The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (11 page)

One of his first acts as king was to build a monastery on the Isle of Athelney, where he had been sheltered. It was the first part of his plan to revive the monastic life, which in Asser’s words had ‘utterly decayed from that nation’. Though some monasteries were still standing, no one directed their rule of life in a regular way. Most English people had lost all their old reverence for the Church. Alfred would have to mount a national recruiting campaign to find men and women to become monks and nuns. Even then the condition of the English clergy was at first so poor that the abbot for the new monastery on Athelney had to be brought in from Frisia in northern Germany. Alfred’s younger daughter Ethelgiva became a nun, and he founded a convent for her near the eastern gate of Shaftesbury.

As part of his programme of repairing the Viking destruction of English life, Alfred commissioned a history of England called
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
to help his people acquire some knowledge of themselves and their history. And to make sure that every English person did read it, for he wished all English boys to know their letters, he commanded that it should be written in the language everyone could understand, that is Anglo-Saxon. Copies of the history were distributed to every important church in the country. Containing a brief description of the important events of each year since the mid-fifth century and influenced by Bede in its use of records, the
Chronicle
was continued in various monasteries after Alfred’s death up until the twelfth century. Along with Bede’s history it is one of the most remarkable of the early histories which any European people possesses.

Alfred believed that kings should have good tools to work with. He wrote, ‘These are the materials of a king’s work and his tools to govern with; that he have his land fully peopled; that he should have prayer men and army men and workmen.’ The prayermen had been taken care of. Now Alfred turned his attention to some of the workmen, particularly the judges. The normal machinery of English life had been badly disrupted by the war with the Danes. The Anglo-Saxon law dispensed every month in the local hundred courts was based on ancient custom. But as a result of the wars many people were no longer clear what the ancient customs consisted of. To make up for these gaps Alfred updated the West Saxon laws for the nation, including whatever he thought helpful in the codes of Ethelbert of Kent, Ine of Wessex and Offa of Mercia. The introductory preface announced that he had showed them to his witan, whose members had agreed that the laws should be observed.

Scholars believe that Alfred was personally responsible for a new emphasis on laws to protect the weak. And he himself said that one of his functions was to be the defender of the poor (who received a quarter of his income), because they had no defenders. He imposed further limitations on the destructive custom of the blood feud and emphasized the duty of a man to his lord. Up to Alfred’s day there were no prisons but such was his desire to reintroduce a peaceful and civil society where a man’s word really was his bond that anyone who broke his oath was to be given forty days’ imprisonment.

Alfred’s laws had a strongly religious flavour. They opened with the Ten Commandments and included many biblical references to persuade the English to hold them in greater respect. His judges, the local lords, were told that they would either have to improve their legal knowledge or resign. Asser reports that, though most of the judges were ‘illiterate from their cradles’, in fear and admiration of their great king they frantically set about studying. Since so many of them could not read, most of them adopted King Alfred’s suggestion of having the laws read out to them by a son or slave ‘by day and night’, whenever they had the leisure. Alfred often looked into their judgements. If he disagreed with them he summoned the judge in question and asked why he had come to such a conclusion. ‘Was it ignorance, malevolence or money?’ he asked frankly on one famous occasion.

Mindful of his grandfather’s descriptions of Charlemagne’s famous Palace School, Alfred established his own school at the royal court. This was to educate the cleverest boys in the kingdom, regardless of their origins, as future clerks for his civil service so that he would be able to draw on the largest pool of talent in the country. Holy and devout, Alfred invented the first English clock, a horn lantern with candles so that he could divide his day satisfactorily into three eight-hour parts, one for praying, one for governing and one for sleeping. Upon his death in 899, aged only fifty, he was buried in the New Minster he had built in his capital of Winchester.

King Alfred was one of the most important English kings, whose defence of English civilization has rightly earned him the soubriquet the Great. He was succeeded by a worthy soldier son Edward the Elder, who continued the fightback against the Danes that his father had begun. Despite all Alfred’s achievements, Edward the Elder still inherited a kingdom which confronted land occupied by the bloodthirsty Danish armies all the way to Whitby in north Yorkshire. Moreover, when the Danes settled they settled in armies rather than kingdoms, so that the threat of another invasion was always present. Further danger threatened because the Norse kingdom of Dublin in Ireland was forever casting covetous eyes at the Danish kingdom of York, which was becoming an important Scandinavian trading post.

As a military strategist, Edward knew that for the sake of England’s security he would have to launch a series of pre-emptive strikes against the Danish kingdoms which surrounded him. He should try to capture as many as he could or at least neutralize them and show that there was no point in building a war chest against him. With the help of his sister Ethelflaed, who was known as the Lady of the Mercians because she ruled them after her husband’s death, and by constant fighting Edward pursued Alfred’s ambition of making England a single state. They strengthened the frontier with the Welsh and Danes by making use of Alfred’s device of the burh or fortified town, and they had reconquered the rest of the midland part of the Danelaw, starting with the five Danish boroughs of Derby, Stamford, Nottingham, Leicester and Lincoln, by the time Ethelflaed died, worn out by the constant campaigning. Edward appointed no successor to his sister but took over the government of both Danish and English Mercia, roughly speaking what we call the midlands today, further unifying the country. The midlands were followed by the reconquest of East Anglia and then of a great deal of Northumbria after a lengthy northern campaign. In the process a fresh line of fortresses was built eastwards from Chester along the line of the River Mersey.

By 923 the rest of the princes of Britain accepted they could no longer resist a great West Saxon king who was never happier than when leading the attack in his buckskin trousers and gripping his small shield. Edward and his descendants became overlords to the Scots and Welsh and began to enjoy greater status abroad as a result. Edward the Elder’s son, the golden-haired Athelstan, was fêted with expensive gifts by the greatest European rulers of the age, who made a point of intermarrying with the house of Wessex. The German Henry the Fowler, king of the East Franks, married his son Otto, the future emperor, to Athelstan’s sister Edith, while another sister married the king of France. Alfred had long favoured Athelstan because of his beauty, graceful manners and love of poetry. He had given his grandson a special Saxon sword to remind him to be proud of his ancestry, and a scarlet cloak, and Edward had deliberately educated him in his aunt’s household in Mercia to bind that kingdom closer to the West Saxon monarchy. Athelstan’s campaigns drove out the line of Danish princes ruling York. Although in 937 some Welsh princes, the Scots king Constantine and Vikings from Dublin revolted against Athelstan, they were conclusively defeated at the Battle of Brunanburgh and did not rebel again.

Under the rule of the Wessex kings England over the next fifty years became a unified country. The expansion of the royal house of the West Saxons into a national monarchy was helped by the Danes’ destruction of the old dynasties of Mercia and East Anglia, and by the fact that for almost a hundred years there were no fresh Danish invasions. For the great period of Viking invasion was now over–not only in England but on the continent. In 911 Rollo and his Norsemen had been granted a kingdom in the basin of the lower Seine which soon became known as the Duchy of Normandy, on condition that they defend the Frankish kingdom against attack. They were baptized and became subjects of Charles the Simple; Rollo himself married Charles’ daughter. Throughout Europe there seemed to be peace at last from the Vikings’ marauding ways, though the French cleric Abbé Suger would presciently remark that ‘The Normans, in whose fierce Dansker blood is no peace, keep peace against their will.’ One hundred years later England would feel the force of that statement.

Like so many of the Wessex kings Athelstan died young, aged only forty, in 940. He was followed by his brother Edmund, who successfully quelled Danish rebellions in Mercia and Deira and brought Scotland under King Malcolm into a closer alliance with England in return for forcing the Welsh to give the Scots Cumberland. Somewhat to the surprise of the English, after half a century the Danish now settled down to being constructive neighbours: once tamed the Vikings would enrich the blood of Europe and England. They had always been merchants as well as pirates, as scales found buried with battleaxes in their tombs show. With the war over, town life in what was becoming known as Yorkshire began to revive. Rural life was invigorated too. These fearless people, who would put to sea in any weather, did not exterminate the local populations as their Anglo-Saxon predecessors had done, but used their English neighbours’ knowledge of the land to become excellent farmers. Viking ancestry may account for the famous hardness and cussedness of the people of Yorkshire, that nation within England. The English as a whole would learn a great deal from Viking military success: they borrowed the Vikings’ disciplined wedge formation to fight on land, as well as their metal mesh shirts, which would become the chainmail body armour of the English knight.

In 946, after only six years on the throne, King Edmund was murdered while gallantly saving a guest from a roving band of outlaws who had managed to get into the royal banqueting hall. Although he left two small sons they were too young to ascend the throne, which now passed to Edward the Elder’s youngest son Edred. Although Edred was in poor health his chief minister was one of the great figures of the tenth century–the monk St Dunstan, Abbot of Glastonbury. St Dunstan had a powerfully ascetic nature, sleeping in a cave by the side of the church of Glastonbury, where the ceiling was so low that he could not stand upright. Like Alfred he was determined to encourage a monastic revival in England to rebuild the civilization destroyed by the Danes. But as well as remodelling the English monasteries on the lines of the Benedictine reforms at Fleury on the Loire, Dunstan guided Edred in expanding the boundaries of his kingdom, and by 954 Edred had decisively reconquered Northumbria from the Danes. He was soon calling himself the Caesar of the British. More than ever the English and Danes had been blended into one people, a process speeded up by the conversion to Christianity of most of the inhabitants of the Danelaw. Dunstan had the farsightedness to allow the Danes in the northern Danelaw a certain amount of independence, enabling them to run their county in their old manner through earls, as they called their rulers. On the death of Edred in 955 his nephew Edwy became king, but he quarrelled with Dunstan and drove him into exile. Dunstan had in any case made many enemies for himself at court by his attempts to expel the married secular canons who, owing to the dearth of English monks, had taken over what were previously monasteries. Their relations at court benefited from livings that passed from father to son and they influenced the king against Dunstan.

Without Dunstan to guide him Edwy’s rule was both weak and harsh. Mercia and Northumbria rebelled against him and insisted that his younger brother Edgar become king of their countries. Dunstan returned in triumph to crown the new king with the sacred oil known as chrysm, for the first time in England’s history, to show that Edgar was the Lord’s Anointed. That ritual is still part of the coronation ceremony today. Although Edwy remained king of Wessex, upon his death Edgar became king of the whole of England. He ruled from 959 until 975 and is most famous for being rowed on the River Dee at Chester by six under-kings who all acknowledged him as overlord: the king of Scotland, the king of Cumberland, the Danish king of the Isle of Man and three Welsh kings. Advised by St Dunstan, who had been made Archbishop of Canterbury, Edgar avoided the destructive border wars with the Scots by making the king of Cumberland vassal to the Scots king, and by giving Scotland Lothian, which until then had been part of the kingdom of Northumbria. As Archbishop of Canterbury St Dunstan was now in a position to address the low standards of behaviour in English monasteries and ensure that there was once again a thoroughgoing obedience to the rule of ‘poverty, chastity and obedience’ first laid down by St Benedict in the sixth century. Many of the secular canons were replaced by monks.

Edgar’s reign was the high point of the West Saxon monarchy, before the years of its decline under his son Ethelred, famously nicknamed the Unready, who reigned from 978 to 1016. Ethelred inherited the throne after his elder half-brother, King Edward the Martyr, the successor to Edgar, was stabbed to death on the orders of Ethelred’s mother Elfrida.

To the chroniclers it seemed that the crown taken in blood brought nothing but misfortune to the king who wore it and to the country he governed. Contemporary observers were savage about Ethelred: one said that he had occupied the throne for thirty-seven years rather than ruling it, and that his career had been cruel at the beginning, wretched in the middle and disgraceful at the end. Archbishop Dunstan was forced by Elfrida to crown her son king to lend the coronation an air of legitimacy. But the murderous queen mother had reckoned without Dunstan’s powerful conscience and strong sense of justice. As the ceremony began St Dunstan could not refrain from giving public vent to his feelings of outrage. As he lowered the crown over the head of Ethelred he prophesied, ‘Thus saith the Lord God, the sins of thy abandoned mother, and of the accomplices of her base design, shall not be washed out but by much blood of the wretched inhabitants of England; and such evils shall come upon the English nation as it hath never suffered from since the time it came to England.’