth century, the squires of the eighteenth century, and the country gentlemen of the nineteenth century.