ÆLFRED’S BRITAIN
Max Adams
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About Ælfred’s Britain
From the close of the eighth century, fierce warriors from Scandinavia descended on the undefended coasts of northern Britain. At first they contented themselves with intermittent raids on monasteries – with arson, murder and kidnap; but then, in 865, they came to stay. A ‘Great Heathen Host’ landed in East Anglia, reduced that kingdom to vassalage, established a Norse presence in the southern part of Northumbria, and precipitated a series of wars with the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex that would last until the 950s.
Max Adams traces the heroic efforts of Ælfred of Wessex, his successors and his fellow kings in Britain to adapt and survive in the face of a new and terrifying threat. He explores the accommodations made between native and incomer, and the forces that led to cultural assimilation and integration among the Scandinavian populations who settled in Britain.
Convention has it that Ælfred of Wessex, Constantín of Alba and the grandsons of Rhodri the Great are the founding fathers of England, Scotland and Wales, nations forged in the chaos of an age of terror; but Ælfred’s Britain reveals a kaleidoscope of continuing regional diversity, in which the old kingdoms – from Kent to Wessex, from Mercia to Lindsey, from Gwynedd to Strathclyde – express a patchwork of ineradicable local identities.
Weighing the evidence of chronicle, coinage, excavation, landscape and place name, Max Adams plots a clear path through the shape-shifting complexities of Britain’s Viking Age.
Contents
Welcome Page
About Ælfred’s Britain
List of Maps
Dedication
Map
Frontispiece
Author’s note
Introduction
PART I: The tiger in the smoke, 789–878
Timeline 1: 789–878
Forespæc
Chapter 1: Landscape with figures
Chapter 2: Central places
Chapter 3: The incoming tide
Chapter 4: The End of Days
PART II: Newton’s cradle, 879–918
Timeline 2: 879–918
Forespæc
Chapter 5: The balance of power
Chapter 6: Arrivals and departures
Chapter 7: Fragmentary annals
Chapter 8: Politics by other means
PART III: Going native, 919–955
Timeline 3: 919–955
Forespæc
Chapter 9: Innate affinities with ambiguity
Chapter 10: Lawyers, guns and money
Chapter 11: A house of cards
Chapter 12: The illusory prize
Endpapers
Appendix: Regnal tables
Rulers of Wessex 802–955
Rulers of York 867–955
Rulers of Mercia 757–924
Rulers of Pictavia; Dál Riata; Alba 839–955
Rulers of the Welsh 808–950
Abbreviations, sources and references
Notes
Bibliography
Picture credits
Acknowledgements
Index
About Max Adams
Also by Max Adams
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
List of Maps
North West Europe
Viking Age travel map 1
Viking Age travel map 2
The estates of the community of St Cuthbert in the ninth and tenth centuries
For my cousins
Map
Frontispiece
A BEAST OF THE IMAGINATION, from a cross shaft at Kirk Braddan old church, Isle of Man
Author’s Note
ÆLFRED’S BRITAIN IS INTENDED AS A COMPANION volume to my previous Early Medieval histories, The King in the North and In the Land of Giants. Many of the themes, people and places encountered here refer back, one way or another, to those two books. I leave the reader to make the connections.
The word ‘Viking’ is problematic, and much has been written about its origins, meanings and familiarity to those who found themselves on the wrong end of a Scandinavian raid. Suffice it to say that it is safe to think of ‘viking’ as an activity: hence, to ‘go a-Viking’. It should carry no particular ethnic or national badge—although, inevitably, it is frequently used as a convenient shorthand for a raider of Scandinavian origin. I have tried to avoid using it as an ethnic label.
A few words are required on spelling and pronunciation. I have tried as far as possible to render spellings in their original language for the sake of authenticity. In Old English, readers will come across letters like the ligature or grapheme Æ, or æ, which should be pronounced like the ‘a’ in ‘hat’ (it comes from the runic letter called æsc, or ash, after the tree with which it was associated in the runic alphabet). Less familiar, perhaps, is the thorn, written þ and pronounced with a soft ‘th’, as in ‘think’. The eth symbol ð is a harder ‘th’ sound, as in ‘that’, and appears as Ð when it occurs at the beginning of a word. Anglo-Saxon spelling was itself inconsistent, and it is generally modernized by scholars and translators. Where I have quoted from their work, I have kept their rendering.
Old Norse has its own distinct accents and conventions. Most notably, names like Rögnvaldr have a final ‘r’ which is silent, and entirely absent in the possessive. So: Rögnvaldr, but Rögnvald’s. In Old Irish his name is rendered Ragnall; in the Latin of the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto he is Regenwaldus.
The derivations of place-name forms and meanings are overwhelmingly taken from Victor Watt’s magnificent Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names. All quotations from translations of the original sources are most gratefully acknowledged. To have almost all of our Early Medieval sources in fine, accessible translations is a monumental scholarly achievement. Two outstanding resources, without which the modern researcher would be stranded, are worth mentioning: the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE), a searchable database of all the recorded inhabitants of England up until the eleventh century; and the Electronic Sawyer, an online database of surviving charters from the Anglo-Saxon period.1
The Viking travel maps started as an aide-memoire to understand how Scandinavians were able to penetrate the remote corners of the island of Britain so effectively, and why it was so hard to stop them. The two versions, early and late, have proved helpful to me; I hope they are equally useful to the reader in making sense of this half-familiar, half-exotic world.
Introduction
AS THE EIGHTH CENTURY DRAWS TO ITS CLOSE, BANDS of feral men, playing by a new set of rules and bent on theft, kidnap, arson, torture and enslavement, prey on vulnerable communities. Shockwaves are felt in the royal courts of Europe, in the Holy See at Rome. The king’s peace is broken. Economies are disrupted; institutions threatened. In time the state itself comes under attack from the new power in the North, a power of devastating military efficiency and suicidally apocalyptic ideology. It seems as if the End of Days is approaching. Out of the chaos come opportunities to shuffle the pack of dynastic fortune, to subjugate neighbouring states, to exploit a new economics and re-invent fossilized institutions.
The economic strengths that made Britain such an attractive target lay in the exploitation, by an organized, self-knowing élite, of abundant resources: its cattle, sheep, grain, timber, minerals and the labour to harvest and process them. The ease with which people and goods were able to move through the landscape, and the institutions which evolved to benefit from that wealth, rendered Britain uniquely wealthy, but also uniquely vulnerable. No king or counsel saw the di
saster coming; only, perhaps, the wise and Venerable Bede, wagging a warning finger at the future from his writing desk in 734.1 After the first shock, a little before the year 800, a century—four generations—passed before effective state strategies tamed the wild beast and a new European culture, vibrant, energetic and ambitious, began to take shape. Accommodations were made between native and incomer. In Britain grand projects were conceived: to unify peoples under the banners of kingdoms that came to be known as Scotland, Wales and England. It is not so clear who conceived those projects; even less so that they were successful.
The first notice of a new-dawning reality comes to us from an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 789. In this year, it was remembered, three ships came out of the North. Presuming them to be traders, the West Saxon king’s man of business—his portgerefa, or port-reeve—rode to meet them somewhere on the south coast, perhaps Portland in Dorset. They slew him. Within a decade, a rash of notices recorded the sacking of monasteries along the North Sea coasts of Britain, among the Hebridean islands and as far west as Ireland. The famous attack on Lindisfarne, Holy Island, in 793 was and is seen as a marker for the start of a new European age of warfare, uncertainty and migration.
In the rich imaginations of the Scandinavian male nobility, from whose swelling ranks the sea raiders were drawn, treasure was guarded by fierce, vindictive dragons in unearthly lairs. It could only be won by guile, deceit, luck and the aid of complicit gods. Its acquisition invariably led to vengeful pursuit by jealous gods, brothers, sons. Action required reaction; warriors won honour and a place in Valhalla; death must be glorious; the pursuit of material wealth, at great personal risk, was a game every bit worth the candle.
In Britain and Ireland and on the north-western coasts of Continental Europe, where monasteries had been established under the protection of tribal warlords and founding saints across 200 years and more, treasure was guarded by prematurely balding men, sometimes by women, wearing woollen robes, unarmed and untrained in combat, living in remote communities far from the protective reach of kings’ armies. Their only defensive weapons, it seemed, were the word and the cross. For any enterprising northern warrior the holy islands of Britain and Ireland were too good an opportunity to pass up.
For twenty or thirty years raiders probed the coasts and estuaries of Frisia, Saxony and Francia, Britain and Ireland, picking off the precious treasures of the church without challenging its institutional power. They set off in in their sleek longships in springtime and returned to their homelands in autumn. Dynasties rose and fell across north-west Europe, and Scandinavian entrepreneurs took a close interest in their fortunes. The middle decades of the ninth century saw more ambitious raids: scores and even hundreds of ships at a time falling on trading settlements, penetrating deep inland and occasionally, increasingly, overwintering in secure bases, their longphuirt,* in uncomfortable proximity to their victims.
Those military states facing the Atlantic and North Sea experimented with defensive and offensive tactics; they constructed signal stations, built fleets, dammed rivers, enforced ever-increasing military burdens on the estates of their nobles and bishops. They chased and sometimes caught the enemy, and when they were able to bring him to battle in open country they were often victorious. Much of the time they were engaged in wild goose chases across land, by river and at sea. Often and unsuccessfully they attempted bribery and sometimes they tried pitting one band of raiders against another.
In 865 the game changed: a great army landed in East Anglia, an army of conquest, precipitating a series of wars which lasted until the middle of the following century. Ælfred the West Saxon king has often been the central figure in the narrative of those conflicts—understandably, in many respects: he was an individual of rare talents, not least of which was that, like Winston Churchill, he ensured history’s enduring affection by writing it himself. My purpose in writing this book is to place Ælfred’s part in the story of the Viking Age in Britain in a wider cultural and geographical context. The Britain encountered by the Scandinavians of the ninth and tenth centuries was one of regional diversity and self-conscious cultural identity: of Pict, Dál Riatan and Strathclyde Briton; of Bernician and Deiran, East Anglian, Mercian and West Saxon. Ancient kingdoms surviving in Kent and Cornwall, Powys, Gwynedd and Dyfed, Hwicce, Lindsey and Man had profoundly individual identities that endure, in many respects, into the present and played pivotal roles in the story of the Viking Age. The richness of those peoples’ encounters with the cultures of Scandinavia, at war and in peace, cannot be captured through either a purely Ælfredan or Anglo-centric lens. A broader view brings perspective. Nor can the story of those encounters be told without offering a more nuanced portrait of the Scandinavians who both wreaked destruction and drew creative energy from their compulsion to explore and exploit the world.
Ælfred’s Britain is a history and archaeology of the peoples of Britain, native and immigrant, during the formative century and a half between those first raids and the expulsion of a Scandinavian dynasty from York in 954. Some of the parallels that this age offers for the early twenty-first century are remarkable; disturbing, even.
Brother will fight brother and be his slayer
Sister’s sons will violate the kinship bond
Hard it is in the world; whoredom abounds
Axe-age, sword-age, shields are cleft asunder
Wind-age, wolf-age, before the world plunges headlong;
No man will spare another.2
* The singular is longphort.
PART
I
The tiger in the smoke
789–878
TIMELINE 1
789 to 878
Unless otherwise stated, narrative source entries are from the ASC Parker ‘A’ text.
Abbreviations
ASC – Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
Æðelweard – Chronicon
Alcuin Ep. – The letters of Alcuin
ASB – Annals of St Bertin
Asser – Life of King Ælfred
AU – Annals of Ulster
HSC – Historia de Sancto Cuthberto
NH – Nithard’s Histories
RFA – Royal Frankish Annals
789 First recorded attack by Scandinavian raiders on south coast kills royal official named as Beauduherd (Æðelweard).
793 Lindisfarne attacked and plundered by Vikings. Famine in Northumbria.
799 Romans capture Pope Leo, cut out his tongue, blind and banish him. He recovers and retains his see—and sight (RFA).
— First recorded Viking raid on Francia: islands off the coast of Aquitaine (Alcuin Ep.).
807 The Iona community retreats to new monastic foundation at Kells in Co. Meath for safety (AU).
810 King Godfrið’s Danish fleet of 200 ships harries Frisian coast, defeats Frisian forces, exacts 100 lb (45 kg) silver in tribute. King Godfrið murdered (RFA).
814 Death of Charlemagne, aged seventy; succeeded by Louis the Pious (RFA).
820 Approximate dendrochronology date for construction of Oseberg ship.
825 Battle of Ellendun: defeat of Mercian King Beornwulf by Ecgberht, king of the West Saxons. Wessex annexes Sussex, Kent and Essex.
829 Conquest of Mercia by Ecgberht; Wiglaf exiled. Ecgberht mints coins as king in Lundenwic.
834 Dorestad laid waste by a raid (ASB). The beginning of a series of great Danish raids on Francia and England.
835 Heathens ‘devastate Sheppey’, the first great raid on an Anglo-Saxon kingdom.
839 King Ecgberht, after a series of poor harvests, tells Louis the Pious of an apocalyptic vision of darkness and heathen fleets raiding (ASB).
— Death of Ecgberht; Æðelwulf succeeds as king of Wessex; Æðelstan, his eldest son, succeeds to Kent, Surrey and Sussex.
— Large Viking raid against Fortriu in which Pictish kings are killed and the ruling dynasty is wiped out (AU).
841 Dublin become
s the principal longphort of the Vikings in Ireland: evidence of co-ordinated establishment of raiding bases in Ireland (AU).
— Charles the Bald becomes king of West Francia (NH).
— Cináed mac Ailpín becomes king of Alba and Pictland.
845 Paris plundered by Norse raiders (ASB).
851 350 heathen ships arrive at the mouth of the Thames; raiders attack Canterbury and London, put King Beorhtwulf of Mercia to flight. King Æðelwulf and his son Æðelbald achieve great victory over a Danish army at the Battle of Acleah.
855 King Æðelwulf of Wessex travels to Rome for twelve months with his youngest son Ælfred. Marries Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald (Asser).
858 Death of King Æðelwulf. Æðelbald succeeds in Wessex; Æðelberht succeeds in Kent, Essex, Sussex and Surrey.
860 King Æðelbald dies; Æðelberht succeeds to whole kingdom.
864 Edict of Pîtres: Charles the Bald reforms the Frankish army, forms cavalry; reforms coinage; orders construction of fortified bridges to block Viking incursions (ASB).
865 A Great Host comes to England and overwinters in East Anglia under Ívarr. East Anglians submit. Death of King Æðelberht; succeeded by his brother Æðelred (to 871).
866 Óláfr and Ásl attack Fortriu, plunder Pictland and take hostages (AU).
867 Osberht of Northumbria expelled, succeeded by Ælle. Battle of York against mycel hæþen here: city stormed by Northumbrian force.
869 Battle of Hoxne: Danes under Ívarr kill St Edmund, king of East Anglia.
870 Dumbarton besieged and captured by Óláfr and Ívarr (AU); last Early Medieval mention of Dumbarton.
871 Battle of Ashdown. Year of nine engagements between Wessex and Danish army; King Æðelred dies (buried at Wimborne monastery); succeeded by Ælfred. Wessex makes peace with the Host.