English Wealth

If we remove the three pillars of a united kingship, Christian nation and law, then a very large part of the substructure imagined by Bede and his successors vanishes from our understanding of Anglo-Saxon England. This leaves instead quite another unifying principle, one that in reality may have played a much more significant role in the idea of an entity named England. Just as modern Italy or Switzerland or Belgium are divided nations in terms of language, regional loyalties, culture or even administration, but united in the sense that they represent powerful trading communities with a single national economy, it is arguable that it was the wealth, rather than the religion or even the language of the English, that served as the principal unifying feature before 1066. England was precocious not only in terms of its sense of national identity, but in terms of its wealth. It was this potential bounty, over and above any other considerations, that first drew foreign invaders, Phoenicians and Romans of antiquity, Angles, Saxons and Jutes of the fifth century, Vikings of the ninth and tenth, and Normans and Frenchmen of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to stake their claims to rule or own the land. There is every sign that England was extremely wealthy. There is very little proof of the source from which this prosperity derived.

It came perhaps from the mining of metals, above all tin, but lead too, and gold and silver, which, though now confined to a single gold mine in Wales, were in the early Middle Ages possibly abundant in the Mendips and the hills of Cumberland. These mineral resources probably first drew Britain into contact with the Mediterranean world, as long ago as the fifth century bc, when a Phoenician admiral reported the mineral wealth of Cornwall, long before Julius Caesar conceived of a Roman military conquest of Britain. The British Isles are formed of every conceivable rock and sediment heaved up from each of the great convulsions of the vanished continents of prehistory. England may have been the Gold Coast of early medieval Europe, dependent upon the export of those same two commodities, gold and slaves, upon which a much later British Empire was to be founded. Bristol was almost certainly a centre for the trade in slaves to and from Ireland and Wales, and perhaps for silver from Wales or the Mendips, long before it became involved in the trade in gold and slaves from Africa or sugar from the Caribbean. St Patrick, one of the most mythologized yet significant figures in Irish history, may have begun his life as a slave, captured in what is today south-west England and traded to the Irish c. 410 AD.

More likely, however, the wealth of the Anglo-Saxons derived from animal rather than from mineral or human resources, in particular from the export of wool. Wool exports can be meaningfully measured only from the late thirteenth century, but this was a trade in all likelihood much more ancient. It was English wool, spun and dyed, sometimes in England, more often by foreign weavers and dyers, that supplied the English with many of their best-known exports: Lindsey blankets, Worsted from Norfolk, and above all, the most precious of products made from English wool, Scarlet, woven with twisted yarns according to techniques originating in Central Asia, dyed white, blue, green but most often carmine red. If the Bayeux Tapestry was produced in England, as most modern commentators suggest, then the very variety of the colours supplies testimony, not only to the wealth that first drew William of Normandy to the idea of conquering England, but to the trade that already linked England to the European and Mediterranean worlds.

We have no firm proof that it was wool which made England rich before 1066. Nonetheless, there is powerful circumstantial evidence to this effect, not least the rise of neighbouring Flanders. If England was rich, then Flanders in the centuries before 1066 was growing richer still. Flanders itself was a great blank of flatlands and bogs, much of it undrained as late as the seventeenth century. Yet this unlovely corner of northern Europe already by the eleventh century boasted flourishing towns and an extraordinary density of knights, the elite ‘haves’ in a society of ‘have nots’. Flemish knights, the ‘Brabanters’ and ‘routiers’ of the twelfth century, were to provide the staple of many a mercenary army in English and continental history. Flanders flourished probably as a consequence of its position on the trade routes between north and south, and in particular on the trade routes to England. In the two centuries after 1200, it was English wool, purchased by Flemish merchants, that fuelled the economies of both England and Flanders. There is every reason to suppose that this was a much more ancient phenomenon, and that the rise of Flanders tells us much about the rise of the English wool trade. Without sheep, and without Flemish merchants to trade their wool, the very idea of England might have been just one of those good ideas left unfinished on the cosmic drawing board.

By the eleventh century, across the continent, from northern France down to southern Italy, England was famed not only for its wools but for its role in associated luxury trades: precious metalwork, intricately painted manuscripts, and perhaps above all for the manufacture of ‘Opus Anglicanum’, literally ‘English Work’: luxuriously decorated vestments, painted by needle with silks, pearls and the most precious of gold and silver thread, that through to the fifteenth century and beyond kept the English brand current upon the luxury export markets of the world. The Canterbury monk Eadmer, accompanying his archbishop to the papal court at Bari in southern Italy in the 1090s, was amazed to be shown a cope, a liturgical vestment, worn by the Archbishop of Benevento, trimmed all around with gold, apparently made of the most precious Opus Anglicanum. The cope had been presented to the archbishop in England many years before in part-payment for a most precious relic, the arm of the apostle St Bartholomew, sold to relieve a famine in Italy. That an Italian archbishop, in the 1020s or 30s, should regard England as a potential source of famine-relief tells us much about perceptions of English wealth. That he accepted and treasured such a gift for more than sixty years tells us that such gifts were particularly sought. In the same way, the English desire to acquire Mediterranean relics tells us much about England’s cultural dependence upon Europe and in particular upon Rome, a much battered city but still viewed as the cradle of European civilization. An inventory of the Pope’s treasures, drawn up at the end of the thirteenth century, lists no less than 113 pieces of English embroidery, exchanged for who knows what sort of reciprocal benefits to the English.