Battle of Hastings, The (8 page)

The ninth-century Viking invasions also played an important part in breaking down what by that time remained of the old divisions and pushing the various constituent parts of the country
together. To begin with, it seemed that the old Anglo-Saxon England would be submerged beneath the Scandinavian invaders; but after the fight-back by Alfred and his successors, England in more or
less its eleventh-century form had emerged with Wessex predominant, and Alfred’s grandson, King Athelstan, could without exaggeration call himself king of all England. It is said that King
Edgar, Athelstan’s nephew, made a point of circumnavigating his entire kingdom every year by sea. If he did, he must have taken in Scotland and Wales as well, over which the English kings
rarely had more than a nominal supremacy, but certainly
the King of Scotland and Kings of Wales were among the eight subject kings who reputedly rowed Edgar on the river Dee
at his coronation. More practically, he promoted the unity of his kingdom by introducing a uniform currency all over England that he alone controlled and that was withdrawn periodically, usually
every five or six years, and replaced by another. Apart from providing a significant source of royal revenue for himself and his successors, since all moneyers had to buy the new dies from the king
when this happened, this reform promoted the development of the economy at home and abroad, where English coins were much respected. This was to be one of the English customs that the Conqueror did
not abolish.

Thus, when the Viking raids resumed in the tenth century, the raiders found a united country in which the Byrhtnoth who confronted them at Maldon in 991 may have been a nobleman of the former
kingdom of the East Saxons but who announced himself to them as ‘Æthelred’s earl’, fighting to protect the West Saxon Æthelred’s England, his land and his
people, with an army that included at least one Mercian and one Northumbrian, and representatives of all the social classes of England, united in a determination to defend their country. If, as has
been suggested,
The Battle of Maldon
was not written until about thirty years after the battle, it looks even more like a deliberate attempt to portray the defence of a kingdom united in
race and class. It throws into sad contrast the verdict of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1010, later in the reign of Æthelred, when the demoralization of the country had led to a situation in
which ‘no shire would any longer help its neighbour’.

Because of the length of time that the Anglo-Saxon rule lasted, it was naturally not the same throughout, but there were, none the less, consistent threads running through the period. The
kingdoms that the seventh-century Ine and the tenth-century Athelstan ruled were indeed very different in many respects, but those over which Athelstan and Edward the
Confessor ruled were not in essence very dissimilar. The Domesday Book (1086), one of William’s most famous (and, it must be said, most valuable) achievements, aimed to take a snapshot
picture of England ‘on the day King Edward was alive and dead’, 5 January 1066; many of the institutions that it records as having existed then and that survived the conquest have been
shown to go far back in history, many of them to a time well before King Alfred or even King Ine. It has been surmised that some of the most important elements of them, for example the system of
hundreds, the local government units into which the shires were broken down for administrative and tax purposes, may well go back to a common Indo-European culture, for traces of it have been noted
in Carolingian France also. Many of them survived far into the future as well. The shire structure itself continued through the conquest unaltered and untampered with until 1974. A retiring prime
minister, resigning his parliamentary seat in the early years of the twenty-first century, still had to apply for the stewardship of the Chiltern hundreds of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham in
Buckinghamshire.

The system of justice meant that wherever a man lived, he was rarely in a district so remote that he did not have access to a court of law: the king’s court, the shire court, the hundred
court. The involvement of the different ranks of the people in the different levels of the national administration of justice was also a unifying factor, and gave the public at large a voice in
national affairs that could never have been imagined in, say, Normandy during the reign of autocrats such as Duke William or his father. There were written law-codes in England from the time of
King Æthelberht of Kent in the sixth century, and
there are many hints between the times of Æthelberht and Edward the Confessor that not even the king could be
regarded as being above the law (not least the agreement between Æthelred and his people that he would be accepted back as king provided he ruled better). In considering why the Angevin kings
were to prove more effective legislators in England than in their homeland of Anjou, Patrick Wormald suggests that this could be because in the tenth and eleventh centuries, English kings had laid
down the law as no other western rulers did.
^xxii
Henry II, he points out, made law like no other twelfth-century king because he inherited a system of
royal justice that was already uniquely well developed and active. There had never been any written law-code in Normandy. It has been said that

It has been estimated that in Anglo-Saxon England there were rarely more than two layers of lordship between the yeoman and his king. A situation in which King Alfred could give
judgement in a case while he was in his chamber washing his hands was recorded for posterity not because it was unusual but because it was habitual – one of the plaintiffs had appealed to the
king from the local shire or hundred court.
^xxiv
It is true that in the days of Alfred’s descendants, particularly during the reign of
Æthelred when the need to pay Danegeld led to the frequent levying of extra
taxes, this independence of the peasant-farmer was to some extent eroded, probably in the
main because of the increasing difficulty smallholders experienced in maintaining themselves. A bad harvest could bring them to the verge of starvation; a Danish raid could reduce them overnight to
beggary. It made sense in such cases for a smallholder to trade in his nominal independence for the security of binding himself and the land that he had inherited in some form of servitude to a
lord who was able to protect or maintain him. There is little doubt, however, that the process was accelerated and, to some extent, brutalized by the conquest; Stenton has noted that ‘many
peasants who in 1066 had been holding land immediately of the king, or as the voluntary dependents of other magnates, are represented in Domesday Book by
villani
[serfs] on the estates of
Norman lords.’
^xxv

Moreover, the sophisticated system of land tenure in England meant that the kings always knew exactly what they could count on in terms of revenue and fighting men, and their subjects knew what
their liabilities were as precisely. It has been calculated that in the whole of England, there was not a scrap of land unaccounted for in the assessment system. Each hundred was broken down into
so many hides of land (carucates in the Danelaw, sulungs in Kent). Theoretically, the hide was originally the amount of land sufficient for a peasant family to live on, but very soon the hide
ceased to have any relationship to a specific area of land (just as the modern pound has ceased to have any relationship to a specific weight of gold) and became simply a unit of assessment, so
that hides in different parts of the country might be assessed differently, often according to the wealth or productivity of the area. A man’s ownership of, say, five hides of land might
typically mean that he was liable for so much in taxes, for the provision of a fighting man with all his equipment for a
specified number of days a year when the king needed
him for the defence of the realm, and for various other services. Such services might include, depending on the owner’s rank, duties of hospitality and escort to the king or his family, food
rent (the laws of Ine tell us that the food rent from a ten-hide estate should be ten vats of honey, three hundred loaves, twelve ambers of Welsh ale, thirty of clear ale, two full-grown cows or
ten wethers, ten geese, twenty hams, ten cheeses, an amber of butter, five salmon, twenty pounds of fodder and a hundred eels) and other miscellaneous services such as maintenance of hedges. Some
of these might be remitted in special circumstances; the three services that were almost never remitted, whether the land were owned by a layman or the Church, were military service, the
construction and maintenance of the country’s fortifications and bridge-building. It was this efficient system of assessment that made it possible for Æthelred to raise quickly as extra
taxes the vast sums of money that were needed to pay off the Danes between 991 and 1016. It is hardly surprising that they kept coming back for more.

However efficient the tax-collecting system, it would hardly have worked if the money had not been there to be collected. Despite the frequent plundering raids, England was known to be wealthy
– indeed, its notorious wealth had much to do with the frequency of the raids. Through the six centuries of its existence, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom had been a trading nation, but it had also
achieved renown in various kinds of manufacture. Much of the detail of what the country once produced and contained is still obscure, despite recent archaeological research, and will no doubt
remain so because by its nature it was perishable; the remaining archival evidence indicates only a fragment of what must once have existed. But there is enough information in the surviving
letters, wills and deeds to give some idea of what people produced
and had to dispose of. The evidence of the sheer amount of bullion in the country is impressive, without
considering its artistry which, by all accounts, was equally so. As far as imports are concerned, especially those made of precious metals, even William of Poitiers, no friend to the English, and a
man who believed that the sooner English treasures were sanitized by passing into Norman hands the better, noted the country’s wealth:

If we consider merely the Sutton Hoo treasure of c.650, the greatest find yet discovered, we are looking at imports from Byzantium, the Mediterranean, Egypt and Sweden at the
very least, and at jewellery that may well have been made in Kent, a known centre for this particular kind of fine workmanship. Frequent references in the various codes of laws drawn up by
successive kings make it clear how important trade was to the country and how vital they considered it to be that foreign merchants should be protected and their trade properly regulated.

Commerce was not the only channel through which foreign goods entered the kingdom. The diplomatic and marriage alliances that the English kings had built up throughout Europe meant that there
were many ways in which trade could be promoted, and goods and gifts of great value passed backwards and forwards. Dorothy Whitelock
^xxvii
quotes an
impressive list of the valuable gifts sent by Hugh, Duke of the Franks, to King
Athelstan when he asked for the hand of Athelstan’s half-sister Eadhild in
marriage.
^xxviii
The eldest son of King Æthelred who predeceased his father, another Athelstan, left to his brother, Edmund Ironside,
‘the sword which King Offa owned’. One can only conjecture whether this is the Hungarian sword known to have been sent by Charlemagne as a gift to the great Offa of Mercia; it may well
have been. Swords were among the most treasured items a man could have, and were passed down as precious heirlooms, as was armour of all kinds, but swords had a particular value and were often
decorated with quantities of gold and silver. Offa’s sword was clearly priceless and Edmund Ironside put it to good use; but items of greater monetary though possibly less historical and
symbolic value passed regularly between England and Europe.

It was not only through royal marriages and diplomatic dealings that there was contact with the outside world. One of the most striking things in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the frequency with
which pilgrimages to Rome (sometimes even to Jerusalem) are mentioned. Many of these were, naturally, journeys made by clerics; all archbishops had to go to Rome to collect the pallium or stole of
office from the Pope. But many of them were made by lay people of all ranks, from kings downwards. The Chronicle also refers on several occasions to a special school or hostel in Rome built to
accommodate the English pilgrims who went there (and, on some occasions, to accommodate their graves); and one of the achievements of Alfred and Cnut on their visits was to negotiate better terms
for the English who made what was then an extremely hazardous journey. The itinerary of Archbishop Sigeric who fetched his pallium in 990 has survived, and records the names of seventy-nine stages
on the journey from the Somme to Rome. On the assumption that each stage meant at least
one night’s lodging, the journey would have taken not less than three months in
each direction, when the cross-Channel voyage and any necessary travel within England to the south coast are included. An archbishop would have been able to ride; those who had to go on foot
probably took longer. Pilgrims normally made their wills before leaving. But those who returned brought goods of foreign workmanship with them, apart from any spiritual benefits.