Chapter 10
The English Kingdom and the Vikings
The modern English language is a melange of ingredients. During the pre-Norman period the basic tongue was enriched by Latin and Scandinavian additions and adapted to serve the needs of traders, seamen, churchmen and a host of others. It was flexible enough by the time of Alfred to be used for writing books and for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles as well as legal documents and charters. In course of time too it achieved the flexibility to enable it to absorb the pressure of Norman-French when that arrived.
Britons in the later Roman period were still not very literate but were familiar with the notion of other languages. No doubt some Romano-Britons could read and write Latin fluently and presumably more people would have been able to manage to speak some Latin but most were capable of only a smattering of words from the Roman language. This seems likely from the scraps of Latin that one finds on tiles or scratched on walls by artisans during the period. So it may be that the British language was already partly under attack, at least in the most Romanised areas of Britain by the end of the fourth century.
How did the British tongue change to English? Nobody speaks our original form of language today as, on the Continent, nobody still speaks the ancestral form of French or German but the earlier forms seem to have survived for a long time. We know that as late as the sixteenth century, Dekker, the Elizabethan playwright, wrote whole scenes in the argot of the Dutch and Frisian coastlands in his ’Shoemaker’s Holiday’ in the knowledge that his Elizabethan audience would understand them. This suggests that this dialect had some relationship to ancestral English. So, it may be that our language originated in a lingua franca spoken in the Rhenish area of north-eastern Europe during the centuries before and after the turn of the first millennium AD that slowly developed into a number of individual languages over a period of centuries.
The mechanics of this change to English is a matter for philologists but one suggestion worth considering is that it was happening in Britain during the early Roman period since three of the legions that Caesar brought to Britain had been based in the Rhineland area for fifty years and were made up of soldiers recruited there. In their dealings with British civilians they naturally spoke their native language which would have been quickly picked up by those Britons and this would have spread the language (or a debased version of it) throughout the region where the Roman army was stationed for periods of years. But this could not happen in areas like Wales and the south-west where the Roman army was not present in large numbers. We can see a similar development taking place in southern Iraq today where British troops are stationed and young boys and Arab traders are already speaking a good deal of English. And we must bear in mind that back in the early centuries AD the British language was less anchored since it was not tied down in the way that a written language like Arabic is.
However, Stephen Oppenheimer is his latest book (see Bibliography) suggests that English may have been a dialect belonging to the family of Germanic languages of north-western Europe that was spoken in Britain many generations before the Roman Conquest.
We can see some later stages in its development of the language in poems like the Battle of Brunanburh (937), in Chaucer (fourteenth century) and Shakespeare (sixteenth century) but by this time printing had been invented, people were more literate and the vocabulary, as a result, was changing more slowly so that we are still able today to appreciate Hamlet’s soliloquy and Jacques’ philosophising some four hundred years after they were written.
The reigns of three kings occupied the bulk of the seventh century in Northumbria – Edwin, Oswald and Osuiu – and during this period from 616 to 670 they dominated the southern kingdoms. However, Edwin’s attempt at expansion to the west was resisted by the British in Wales and the Mercians and he was killed at Hatfield Chase, a victory that established Penda on the Mercian throne. Penda was also in expansionist mood and in co-operation with East Anglia and the Welsh Britons challenged the Northumbrians in 654 in perhaps the most significant of all battles between the northern and southern English at Winwæd near the Humber estuary. But the king of East Anglia was killed and Penda died soon afterwards. The Northumbrian king, Osuiu, was now dominant in England but his successor Ecgfrith was defeated by the Mercians near the Trent in 678. After this setback, his attention had to turn to the north where attacks from Picts, Scots and Strathclyde were pressing and it was in these struggles that he was killed.
During the succeeding fifty years no one kingdom was able to claim supremacy over the others in England until the accession of Ǽthelbald to the Mercian throne in 716 and it was the turn of Mercia to be the dominant kingdom. This was the result of two long and stable reigns, for Ǽthelbald was succeeded by Offa who, apart from Alfred and Athelstan, was probably the greatest of the pre-Conquest kings. Ǽthelbald was killed in 757 and after Offa had been on the throne for some time the kingdoms of East Anglia, Lindsey and Essex became dependent provinces within Mercia and even Kent, Sussex and Wessex were greatly influenced by the Mercian king after the conclusion of a particularly protracted struggle with Kent.
A momentary insight into the groupings of people who made up Offa’s ‘Empire’ and owed tribute to the Mercian court is provided by the document known as the Tribal Hidage which assesses their taxable capacity. Many of the names of these groups or communities of people have names that are unknown to us, other names appear in modern place-names like the Hicce of Hitchin and a few are familiar like the Elmetsætan of the ancient kingdom of Elmet in southern Yorkshire. The assessments are in the form of hides which, still in use in Domesday times, are perfectly comprehensible as measures of area and in the eighth century may refer to indefinable somethings one of which was described by Bede as terra unius familiae – a holding that was sufficient to sustain a household. In this reading of the text then each hide would be equivalent to one household.
One of Offa’s problems was with the Britons in Wales and he fought a number of battles from 760 to 796 both in the borderlands and in Wales itself against the Princes of Powys and because of this he is thought to have been responsible for the Dyke named after him that was constructed along the Welsh border. The Dyke is some 129 kilometres long and consists of a ditch and bank, still up to eight metres in height in some places, which is probably to be seen as a demarcation line rather than a defensive wall since no king of the period would have been able raise a standing army of sufficient size to patrol its full length.. Its builders took advantage of natural features and because of its extent, greater than that of Hadrian’s Wall, it must have involved years of work by a great many men but whether Offa was responsible for the whole of it and whether it was done in consultation with the Princes of Powys is not known. If it was built as the Welsh writer Asser asserted ‘from sea to sea’ is not yet fully identified – there is large gap in it in Herefordshire – and it is difficult therefore to claim it purpose was purely defensive. There were other dykes built during the post-Roman period, Wat’s Dyke, not far away in north Wiltshire is an example, but none approach it in scale or the effort expended to dig it with the hand-tools of the period.
Offa introduced silver coinage in England in the form of pennies and some gold coins copied from the dinars of the Abbasid caliph Al Mansur, perhaps evidence of the presence of a slave trade with the East. By this time much trade with the Continent went through both Quentovic, an important centre for tolls and the most important Frankish mint after the Palace itself, and Duurstede and then up the Rhine through Frankia. Relations with the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne were not always very smooth. On one occasion there was an embargo on English trade into Frankia and on a second occasion we have more details of the controversy. Apparently, Charlemagne was complaining of the new-fangled fashion of rounding British cloaks at the knees. ‘What is the use,’ he wrote, ‘of these pittacola: I cannot cover myself up with them in bed, when riding I cannot defend myself against the wind and rain, and getting down as necessaria naturae tibiarum congelatione deficio’. In the letter he told Offa that if the Mercians complained about the size of the marble building stones that were sent to them (probably from Tournai for use in fonts) then he in turn must complain about the length of the cloaks. This incident is an indication of the continuing significance of English cloth production. However, the slave trade also went through Frankia and continued to be important throughout the period. In return for their exports British merchants were bringing in Rhenish wine as a major item of import.
Charlemagne’s complaint about how uncomfortable it was to get down from his horse to defecate in cold weather reflects the way of life of a monarch of the time. His ‘palace’ (palatium, court, llys) was where he happened to be on his continual peregrinations around his kingdom. With him went a large entourage of household officers, chaplains, clerks, petitioners and hangers-on and to energise all these people and ensure that things got done, to conduct negotiations with distant correspondents, to dispense justice and impress his will throughout his kingdom as well as on its neighbours required a personality and energy that not all rulers possessed. Offa was fortunate in this regard and so were the other significant rulers of the period like Alfred and Athelstan.
Offa’s relationships with the Archbishop of Canterbury were difficult. As a result, and with the help of the Pope Adrian I, he established a rival archdiocese at Lichfield which did not survive for very long and for a time, too, Offa’s prestige brought Tamworth into prominence almost as a English capital. Elsewhere in his kingdom, the ninth-century minster church of St Aystan at Repton was built over an eighth-century crypt which became the burial place of some Mercian kings. Wiglaf, the south Mercian king was placed here and his murdered grandson Wystan joined him in 849 in the chamber which is still intact although the tombs have disappeared. Originally, the crypt was free-standing, probably with a pyramidical timber roof.
Offa died in 796, three years after the ominous initial arrivals of Viking raiders at Lindisfarne and on the Dorset coast where the Dorchester king’s reeve was killed when he went to challenge them. But Mercia did not decline in influence until a quarter of a century later in 825, when its forces were heavily defeated by Egbert of Wessex which then assumed the role of the leading English kingdom. Egbert had been an exile at the court of Charlemagne and was, first and foremost, a warrior and he went on to annex to Wessex all the lands south of the Thames and, to the north, Mercia, Lindsey and East Anglia and, later, force the submission of the Northumbrians. However, an omen for the future was his final victory in 838 which occurred in Cornwall where the Cornish resistants were joined by a large force of Vikings at Hingston Down by rhe River Tamar.
Norwegians had raided Northumbria for some years after 793. In 794 they attacked and plundered the monastery of Jarrow. Further north they were probably settlers in Orkney and Shetland before the end of the eighth century as the place-name elements like bolstaŏr arm), ey (island) and vagr (creek or bay) remind us. Jarlshof in the Shetlands is the site of one of their farms, situated by the harbour of Sumburgh Voe close to the Broch of Mousa. The Viking houses were built of stone and turf and the settlement was successful enough to expand as the years passed. Food debris excavated there included the bones of oxen sheep, pigs, deer, whales, fishes and birds. Very few weapons were found but this may change when a cemetery has been found and excavated. It is thought, in fact, that these settlements on the northern isles were bases for raids on Irish monasteries. Attacks further south were the work of Danish Vikings. After 835 raids were almost annual on one or other of the English coasts and in 850 the Danes over-wintered in England for the first time.
Down in Wessex, Egbert was succeeded by his son Ǽthelwulf who won a decisive victory in 851 over a Danish host composed of 350 ships’ companies which had attacked Canterbury and London and driven the Mercian king into flight. This led to a lull in the Viking attacks and after some fifteen peaceful years on the throne the king set out on a pilgrimage to Rome with his youngest son, Alfred, leaving his eldest son Ǽthelbald to rule. On the return journey he stayed at the court of Charles the Bald, king of the West Franks, and met and married Judith, Charles’ daughter who was only thirteen, as a mark of alliance. His return to Wessex was not happy, for the leading men of the kingdom had become disillusioned with him and, to avoid a civil war, he agreed to divide the kingdom, taking Kent and south-eastern parts for himself. But he passed away in 858 and the kingdom was not reunited until his successor died and his third son, Ǽthelred, became king.
The Viking‘Great Army’ as it was called at the time, landed in East Anglia in the autumn of 865 under the leadership of the Viking Ivar the Boneless, son of the famous Ragnar Lothbrok, and remained there for twelve months before, in a series of campaigns, lasting for fifteen years, expanded its depredations and ravaged most of eastern England. The raiders seized horses to move about swiftly and lived off the country which gave them great mobility and made it difficult for the fyrd, the king’s army, to bring them to battle.
In the autumn of 866 the Danes set out for a march to York, two hundred miles away, and took up residence inside the Roman walls where they were attacked by a Northumbrian force in the following spring but in the battle inside and outside the city’s walls the Northumbrians were massively defeated and both their leaders killed with the result that the kingdom of Northumbria virtually came to an end. The Vikings established a kingdom of York which extended from the North Sea to the Irish Sea and made the city into a busy trading centre. .Excavations in the city have produced finds of soapstone bowls, imported either from Shetland or Norway, jewellery from Scotland and Ireland, lava quernstones, pottery and cloth.from the Rhineland, Silk came from the Byzantine Empire while a cowrie shell was traded from as far afield as the Red Sea. At Coppergate, the extensive excavation site has been restored to its Viking appearance in a reconstruction equipped with the sounds and smells of the time that welcome the visitor as they glide in their capsules through the bustling world of the later ninth century.
York was similar to other Viking trading centres elsewhere in the north. Birka in Sweden was probably the biggest, now an area of twenty-two acres of black occupation earth some two metres deep, on the island of Björkö in Lake Malar. A fort offered protection in time of trouble to the townsfolk who lived in an area surrounded by a wall built about 925. Most of our knowledge of the place comes from the graves that surround the town. Some eleven hundred have been excavated and contain glass and pottery from the Rhineland, Frankish jewellery and Anglo-Irish bronze trinkets. Other trading centres were Hedeby in Denmark and Kaupang in Norway where the largest Viking collection of western bronze metal has been found amongst trade goods. Most of the metal was probably loot.
Viking age trade in eastern Europe can be traced by the location of their coin-hoards, most of them found in lowlands beside the coasts and rivers. In these hoards Byzantine coins are scarce along the Russian rivers except in the south, in the areas close to Byzantium. Arabic coins, on the other hand, are rare in the south, but are found concentrated on the rivers between the Baltic and the Volga Bend. Written sources as well as coin hoards demonstrate that the trading centre of Bulgar on the Volga Bend attracted Arab merchants presumably in search of furs and amber. In one direction the trail of coin finds leads along the Volga to the Ladoga area and, in another, along the Oka valley. The central position of Gnezdovo, which lay between the Dnieper and the Duna at the junction of river routes to Bulgar, Ladoga and the Baltic, is clearly demonstrated by the heavy concentration of treasure found nearby. Slavs called the Vikings the Rus, which provided the name Russian.
Next year, 867, back in Britain, the Danish army set out for Mercia where they occupied Nottingham. Burgred, king of Mercia, whose wife was the sister of Ethelred of Wessex, son of the Wessex king, was in sore straits and he sent south to Wessex for help. Troops were collected and they and the Mercians confronted the Vikings who remained within their entrenchments in the town of Nottingham. No battle took place but the germ of the idea of fortified towns used by Alfred may have been born here. Leaving Nottingham, the Danes made for their base at York where they over-wintered before setting out for East Anglia in the spring. East Anglia was destroyed as a kingdom in 868 by the Danes and their king Edmund killed and subsequently canonised. Late in 1870, they left their new quarters at Thetford to make their first attack on Wessex and set up a base at Reading. After defeating an English force, the army moved south to Ashdown on the Berkshire Downs where they met their match in the army of the Wessex king and his brother Alfred. But the Wessex levies were scattered shortly afterwards at a battle south of Reading when following up the retreating Vikings. Ǽthelred died early in 871 and Alfred became king and fought a hard-pressed series of engagements that, combined with a payment, persuaded the Danes to leave Reading for London.
During the next few years, Mercia was the Danes’ target. Its king, Burgred, was expelled and ended his life in Rome and the Danes installed a puppet who held the kingdom for them. But, after years of campaigning, some of the Danish army grew weary and they broke away from the host and under Halfdan eventually settled down in the area that we now know as Yorkshire. Repton was the base of the rest of the army in Mercia. They moved from there to Cambridge for a year and then turned their attention again to Wessex, marching to Wareham where Alfred was able to force them to accept an agreement whereby they gave hostages and promised to leave Wessex. However, they slipped away to Exeter, marching by night and shutting themselves up behind its defences. They had failed in this second attempt on Wessex and the Viking host split again, one part turned back to eastern Mercia where they settled down, probably in the territory known as the Five Boroughs, the shires of Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Leicester and Stamford. Guthrum led the remainder from Gloucester on a final attempt on Wessex early in January 878.
Wessex seemed to have been taken by surprise. Alfred with a small force, retreated west of Selwood Forest into the Somerset Levels where he based himself on his estates in the marshes of Athelney. During the next few months he built up his forces and early in May crossed back east of Selwood and joined levies from Wiltshire and part of Hampshire and advanced on Guthrum’s base at Chippenham where fieldwork has recently discovered the defences and the location of the original settlement on top of its bluff above the River Avon (Mike Stone, pers. comm.). The combined levies met the Danes at Edington, fifteen miles south of the town where Alfred won a decisive victory. Guthrum was baptized and vowed to leave Wessex. Later, like the rest of the host, they moved to East Anglia and settled down, in this case in the area that came to be known as Danelaw.
Excavations at Ingleby in Derbyshire in Danelaw over a number of years have uncovered a Viking cremation cemetery in which the ashes were interred under barrows and in some cases on riveted planking that is assumed to have been at one time part of a Viking ship. Some of the graves are thought to be of Christian converts, others contain a few grave-goods – a couple of swords and some wire embroidery – and these provide a date for the cemetery of late-ninth to early tenth-centuries. Other Viking burials are interred in Christian cemeteries, pointing to a process of rapid acculturation; other cremations have been found at Hesket in the Forest, Claughton Hall and perhaps Inskip. Not far away from Ingleby is Repton where a mass Viking inhumation turned up in excavation. Disarticulated remains there are of both men and women and it has been suggested that they could have been gathered up from the scattered graves of victims of an epidemic of 873-4 and re-interred in a standing masonry tomb in the churchyard.
But, as Guthrum’s warriors were forging their swords into ploughshares, a Viking force began operating in the Channel raiding both England and France. Alfred realized that he had to take measures to defend his kingdom against this threat and he had ships especially constructed and crewed by Frisians who were the most experienced and expert sailors of the day. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes the vessels as ‘twice as long as the Danish ships. Some had sixty oars, some more. They were both swifter and steadier and also higher …….. They were built neither on the Frisian nor on the Danish pattern but as it seemed to him (the king) himself that they could be most useful.’ Their size was an advantage in fighting but their deeper draught put them at a disadvantage with the Danish ships as demonstrated in the Chronicle’s account of the naval battle fought off southern Wessex in 896.
‘Six ships came to the Isle of Wight and did great harm there, both in Devon and everywhere along the coast. Then the king ordered (a force) to go thither with nine of the new ships and they blocked the estuary (where the Danes had beached their vessels) from the seaward end. Then the Danes went out against them with three ships, and three were on dry land further up the estuary: the men from them had gone up on land. Then the English captured two of these three ships at the entrance to the estuary, and killed the men, and the one ship escaped. On it also the men were killed except five. These got away because the ships of their opponents (the English) ran aground. Moreover, they had run aground very awkwardly: three were aground on that side of the channel on which the Danish ships were aground and all (the others) on the other side, so that none of them could get to the others. But when the water had ebbed many furlongs from the ships, the Danes from the remaining three ships went to the other three which were stranded on their side and they then fought there. And there were killed the king’s reeve Lucuman, Wulfheard the Frisian, Aelthelfrith the king’s geneat (companion) and in all sixty-two Frisians and English and 120 Danes. Then, however, the tide reached the Danish ships before the Christians could launch theirs, and therefore they rowed away out. They were so wounded that they could not row past Sussex, but the sea cast two of them onto the land and the men were brought to Winchester to the king, and he ordered them to be hanged. And the men who were on the one ship reached East Anglia greatly wounded.’
In the seas around northern Europe Vikings had been active from the eighth century At first, violence overshadowed other activities but trade gradually became more and more important. They established a ‘Viking-trade area’ in the Irish Sea, trading between Dublin, the Isle of Man, Anglesey, Chester and the Wirral. Close to Red Wharf Bay, at Llanbedrgoch, a large natural harbour on the north-east coast of Anglesey, a Viking settlement dating from in the eight and ninth centuries, has been found with two large halls and an ancillary building within a D-shaped ditched enclosure. The halls measure some 12m by 8m with central hearths and timber walls with stone footings. Finds include a large whetstone with a brass ferule at one end in the shape of a Viking helmet, a copper pin and a small bronze bell, hacked-up silver armbands made in Ireland, dress fasteners of Irish or York manufacture, leatherworking tools similar to those in Whithorn and Dublin, and ‘Chester ware’ made in Staffordshire (Redknap)
It was a different story further south in France. In 799 the first Vikings landed in Aquitaine. Around the year 800, the increasing threats of Viking raids forced Charlemagne to build a number of forts like Esesfelth near Neumünster, along the north-western borders of the Frankish Empire. In 882 bands of Vikings plundered along the Rhine and burned towns to the ground. The only effective defence against Viking attacks in France was the development of mobile, heavy cavalry to catch and break the Viking foot-soldiers, along with the construction of fortified centres: thus foreshadowing the construction of medieval castles on the Continent. These strongpoints could resist attack and act as bases for counter-attacks and during the second half of the ninth century the Franks constructed a number of them and with the help of heavy cavalry that was being developed at the time, Viking raids were quickly made less profitable.
In France the Vikings used rivers, sticking to their ships, and not venturing far from them, not as in England. On the Seine in 860, the Vikings made an attempt to reach Paris, camping for the night on the island of Jeufosse a few miles below the town and pulling their boats up on the low sandy beaches. They put up tents, cooked their food and discussed their plan for attacking Paris. In the meantime a Frankish army gathered on both sides of the river .but there was little they could do. Any attempts to go ashore on the island in small boat could bring death before the Franks had solid ground underfoot. In any case, the Vikings did not seem to be in the mood for battle. They jeered, sang, pulled up their shifts and bared their backsides to the Frankish soldiers before embarking on their boats and, on this occasion, rowing back down the Seine. But, on another occasion, they reached and besieged Paris unsuccessfully, for the Franks had turned it into one of their fortresses. Further south in the Mediterranean, the Vikings were only nuisance raiders.
But in Normandy the Vikings settled, a colonisation that was mainly aristocratic in character, providing reinforcements for a rural population that the Franks had largely ignored. Place-names show that between the end of the tenth century and the beginning of the eleventh many estates came into the hands of the new rulers. These changes were particularly important in eastern Normandy where few pre-Viking place-names remain. This settlement proved to be especially significant for England since the Northmen within a few years established a duchy there and with remarkable speed adopted the language and institutions of the new country and soon became a dynamic force both in France and Europe. In time they were to conquer England and establish an empire in southern Italy and Sicily
It was the Viking longship that was the key to their unusual mobility. Norse ships have a long ancestry starting with a few dug-out Neolithic canoes excavated in Amossen in Denmark, and rock carvings in Norway and Sweden and progressing to the first plank-built Hjortspring boat, c300BC, about fifty feet long and stitched together with hide thongs. Built on a colossal scale was the Nydam ship (early fourth-century), seventy-five feet long, the planks being held together by iron rivets. Found at Sunnmore in Norway, the Kvalsund ship (c700) was sixty-one feet long with a embryo keel. Its hull-shape suggests that it could have carried a mast and a sail. This is perhaps the type of ship used by the Viking raiders. At Ladby in Denmark (c1000), an excavated vessel, designed primarily for coastal waters, was propelled solely by oars while the Swedish Kalmar ship (thirteenth century), deeper and broader than the Viking longships, was intended for cargo.
The discovery of the five Skuldelev ships at Roskilde Fjord in Denmark made it possible to study the construction of Scandinavian ships built around 1000. Three of the wrecks were merchantmen, the others probably warships. Important evidence was obtained when the archaeologists examined the mounting of the mast in Wreck III, a merchantman that, although primarily a sailing ship could have been used with oars. This was significant since merchantmen propelled by sail were the ships of the future in northern seas. Warship construction was soon to be abandoned - merchant ships were requisitioned and modified for the purpose as required.
A good example of a merchant ship of the eleventh century used for coastal trading was found near Skuldelev. Some 13.8m long, she could carry a cargo of about 4.1 tonnes. An ocean-going version of the knörr (the common name for this type of trading ship) was later found at Skuldelev itself. She was 16.3m long and 4.6m in the beam and could carry 13.6 tonnes and her estimated speed under sail, the only means of propulsion, was some three to six knots. A knörr had half-decks both fore and aft and a sail which probably cost as much to produce as the hull. It was made from the finest grade of homespun wool and might have taken the home weavers several years to make. Before use it was coated with animal fats and oils and the rigging was likely made of bast from oak, elm or lime trees. The expense involved in making a sail was probably one of the reasons why sailing ships took a long time to become common in northern waters.
Apart from shipbuilding the Vikings were skilled metalsmiths working in gold and silver and inlaying silver brooches and other trinkets in a tradition that can only be described as showy. Showy too were their decorated textiles and, presumably so would have been the decoration of their houses.
Runic inscriptions are common in the Viking world, most carved on stones and most found in Sweden. They are commemorations of great people like the Jellinge stone in Denmark erected in 935 ‘King Gorm erected this memorial in honour of his wife, Thyri, restorer of Denmark’. But the literary Viking hardly comes into the picture before the twelfth century when the sagas appear. Their greatest flowering is in Iceland and they have become a prime source of general information about the Viking world. They cannot be described as history but are literary achievements of two chief kinds: the first sort claims to give an historical account of the reigns of the kings of Norway that cannot be trusted and the second is the collection of Icelandic Family Sagas, biographies of men of note in Iceland during the tenth century. But the most remarkable literary achievements of the Vikings which show that their usual ferocious reputation was not all there was to Viking life and culture are the Poetic Edda, poems that deal with mythological and heroic subjects, many dating from the Viking Age of expansion.
Alfred was faced with the problem of finding a long-term defensive solution for Wessex. He had the one advantage of the fyrd that consisted of the king’s household warriors together with contingents from his landed retainers that would include a variety of people with the necessary weapons who were obliged by the terms of their leases to follow their lord whenever called upon to do so. One of the laws of King Ine made it a punishable offence to avoid the summons to a fyrd which, however, even when complete would never number more than a few hundred and which would not be able to stay together for more than a few weeks. Earlier, problems had arisen with this system when the king granted lands to the Church. The land was granted in perpetuity and known as the bookland system because the grant would have been recorded, but it meant that the Church would not in return provide military service as did secular landlords. This was put right by the Mercian king Aethelbald who ordered that, although, the recipients of bookland would be free of most services, they had to provide labour and materials for building bridges and soldiers for defence. This became the customary arrangement in succeeding centuries.
Alfred’s reforms divided the fyrd into two rotating contingents which allowed one or other to be in the field at all times while the other was at home attending to domestic affairs. The arrangement provided him with between two and two and a half thousand men. It worked adequately for some time although later on its efficiency declined so that it required updating in the reigns of Aethelred and Cnut when fyrd service was directly related to the amount of land held.
Alfred’s fighting men were drawn mainly from the fyrd serving alongside some of the sailors who manned his fleet but there were always a number of mercenaries hired with money provided by those who were unable for some reason like age or illness or sex (for some of those who held land from the king were female) to answer the call of the fyrd. In addition there was the king’s personal body guard, the housecarls of old who were members of his palitiu (household).
Another of Alfred’s initiatives was the creation of strongpoints in which local people could shelter if necessary. He may have got the idea from Charlemagne’s fortresses or from the incident in 860 when the island city of Paris was able to withstand a prolonged Viking siege but he also learnt from the example of the Danes in the campaigns of 875-7 when they avoided battle by using the defences of Wareham, Exeter, Nottingham, Gloucester and other towns. A document survives that gives valuable evidence about the defensive system used by Alfred and his successors. This is the Burghal Hidage that may date in its original form to around 880 and gives a list of defended sites in the system as it was, or intended to be, but it is fairly clear that the system was modified later on during the reign of his son. The list contains the names of thirty fortifications, all south of the Thames apart from Buckingham; some based on Roman sites where there were walls like Exeter, Portchester, Winchester and Chichester and on other places that were fortified for the first time. In some cases the earlier walls were reinforced, in others complete circuits were dug and in cases a promontory was cut off by a bank and ditch. We are told in a Winchester charter that its fortification was intended to shelter all the people so, perhaps we can account for the different sizes of these ‘safe-houses’ by the sizes of the local populations that needed shelter in times of Viking incursions. The largest are Winchester and Wallingford. We know this because each burh in the document is assessed in hides, the measurement of arable land which in the Hidage relates to both the nominal garrison size and the length of the defences. Basically, each hide equalled one defender who equalled just over four feet of the perimeter. In all, the system would have required about 25,000 defenders, but of course they were never expected to be manned at one and the same time. The measurements are surprisingly accurate. In Bath, for example, assessed at 1000 hides the perimeter of the newly constructed defences should have been 4000+ feet and this is almost exactly what it is, calculating it on the assumption that the medieval walls followed the same line. The smallest sites are in the west. Lydford, whose defences have been excavated, was protected by a bank and ditch that cut off the promontory on which it stands was assessed at only 140 hides.
Recent research has suggested that the system was quickly modified, that, for example, some defended market towns that stood in more advantageous situations with larger populations replaced the burhs in the system. Totnes, with a bridge on the river, is said to have replaced Halwell while Barnstaple replaced Pilton. Later, the system was extended to Mercia during the reign of Edward the Elder and his sister.
During Alfred’s reign, sometime in the late ninth century, a yearly chronicle of events was begun in Winchester. Copies of this were sent out to various centres to be continued locally together with copies of Alfred’s translation of the Cura Pastoralis, perhaps as part of his campaign to raise the standards of literacy in the country. It is significant that people were not expected to learn the bureaucratic tonque, Latin, but the vernacular, and. in pursuit of this goal, the chronicles were also in English. In these monastic centres the separate chronicles were continued, each from its individual regional standpoint and of them three manuscripts and two fragments have survived. What we usually read today is a conflation and really should be described as Chronicles rather than Chronicle but it is probably too late to correct the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ nomenclature to a more realistic ‘English’.
Some of the dating is rather erratic but this should not obscure the important innovation of reckoning years from the birth of Christ. This follows the example of Bede’s anno domini which became the normal usage both in Britain and on the Continent. The monastic year was punctuated by saints’ days, other holy days and regulated by the flow of the seasons and the chronicles faithfully recorded what each particular scribe at his particular time in each particular monastery thought was important but we are told that the purpose of the entries was not simply to record or even analyse events but ‘to characterise the receding series of years, each by a mark and sign of its own, so that the years might not be confused in the retrospect of those who lived and acted in them’. (Plummer).
An example of the amount of detail that sometimes was included comes in 891 when it is recorded that ’Three Scots came to king Alfred, in a boat without oars from Ireland, from whence they had stolen away because for the love of God they wished to be in exile, they did not care where. The boat in which they came was worked from two and a half hides; they took with them food for seven days. They came to land on the seventh night in Cornwall, and went soon to king Alfred. They were called: Dubslane, Macbeth and Maelinmum.’
Alfred occupied London in 886, appointing the Mercian Ǽthelred as ealdorman (royal official, of royal or noble blood) to oversee its defence and a burh was built south of the Thames to convert London into a double burh. The king later married his daughter to Ǽthelred who presumably took up residence inside the old city which had been abandoned to some extent after the Roman army left Britain. Trade had moved further upriver to Lundenwic. Inside the walled city, however, some occupation continued. The cathedral church of St Paul had been first built during the reign of King Ǽthelbert of Kent shortly after 604 but no trace of it remains today. Papal policy, as mentioned previously, clearly not au fait with the political situation in Britain, had appointed a bishop of London. This may have helped to keep some population inside the walls, in particular, Christian families who had retained their faith since Roman times, and new converts. Now they were augmented by the entourage of the new governor.
Outside the city, there were settlements in Hammersmith, Brentford and Barking which may have been a wic, perhaps servicing vessels that could not get as far up the river as Lundenwic which was situated in present-day Aldwych and was flourishing by 700. Some time around 842 a Viking attack perhaps persuaded the inhabitants to move their operations within the shelter of the old city walls where there were ruined Roman masonry buildings some of which may have been capable of being patched up and re-used.. Lundenwic appears to have been abandoned. This was the time in the old city when a series of north-south streets began to be laid out between the river and the east-west market streets of Eastcheap and Cheapside (cheap = market) further up the north bank of the Thames while a new landing-place was established at Queenhithe. Dendrochronological dating of timber from a structure at Bull Wharf there is of the eighth decade of the ninth century. Trade was with Frisian and Scandinavian ports.
Finds of metalwork of the ninth and tenth centuries from the Carolingian Empire are significant and, by 1000, documents speak of merchants from Rouen, Ponthieu, Huy, Liége and Nivelles trading at the new port at Billingsgate established below the new London Bridge which had proved to be a barrier to larger ships after its construction in the later tenth century. Here a new jetty of that period has been found together with imported objects like French and Rhenish pottery, rings and trinkets from Scandinavia, hones from Norway, querns from Niedermendig in Germany and coins from different parts of Europe. Further north in the city finds in excavations on properties belonging to wealthy merchants include crucibles, inlaid knives, jewellery, scabbards and shoes. Their wealth came from manufacturing as well as trading. Craftsmen produced objects of copper, silver bone, leather and practised high-class weaving.
By 1000 London was the largest and the most important city in England, an importance reinforced by the erection of the Abbey at Westminster, a site a little way upstream on the northern bank of the Thames settled as early as the eighth century. A royal palace was built there in the 1050s and its remains now lie underneath the Houses of Parliament. Close by, at Chelsea, a waterfront had been constructed that is dated to the period between 700 and 900 and this may have been associated with an earlier palace of Offa built on the river bank on Thorney Island just upriver of Westminster. (see various publications by the Museum of London)
London itself was a typical timber town of the period. Only the new churches were built in stone. Although the largest and most prosperous place in the country, it, like New York in the United States, had to defer to a smaller centre of authority, in this case, Winchester.
Alfred, drawing on the old codes of Ǽthelbert of Kent, Ine of Wessex and Offa of Mercia, put together and issued his own code of laws which had the effect of strengthening the central monarchy and assisting in the reform of the administration of justice. Court finances were re-organized and the monarchy put on a firm financial footing. At Winchester he gathered together scholars and energetically put in hand measures to improve the standard of literacy in the country. A court school was founded and monasteries encouraged to follow this example not solely by training neophyte monks but also the sons of nobles who could now gain an education without going abroad. Alfred himself became an author and translated several Latin works into English.
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