Chapter 15
Athelstan and Edgar
What we can identify as a truly English culture appeared in the last couple of pre-Medieval centuries. It coincided both with the unification of the country and the intensification of Viking attacks. But we have lost a great deal of the splendour of the time by the destruction of the great churches, not by the Vikings but by the Norman bishops who were determined to leave their own mark on their cathedrals.
After the defeat of the Danes and the settlement of many of them as peasant farmers in eastern England in the Danelaw and the subsequent re-conquest of England by Edward the Elder, the great period of Saxon England began. In 920 he realised his vision of a united island. In the words of the Chronicles : ‘He was chosen as father and lord by the king of the Scots and all the Scottish people: by Raegnald, and Easdul’s sons, and all who dwelt in Northumbria, English, Danes, Norse and others, and the king of the Strathclyde Welsh, and the Strathclyde Welsh themselves’.
Scandinavian art began to surface in England as the settlers were assimilated into English society and it began to merge with native traditions. Their styles were not unfamiliar, being close to the interlace patterns of the Books of Durrow and Kells. Stylized animals covered every surface in an exuberant riot of decoration. We know the earliest style as the Jellinge animal art and it was found both in Danelaw and in the Norwegian-settled area of the north-west of England. Later, English influences on the Viking artists produced the Ringerike style, owing a great deal to the Winchester School, combining the animal forms with the foliage favoured by the English craftsmen. An example of this is the churchyard stone from St Paul’s in London which, apparently, was originally painted. In Northumbria the earlier motifs persisted for much longer and appear in all sorts of situations like the door-hinge in the shape of a Viking boat on the church door at Stillingfleet in Yorkshire and the carving of a Viking army on the march on a tombstone in Cumbria.
After Edward died in 924 he was succeeded by his son Athelstan, brought up in Mercia and crowned at Kingston, who found that Scandinavian Northumbria was still a problem. In 927 his army entered York, expelling the Norse Olaf and razing the defences of the city but he didn’t seem to have done a complete job, judging by the condition of the Roman defences today. At a gathering near Penrith he (in the re-iterated words of the Chronicles) ‘received the kingdom of Northumbria and all the kings on this island were brought under his rule: first Hywel, king of the West Welsh; Constantine, king of the Scots, Uwen, king of the people of Gwent, and Eadred, son of Eadulf, from Bamburgj. With pledges and oaths they fastened a peace, in the place called Eamont Bridge, on July 12th, and renounced all idol-worship, and from there turned away in peace.’ The mention of ‘idol worship’ demonstrates that Christianity had still not become universally observed in Britain.
Athelstan was proving to be just as able a soldier and diplomat as his father and grandfather but no agreement of this sort lasted for very long in those days, partly because the participants felt themselves out of sight and out of mind soon after it was sealed and because of the short life-spans of those who had signed. Successors very often did not feel themselves bound by an agreement arrived at by their fathers. By 934 Athelstan was once more marching northwards, this time accompanied by a naval force that raided the Scottish coast up to Caithness. The king got as far as Kincardine but his intervention seems to have galvanised all the forces that had been squabbling over territory in the country into unity and in 937 the ruler of the Norse kingdom of Dublin, Constantine, king of the Scots and the king of Strathclyde joined together in an invasion of England. Athelstan met them at Brunanburh, a place still not identified, with the Mercian and West-Saxon fyrds and won a smashing victory.
The Chronicle celebrated it in a poetic paean:
‘Athelstan, king, lord of eorls, ring-giver to men, and his brotheralso, the atheling Edmund, lifelong glory struck in battle with sword’s edge at Brunanburh, broke the shield-wall, hewed linden-wood (shields were made of line-wood) with hammer’s leaving. Edward’s sons, as they were nobly-born, accustomed to battle, often on campaign had defended their land from each foe, hoard and home; the hated ones were crushed, people of the Scots, men of the ships, fated fell. The field was slick with men’s blood, from when the burning sun in morning-time, mighty star, glided up overground, God’s bright candle, the Eternal Lord’s till the noble work sank to its setting, many a man lay wrecked by spears, northern warrior shot over shield. So the Scots also were sated with war; West Saxons went forth all the day long on the enemy’s tracks, hewing the fleeing forces from behind with blades new-sharpened. No stroke did the Mercians refuse to pay in the hard hand-play to any who with Olaf over sea’s swells in the ship’s lap sought land, fated to fall: five lay dead on the field, young kings put to sleep with the sword; so also seven of Olaf’s eorls and numberless slain among shipmen and Scots. The Northmen’s lord was put to flight, forced by need to his ship with small company. Keep pressed sea, the king went out on fallow flood, saved his life. So also the old man fled away to his northern country, Constantine, hoary battle-man; he need not boast of the meeting of swords. He was severed from kin, deprived of friends on that field, slain at war and left his son on the death-ground destroyed by his wounds, young at war; he need have no proud words, the white-haired warrior, the wily one, about striking edges, nor Olaf either. With the remnants of an army they need not laugh that their battle-work was better where standards crossed and spears clashed in the meeting of man when on the death-fields they played with the sons of Edward. The Northmen went off in nailed ships, sad survivors of spears, on Ding’s mere, over deep water, seeking Dublin, Ireland again, ashamed in their hearts, so the brothers both together king and atheling sought their country, the land of Wessex, exulting in war. They left behind them sharing the dead the dusk-dressed one, the black raven, with hard beak of horn and hairy-coated eagle, white-tailed, eating the carrion, greedy war-hawk and that grey beast, the wolf of the wood. Nor was more slaughter on this island ever yet, so many folks felled, before this fight with sword’s edge, as say the books, the old wise men, since from the east (Angle and Saxon?) came up together over broad sea seeking Britain, who overcame the (Welsh?), eager for glory, and gained a land.
An Early English rap! But the jolting rhythm conveys perfectly the panting ferocity of the struggle,
As well as a formidable skill in war, Athelstan was as much of an intellectual as he had time to be, collecting objects of interest from all over Europe, an able administrator and lawyer and a man of extreme piety, providing gifts to monasteries and shrines. He achieved renown in Europe and several rulers sought an alliance with his family. One was Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor, who in 929 married Athelstan's half sister, Eadgyth, daughter of the late King Edward the Elder and grand-daughter of Alfred. She died in 946 and has a tomb in Magdeburg Cathedral.
Athelstan, and Alfred for that matter, seem to us almost modern men whom we might see in the Cabinet today, or as Field-Marshals or leaders of a great business enterprise but, of course, they were men of their time. The following passage points up the differences. It a passage from Florence of Worcester’s Chronicle describing the gifts sent by Hugh the Great, Duke of the Franks to Athelstan when he requested a sister of the king as his wife: ‘when he had set forth the wooer’s request in an assembly of nobles at Abingdon, he offered indeed most ample gifts which might instantly satisfy the cupidity of the most avaricious: perfumes such as never before had been seen in England; jewellery, especially of emeralds in whose greenness the reflected sun lit up the eyes of the bystanders with a pleasing light; many fleet horses, with trappings ‘champing’ on bits of ruddy gold; a vase of onyx, carved with such subtle engravers’ art that the cornfields seemed really to wave, the vines really to bud, the forms of the men really to move, and so clear and polished that it collected like a mirror faces of the onlookers; the sword of Constantine the Great on which could be read the name of the ancient owner in letters of gold; on the pommel also above thick plates of gold you could see an iron nail fixed, one of the four that the Jewish faction prepared for the crucifixion of Our Lord’s body; the spear of Charles the Great which, whenever that most invincible emperor, leading an army against the Saracens, hurled it against the enemy, never let him depart without the victory; it is said to be the same which, driven by the hand of the centurion into Our Lord’s side, opened by the gash of that wound Paradise for wretched mortals; the standard of Maurice, the most blessed martyr and prince of the Theban legion, by which the same king was wont in the Spanish to break asunder the battalions of the enemy, however fierce and dense, and to force them to flight; a diadem, precious certainly for its quantity of gold, but more for its gems, whose splendour so threw flashes of light on the onlookers that the more anyone strove to fix his gaze on it, the more he was driven back and forced to give in; a piece of the wholly and adorable Cross enclosed in crystal, where the eye, penetrating the substance of the stone, could discern what was the colour of the wood and what the quantity; a portion also of the crown of thorns, similarly enclosed, which the madness of the soldiers placed on Christ’s sacred head in mockery of his kingship.’
That such a mixture of bogus rubbish and objects of high craftsmanship could have been exchanged between leaders of society seems very strange to us. But, in their everyday lives and in their stance towards the vicissitudes of this world they needed support and in those days, lacking the background of technology and science that we have accumulated over the centuries, that could only come from a belief in the magic of relics that connected them directly to God or to the heroes of old and were visible and concrete symbols of their reality.
But although Athelstan might have been the outstanding kleptomaniac of his time when it came to relics he was not alone. All the secular rulers and leaders of the church were at it and most were a good deal less ethical than Athelstan. St Hugh of Lincoln, on a visit to the abbey of Fécamp of Normandy, bending over to kiss the monks’ most profitable relic, took a lump out of it with his teeth and carried it away to display in his own church. We are not told what the relic was but it says a good deal for the quality of the saint’s teeth.
But the pre-Conquest period was a period of much ecclesiastical book writing. Apart from many volumes of sermons there were treatises on other subjects. Byrhtferth, a monk from Ramsey in Huntingdonshire, was concerned that parish clergy should be properly educated and so he wrote a Manual of Enchiridion in which he described the elements of astronomy and mathematics as he understood them. Also included was an explanation of the zodiac and Latin grammar, all illustrated with diagrams. It was, in short a handbook of simple science and nowadays is still an instructional handbook, telling us something of the state of knowledge of the day. Another scholar was Ǽlfric who became abbot at Eynsham near Oxford who wrote the Catholic Homilies, the Lives of the Saints, a Latin Grammar, a Latin-English Vocabulary and his Colloquy, a conversation with representatives of various trades and professions. The realistic dialogue tells a good deal about the life and work of these people in these various walks of life.
The personality of the king was still all-important as the most important ingredient in the business of holding a country together and this is not better demonstrated than in the history of the last few pre-Conquest years. Athelstan died in 939 and his tomb is in Malmesbury Abbey. On hearing the news, the Norse Olaf Guthfrithson sailed over from Ireland, returned to York and set out to ravage the Midlands. Athelstan’s brother, Edmund, came to an agreement to recognise him as ruler of York and the area of the north-eastern Midlands between the Humber and Welland. But the Viking died in 941 and by that time Edmund was sufficiently strong to recapture both the Five Boroughs and York.and take over Strathclyde which he handed to Malcolm, king of the Scots. In this way he set a Scottish border and brought peace which was later confirmed by King Edgar’s agreement with Kenneth of Scotland that firmly established the River Tweed as the boundary between the two countries. He ended his short reign in strange circumstances, being stabbed to death in Pucklechurch in south Gloucestershire.
Eadred, his brother, was now king. His problem in the north was again with Northumbria. Eric Bloodaxe had now been welcomed back in York and Eadred marched there, ravaged the area with such ferocity that the Northumbrians expelled Eric who shortly died and so, at last, brought some degree of homogeneity in England for the future Northumbria was to be ruled by a succession of eorls nominally at least, as deputies of the English king. Another short reign , this time of nine and a half years, was brought to an end by the death of Eadred at Frome in Selwood Forest in eastern Somerset in 955 and he was succeeded by Eadwig, Edmund’s son, in whose reign, the charismatic churchman, Dunstan, was exiled. Eadwig’s reign was mercifully short and he was succeeded by Edgar in 959.
Edgar was the first Saxon king to be crowned as king of all-England, in Bath in 971. This was the first coronation with an order of service that was especially written for it. An eye-witness tells us that the king wearing his robe and crown entered the church in a procession led by two bishops, each holding him by a hand. He removed his crown and prostrated himself before the altar while Dunstan led the singing of the Te Deum. The king was raised by the bishops to take the coronation oath and be anointed while the choir sang Vivat rex in aeternum. A ring was placed on his finger by the archbishop and he was girded with a sword and crowned on a throne. One can see in this ceremony the seeds of the modern Coronation ceremony.
A royal ordinance promulgated during the mid-tenth century first includes the term ‘hundred’ which is used to describe a sub-division of a shire although in some areas of Viking influence ‘Wapentake’ was used for the same thing. In the ordinance, it is stated that a meeting of the hundred was to be held every four weeks and that at the meeting every man was to do justice to his fellow men. Crimes that commonly came before the hundred court were theft and cattle-rustling. One member of the hundred was recognised as the chief official and he was known as the ‘hundred man’ and it was his job to brief the men of the ‘tithings’ who were all to go to round up the accused. It is not quite clear whether this ‘tithing’ refers to groups of ten men organised for police purposes or to a territorial subdivision of the hundred. The senior man in the tithing was the ‘tithingman’.
If a crime was committed, it was generally up to the victim or the victim’s family to complain to the court and swear to the truth of the charge. When the accused was brought before the court he was required to swear an oath as to his innocence in company with his oath-helpers who, to be taken seriously, needed to be men of good repute or, if he failed to do this, he faced the ordeal, either by boiling water or hot iron. If the wound healed cleanly, then he was adjudged innocent. Punishments were either a fine paid to the victim or his family, slavery, mutilation (often losing a hand) or death, usually by hanging or, to be more precise, suspension by the neck until dead.
Law-suits could be passed up to the shire-court, the most important unit of government in the pre-Conquest period through which the king was able to exercise control over local affairs. Earlier it consisted of the ealdorman, a royal official; often related to the ruling family but he was replaced in later times by the shire-reeve or sheriff who, certainly, by the time of Ǽthelred, presided over a meeting of the rich and famous in the shire. They met regularly and their business was concerned with carrying out instructions contained in the king’s writs and all aspects of local government, both secular and clerical. A good deal of their judicial work was concerned with disputes over the ownership of land.
In the years up to the Norman Conquest of 1066 the country grew prosperous. A market-based economy was firmly established, coins became common, found on excavation sites of the late tenth century and early eleventh century, and long-distance trade that had been pretty subdued during earlier times revived. In the context of burgeoning foreign trade across the Channel and in Europe England's silver coinage was regarded in Europe as a most trustworthy currency.
With stable times returning to Wessex, monasticism came to life again. . It was during the reign of Alfred’s grandson, Edmund, that a sustained renaissance began after the disasters of the Viking period when in Danelaw every monastery had perished or shrunk to a few monks or secular priests and it was little better in other parts of the country. One of the first signs was the new foundation of St Oswald in Gloucester where a church was built in the 890s. Perhaps understandably, it harked back to pre-Viking times, and was a rather conservative structure with a portico each side of the nave, like the monastery of Augustine at Canterbury, but with a western apse in Frankish style. When the relics of St Oswald were obtained from Danelaw, a crypt like that at Repton was built for them, again a glance back to the past, but later on during the tenth century a tower was added and the western apse demolished. Some remains of the Saxon structure can still be seen on the site,
Dunstan, a relative of the king, was a leading spirit in this renaissance, restoring Glastonbury to its past glory with new buildings, an emphasis on learning and the Benedictine rule. With his associates, Ethelwold of Winchester and the Dane Oswald, the decayed monastery of Abingdon was restored and some monks taken from it to the minsters of Westminster and re-creations in the Fenland like Peterborough, Ely, Ramsey and Thorney and Crowland. Later, St Albans and Eynsham were refounded while in the west, Winchcombe, Westbury, Pershore and Deerhurst were established and monks introduced into Worcester cathedral. Also in the west, monks were returned to Bath, Cerne, Sherborne and Malmesbury and in the east to Christ Church and St Augustine’s at Canterbury. It was at Malmesbury where the monk, Eilmer, either in a spirit of scientific enquiry or religious enthusiasm, was the first to make the attempt to fly some time during the first ten years of the eleventh century, taking off in his glider from the tower of the abbey and flying some two hundred metres before crashing and breaking his legs. His matter-of-fact explanation for the prang was that he had forgotten to put a tail on the machine – ‘caudam in posteriore parte’.
By the middle of the eleventh century, England had about fifty monasteries and twelve nunneries, including some new foundations like Burton-on-Trent, St Benet’s Holme and Coventry. Almost all were large establishments and well endowed with land, the exceptions like Athelney and Buckfast being very few.
During the whole post-Roman period, sixteen bishoprics were created: Canterbury in 597, London and Rochester in 604, York 625 , Dorchester 634 and with Leicester 870, Lindisfarne, 635, later transferred to Durham, Lichfield 656, Winchester 963, Hereford c676, East Anglia (Elmham) 673, Worcester, 620, Sherborne, 705, Sussex, (Selsey) 708, Ramsbury c909, Crediton, c909, Wells c909 and Cornwall (St Germans) 931 Some of these places did not survive as bishoprics. The sees at Dorchester (on- Thames), Elmham and Crediton were transferred to Lincoln, Norwich and Exeter. Ramsbury was represented by Salisbury. With the exception of Elmham, all their cathedral buildings have disappeared although occasional diggings for various purposes around standing cathedrals have exposed parts of their foundations. Rochester is known to have been fourteen metres long by 8.8 wide with a semicircular eastern apse. Another excavation at Worcester has discovered the foundations of what appears to have been the apse or rotunda alongside part of the arcading of the building of the tenth century cathedral with a diameter of some 24 metres. The rotunda was a design which became popular in the tenth and eleventh centuries and suggests that the Worcester cathedral was larger than those at Cathedral and Wells. At Wells a small portion of the eastern apse of the early cathedral has been discovered.
The site of the cathedral see at North Elmham which existed from the late seventh-century to 1071 with a gap for the Danish period between the mid-ninth to mid-tenth centuries, has been excavated. The cathedral itself still stands in a ruined and altered state and the original building, built in the tenth century or early eleventh century consisted of a narrow nave with a tower each side of the eastern end and beyond them a transept below a camera and a shallow apse as the eastern termination. This was the later of the Saxon bishopric cathedrals in North Elmham, the earlier one was described in a medieval account of the foundation of Norwich Cathedral as a wooden chapel which presumably stood on the same site at the top of the present village street. A visit to the site provides a useful understanding of the small size of most of these early cathedrals.
In Germany the Carolingian society that preceded the Ottonian was omniverous in its appetite for foreign influences. It can be seen in the manuscripts and more dramatically in its churches. Charlemagne built his chapel at Aachen c800 in the Byzantine style, modelling it on the Byzantine S. Vitale at Ravenna. Later came Corvey on the Weser with its rather heavy westwerk (towered western end) which gave rise to the Ottonian churches of middle Germany like Mainz and Hildesheim in north Germany, both built in the early eleventh century. In England at the same period excavations have shown that 'westwerk' churches became the blueprint for cathedral churches at Winchester and Canterbury.
Cathedral churches of Carolingian inspiration appeared at Canterbury, at Hereford in 825 and of Ottonian inspiration, at Winchester in 980, Worcester in 983, Peterborough in 966 and several other places but none survive today, all victims of the ecclesiastical development fever that Norman prelates suffered from
At Winchester, the Old Minster was entirely demolished by the Normans but excavations outside the later church discovered part of the foundations that are now marked out with brick paths on the ground. The investigation (Biddle) elucidated the outlines of the history of the Saxon cathedral that was founded in the seventh century and was constructed out of re-used Roman masonry. Two-celled, with square portico, one part being a baptistery, it was refashioned during the eighth century when the rectangular chancel was rebuilt as an apse and a small detached tower of St Martin’s built to the west with an arched throughway underneath it that allowed direct access to the royal palace beyond. In the last years of Alfred’s reign a new minster was planned and and was built in the reign of his son., Edward the Elder in 901. It was so close to the old minster that it was said the ‘the voices of the two choirs confounded one another’. In 971, monastic reforms meant that the old minster had to be largely redesigned to suit the Benedictine Order. A cloister, refectory and other conventual buildings were constructed and a new plumbing system installed. A 66m high tower was raised to link the church with the tower of St Martin. It had a vast apsidal martyrium that was the largest in Europe. However, this did not conclude the building operations for next year a change of plan resulted in a westwark as a new west front with a throne-room in the upper floor. A little later, work on the eastern end of the cathedral raised the floor of the nave, rebuilt the baptistery in marble and extended the chancel with a new high-altar over a new crypt, built rectangular and apsidal side-chapels, a five storied bell-chamber and a pyramidal mausoleum at the end and finally, an organ was installed that took seventy men to pump it. This was a monster with twenty-six bellows to supply the wind to the organ’s 400 pipes. A smaller organ of the same design with only four pumpers is shown in the Utrecht Psalter with the two keyboard performers urgently encouraging the pumpers in their efforts (Figure Five). The cathedral became the dynastic church of the Wessex kings and most were buried in it. Their bones are still on the site, now preserved above the choir in the present cathedral in mortuary chests.
Canterbury nave was refloored fairly recently and underneath was found the remains of the Ottonian church that was built in the earlier part of the eleventh century. Its walls lay parallel to the later Norman cathedral but five metres to the north. A westwork was added with hexagonal stair towers at each side and a western apse with a polygonal outer face and a smooth rounded interior. This demonstrates that Canterbury was in the vanguard of European great church building which was being led in Saxony by the so-called ‘Ottonian Renaissance’ with churches that were bold, large and striking buildings. St Cyriakus at Gernrode (founded 961) is the most complete example left to us, since, as in Britain, most great churches were continually rebuilt but one can see an example of the famous westwerk, the typical Ottonian monumental western end of a church, still intact at St Pantaleon in Cologne, built between 966 and 980.
We have a few descriptions of Saxon cathedrals but they tend to be too vague to be much use to the archaeologist. Here is York cathedral’s Alcuin, headmaster of the cathedral school, writing of the building in the 770s ‘A new structure of a wondrous basilica was in the days of this bishop began, completed and consecrated. The house of appropriate altitude is supported by solid columns set under curved arches. Within it sparkles with admirable ceilings and windows and in its beauty shines, environed with many aisles (or apsidal chapels). It has a great number of apartments with distinct roofs which contain thirty altars with various ornaments.’
An ancillary building: ‘The bishop had constructed a large altar and covered it all about with gold and silver and jewels. He dedicated it to the name of holy Paul. He suspended above this altar a lofty candelabrum which sustained three large vessels for fine oil with nine rows of lights. He raised the banner of the cross aloft the altar and covered the whole with precious metals’.
We can distinguish the nave of the church with the reference to basilica and several aisles and it sounds like a standard Constantinian basilica but the reference to a great number of apartments with altars and distinct roofs is puzzling unless he is referring to porticūs like those in Augustine’s monastery church at Canterbury. If so, this is a distinctly ancient British addition to the standard plan. Canterbury Cathedral, in contrast, was purely in the fashion of the times.
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