19
In 990 or 991, a landowner named Wynflæd made a plea against Leofwine (possibly her stepson) before the English king Æthelred II, about the ownership of two estates in Berkshire. She had a heavyweight set of witnesses, the king’s powerful mother Ælfthryth (see below), the archbishop of Canterbury Sigeric, and a bishop and an ealdorman, the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of a Continental duke or count. Leofwine insisted that the matter be first heard at a shire assembly (scirgemot), the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the county-level placitum in the Frankish lands; this was correct in law, but was also important to Leofwine, presumably, because the twenty-five-year-old king might not easily judge against his mother, even in the period before 993 when she was temporarily not part of his court. The move of venue did not help Leofwine much, however, for after Æthelred formally committed the case to the Berkshire assembly, with his seal and (apparently verbal) instructions, the queen-mother and twenty-four named men and women appeared and swore in favour of Wynflæd’s ownership of the land. It was pointed out to Leofwine that, if the case reached the oath-swearing moment, he would risk a huge fine, and also the end of ‘friendship’ between the parties (though that had, one feels, long gone). He therefore conceded, handing over the land, in return for the gold and silver of his father, which Wynflæd still had. She was very reluctant to return it; it was this which had probably sparked off Leofwine’s occupation of the land. But the document relating the case (an original text) ends here, and we cannot follow the parties further.
English court cases often ended in deals; Leofwine had done quite well to get this rather half-hearted one, given the odds against him (perhaps he was even in the right over the money, hence the court being prepared to broker an arbitration). But it is equally important that the deal took place in public, in the Berkshire judicial assembly. By the later tenth century, England, like the Carolingian lands, had a network of public assemblies whose main purpose was to hear disputes in front of a large number of locally powerful people. By law, these should include the local bishop and ealdorman, as usually in Francia; in the event two bishops and an abbot presided over this one, and the king’s reeve Ælfgar was there too (probably he was the shire reeve, the ‘sheriff’, by now the king’s direct representative in the locality, more directly responsible to the king than was the ealdorman). And it is clear just from Wynflæd’s witnesses that the assembly was substantial in size. It will have consisted of all the local notables of Berkshire who could get there, the ‘good men’ as the text called them, including the aristocracy, the thegns of the county. This assembly heard local disputes, and also did royal business. The case was royal in origin, and was decided as the king would undoubtedly have wished, but his will was carried out by the whole county community. This balance between royal power and collective validation is very Carolingian in style; so is the large penalty for losing an oath. As we shall see, it is likely that there is direct Carolingian influence at work here. But we are also in 990. By now, this sort of regular royal-controlled public politics had vanished in most of the Carolingian lands, either because kings were themselves weak, as in West Francia, or because (as in Italy in particular, but also parts of East Francia) local assemblies and courts by now had a rather intermittent relationship to kings. Charlemagne’s image of how the local judicial assembly should work had come to be perpetuated only in England, even though no part of England was ever under Carolingian rule. This is the paradox which we shall explore in this chapter: first, through a narrative of ninth- and tenth-century English politics; then, through a discussion of political structures and Carolingian influences on them; and finally through an analysis of English difference. For, however influential Continental practices had become, the structures of English society remained distinct too.
We left Anglo-Saxon England in Chapter 7 with Offa (d. 796) and Cenwulf (d. 821) of Mercia dominant south of the Humber. After Cenwulf’s death, however, Mercian hegemony quickly broke down under a series of short-lived kings, from rival families. Ecgbert of Wessex (802-39) defeated the fourth of these, Wiglaf (827-40), in 829 and ruled Mercia directly for a year. Wiglaf recovered his throne in 830, and in 836 could call all the bishops of the southern English to his court, as had the eighth-century Mercian kings, but from now on there were two major powers in the south, Mercia and Wessex. By 840 Anglo-Saxon England was more or less back to the situation it was in in 700, in fact, with four roughly balanced kingdoms, for we must add to these two East Anglia, ill-documented but by far the most economically complex kingdom, and Northumbria, which in the early ninth century under Eardwulf (796-c. 810) and his son Eanred (c. 810-40) had a period of relative internal peace. The Mercian supremacy had firmly developed the structures of royal power, and linked the episcopal network more closely to government; it had also contributed to the definitive eclipse of the smaller kingdoms, with the Hwicce now finally attached to Mercia, and Essex, Sussex and Kent first attached to Mercia, and then, after 825, ruled stably by Wessex. (Only Kent maintained a certain autonomy, ruled as it was by Cenwulf’s brother Cuthred, d. 807, then informally controlled by Archbishop Wulfred of Canterbury, d. 832, and then after 825 governed by three West Saxon sons of kings in turn.) All the same, eighth-century Mercian power had not changed the geopolitics of England, which could easily revert to the older four-kingdom framework. In the mid-century Northumbria fell back into civil war, and Mercia and Wessex were increasingly clearly the major kingdoms, cooperating quite closely on occasion, under Berhtwulf (840-52) and his probable son Burgred (852-74) of Mercia, and Æthelwulf (839-58) of Wessex, who married his daughter to Burgred and helped him fight the Welsh. Æthelwulf had a wider prestige too, for late in life he married Charles the Bald’s daughter Judith; but he was happy to concentrate on controlling southern England. At most he nibbled at Mercia’s boundaries, taking over Berkshire in the 840s, although he retreated from London, leaving it and its wealth as an isolated outlier of Mercian rule.
What changed this political pattern was the Vikings. They raided the English coasts from the mid-830s, just as they did in West Francia and elsewhere; they were particularly active in Kent and East Anglia, and they stepped up their attacks in the 850s, by when they were over-wintering in some places. But, whereas in Francia they always had to leave temporarily when a royal army finally appeared, the scale of insular politics - and armies - was far smaller, and Anglo-Saxon armies could lose to Viking ones, as Berhtwulf of Mercia found in 851 and a Kentish army found in 853. The Vikings had eventually realized that this gave them the chance for more permanent gain, for it was in England that leading Danish Vikings grouped together in a ‘Great Army’, micel herein the Old English of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in 865. The Great Army numbered in the thousands, rather than the hundreds of earlier raiding parties, and was larger than any Anglo-Saxon army; it had a collective leadership, but it acted as an effective conquering force. In 866-7 it conquered Northumbria, killing its two warring kings; in 869 it took East Anglia, again killing its king, Edmund, who was afterwards venerated as a martyr; in 870-71 the West Saxons under Æthelwulf’s sons Æthelred I (865-71) and Alfred (871-99) only just, somehow, managed to hold the Army off for a time; in 873-7 it took half of Mercia, leaving Ceolwulf II (c. 874-8) with only the north-west and the south. In 876-8 it attacked Wessex again and cornered Alfred in the Somerset marshes (the location of the famous, but sadly only eleventh-century, ‘Alfred and the cakes’ story), before the latter managed to call an army together in 878 and defeat the Vikings at Edington in Wiltshire. This was a key battle for Wessex. The Viking leader Guthrum was forced to make peace, and even accepted baptism, retreating to East Anglia, which he turned into a stable Viking kingdom. Thereafter, the wars stopped for over a decade.
Alfred was left in control of all his father’s lands, to which he added London in 886. His kingdom was thus the only one fully to survive the Viking onslaught. And he was probably also, by his death, the only Anglo-Saxon king. Ceolwulf’s successor Æthelred II of Mercia (c. 879- 911), Alfred’s son-in-law, was called king on occasion, but is usually entitled dux or ealdorman in our sources; Mercia was slipping into the status of a sub-kingdom of Wessex, certainly as a result of Alfred’s political choice. The only other autonomous Anglo-Saxon ruler was Eadwulf (d. 912) in Bernicia in northern Northumbria, where the Vikings did not reach; his family’s rule survived off and on up to the Norman Conquest, but they may not have used the royal title. There were Danish kings, of course, in East Anglia and in York (and also apparently collective leaderships in the Five Boroughs of Danish Mercia). We do not know much about their political infrastructures. Kings were certainly less powerful in Denmark than anywhere in England, so they would not have brought strong ruling traditions with them; only the kings of York leave much impression in our (largely West Saxon) evidence, and even then not until after 919, with Røgnvald (d. c. 920) and Sigtryg (d. 927), both from a Dublin-based family. Once the Great Army had moved from conquering to ruling, in fact, it became strategically weaker. It had had to divide up; this fact in itself probably explains Alfred’s survival, for Guthrum did not have with him the Vikings who were establishing themselves in Northumbria; and the Vikings in England not only never united again, but also seem to have ruled less stable polities than the increasingly coherent West Saxon (plus Mercian) kingdom in southern and western England. Alfred may have owed his success in 878 to luck, but he built on this systematically in the next two decades, above all - necessarily - in military preparedness: he seems to have developed a large-scale military levy from the population, and he certainly established a dense network of public fortifications,burhs, throughout southern England, defended by public obligation, which was sufficiently effective to hold off a second large-scale Viking assault in 892-6. Alfred died ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’, or, in the Chronicle’s words, ‘of the whole English people except that part which was under Danish rule’; he may have been the first king to see himself in ‘English’, not West Saxon or Mercian, terms, as his neat footwork with respect to Æthelred of Mercia’s autonomy also shows. But it was the Vikings who made that choice possible for him.
Alfred’s son Edward ‘the Elder’ (899-924) began to counterattack, at first in border wars, and then, after Æthelred of Mercia’s death, systematically. In 911 Edward and his sister Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians (911-18) in succession to her husband Æthelred, moved eastwards, and had taken East Anglia and the Five Boroughs by Æthelflæd’s death. In this period Wessex and Mercia were still operating as an alliance of near-equals; but in 919 Edward also fully annexed English Mercia, sweeping aside Æthelflæd’s daughter Ælfwyn. In the 910s, the core of the English kingdom thus took shape, with finality, for across the next century Alfred’s dynasty never lost control of Mercia and eastern England again, except for a brief conquest of the east Midlands in 940 by Olaf Guthfrithson, king of Dublin and York, reversed in 942. Northumbria was a different matter; the English kings and two Norwegian families fought over it for nearly thirty years, 927-54, before the last Scandinavian king of York, Eirík ‘Bloodaxe’, was killed on Stainmore in the latter year. But most of Northumbria was always a peripheral, only half-controlled, part of England across the next two centuries, and indeed for a long time after, and it is arguable that these wars were only really fought for the increasingly rich trading entrepôt of York itself. Edward’s son Æthelstan (924-39) and his successors indeed seem to have regarded successful war against, and hegemony over, kings in Wales and of Scotland as being as important as their rule in Northumbria, as is represented by the increasingly grandiloquent claims in their documents. Æthelstan was ‘king of all Britain’ from 931, ‘basileus of the English and all surrounding peoples’ in 938, and imperator became increasingly common from now on too. Overall, apart from York, one could regard the major shift of the tenth century, the invention of the kingdom of England, as being complete in military-political terms by 919.
Edward and Æthelflæd’s conquest of midland and eastern England was above all a West Saxon conquest. It involved the West Saxon aristocracy, quite as much as the kings, and in the next generation the families of ealdormen of East Anglia and also, significantly, Mercia were predominantly of West Saxon origin. A surviving Mercian-focused affinity seems to be both visible and quite effective when successions were tense or disputed between brothers, as in 924 or 957-9, in each of which the Mercian-supported brother ended up as king, but the West Saxons had the strategic edge, and their aristocratic placements underlined it further. The Wessex dynasty thus created a Reichsaristokratie, as the Carolingians had done, and as their Ottonian contemporaries did not manage. None of Æthelstan’s successors - his brothers Edmund and Eadred (939-46, 946-55), Edmund’s sons Eadwig and Edgar (955-9, 957-75), Edgar’s sons Edward ‘the Martyr’ and Æthelred II (975-8, 978-1016) - were over eighteen at their accessions except Eadred, but, almost uniquely in history, this did not result in a weakened political system. The influence of queen-mothers, notably Edmund and Eadred’s mother Eadgifu (d. after 966) and Æthelred’s mother Ælfthryth (d. c. 1000) was very considerable, which helped the continuity of royal power, as often in Francia. But the loyalty of the leading ealdormen was as important. Under Eadgifu (that is, Edmund, Eadred, Edgar) the family of Æthelstan ‘Half-king’ (d. after 956), ealdorman of East Anglia from 932, came to dominate in Mercia and East Anglia; Eadwig’s brief reign saw the emergence of a rival family, that of Ælfhere, ealdorman of Mercia (d. 983). These two families, both West Saxon, thereafter shared power, along with a handful of other inter-related ealdormen. We can see them as an oligarchy, ruling through a succession of young kings with, apparently, considerable coherence. And they needed to be coherent. If the English political system broke down, they could not hope to remain as powerful, given the geographical range of their landholding and office-holding, extending as it did in each case across much of southern, central and eastern England, thanks to Edward the Elder’s conquests and to royal generosity thereafter.
Not that this coherence necessarily meant amity. Eadwig in particular seems to have tried to shift alignments; his reign was marked by extraordinarily large-scale royal gift-giving, and new families appeared as a result. Eadgifu and Æthelstan ‘Half-king’ responded by setting up Edgar in Mercia against him, apparently without violent conflict however, unlike in contemporary succession disputes in Francia; the two brothers reigned together for two years until Eadwig died, and his protégé Ælfhere actually joined Edgar, presumably in order not to lose his own Mercian clientele. Edgar and his supporters then patronized a large-scale monastic reform movement, which after 964 converted even cathedral churches into monasteries, under Dunstan of Canterbury (d. 988), Æthelwold of Winchester (d. 984) and Oswald of Worcester and York (d. 992), all of them monk-bishops; free-standing monasteries were also founded and patronized by kings and aristocrats, including the rival Fenland houses of Ramsey (968) and Ely (970). The landed politics of these increasingly rich houses was itself controversial, and the reign of Edward the Martyr in particular saw trouble, with aristocrats taking, or taking back, monastic lands. Edward was actually murdered in 978, in obscure circumstances, a bad start to the reign of Æthelred II and his (but not Edward’s) mother Ælfthryth. But none of these tensions resulted in more than sporadic violence, and the ealdormanic oligarchy survived into the 990s. Æthelred II was by then strong enough to end it. Ælfhere’s probable brother-in-law and heir in Mercia, Ælfric, was expelled for treason in 985; when Æthelwine, the powerful son of Æthelstan ‘Half king’, died in 992, his sons did not succeed him in East Anglia; by 1006, all the old families were gone, most of them permanently. It was Æthelred II, then, who decisively broke with the 930s-940s political system of Æthelstan and Eadgifu; his later protégés were all new. Unfor tunately, they also seem to have been less effective. Æthelred’s reign also saw the return of Viking raiding, sporadic from 980 and serious after 990; from 1009 the invading armies were ever more successful, and English defences ever more feeble. In 1013 King Svein of Denmark (d. 1014), who had led some of the earlier raids, engaged in a full-scale conquest of England, which was completed in 1016 by his son Cnut (1016-35).
The wars and instability which the southern English had managed to avoid for a century returned a hundredfold in the 1010s. The sense of political collapse that is so visible in the bitter pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for these years has few parallels in the whole of English history since. But Cnut nonetheless managed to inherit a rich and stable kingdom from Æthelred. We must not underestimate the stresses and factions in that kingdom, and maybe the difficulties in making an English identity stick in the face of more local loyalties. All the same, it had achieved, in the generations since Edward the Elder, a structural coherence that could outlast the destruction of its ruling élites by Æthelred and the military ineptness of their successors. The rest of this chapter will look at how and why this occurred.
The structures of government did not change much in the early ninth century, except that royal entourages seem to have become more complex in that period, with increasing numbers of officials travelling the country and having to be fed. Major shifts seem to have begun with Alfred. Exactly how this worked will never be fully known. Anglo-Saxon sources are never generous, including by early medieval standards; even those for Alfred, although more numerous than for the reigns of his father and his son, are very much the mouthpiece for Alfred himself, who was not only the patron of writers but an author in his own right, well aware of the possibilities of political spin, and visibly skilled in covering cynical political calculation with a moralistic veneer. What is clear, however, is that Alfred was very influenced by the political values of the Carolingian court. He sought intellectuals from Francia; we have a letter from Archbishop Fulk of Reims rather reluctantly granting Alfred’s request for Grimbald of Saint-Bertin in 886. Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne was available in England, and was one of the models used by Alfred’s Welsh protégé Asser in his own Life of Alfred. That text, written in Alfred’s lifetime, creates an image of Alfred heavily influenced by hagiography, including an illness (piles) which protected his youthful chastity, and another debilitating disease which undermined him in later years (the illnesses may well have been real, but their role in Asser’s text parallels hagiographical writing), as well as a heavy emphasis on Alfred’s learning and spiritual commitment. Alfred was indeed unusually well educated, even by Carolingian standards; he thought it essential to sponsor translations into Old English of some of the fundamental Latin Christian works of the early Middle Ages, such as Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, to make them accessible to the Anglo-Saxon élites, and three of these translations are his own work. Alfred’s often fairly free translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy shows a king fully familiar with a biblical and theological conception of kingship, pragmatic (kings need resources) but also self-aware (when the rich and powerful go abroad and meet people who do not know them, they realize how much their position is owed ‘to the praise of foolish people’). Alfred looked systematically to the Bible; his law code goes further even than those of Charlemagne in its insertion, as a preface, of a set of extracts from the laws of Moses in Exodus, which were evidently intended to have at least meta-legal force. This sort of literary royal ideology was unparalleled in England before Alfred’s generation, but it has direct roots in the thought-world of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald.
The Carolingian reform programme thus took root in England during just the decades in which it was running out of steam in Francia. But Alfred also borrowed political practices from the Frankish world. One of the clearest is the collective oath of loyalty sworn to the king, which is the first law in Alfred’s code, and which looks straight back to Carolingian legislation (Alfred states just before that law that he ‘dared not presume to set down in writing at all many of my own [laws]’ but this is typical Alfredian disinformation); one of the tenth-century developments of this law, Edmund’s code of about 943, quotes directly from a capitulary of 802. In England, indeed, that law was interpreted rather more harshly than in Francia, for the next century is scattered with cases of aristocrats who lost all their land for breaking their oath, something that rarely happened in either the Carolingian or the Ottonian world. The great emphasis on the oath in the Wynflæd-Leofwine case seems related to this too. The detail of Alfred’s own government, including his army reforms, looks back to the Anglo-Saxon past rather than over the Channel, as far as we can see. But the precedent he set allowed his tenth-century successors, as they developed the increasingly coherent and self-confident southern English state, to draw from Frankish example wherever necessary, alongside extensions of indigenous practice. Edward the Elder and his successors spread the pattern of West Saxon shires across Mercia, obliterating the old Mercian regional divisions (in a particularly overt act, perhaps dating to the 920s, the old Mercian royal centre of Tamworth was actually bisected by the boundaries of Warwickshire and Staffordshire, thus marginalizing it for ever after); the burh network of Wessex was extended to Mercia already in the 910s, although it seems increasingly likely that the Mercians had had a similar system of fortified centres before as well. Conversely, the new subdivision of the shire, the hundred, seems to have been a Frankish import, not a West Saxon one, and it too was established in the tenth century. Tenth-century assembly politics (the king’s own large consultative assembly, the shire assembly, the hundredal assembly) similarly had Anglo-Saxon - indeed, common Germanic - roots; but the increasingly visible judicial activity of these bodies, and their association with royal direction, the king’s seal and attached instructions, betrays Frankish influence. So does royal legislation, as already implied; Alfred’s revival of it in itself probably shows his awareness of Carolingian law-making, and the numerous codes of the 920s-1020s resemble Frankish capitularies, sometimes quite closely. As with Edmund in 943, when Æthelred II in 1009 decreed a three-day fast in great detail in his seventh code, as a response to the great Viking invasion of that year, he was directly echoing Charlemagne.
These Frankish influences are not surprising. (More surprising is how seldom they were noticed before the 1970s.) Carolingian Francia was so much more powerful than any English kingdom, and its governmental technologies were so much more sophisticated, that, once the idea of borrowing developed, it could continue for a long time. We must add to this the increasing integration of the tenth-century West Saxon dynasty into Continental politics. Edward the Elder was the first Anglo-Saxon king to engage systematically in marriage alliances abroad, and his daughters ended up married to Charles the Simple, Hugh the Great and Otto I; Æthelstan intervened in West Frankish politics, sheltering his nephew Louis IV in his years of exile, and sending armies twice to the Continent. The English kings were increasingly regarded by the Franks as political players, and mutual interest increased: Asser and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle include an account of the 887-8 Frankish succession crisis; Flodoard and Thietmar both include (a few) English events in their chronicles. Cultural relationships developed as well. English clerics sometimes spent time in Continental monasteries, as Oswald did in Fleury and Dunstan in Ghent (Æthelwold, too, sent a monk to Fleury to learn local practices); Continental intellectuals came to England in their turn, from Grimbald in the 880s to Abbo of Fleury in 985-7. Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023), who wrote several law codes for both Æthelred II and Cnut and some compilations of his own, was also a rousing social and political critic in the Hincmar mould, and his work is clearly influenced by the idiom of Carolingian correctio. The later tenth-century monastic reform in England was sister to that of Gorze, or that favoured by the abbots of Cluny (see below, Chapter 21), and the new English national monastic rule, the Regularis Concordia, drawn up by Æthelwold in the late 960s, both explicitly drew from contemporary example in Ghent and Fleury and owed its wider ambition to the unification of monastic practices set in motion by Louis the Pious after 816.
This international dimension, so visible in tenth-century England, does bring a paradox all the same. For tenth-century Francia, as noted at the start of the chapter, was by no means still Carolingian in its aspiration. In Alfred’s time the values of Charles the Bald and Hincmar were still alive, but they were far weaker on the Continent by the time of Æthelstan or Edgar. Carolingian institutions, rituals, values came to England not (or not only) through the observation and emulation of practice, but through books. Wulfstan owned a copy of Ansegis’s capitulary collection, and it is likely enough that one had existed in England since Alfred’s time. Alcuin (himself Anglo-Saxon, of course) was certainly well known, Theodulf and Amalarius were available, and Hincmar may have been as well, at least second-hand. But it is still striking that the English took this literature so seriously. This may in part have been the legacy of Alfred’s highly moralized kingship; it must also have been a spin-off of the self-confidence of the tenth-century political community, whose members, however fractious, were the creators and maintainers of the largest, strongest, and most internally stable polity in Britain since the Romans left, and proud of it too.
Tenth-century English government was both more and less coherent than that of the Carolingians. Although Old English, not Latin, was the main language of legislation and much theology, implying a desire for wider dissemination in the country, the English court seems to have used writing less; royal orders seem to have been largely (although not always) verbal across the century, and writs, written orders, only clearly survive from Æthelred II’s reign. For all the elaboration of tenth-century law-making, it is never explicitly referred to in our surviving court cases, and one has to look hard even to find implicit echoes; it often matches the political theology of Charlemagne’s reign, rather than his practical institutional changes, although Æthelstan and some of his successors did consciously innovate in their laws. The sophistication of English government, often written up in recent years, has to be set against the relative roughness of some ‘administrative’ practices: when the inhabitants of Thanet robbed some York merchants in 969, Edgar simply ravaged the island; Æthelred II similarly sacked the diocese of Rochester in 986, and, later on, Harthacnut (1040-42) sacked Worcestershire in 1041 because two tax collectors had been killed in Worcester cathedral.
Conversely, there is clear evidence of royal strength. The importance of oaths to the king enormously widened the scope of ‘treason’ in the period, and it seems to have been easier in England than elsewhere for people to lose their lands and lives because of the king’s displeasure. Monastic reform was very heavily dependent on royal authority, and enhanced that authority in its turn. And in the 990s Æthelred II, in order to pay off the Vikings, instituted a tax system that in a few years was capable of generating considerable sums; this went way beyond anything the Carolingians ever attempted (Charles the Bald had begun the same process, but only tried it twice). How the Anglo-Saxon state managed such a task, given the detailed assessment which was necessary for it to run at all, without a very developed writing-based administrative infrastructure (as it seems), and in a period of continuous military defeat and demoralization, cannot be explained at present. But it was successful; eleventh-century English taxation was more elaborate than any other post-Roman state managed in the West until after 1200, and it generated, among other things, the most systematic governmental survey before the late Middle Ages, Domesday Book of 1086. Taxation was organized harshly; people who could not pay it lost their lands to people who could pay in their stead, and collective rejection of taxation brought reprisals, as at Worcester in 1041. The late Anglo-Saxon state, here as elsewhere, was heavy-handed and not notably benign. But taxation continued. It further increased royal wealth, and thus power, by the time that Cnut’s conquest allowed the money raised to stay in England, and it made possible the enduring solidity of the English state that was conquered, first by Svein and Cnut in 1013-16, and then by William I in 1066.
The tenth-century English kingdom had a rich aristocracy, as we have seen, one that saw its identity and political future as very much tied up with the success of the West Saxon dynasty. In Wessex, and also in English Mercia, it had deeper roots, but in much of the country it was entirely new, for its wealth in Danish Mercia and East Anglia derived from Edward the Elder’s conquest in 911-18 and partial expropriation of the political élites there, whose power in turn had presumably in most cases been new as well, a product of the Viking conquest of 869-78. It is interesting to realize, however, that despite the great importance of that conquest as a catalyst for the creation of a southern English state, the effect of the Vikings themselves on the country is very difficult to see. It is not clear that either Danish or (in north-west England) Norwegian settlement was very extensive; Scandinavian place names are dense in many areas, particularly Danish Mercia and Yorkshire, but this seems mostly to indicate the renaming of estates by new owners, not a mass peasant immigration. A distinctively Scandinavian material culture is also hard to find in the archaeology; the settlers seem to have become Christian fairly quickly; even Danish law, whose existence is implied by the later use of the term ‘Danelaw’ for northern and eastern England, seems, in the rare compilations that mention it, to have been much like Anglo-Saxon law elsewhere. There must have been some clusters of people with a Danish culture and identity in later tenth-century England, and there were certainly plenty of aristocrats with Danish ancestors (Oswald was one), but, overall, the eastern ‘Danelaw’ was probably less different from Wessex and English Mercia than Northumbria was from either. What the Vikings left for the West Saxon incomers was a more complicated and fragmented estate structure, with more space for a landowning peasantry (although even this may predate the Great Army’s conquests); and, in the southernmost part of Northumbria, the notable cosmopolitanism and openness to long-distance links of tenth-century York. For the rest, it is the West Saxon aristocratic stratum, overlaying the Viking period, that remains the most visible, at least south of the Humber.
The coherence of the English kingdom is perhaps best expressed in one of the witnesses to its late tenth-century defeat, the poem known as The Battle of Maldon. This text celebrates the fight to the death by Ealdorman Byrhtnoth of Essex and his entourage against the newly invading Vikings at Maldon in 991. Byrhtnoth, an ally of the family of Æthelstan ‘Half-king’, had been one of the major figures of the kingdom since the start of Edgar’s reign and an important patron of Ely abbey; his death came as a considerable shock. The poem is written up in the best heroic style by an anonymous poet, probably (though this is debated) shortly after the battle. Byrhtnoth’s troops have the same personal attachment to him that heroic warbands had in earlier poetry, but there are differences. One is that he has with him a county levy from Essex, heir to the collective defensive levies set up by Alfred, as well as a core group of personally loyal dependants. Another is that the men who fight on, with proud speeches, around their dead leader are from different parts of England (a Mercian aristocrat, a Northumbrian hostage, as well as men of Essex) and also from different social classes (a simple peasant, an old retainer): they are intended to represent a cross-section of English, not just Essex-based, identity and loyalty, and they explicitly fight not just for Byrhtnoth but for ‘the kingdom of Æthelred, my lord’s people and his country’. This kingdom-wide identity (at least in the vision of the Maldon poet) briefly unravelled in the chaos of the early 1010s, when, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle grimly claims, ‘in the end no shire would even help the next’, but it revived after that. There was no permanent regional breakdown in at least southern England, no equivalent to the increasingly separate marches, duchies, counties of the Continent. Nor did private lordships develop; the shire and hundred assemblies controlled nearly all justice right up to the Norman Conquest. By 1066 even Northumbria was beginning (although with difficulty) to be incorporated into the political system. Of course, there were local differences, and also local loyalties and rivalries. But, as Domesday Book shows, the wide geographical spread of the landowning of the tenth-century ealdormanic élite continued throughout the eleventh century as well, and in 1066 that spread is equally visible for the next level down, the thegns, the basic aristocratic stratum of the country. That landowning, fully matched by the spread of lands of cathedrals and monasteries, held the country together. The newly minted tax system simply added to this pre-existing coherence.
England may have been Carolingian in its aspirations; but the long-lasting solidity of the political settlement of Edward the Elder’s reign has so little parallel on the Continent that we cannot ascribe it all to the Carolingian lesson so systematically learned. What its roots really were must remain speculative: we do not have enough evidence for late Anglo-Saxon England to be sure of any argument of this kind. I would myself, however, associate it with a ninth-century development entirely separate from Viking conquest and Alfredian ideology: the formation of exclusive rights to property. We saw in Chapter 7 that early Anglo-Saxon land-units can best be seen as territories from which kings and some aristocrats, and, thanks to royal gift, churches and monasteries, took tribute, which could be quite light. In such territories, which were often substantial, covering the territories of a dozen later villages or more in some cases, a variety of people could live, from aristocrats to peasants, with, it seems, a variety of rights of possession; only the unfree seem to have paid heavy rents and services to lords or masters. That was the situation in the late seventh century, when our documents (all of them initially gifts by kings to churches) start. By 900, though, a list of rents surviving from Hurstborne Priors in Hampshire shows a village with much more serious obligations: here, the ceorlas, free peasants, had to pay money and produce in rent, and also do labour service, ploughing and sheep-shearing. These detailed requirements show tight control, and they are the first signs of what would become the standard landlord- tenant relationship in England: for the ceorlas of Hurstborne are best seen as tenants of the bishop of Winchester, the holder - we can now say owner - of the land. By the late tenth to early eleventh century, this sort of relationship seems quite generalized in the west Midlands and Somerset, too, for this is the broad area of origin of a text, called the Rectitudines Singularum Personarum, describing the standard dues owed by several strata of dependants on an unnamed estate, apparently as a guide to good estate-management. By Domesday Book in 1086, such an estate pattern characterized the entire country, in the former Viking-ruled lands no less than in the west and south. The global wealth deriving from rents and services was by now both great and capable of being described in detail.
These changes represent a revolution in land tenure, in which not just unfree, but also free, peasants ended up paying not just tribute to lords and rulers, but rents to landowners; these rents, importantly, were much heavier as well. The absence of any documented resistance to this process indicates that it was slow, certainly starting with the unfree (who were numerous), but then probably extending steadily to different groups of the free, first at the centre of land-units, and then coming to include their fringes and outliers, whose inhabitants paid lower rents and services well into the central Middle Ages. The more influential inhabitants of early Anglo-Saxon territories for the most part, by contrast, ended up not as tenants but as lords. Territories split up as time went on; a land-unit covering a dozen later villages might turn into twelve smaller units, which we can now call estates, each covering a single village territory. When held privately, these estates were characteristically in the hands of thegns, whether they held the land outright (in gift from the king, their former territorial lord, perhaps), or in lease from a church; the latter relationship is particularly well documented on the lands of Worcester cathedral, which kept its leases and recorded them in two eleventh-century cartularies. We cannot easily date the main period of the shift from land-units to estates, for the terminology of our documents remains much the same; but the break-up of larger units into village-sized blocks seems, from documentary evidence, to be a feature of the ninth and tenth centuries. This is also the period of a generalized concentration of settlement in the Midlands and central-southern England, into the villages at the centre of each of these blocks; this was a slower process, but probably a related one. The Hurstborne document, however isolated, would thus mark a change that was by then widespread, even, maybe, already nearing completion: the creation of a landscape of estates, one which had for long been typical of Continental western Europe, but which had not existed in England since the departure of the Romans.
This shift is as ill-documented as it was fundamental; my characterization of it in the last two paragraphs has to be seen as hypothetical. But its consequences are more visible, and several of them are important. One is that disposable wealth was sharply concentrated, and in fewer hands: those of kings, greater and lesser aristocrats and churches. As a result, an exchange economy, and more elaborate patterns of production, are notably more visible in the tenth century than in the eighth. In the eighth, exchange was still focused on a handful of ports, Southampton, London, Ipswich, York. In the tenth, York expanded dramatically, in part thanks to the international links of the Viking world (as we shall see in the next chapter), but so also did a network of inland centres, Lincoln, Thetford, Stamford, Chester, Winchester, and, to a lesser extent, a wide set of the burhs or boroughs of Alfred, Edward the Elder, and their Danish opponents, in particular the network of county towns, Leicester, Worcester, Shrewsbury, Oxford. This can be seen as a capillary urban network, at least one per shire and often more. And, in productive terms, wheel-thrown pottery with relatively wide distribution patterns begins to appear in the decades around 900, first in the east Midlands, at Stamford, Thetford, St Neots, and then elsewhere; references to wool, England’s central medieval export strength, begin to appear by the end of the century too. The tenth-century kings greatly increased the money supply, and exchange was sufficiently widespread for the tax system of the 990s to assume that taxes could be paid in silver coin. That wealth may have been creamed off to Denmark, at least initially, but it was still wealth. The infrastructure for its extraction from the peasantry evidently existed fully by then. Rare excavations of thegnly residences, at Raunds in Northamptonshire and Goltho in Lincolnshire, also show concentrations of wealth that were invisible in the eighth century; so do late Anglo-Saxon private churches, which were for the first time becoming numerous, and which after 1000 were increasingly built in stone.
This concentration of wealth was all the greater because of its geographical completeness, the second consequence of the estate-formation process. Most of England split into village-sized estates, or perhaps half-or quarter-villages; any space for a free landowning peasantry virtually vanished. This pattern was less regular in parts of the Danelaw, in particular the east Midlands, where some more independent peasant groups persisted (many were called sochemanni, ‘sokemen’, in Domesday Book, indicating that they had rights to seek justice with, it seems, some autonomy from lords, even when they were tenants); the Danelaw, from Yorkshire to East Anglia, also had more fragmented estates, which in itself gave more space for peasant landowning, and which allowed for reduced subjection on estate outliers. But even there, the process of estate formation seems to have had the same sort of timescale; and even there, the percentage of landowning peasants was lower than on most of the Continent. England had thus moved from being the post-Roman province with least peasant subjection, in 700, to the land where peasant subjection was the completest and most totalizing in the whole of Europe, by as early as 900 in much of the country, and by the eleventh century at the latest elsewhere. The lordships of France based on private justice did not develop in England, but they hardly needed to; peasants were already entirely subject to lords tenurially, and many were unfree (unlike in France: see Chapter 22) and thus had no rights to public justice either.
A third consequence is that this crystallization of landed power, with the substantial increase in dues from peasants that came with it, greatly favoured kings. Kings had had rights of small-scale tribute from most of the land-area of their kingdoms - all the land which they had not already conceded to churches. When this turned into rent, churches and indeed lay aristocrats all found their local power (and their own wealth) more certain, in the village blocks they controlled, but kings were still the main beneficiaries. By the tenth century, kings ended up with a high proportion of the land under their direct control. Although that proportion was higher in some areas than in others, the tenth-century kings of southern England controlled, overall, a far higher percentage of the land-area of their kingdom than did Charlemagne; the Frankish king/emperor was certainly much richer than they, but only as a result of his rule over ten times the land-area of the realm of Æthelstan. English kings thus had a uniquely favourable position in Europe: they could be enormously generous, creating a new aristocracy or giving it hitherto unknown wealth, whether on a large scale (Æthelstan ‘Half-king’, Ælfhere of Mercia) or a small, while still maintaining overall dominance, as a result of the extensive lands they still owned. They thus kept the strategic upper hand, which was further safeguarded when taxation came in. Royal courts and royal power, as we have seen, remained central even in the mid- and late tenth century, characterized as it was by royal minorities and the oligarchy of the queen and her leading aristocrats; this centrality was greatly aided by royal dominance over land. No one in early medieval Europe was ever as generous as Eadwig in his documented land grants of 956-9, but his successors were not weakened, and Æthelred II rolled back the tide of generosity when he took offices and often private property off the ealdormanic élite again; Cnut’s conquest displaced more aristocratic families, and William I’s did even more completely. Kings could thus remain crucial to all political calculation in England, simply because of their undiminished powers of patronage. It is this, above all, that marks England as different, and marks out its trajectory as separate from that in any of the Carolingian successor states. The ‘politics of land’ here definitely favoured royal power, and, eventually, central government.
This was further reinforced by another special characteristic of England, already referred to: the tenth-century kings’ continuing relationship to free society. One consequence of the exclusion of the peasantry from landowning might have been that they were also excluded from any relationship to the public world, as indeed happened in West Francia, and often elsewhere in the Carolingian world too. In England, as we have just seen, more of them were tenants of the king than was the case elsewhere; royal dependants seem to have had more rights than other tenants (this was still so later in the Middle Ages), and they were at least not subjected to private lords. But the traditional public obligations of all free men persisted as well. The national emergency of Alfred’s reign required a wider military participation than was by now necessary on the Continent, and burh defence was added to it; these public commitments continued without a break, alongside the more skilled military strike forces of the aristocracy, whenever national defence required. Similarly, even shire judicial assemblies had space for the free peasantry, and the basic law for the hundredal assembly indeed presumed that their attendance was normal; this public role for the free continued without a break thereafter, as it did not in most regions of the Carolingian world.
England’s development thus remains paradoxical. It became the European country where aristocratic dominance, based on property rights, was most complete, while also being the post-Carolingian country where kings maintained most fully their control over political structures, both traditional (assemblies, armies) and new (oaths, taxation). But the paradox seems to me expicable, nonetheless: it is the consequence of both the oligarchical compact that allowed the West Saxon conquest of the rest of southern England in the 910s, and the crystallization of property rights that took place in the ninth century and into the tenth. England’s history as the longest-lasting state of medieval Europe began there.