Ethelbert of Kent to the Viking Invasions (597–865)

When the papal mission arrived on the Island of Thanet in 597, its leader St Augustine was extremely nervous about meeting the Saxons. If King Ethelbert of Kent resembled any of the other German barbarians such as King Clovis of Gaul, his wife’s grandfather, he would be a fierce, soldierly type. King Clovis had said that if he had been present at Christ’s crucifixion he would have avenged it, which was rather missing the point. Despite Augustine’s fears Pope Gregory was insistent in a series of letters that the mission be accomplished. At the end of the sixth century Ethelbert was the most important king, the bretwalda, of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms into which England was divided. If Ethelbert’s country was converted to Christianity he might influence the other kingdoms to copy him.

King Ethelbert lived up to expectations. Though the small group of forty travel-weary monks were unarmed and wearing homespun brown habits bearing before them a silver cross of the suffering Christ, he treated them as if they were wizards or magicians. He insisted on meeting them in the open air where their magic would be less potent to prevent them casting spells, and he would not allow them to leave the island. However, one of the conditions of King Ethelbert allying himself to the powerful royal house of the Franks had been that his wife Queen Bertha was to be allowed to practise her religion. So, living among the worshippers of Woden and Thor, she did not forget her faith. An old Roman church to St Martin was still standing on the eastern side of the king’s capital of Canterbury, and there she and her spiritual adviser Bishop Luidhard were allowed to pray.

After a while, having observed that the monks, who had brought him a richly decorated Bible and jewels from the pope, were quiet and well behaved, King Ethelbert allowed them off the island to worship in the queen’s church. Soon Ethelbert would be so impressed by their preaching of a future eternal life at a time when even a king could do little against illness, by their reading and writing and by their care of the poor, that he himself was baptized. By the end of the year, 10,000 of his people had been baptized as well.

Under the influence of the Roman missionaries, who received regular advice in letters from Pope Gregory, for the first time in the England of the Anglo-Saxons a code of laws was written down in 616. But this time it was in English, not Latin. Unlike the Romano-British the Anglo-Saxons could understand only their own language. These first English laws of Ethelbert’s, which were much influenced by the Franks, protected the new clergy and the land the king donated to them for church-building. By the end of the seventh century the churches would be free of taxation. Augustine built the monastery of St Augustine (which became the burial place of the early Anglo-Saxon kings of Kent), as well as founding the church that became Canterbury Cathedral. In the monastery the letters from Pope Gregory would be preserved, as well as other precious written materials. The Roman missionaries built further monasteries, which developed into centres of learning for the people of Kent. A fashion developed for wealthy noblemen to have their sons taught to read and write in monasteries for whose foundation they gave money and land. In 602 the pope created the archbishopric of Canterbury for St Augustine.

Pope Gregory had intended there to be twin archbishoprics in England, at Canterbury and York, because he still thought of England as the Roman province–one of whose centres would be the important Roman city of Eboracum, or York. But York was now part of the kingdom of Deira, which was entirely separate from Kent even though Ethelbert’s lands stretched as far as Deira. York and its environs would therefore have to be converted separately, as would all the other kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England. Another bishopric was created in 604 at nearby Rochester, whose ‘chester’ or ‘ceaster’ suffix denotes in the Anglo-Saxon way an old Roman city; a further bishopric, for the East Saxons, was created the same year at the old settlement of Londinium, known to the Saxons as Lundenwig.

Though he knew that Ethelbert was the most important king in the country, Pope Gregory was unaware of the extent of the changes that had taken place in England since the departure of the Romans. As we have seen, England had long ago lost all vestiges of her Roman national administration. The country was now divided up into the separate lands of small tribal peoples who themselves were in the process of being subsumed by the more warlike kings. Thus the heads of the small tribes became underkings or what the Anglo-Saxons called ealdormen (the word for military leader) of the larger kingdoms. By the end of the seventh century there were seven kingdoms altogether, known as the heptarchy; they were Sussex, Kent, Essex, East Anglia, Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria. Historians have to make educated guesses about these tribal peoples because they were not literate. But surviving references to ancient practices in later documents, literary fragments and law codes have brought them to the conclusion that the early Anglo-Saxons still shared many characteristics with their Germanic ancestors of the first century AD, characteristics which had been observed by Roman commentators.

The most important feature of the social organization of the Germanic peoples was the family, or to use an Old English word the kin. Loyalty to one’s kin was a key concept. The kin had an obligation to kill the murderer of one of their own. Even by the first century, however, this had been commuted to a money payment, the so-called wer-gild or price of a man (literally man-gold), which had the effect of making society more peaceful. If payment was not made, the custom was that the victim’s kin must either kill the perpetrator or be paid not to do so. In addition a man’s kin were expected to swear an oath to support him in court if he was accused of a crime. By the tenth century the kin was responsible for a criminal family member’s future behaviour. Over the centuries kings and their nobles, who began to take charge of the village courts, would accept the evidence of the community to balance the evidence of the kin when it came to establishing the facts about a crime. By the ninth century kings like Alfred the Great would be changing the law to make sure that duty to one’s lord took precedence over duty to one’s kin. But, with these shifts of emphasis, loyalty and the sacredness of oath-taking continued to form the bedrock of Anglo-Saxon society.

Most of the Angle and Saxon invaders settled in England in tribal groups of free peasants under separate leaders, not under one national king; over those separate peoples overlord kings and bigger kingdoms would arise. This can be seen by the many place names in England that end in ‘ing’, which means ‘people of’–thus Hastings signifies ‘the people of Haesta’ and Woking ‘the people of Wocca’. A famous tenth-century document drawn up for taxation purposes, the so-called Tribal Hideage, identifies many of these peoples and the amount of land they held in ‘hides’, the Old English unit of landholding and assessment for taxation. Depending on which kingdom you inhabited, a hide consisted of between 40 and 120 acres.

King Ethelbert’s law code reveals that the people of Kent were used to discussing local affairs in popular open-air assemblies under the direction of the more learned or wealthy. Since the late sixth century there seems to have been a tribal court for every hundred hides, about 4,000 acres or more. They were probably the origin of the ‘hundred’ courts to which there are documentary references by the tenth century. By then the courts of the hundred were held on a monthly basis to sort out breaches of the customary and Church law and to adjust taxes, reflecting the fact that all the English kingdoms were now divided into administrative units called hundreds. For many centuries the judges were chosen by the local people rather than by the king. In contrast to the Roman way of life, early on among these primitive Anglo-Saxon peoples there were genuinely democratic customs, even though they themselves had slaves.

A small class of nobles formed the wealthiest level of Kentish society, but the most numerous element in that kingdom at the end of the sixth century was the free peasant or ceorl (churl), whose rights were protected by law and whose immediate overlord was not a noble but the king himself. In Kent the ceorl was worth a hundred golden shillings to his family: that was the price of killing him, the wer-gild. The disruption caused by the ninth-century Viking invasions ruined many of these people, so that they had to labour for the local lord to pay the swingeing tax bill of Danegeld, or to pay for the protection of the lord’s soldiers when war threatened his home and crops. At the same time many Anglo-Saxons managed to cling to the financial autonomy of their distant ancestors, valuing the independence of mind it allowed.

The late-seventh-century laws of King Ine of Wessex give us further information about the western cousins of these men. They were required to serve in the fyrd, the Anglo-Saxon militia which was called out against national enemies at times of crisis; and there was a special law imposing heavy penalties on anyone who penetrated the hedge around another’s property when the fyrd was out. With their fellow villagers they had to support the king by paying a feorm–that is, an ancient royal food rent, originally a certain amount of ale, oxen, honey and loaves which was later commuted into a money rent or tax. With a contribution assessed by hideage, it seems that from the earliest times the Anglo-Saxons were expected to help build local bridges and walls and the king’s fortresses if called upon. By 700 the kings of the separate kingdoms of England each had their own council of wise men called the Witan. Members of the Witan, who tended to be the great landowners of the kingdom, witnessed the king’s acts of state, whether it was giving land to a noble, or declaring that a monastery need not pay rent. They could elect a king from a royal line if they chose, but their chief role was to advise him.

Just as they had settled England in tribes, the Anglo-Saxon peasants tended to live in small villages. Their fields were quite different from the rectangular ones of the Celtic Iron Age, being laid out in long curving strips. In some kingdoms some land was farmed in common, in strips scattered over open fields. In others, such as Kent, land was organized in a more self-contained way. All over England woods on the outskirts of villages tended to be held as common land where everyone could put their pigs, sheep and cows out to pasture.

These blond, big-boned Angles and Saxons had heavier, stronger ploughs than the ancient Britons, whose lighter ploughs had led them to prefer high ground and lighter soil. So the Anglo-Saxons were unafraid of the richer, heavier, alluvial valley soil of the midlands. Increasing numbers of them therefore began to spread along the Ouse towards the Tyne and Tees, enlarging the kingdoms of Mercia, Deira and Bernicia. By the early seventh century the latter two would be united by the powerful King Ethelfrith into the kingdom of Northumbria (the people north of the Humber).

The Anglo-Saxon peoples regarded the ruins of the vast Roman buildings they came upon with wonder. They were primitive builders themselves who could handle only wood and brick. The skills required to build the towering marble temples, the immense stone Roman baths, the aqueducts that littered England were so far beyond them that they could not believe they had been constructed by humans. ‘The work of giants’ is how their literature repeatedly describes Roman architecture. It used to be thought that the Anglo-Saxons avoided Roman cities because they believed superstitiously that they contained ghosts. But the latest research suggests that, while at first the Saxons and Angles may have preferred to carry away superior Roman bricks to build their own settlements, by the end of the seventh century the old Roman cities were beginning to attract a new population of Anglo-Saxon city-dwellers. These cities, such as York and London, never contained more than a few thousand people, as most Anglo-Saxons preferred to live in the country as farmers. However, the farmers would build a king’s hall, a royal manor or tun, which survives in the place names Wilton, Walton and Kingston. These edifices were impressive (if crude) wooden buildings which functioned as administrative centres and which had to be large enough to receive the local hundred when they brought their goods to support the king.

But the king’s hall, whether it was the home of a king’s ealdorman or the king himself, was also a warm cheerful place where mead was passed round in a horn from person to person at a vast log table, with a fire burning in the enormous hearth and clean green rushes on the floor to sweeten the air. Although most Anglo-Saxons had settled down to farm they still retained a folk memory of their ancestors, the north German warriors, which found expression in the vigorous songs which bards sang for them in the great hall, recounting the exploits of Beowulf for example.

Loyalty, revenge and death were some of the favourite themes of Anglo-Saxon literature, but perhaps most popular of all were poems about the loyalty between the king and his men, the devoted noblemen known as thanes. Like the bond between kin, the bond between a king and his bodyguard was sacred. It was a disgrace for a man to allow his lord to fall in battle without avenging him by his own death. The early history of England is full of heroic examples of thanes who refused to change sides even if their lord was dead, like those of the eighth-century King Cynewulf of Wessex who avenged his slaying by laying down their own lives.

As the seventh century dawned in England, outside Kent most of the country remained wedded to the heathen gods and pagan way of life. It would take men of tremendous conviction to woo them from the powerful deities after whom they had named many features of the landscape–Thundridge in Hertfordshire meant Thunor’s or Thor’s ridge, and so on. The Church would become one of the pillars on which the English kingdoms were built, the essence of the civilization of the middle ages. But the raw material the Church was battling with was rough, pagan and insensitive. The monks seeking to convert the Saxons to Christianity often had to adapt their prayers and stories to attract an audience which admired strength and found it hard to admire the Christian reverence for suffering.

Nevertheless, thanks to the force and energy of Augustine’s Roman missionaries, and of other missionaries from Ireland and Scotland, within less than a century the Church had converted the whole of the savage country of England to Christianity. It would go on to transform the Anglo-Saxon people and their culture in an astonishing way. From bloodthirsty warriors, the Anglo-Saxons became a people whose sons learned to read and write Latin and thus had access to the knowledge of the ancients. For 150 years in England, from the 660s to the 820s, there was an extraordinary revival of learning in the new monasteries which swept rapidly over the country. It would reach its peak in seventh-century Northumbria, as seen in the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels, and a scholarly and artistic renaissance would spread from England to the kingdom of the Franks. Links were created between the continent and England not seen since the early fifth century. After 300 years of constructing simple wooden dwellings, the Anglo-Saxons started to put up great numbers of elaborate churches and monasteries as it became socially prestigious to erect buildings to the glory of God. Thanks to French and Italian artists whom the late-seventh-century Archbishop of Canterbury Theodore of Tarsus brought to England, the Anglo-Saxons would be exposed to far more sophisticated workmanship than the wattle and daub of their native Denmark and northern Germany.

English buildings would become splendid again under the influence of the Christian Church with its links to a higher continental civilization. Streets began to be paved, and the floors of kings’ halls were made out of tiny pieces of decorative stone. Cloth of gold was the material once more seen on their interior walls, as it had been in the days of the Caesars. Glass-making would return to England after three centuries, thanks to the English Church’s strong links with Gaul, for the Gauls had kept that Roman art going. At the end of the seventh century, the warrior and nobleman Benedict Biscop would be the first person to import Gaulish glass-makers to the monastery he had founded at Jarrow on the Tyne. Glass, soon to be stained glass, appeared in church windows for the first time in Anglo-Saxon England.

But early English Christianity was a very fragile plant, dependent on the patronage of a strong ruler. After King Ethelbert of Kent died in 616, his son and successor Eadbald was so hostile to Christianity that Kent trembled on the edge of paganism again. Members of the Roman mission became so dispirited that many decided to quit Kent for France. According to tradition it was only because the Prince of Apostles, St Peter, appeared in a vision to one of their number, Bishop Laurentius, that they returned. In a rage St Peter set about the bishop, beating him ferociously, reminding him all the while of the parable of the Good Shepherd and insisting that he should not abandon his sheep to the infidel wolves. The next day Eadbald was so alarmed by the weals St Laurentius showed him that he reformed and the other bishops returned.

We would have little knowledge of the story of how the astonishing changes took place in the lives of the wild Anglo-Saxons were it not for the detective work of the eighth-century monk from the monastery at Jarrow who is always known as the Venerable Bede. This great writer, the father of English history and one of the most influential writers of the first millennium in Europe, was born about 670. His tomb may still be seen at Durham Cathedral. Bede made it his business to search out the facts as opposed to the myths and legends about the origins of the English people. He was hard working, scientifically rigorous and wide ranging in his investigations. Though he consulted eyewitnesses where he could, every piece of information he presented as a fact had to be backed up by documentary evidence, for which he scoured ancient documents in England as well as sending to the papal registers at Rome for information. He also perfected the system invented by Dionysius Exiguus of chronological dating, taking the birth of Christ as the beginning of modern time. Bede’s books became so famous throughout eighth-century Europe that owing to his influence the letters AD (Anno Domini, ‘in the year of Our Lord’) were adopted for presenting dates everywhere.

The story of the transformation of England is set down in Bede’s book The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. From it derives the greater part of our knowledge of the fifth-century invasion and the sixth-, seventh-and eighth-century kingdoms of England. The next most important conversion of the peoples of England after Kent was that of the kingdom of the Northumbrians. Although the new Bretwalda of England on the death of Ethelbert was Raedwald, the King of East Anglia, it was owing to an exiled prince of the northern kingdom of Deira (modern Yorkshire) at Raedwald’s court, Edwin (the future founder of Northumbria), that the most influential movement of English Christianity began.

Though most early Anglo-Saxon kings are covered in obscurity, Raedwald is one about whom rather a lot is known. In the summer of 1939, just before the Second World War broke out, what is generally acknowledged to be his tomb was found on what was formerly the Suffolk coast at Sutton Hoo. The magnificent remains, which are thought to date from circa 621–30 and are now on display in the British Museum, further amplify our picture of seventh-century Anglo-Saxon rulers like Raedwald himself and his client Edwin of Northumbria. At the top of a hundred-foot headland, not unlike the funeral pyre of Beowulf, ‘high and broad and visible to those journeying the ocean’, was found a burial chamber made out of a ninety-foot longship, the kind of vessel in which Raedwald’s Angle ancestors had famously appeared.

What is especially interesting about Raedwald’s tomb is that it shows that there had been a revival of international trade in Europe, which for two centuries after the fall of the western Roman Empire had decayed to local barter. Raedwald’s helmet and armour were made in Sweden, while his drinking bowls were the product of Middle Eastern craftsmen. The many different kinds of foreign coin show what complicated and far-reaching trade Raedwald was involved in, taking in Constantinople and Alexandria.

Sutton Hoo also reveals that, despite Raedwald’s veneer of Christianity, his deepest beliefs were as pagan as those of Tutankhamun. For he was buried with quite as much grave furniture as any of the ancient Egyptians, with an enormous cauldron and an immense mead horn beautifully mounted in silver for drinking in the halls of Valhalla. Gold belt buckles weighing more than a pound each, with intricate designs of stylized hunting animals like falcons, indicate that there were brilliant smiths at work in seventh-century England who had developed the art of cloisonné to a peak it would be hard to reach today. But what is outstanding about this man is his appearance as a warrior. His wonderful iron helmet covered with a layer of bronze sculpted with fighting figures, with menacing slits for the eyes and flaps to protect the ears, could only strike fear in those who encountered him.

Edwin of Northumbria was a warrior of this kind too. In the seventh century, when most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were in a constant state of war, battling for territory, it could only be with the support of such a man that Christianity could become permanently established. With Raedwald’s help Edwin had defeated his enemy Ethelfrith, who had united the kingdom of Deira round York with Bernicia as far as the Scottish borders and thus became king of the whole of Northumbria. But it was his marriage to Ethelbert of Kent’s Christian daughter Ethelburga that was the other crucial feature of Edwin’s reign. For she brought with her to the Northumbrian court a Roman Christian monk of intense and determined personality named Paulinus. A potent combination of intellectual argument and magnificent papal gifts such as a silver looking-glass and a gilt ivory comb of exquisite Italian worksmanship, as well as a shirt of extraordinarily fine wool, successfully appealed to the king’s taste and to his sense of his kingly rank.

King Edwin’s conversion was a very serious matter which was evidently not embarked on without discussion among–and in effect with the permission of–his nobles and his leading heathen priest. It prompted one of the most famous passages in the literature of the Anglo-Saxons, written by Bede, which gives us a rare portrait of the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon ruler’s life. After the high priest Coifi of Northumbria had frankly admitted that even he had not gained from sacrificing to idols, one of the king’s chief men spoke out as follows:

Utterly convinced, the high priest borrowed a horse from the king and rode off to destroy the shrine of the idols to whom the Northumbrians were still sacrificing herds of cattle.

Once Edwin had converted to Christianity, his people followed. It was as a community that on Easter Sunday 12 April 627 the nobility and a large number of ordinary people, as well as King Edwin, received baptism at York in a little wooden church built by Paulinus where York Minster now stands. Paulinus then travelled up and down the country performing mass in all the Northumbrian rivers. In fact there was such a fervour to be christened among the Northumbrians that for thirty-six days Paulinus had to work day and night in order to complete his task of baptizing people who had travelled for days from the furthest-flung villages and hamlets throughout the land. By the 630s Northumbria had become a byword for peace among its violent neighbours.

But Edwin, who became bretwalda on the death of Raedwald, had earned the hatred of the old Britons, that is the Welsh under their king Cadwallon of Gwynedd, because Northumbria was increasing its territory at their expense. Despite being a Christian, Cadwallon had chosen to combine his army with that of Penda, the warlike heathen King of Mercia.

The bitter enmity between the Roman missionaries and the Celtic Church meant that no Welsh bishops counselled Cadwallon to refrain from attacking his fellow Christian King Edwin. St Augustine had assumed that the Welsh bishops would be directed by him once his mission had arrived in England, for he had orders to set up two archbishoprics and twenty-four bishoprics. But the Welsh saw him as a foreign usurper who should bow to their more ancient faith. The conference Augustine called in order to reason with them ended with harsh words on both sides. Augustine denounced the Welsh bishops as heretics, warning of dire consequences if the Church was not united. These seemed to be fulfilled when Edwin was killed at the Battle of Hatfield in 633, and the west British swarmed all over Northumbria, burning villages and churches and almost wiping out Christianity despite their common faith. Cadwallon’s soldiers spared neither women nor children, so Bishop Paulinus had to gather up Queen Ethelburga and her household, together with a large gold cross and a wonderful chalice studded with jewels, and escort her south to her brother’s more peaceful kingdom of Kent. From being Bishop of York Paulinus ended his days as Bishop of Rochester, dying (for once we have a precise death date) on 10 October 644.

The devastation came to an end only when the son of Ethelfrith of Northumbria, Oswald, returned to his old country, drove out Penda and Cadwallon and forced the Welsh Britons as far as their kingdom in Cumbria to acknowledge him as their overlord. Oswald’s reign was brief, since he was murdered by Penda in 642. But it was memorable for his association with another great early churchman, St Aidan, who transformed the Northumbrian Church by exposing it to Irish Christianity and its twin traditions of classical scholarship and passionate Celtic evangelism.

St Aidan was a monk at the famous monastery of Iona off the west coast of Scotland where King Oswald himself had been educated and which had been founded in 563 by the Irish monk St Columba to convert the Scots. The monastery had maintained the best traditions of classical education, which had survived in Ireland because it had been left undisturbed by the German migrations. Irish Christianity was a markedly scholarly movement because its monasteries had been the preservers of a significant part of the European classical heritage that had perished in Italy and France under the onslaught of the German tribes. Classical manuscripts, many of them the legacy of Greek civilization to the Romans, once the common reading matter of Roman citizens, continued to be copied in Ireland by industrious monks.

When Oswald returned to Northumbria he brought with him the Irish-educated monks from Iona to re-establish Christianity in his shattered kingdom. St Aidan was made the bishop of the Northumbrians. In typically ascetic Irish and Scots fashion he chose to build his episcopal seat, cathedral and monastery off the Northumbrian coast on the small tidal island of Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, just south of Berwick-on-Tweed. Despite St Aidan’s importance as head of the Northumbrian Church, the buildings on Lindisfarne had thatched roofs of reeds, after the Irish fashion.

Under St Aidan’s influence, King Oswald’s court became known throughout the rest of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms for its higher way of life. The nature of the Anglo-Saxon rulers and ealdormen began to change, guided by their priests into better behaviour. Many of the nobility began to copy St Aidan’s example of fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays. Instead of an ethic based on the rule of the strong, which was the code of the Anglo-Saxons, Oswald became notable for his care of the poor. Bede tells many stories of the great novelty of the king’s selfless generosity, such as giving away his Easter lunch, a silver dish full of dainties, to the poor in the streets.

When Oswald was succeeded by his formidable brother Oswy, who regained the bretwaldaship for Northumbria, the Christian way of life established under St Aidan and Oswald was exported with even greater momentum. Oswy made a point of encouraging missionaries from Northumbria to visit other kingdoms. Thanks to the activities of the Northumbrian monk St Ceadda or Chad, the population of Penda’s famously heathen Mercia also began to turn Christian, including Penda’s own son Peada. By 700 the whole of England had been converted to Christianity. The missionaries’ origins varied: in East Anglia it was the inspired preaching of a Burgundian which did it, while in Wessex it was a Roman from Kent. But in the main the impulse was coming from Northumbria, from Lindisfarne and from Iona. The Yorkshire monk Wilfrid of Ripon converted the South Saxons, while Cedd, who was Chad’s brother, reconverted the East Saxons.

By 698 the new monastery on Lindisfarne had produced an extraordinary monument to the new Northumbrian Christian civilization in the form of the Lindisfarne Gospels. This was a version of the Four Gospels of the New Testament but was decorated with beautiful illuminated letters and patterns, patterns which mingle Celtic designs and the sort of Anglo-Saxon shapes found on the buckles of the East Anglian Raedwald.

The Lindisfarne Gospels were made by monks living in communities which were becoming very much the rule in England by the end of the seventh century. Irish Christianity was notable for its monks’ austere way of life. The earliest Irish and Scottish monasteries tended to be sited in remote places like islands or on hills, and the monks’ cells would be beehive shaped, pleasant in summer and freezing cold in winter. But with the spread of Christianity, as a result of intermarriage between English rulers and of the energy of the Northumbrian and Irish missionaries, monasteries of a more sophisticated kind were built. They grew into large, powerful institutions, with many different rooms such as the scriptorium, where manuscripts were copied, and herb gardens outside. They provided schooling and were increasingly important communities in themselves. They started to have their own farms of sheep and dairy, particularly as the wealthy bequeathed land to monasteries in return for the monks’ saying Masses for their souls. Seventh-century women participated too. Soon there were many communities of what were called ‘double monasteries’, foundations where men and women lived side by side but in separate buildings. The Old English word for monastery is minster and towns with ‘minster’ at the end suggest that they were once religious communities–for example, Westminster, Minster Lovell and Upminster.

It was owing to the energy of King Oswy that the English Church achieved a much needed national unity, for there was constant quarrelling between the different Christian sects of the Roman, Celtic and Scots and Irish Churches. The dominant issue in their quarrel was the date of Easter, but the real problem was that the Church in England lacked a harmonious national organization. Although he was only a simple warrior, or perhaps precisely because he was a warrior, Oswy decided in 664 that how to calculate when Easter fell and a host of other matters should be determined once and for all.

Oswy called a national Church Council at the monastery built by the Northumbrian princess Abbess Hilda at Whitby on the windswept east coast of Yorkshire. Hilda was a great administrator whose abbey became a training school for Church statesmen. Her monastery produced at least five outstanding ecclesiastics including Wilfrid of York and became a place where kings and princes sought advice on government. Here too in the 680s lived Caedmon, a humble lay brother who would compose some of the earliest extant Anglo-Saxon religious poetry.

Bede described the shyness of this poor lay brother attached to the abbey who, because he was uneducated, performed all the tasks of a servant. In the refectory or dining room at meal times (for monks and lay brothers ate together to emphasize the brotherhood of man) the educated monks would amuse themselves inventing elegant verse. Caedmon was always too embarrassed to speak when he saw the harp coming round the long table towards him. He would quickly find an excuse to leave. One night in the stable where he slept in order to take care of the monastery’s horses he had fallen into a melancholy sleep, all too aware of his ignorance. Suddenly someone appeared to him in his dreams and said, ‘Caedmon sing some song to me.’ Caedmon replied that he could not sing and that was why he had left the hall. But the other insisted that he should sing. ‘What shall I sing?’ asked Caedmon. ‘Sing the beginning of created things,’ said the other. And Caedmon, in the muck of the stable, found that the most beautiful verses were coming out of his mouth as he sang the praises of God the Father who had made and preserved the human race. The story goes that when Abbess Hilda heard the exquisite poetry he was speaking she ordered that Caedmon should no longer be a lay brother but should be given a proper monk’s habit.

It was at this abbey that the churchmen of the many separate kingdoms in England bowed to the power of the bretwalda Oswy and assembled in what was the first British conference, the Synod of Whitby, attended by all the great figures of seventh-century British Christendom in a bid to stop the bickering between the Irish and Roman Churches. The Irish Church had become a law unto itself during the Dark Ages when it lost contact with Rome. By 664 it was in effect a separate and rival organization which frequently disagreed with the papacy, whether on the date of Easter or on the tonsure–Irish monks were tonsured (shaved) at the front from ear to ear while Roman monks were tonsured on top. In daily life as the Church began to occupy an increasingly central position within the Northumbrian state this was beginning to create a number of practical problems.

With St Aidan’s death and the accession of the fiery Bishop Colman to Lindisfarne and the bishopric of York, the issue led to a ludicrous antagonism between the two branches of the same faith. Some people had been converted by Irish Scots and some by Roman missionaries, so that their disputes were beginning to take up energies better used elsewhere. At the Synod of Whitby Wilfrid of Ripon was in favour of the Roman way of reckoning. ‘Why’, he asked with some resonance, should a small number in ‘the remotest of two remote islands, the Picts and Britons, be different from the universal Church in Asia, Africa, Egypt, Greece, Italy and France?’

It was left to King Oswy to decide. He came down in favour of the Church founded by St Peter, in preference to what had in effect become a detached Church founded by St Columba. But at this pronouncement Bishop Colman, who was a strict adherent of St Columba, flew into such a rage that he resigned his bishopric at Lindisfarne, stormed back to Iona and eventually returned to Ireland. Oswy’s Synod had done the English Church a great service. Christianity in England was now run by the Roman Church, which had the virtue of being an efficient, permanently staffed, wealthy international organization as opposed to the Irish Church’s reliance on the enthusiasm of individuals. A few years later the country benefited from the pope’s choice of a brilliant priest from what is present-day Turkey named Theodore of Tarsus as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Despite the importance we attach today to the ancient archbishopric, hitherto the Archbishop of Canterbury had had little actual power outside Kent. But over the next twenty years Archbishop Theodore’s organizational skills transformed the English Church into a rationalized whole. In 672 its first canons gave Theodore and his successors at Canterbury authority over all the English Church, with power to create dioceses and make new bishops, a landmark in English religious history. All the bishops (the planned total of twenty-four had now been reached) of the different kingdoms, Mercia, Northumbria and so on, were to be under the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Training schools were set up to ensure that each bishop had so many monks and priests to help with his work as well as schools for gifted children, whatever their means. As a result of Theodore’s Greek-speaking background Greek and Latin were taught again to the inhabitants of England as well as the ancient curriculum of the Seven Liberal Arts: the Trivium and the Quadrivium.

The English Church gained a sense of national unity from the Church Councils which Theodore called on a regular basis. As religious enthusiasm swept the country with the aid of the well-to-do, a large number of monasteries were built all over England, particularly in Northumberland. The monks began to produce alliterative religious poetry like the Germanic verse of their forefathers. Talented poets in their midst were most likely responsible for the fusion of Christian values and the Saxon warrior past, which by the eighth century had produced two of the greatest Anglo-Saxon poems, The Dream of the Rood and Beowulf. If they were not written by monks they were certainly copied down in manuscript by monks in their scriptoriums and transmitted as the Anglo-Saxon version of Christian culture to future generations. They also memorialized the lives of those around them. They painted pictures not of the fabulous monsters of their Nordic ancestors’ dour imaginations but of the real people they saw around them: English ceorls working in their fields or hunting hares with ermines, nobles on their horses flying hawks from their wrists. As the wealthier classes’ children were educated in monasteries, their pleasures became more cultivated. They wrote gnomic verses, simple poetry. Once they had been taught to read and write by the Latin-speaking monks, the cleverer might enjoy Anglo-Saxon riddles derived from Latin literature, as well as that literature itself, including Virgil’s Aeneid (which Bede had certainly read) and Pliny’s Natural History.

Christianity had become a power throughout the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, as important as the kings and their lords. Other than the monastic communities themselves, the key element in each diocese was not the parish priest, of which there were few, but the bishop, who then had an itinerant preaching role. At first there were very few parish churches because they took time and money to build. In areas where there were none, Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus allowed people to worship in the fields, which is why standing crosses were often erected instead of altars. Elaborately decorated with new foreign motifs like the Byzantine-style vineleaves of Theodore’s craftsmen, they may still be seen at Bewcastle in Cumbria and at Durham.

Some Saxon churches, like the important example at Brixworth in Northamptonshire and the Lorna Doone church St Mary the Virgin at Oare in Somerset, survive to this day. But the majority were either destroyed by the Danes or rebuilt by the Normans. As the centuries went on, parish churches tended to be erected as private buildings by wealthy individuals. From this came the large number of lay patrons in England who derived their right to appoint a priest from having built the church on their own land. By the late tenth century, the tithe, a tenth of the farmer’s crops, was legally owed to the Church to support the parish priest. A hundred years later the English lord saw it as part of his duty to give the Church a third of his manor lands’ income.

On the death of Oswy in 670 Northumbria began to lose her position as the dominant kingdom in England to Mercia. Oswy’s son Egfrith had not inherited his father’s practical nature and wasted his kingdom’s resources on fruitless attempts to expand north into the country of the elusive Picts. The eighth century in England is generally known as the period of the Mercian Supremacy under two powerful kings–Ethelbald (716–57) and Offa (757–96).

The period was also to be celebrated for the flowering of the Northumbrian Church in what has been called the heroic age of Anglo-Saxon Christianity as the traditions established by the zealously pious Northumbrian kings and monks at Lindisfarne came to fruition. Its Irish roots gave it a strong pietistic strain as well as the profound sense of mission of its great founders like St Aidan. By the late seventh century the English Church was sending missionaries back to Germany to convert the lands of their heathen forebears. The mission to Saxony was begun by the Bishop of York Wilfred of Ripon, when he was wrecked off the coast of Frisia. It was continued by his pupil St Willibrord and by Willibrord’s contemporary St Boniface.

Strong links were also established between the Northumbrian Church and the new regime in France, where the great tradition of English scholarship of the eighth century helped create a revival of western learning–what is called the eighth-century Carolingian Renaissance. Among the fruits of these contacts was the Palace School founded by the greatest of the Carolingian kings, Charlemagne, where young Frankish nobles and promising boys from poor families could be educated. The blond, magnificent Charlemagne, who could neither read nor write himself, set great store by education. The heathen German Saxons who were given a choice of ‘Baptism or death’ by his conquering soldiers would have been surprised to know that Charlemagne slept with a slate beneath his pillow, hoping to learn by osmosis the magic letters he found so difficult.

In England the power of Mercia meant that for the first time King Ethelbald began to style himself King of All South England, while Offa his successor simply called himself King of the English. This he was certainly in a position to do: except in Northumbria and Wessex, where the ancient house of the West Saxons continued in very reduced circumstances, King Offa directly ruled most of the rest of the country. A superb soldier who introduced a magnificent struck coinage with fine silver pennies in imitation of Roman currency, he also adopted Roman methods to keep the Welsh British out of England, constructing his famous Dyke from sea to sea which can still be seen today. Offa was a notable protector of the Church, which he encouraged as a source of stability and education, supporting it with grants of land and building many abbeys.

During the long reigns of the two strong Mercian kings which between them covered almost the whole century, England prospered as never before. From being the barbarians of Europe, the English had become renowned for their orderly way of life and exemplary scholarship. Charlemagne corresponded with Offa and called him ‘brother’, an epithet he accorded to very few people, and Offa made the first extant European trading treaty on behalf of the English with Charlemagne. It provides for reciprocal rights of free passage for merchants visiting France or England to be enforced by local officials.

In 787 with great pageantry and ceremonial King Offa’s daughter Eadburgha was married to Beohtric, the King of the West Saxons. The marriage brought even more of the West Saxons’ territory within Offa’s orbit: he had already annexed all the West Saxons’ land north of the Thames. Such was Offa’s prestige that he could persuade the pope to split the see of Canterbury in two in order to give Mercia its own archbishopric at Lichfield in Staffordshire. However, despite King Offa’s unique position abroad and at home it was during his reign that an external force of far greater magnitude first began to threaten England.

Shortly after his daughter’s magnificent nuptials in Wessex, three enormous ships appeared off the Dorset coast, each of them almost eighty feet long and seventeen feet wide–the size of a large house or hall. The ships, which had sailed from Denmark, put in to the harbour at Portland, full of strange, grim men from the north. Instead of responding civilly when one of King Beohtric’s officials asked them to accompany him so that they could be registered in the nearest town of Dorchester, as was the practice in those peaceful times, the foreigners turned on the customs official and killed him. ‘These’, says The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ominously, ‘were the first ships of the Danishmen which sought the land of the English nation.’ There were many more to come.

Those three ships are the first mention in English history of a fearsome Scandinavian people called the Vikings. For the next 200 years they would destroy much of the newly erected structure of medieval Christendom by their lightning raids. The Vikings’ name came from the old Norse word vik meaning creek or fjord and they themselves were land-hungry young men from the creeks of Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Brilliant sailors at a time when the nations of north-west Europe had forgotten the art of seamanship in favour of agriculture, the Vikings were also enthusiastic traders and adventurers who roamed the seas, bartering hides from their own countries with whatever took their fancy in foreign ports. But they also had the bloodlust that Christianity had damped down in the Angles and Saxons. The Vikings sacrificed to their cruel old gods of Thor and Odin with death and destruction, believing that only by bloodshed would they reach the afterlife.

For some time in the early years of the ninth century rumours had been sweeping the Scandinavians that Charlemagne’s conquest of the Frisians, the north German policemen of the Baltic, meant that there were no longer any Frisian warships protecting western seas. Very rich pickings were to be had there. At the same time there had been a rapid increase in the numbers of Scandinavian people, something of a population explosion. The Vikings were landless young men who took to raiding to feed themselves as there were not enough fields to support them beside their narrow Norwegian fjords. Self-sufficient and independent, used to ruling themselves in their isolated hamlets and lonely forests, they were irked by the strengthened powers of the monarchy under powerful kings in Denmark and Norway, like Harold Fairhair, the first King of Norway. Pastures new were what they needed, and these they sought with a vengeance. The coasts of eastern England and the north coast of the Frankish Empire, as Charlemagne’s sprawling lands were known, were now at the mercy of any Viking expedition strong enough to overcome resistance at the point where they landed. And again and again they would come, from the icy capes of the Baltic to Britain’s fertile and warmer shores.

Fifty years earlier in 732, western Christendom had just succeeded under Charlemagne’s grandfather Charles Martel in defeating the Muslim warriors who had conquered Spain, beating them in the Pyrenees and throwing them out of France. But now Christian European civilization was in danger again as the Viking ships harried the north European coasts.

The 300-year era when the Vikings overran Europe displays many similarities to the earlier ‘Dark Ages’. Once again, particularly during the ninth century, much of the learning which had been cultivated so painstakingly to replace the devastation of the German migrations vanished. The light given to Europe by Christianity flickered and very nearly went out. Today it would be as if all our public libraries and publishing houses and schools were burned to the ground systematically, with never enough time to rebuild them.

Unfortunately for England many of her most important monasteries which were centres of learning like Lindisfarne were especially vulnerable to the Norsemen, owing to their founders’ wish for solitude. Situated on unprotected promontories jutting out to sea, or on islands far away from the king’s soldiers, they were sitting ducks. The Vikings had no sense of their sacredness but thought only of the chapels’ famous gold chalices and jewelled ornaments.

The Norsemen’s shallow-draught boats were designed to travel swiftly up rivers and estuaries. Their longboats with their vast striped single sails, their snapping dragon-head prows, their shields hung out over the side and huge chainmailed warriors became the sight on the horizon most dreaded by coastal dwellers. The Vikings were stealthy fighters and often moved by night. They would put down their oars, take up their broadswords, disembark and kill the helpless monks even if they were at prayer, before seizing all the gold and silver which the monasteries had collected over two centuries. They would then be off, leaving buildings in flames behind them and despair among the survivors.

Ninth-century Vikings in England and Ireland were responsible for the loss of very nearly all of the priceless monastery libraries, built up by monks painstakingly copying manuscripts by hand. Before printing was invented that was the only way to make a copy of a book. Thousands and thousands of illuminated manuscripts whose great initialled letters occupied a whole piece of vellum and took a year for a monk to paint, became ashes beneath the fallen masonry. Only a tiny number of early manuscripts survived the onslaught of the Vikings, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the eighth-or ninth-century Book of Kells, which was probably made on Iona but carried over to Ireland. Both are now on display in the British Library. Lindisfarne itself, the great centre of English religious life for two centuries, was destroyed in a Viking raid in 793 and the helpless monks slaughtered. It was followed a year later by Jarrow, birthplace of Bede, and the next year by Iona.

It is hard for us to imagine today how frightening the Viking threat seemed. But the thought of their ships lurking offshore began to prey on the confidence of the peoples of England and France. To the terrified inhabitants of England the burning of Lindisfarne was a sign that God was angry with them, for Lindisfarne was an especially holy place. Why had He let it be destroyed? The Viking plague and their barbaric ways–‘Where we go the ravens follow and drink our victims’ blood!’ they sang as they disembarked in their horned helmets–made them bogeymen to the Christian nations. It was no wonder that the Mass each Sunday began to include the heartfelt prayer: ‘From the fury of the Vikings, save us O Lord!’

There were three kinds of Vikings and they moved in three separate directions. While the Swedish Vikings swept east in their thousands under their chief Rurik to found the Kievan Rus or first Russian state, the Norwegian Vikings sailed west and founded Greenland. Two centuries later, about the year 1000, they would discover North America, putting in at what is now New England, which they called Vinland. They sailed down the west coast of Scotland and across to Ireland, where they founded Viking cities like Dublin and Cork and laid waste almost all the wealthy monasteries in the north of the country. They descended on the Orkneys, Caithness, Ross, Galloway, Dumfries, the Isle of Man, Cumberland, Westmorland, Cheshire, Lancashire and the coast of South Wales. Whirling their double-headed axes, against which there was no response, they carried many of the inhabitants into slavery.

The third kind of Viking, known as the ‘inner line’, concentrated their unwelcome attentions on the southern coast of England and the north coast of continental Europe. These Vikings were Danes from Denmark, whose ancestors had moved into the districts left empty by the Angles when they went to England in the fifth century. At first the Danish Vikings came only in small bands, for during the first thirty years of the ninth century a strong Danish monarchy and the remnants of Charlemagne’s diplomacy protected southern England and France from the worst of danger. But the collapse of the Danish monarchy with the death of King Horik removed the last constraint, and the mid-ninth century saw the high tide of Danish Viking expansion, spearheaded by Ragnar Lodbrok (Ragnar Hairy Breeches) and his myriad warrior sons.

As the Vikings became more successful, their fleet on the high seas grew dramatically. At the height of their power in the 860s it numbered 350 ships. With one hundred fighting men on board each craft and the experience of thirty years of warfare, the Danish Vikings were a lethal striking force and increasingly daring and aggressive. From merely being coastal raiders, who in a sense could be lived with, the Vikings of the mid-ninth century started to spend the winter in the countries they raided, showing their utter contempt for the local community.

Vikings began to anchor large fleets in the loughs and estuaries of Ireland and build forts on her eastern shore. Their intention was not just to raid, but to drive out the native population and settle. It was on Holy Saturday 845, the day before Easter, that the full extent of Viking ambitions were understood. On that Easter eve even the most notorious Viking of the ninth century, the fearsome chief Ragnar Lodbrok, sailed up the Seine and sacked Paris. The citizenry fled and the churches were abandoned. Ragnar Lodbrok had successfully struck at the heart of the kingdom which had dominated Europe so recently under Charlemagne. Before the appalled eyes of the Frankish king Charles the Bald, Ragnar Lodbrok hung 111 citizens from trees and let another hundred go only when he was paid 7,000 pounds of silver. Then, his red beard glinting in the pale spring sun, he made a sarcastic bow to the terrified king and took himself off to the open seas once more. But there was no doubt among the watching crowds where power lay. It was certainly not with the king.

From now on Danish Viking armies took up more or less permanent quarters on the Rhine, the Scheldt, the Somme, the Seine, the Loire and the Garonne. In 859 Vikings were fighting in Morocco and carrying off prisoners to their Irish bases. The sons of Ragnar Lodbrok sailed to Luna in Italy and captured it under the illusion that they had come to Rome itself. The Vikings now had all but encircled Europe with their raids, for in the year 865 the Swedish Vikings who founded Russia laid siege to Constantinople.

It was against this background in 849 that the man was born at Wantage in Berkshire who was to save England from the Vikings. He is known to history as Alfred the Great, and he was a prince of the royal house of Wessex.