Alfred the Great to the Battle of Hastings (865–1066)

Wessex was the kingdom of the West Saxons. According to folk memory its founders were chieftain Cerdic and his son Cynric in 495 when they landed at what is now Southampton but which they called Hamwic. (The suffix ‘wic’ comes from the Latin word vicus meaning a place, hence Ipswich and Norwich.) The eighth-century supremacy of the Mercian kings had put an end to Wessex occupying the valley of the lower Severn, but this kingdom–which began in the lush and rolling pastures of Hampshire–still ended at Bristol to the north, and incorporated all of Dorset and Somerset. The West Saxons were not only good military strategists. They were a reflective and organized people. One of their most important kings was Ine, who at the end of the seventh century had issued a code or accumulation of the West Saxon laws.

By the third decade of the ninth century the Mercian supremacy in England had yielded to that of Wessex as, benefiting from vigorous rulers, the kingdom continued to grow rapidly. In 825 Alfred’s grandfather Egbert decisively defeated the Mercians at the Battle of Ellandune and thereafter the old Mercian tributaries of Kent, Essex, Surrey and Sussex became permanently part of the kingdom of Wessex and had no further separate existence. Egbert, who ruled for thirty-seven years, also finally put an end to the West Welsh or Cornish as an independent power by occupying Devon up to the Tamar; henceforth the Cornish paid Wessex an annual tribute. Only East Anglia, Mercia, Wales and Northumberland remained separate from the kingdom of Wessex but acknowledged Egbert as their overlord. And when Egbert obtained Kent he became the protector of English Christianity because it was the seat of the Primate of all England.

The expansion of the Wessex kingdom was played out against the background of the increasingly daring raids of the Danish Vikings. As we have seen, they were beginning to pose a real threat to the peace and security of the whole of England from the 830s onwards; over the next thirty years there are records of at least twelve attacks, and there were probably many more. But as the records were mainly chronicles kept by monks they tend to be incomplete because so many were destroyed during the raids. In the 840s Vikings devastated East Anglia and Kent, attacked Wrekin in Mercia and in 844 killed the king of Northumbria. But at least they went away again, taking their booty with them.

Ten years later the situation was worse. The Vikings were moving in greater numbers, operating in concert with one another, as opposed to the single-ship raids of earlier years. To contemporaries they had taken on the appearance of a ‘pagan army’. In 851 King Ethelwulf, father of Alfred the Great, defeated a fleet of Vikings several hundred ships strong attacking Canterbury and London which had driven King Beorhtwulf of Mercia into exile. Another Wessex prince, Ethelbert, one of Alfred’s brothers, who ruled Kent for his father, defeated a Danish army off the coast at Sandwich. Despite these successes, in 855 a large Viking fleet took up permanent winter quarters on the Isle of Sheppey, menacingly close at the end of the Medway to the mouth of the River Thames. The Vikings began building forts there. Many Londoners feared that, just as the Vikings had sailed straight up the Seine to Paris, it was only a matter of time before the Vikings sailed up the Thames and took London. As a result of his family’s victories over the Danes, the Wessex that King Ethelwulf handed on to his sons was the most important kingdom in England. But the whole country continued to live in the shadow of another Viking invasion. Ten years later what had been feared for so long came to pass. In 865 a ‘Great Army’ of Danish Vikings landed in East Anglia with the obvious intention of conquering and settling the whole of Anglo-Saxon England and making it a Danish Viking kingdom.

Although there had been isolated raids on England the Viking attack on Jarrow in 794 had not been an altogether triumphant experience as it had resulted in the death by torture of the expedition’s leader. This may have made the Vikings more wary of England. Certainly for much of the ninth century they tended to concentrate their larger numbers on France and Ireland. In about 855 Ragnar Lodbrok, who had forced the French king Charles the Bald to hand over 7,000 pounds of silver, at last fell into the hands of Aelle, the King of Northumbria. Ragnar Lodbrok had been raiding Northumbria with impunity, and seeking ever greater speed (according to legend) had built two boats so large that they proved unmanageable. Cursing his folly, the greatest Viking of them all was wrecked off the coast.

Ragnar Lodbrok was captured, tortured and thrown into a dungeon where he died a lingering and painful death among poisonous snakes, humiliated by the mocking faces of the Northumbrian court who came to gloat over the giant red-headed Viking. But even as he wasted away on his filthy palliasse and the Northumbrians congratulated themselves on their capture of the man who had terrified half Europe, Ragnar Lodbrok would not expire quietly. From his prison deep below the castle walls the old sea king could be heard roaring terrible songs of death and glory and prophesying the reign of terror that would begin when his sons came for his murderers. ‘Many fall into the jaws of the wolf,’ he sang, ‘the hawk plucks the flesh from the wild beasts.’ But while he would soon be enjoying feasts in the halls of Valhalla, ‘where we shall drink ale continually from the large hollowed skulls’, his sons would soon be drinking from the Northumbrians’ skulls. Meanwhile, as the snakes rustled beneath him, he called on his sons to avenge him: ‘Fifty battles I have fought and won. Never I thought that snakes would be my death. The little pigs would grunt if they knew of the old boar’s need.’

And the little pigs did more than grunt as they grew up. Ten years later those little pigs, Ivar the Boneless, Halfdan and Ubba arrived at the head of the Danish Great Army and exacted a terrible price for the death of their father. Landing on the coast of East Anglia in 865 they laid waste the countryside until they had obtained provisions and horses from the terrified farmers. Then they galloped north up the Roman Ermine Street, which still ran so conveniently along the east coast of England, to York, the capital of Northumbria. By 867 the whole of Northumbria, its government already weakened by civil war, was in the hands of the Danish Great Army. They had their revenge, killing both King Aelle and his rival and eight of their military leaders or ealdormen. A puppet king named Egbert was put in to rule the former kingdom of their father’s executioner.

But Ivar the Boneless and Halfdan were not content just with Northumbria. Now the Great Army, which was many thousands strong, wheeled about, crossed the Humber and went south to take possession of Nottingham, the capital of once powerful Mercia. Although an army came up to help from Wessex, because the Mercian king Burghred was married to Alfred’s sister Ethelswith, the Danes cunningly refused to come out from their defensive earthworks. In the end the Mercians had to agree to pay them to go away. After wintering again in York and causing misery to its citizens, the Great Army moved back south to East Anglia. On the way the Vikings destroyed the beautiful and ancient monastery at Medeshamstede (Peterborough), killing the abbot and monks and burning the celebrated library. In East Anglia the brave young King Edmund led an army against them. But he was taken prisoner and then horribly murdered at Hoxne, twenty-five miles east of Bury St Edmunds: he was tied to a tree where he was used for archery practice before being beheaded. The abbey of the town of Bury St Edmunds was erected in the murdered king’s honour over his burial place. East Anglia too was now another kingdom of the Vikings.

In five years three of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, all the land north of London–that is Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria–had fallen to the Danes like ripe apples off a tree. Only Wessex remained Anglo-Saxon. The others were now in effect a huge Danish kingdom run according to Danish law. Thanks to poor and haphazard military organization and no fleet to protect their coasts they had been easy meat for any enemy with a standing army and an urge to conquer. Although the fyrd required men to spend forty days a year fighting, it was unpopular and its call often ignored. Of those who did respond most of its members preferred not to fight beyond their kingdom’s boundaries. Rather like jury service today the forty days might come at the worst possible moment, perhaps when the peasant farmer was desperate to bring his harvest in before it rained.

If the isolated raids earlier in the century had been terrible, the permanent presence of the marauding Danish Great Army gave daily life the oppressive feel of a never-ending nightmare. The Trewhiddle Hoard, an important collection of early church silver (now in the British Museum), was hidden in a tree by a priest who never came back for it. It is a mute memento of the continuous slaughter that took place and the destruction of a culture which had developed over two-and-a-half centuries. There is a chronicle written by an eyewitness, a monk of Croyland in the Fens, which gives a typical account of the arrival of a Viking war-party as it was experienced throughout England and describes how the soil shook beneath the pounding hooves of the heathen Danes’ armoured horses as they travelled from Lincolnshire to Norfolk. The abbot of Croyland and his monks were at their morning prayers when a terror-stricken fugitive ran in to tell them that the Vikings were on their way. Some of the monks took to their boats and rowed away from the monastery praying that in the mists and marshes of the Fens they would not be found. But the rest were slaughtered where they stood.

By the autumn of 870 the Danes decided to conquer the last of the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England which remained independent, namely Wessex. But they had finally met their match. Although the present king of Wessex, Ethelred, was not gifted with determination and was more concerned with his spiritual life than with preserving the safety of the kingdom, his younger brother and co-commander Alfred, who was soon to succeed him, was the heir to all the best qualities of West Saxon kingship. Alfred was the fourth and youngest son of King Ethelwulf, who had passed on to him a strong sense of his duty to resist the destruction of Christendom by the Vikings. Ethelwulf had also inspired Alfred with memories of the most constructive sort of Christian kingship handed on to him by his own father Egbert, who had spent his early life at the court of Charlemagne. Alfred was taken to Rome by his father at least twice on pilgrimages to invoke God’s goodwill towards Wessex and protect her from the Viking plague. Reflecting fears among the West Saxons that Christian civilization might die out in England because of the repeated attacks of the Danes, Ethelwulf had designated one-tenth of his kingdom’s revenues to be given to the Church to ensure that learning continued.

The sense of learning’s almost irreversible decline, now that so many monks and priests had been killed, was a subject which would obsess Alfred himself. Once king he would embark on an extraordinary programme to re-educate the English. In later years he would remember that during his childhood ‘there was not one priest south of the Thames who could understand the Latin of the Mass-book and very few in the rest of England’. As a result Alfred himself did not learn to read until the age of twelve, and then only by his own efforts because there were no monks left to teach even a king’s son.

Alfred’s dictum, ‘I know nothing worse of a man than that he should not know’, reminds us that as a result of four decades of Viking raids knowledge could no longer be taken for granted. Latin was the language of learning but as there was no one to teach him Latin–Alfred only learned it when he was forty–much was lost to him, as it was to many other English people. The Welsh monk Asser, who became bishop of Sherborne, wrote a famous contemporary life of Alfred in which he relates that the king told him ‘with many lamentations and sighs’ that it was one of the greatest impediments in his life that when he was young and had the capacity for study he could not find teachers.

Thus when the Danish army decided to turn their unwelcome attentions on Wessex by capturing the royal city of Reading at Christmas 870 they encountered resistance to the death, for to Alfred this was a battle to save English civilization. But it was touch and go. Just when the actual king of Wessex, Ethelred, ought to have been marshalling the attack on the Danes on the Ridgeway in Berkshire, he insisted on listening to the end of the Mass. While Alfred was lining up his part of the army in the famous Anglo-Saxon battle formation called the shieldwall, Ethelred refused to come out of his tent, declaring that as long as he lived he would never leave a service before the priest had finished. Meanwhile the terrifying Danish army were hurling their javelins at the Wessex men below their ridge and keeping up a deafening noise by banging their shields. Ethelred continued to listen to the incantations of the priest as the twenty-one-year-old Alfred took the offensive and charged up the escarpment. His men fought so fiercely around a stunted thorn tree that quite soon, despite their mail shirts, many leading Vikings lay dead on the ridge. The rest soon fled.

Although this was far from being a conclusive engagement (it would be many years before the tide finally turned for the English under Alfred), it was the first time that the Danes had been beaten in open battle. When Ethelred died in his twenties and Alfred became king in 871 he bought time to recover from the Danes by signing a peace treaty. The Danes themselves were glad of a temporary lull. They were exhausted by the ferocity of Alfred’s attacks whenever they ventured out of the fortress they had built at Reading. Fortunately the Great Army was then distracted by a revolt in their northern possessions and, having put it down and hammered the kingdom of Strathclyde in south-west Scotland, half of its soldiers under their leader Halfdan decided to tangle no more with Wessex. They would remain in the north and make it a proper Danish kingdom instead of ruling through a native puppet. Under Halfdan as king the Danish Vikings took over much of the old kingdom of Northumbria, corresponding approximately to Yorkshire today (as is shown by the concentration of Danish place names in that county: the suffixes ‘-wick’, ‘-ness’, ‘-thorpe’, ‘-thwaite’ and ‘-by’ are all indications of Scandinavian settlements). Danish soldiers became farmers. They made their capital at Yorvik and organized the land for taxation purposes in the Danish way by wapentakes instead of by hundreds as in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

By 874 the Danish army had further consolidated its hold on the rest of occupied England. Most of Mercia other than the small area to the west of Watling Street was parcelled out between Danish nobles. Thus the whole of England from the Thames to the Humber was ruled by Danes in a federation of settlements called the Five Boroughs: Lincoln, Stamford, Nottingham, Derby and Leicester.

But the other half of the Danish army which had not settled in the north still had their eye on the rich southern lands of Wessex, that is Berkshire, Hampshire, Dorset and Devon, which were slowly recovering from the Great Army’s depredations. After four years of inactivity the rest of that army decided to return to the fray under its king, Guthrum. Accordingly it moved south to Grantabridge (which we call Cambridge) and began to harass Wessex again. It now occurred to Alfred that the only way to stop the Vikings calling for help and reinforcement from their cousins’ fleet in the Channel off France was to defeat the Vikings at sea before they reached land. He therefore sent for the Vikings’ old enemies, the Frisians, and invited them to show the English how to build their style of ships, which had previously been a match for the Vikings. The ships which resulted were faster and longer than those of the Vikings. Alfred can justly be said to be the father of the Royal Navy.

While Alfred laid siege to Exeter, where the enemy was currently holing up, sailors on the new ships were appointed to watch the coast and prevent Guthrum’s Great Army from obtaining supplies by sea. Undaunted by rumours about Alfred’s navy, the Danes sent messages for help to their Viking relations in France, who under their leader Rollo were in the middle of forcing the Franks to grant them what in 911 would become the kingdom of Normandy (or the kingdom of the Norsemen). The new navy’s first encounter was with a massive force of 120 French Viking ships crossing the Channel with some 10,000 men. Fortunately poor weather played into Alfred’s hands. For once the indomitable Vikings were tired out by battling with storms. They were defeated by Alfred’s navy and their fleet destroyed off Sandwich on the coast of Dorset. Guthrum and his army were allowed to ride out of Exeter and travel to Gloucester in Danish Mercia after they had sworn solemn oaths that they would leave Wessex alone.

But the Danes were not men of their word. They soon broke the Treaty of Exeter. Guthrum had drawn up a plan with Ubba, Ragnar Lodbrok’s youngest son who was now king of Dyfed and was laying waste South Wales, whereby they would both attack Wessex. At Christmas 878, believing that the Danes would abide by their oaths, Alfred had told all his thanes to return to their estates. Meanwhile he was alone with his young family in the royal palace at Chippenham, dangerously close to Gloucester. Just after Twelfth Night a messenger brought him the news that an enormous Danish army was ‘covering the earth like locusts’ and on its way to Chippenham.

By midnight the Danish army had occupied Chippenham, and the king and his family had only just escaped them by fleeing to the unnavigable marshes of east Somerset. The submission of most of the West Saxon nobles followed. They were exhausted by the unending war. Many left their lands to flee abroad, ruined by the obligation to feed the occupying army. Alfred the Great, however, would not submit. While the Danes once more divided up Wessex between them he stayed in hiding with a few nobles on the Isle of Athelney in Somerset. This was dry ground at the confluence of the Tone and the Parrett, surrounded by marshes and impassable rivers where no one could enter except by boat. In the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford may be seen a wonderful little artefact of the most exquisite Anglo-Saxon workmanship. Made of enamel, gold and precious stones and decorated with Christian symbols it bears the legend ‘Alfred me fecit’, which means ‘Alfred had me made’ in Latin. Alfred must have dropped the jewel there when he was camping on the island, for 1,100 years later it was dug up on Athelney by a local farmer.

On the island Alfred and his men lived roughly with few of the necessities of life except what they could forage openly or stealthily by raids. The king himself lived in a hut belonging to one of his cowherds. To this period belong many famous legends about him. One day the wife of the cowherd was preparing cakes (scones probably) for the oven and Alfred, who was still only in his twenties, was sitting at the hearth trimming his arrows and dreaming of the day when his country would be free. The goodwife asked the disguised king, whom, in his homespun clothes, she took to be another shepherd cluttering up her house, to keep an eye on the cakes while she went for some water from the spring near by. But Alfred was so lost in thought planning the next attack that the cakes burned quite black without his noticing–to the fury of the cowherd’s wife, who shouted crossly at him as if he were a kitchen boy. The horrified cowherd had not told his wife who their guest was, but he now revealed his identity and she was covered with confusion. But King Alfred only laughed and told her she had been right to scold and that he should have been minding the cakes. Years later when he was restored to his kingdom he sent for the couple and rewarded them for helping him in his hour of need. Alfred continued to resist the Danish by guerrilla raids and built an impregnable fort on the island where his family could be safe. It is said that he even went into the Danish camp disguised as a harper. He wandered from tent to tent playing and singing but also secretly noting the number of men and the position they occupied.

Thanks to Alfred’s perseverance news spread among the West Saxons that all was not lost and that the king was secretly gathering an army of Wessex men on the twenty-four acres of the island. Support for Alfred grew so rapidly that by the seventh week after Easter 878 a huge number of West Saxon men from Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire came out of hiding to meet him at Egbert’s Stone, now Brixton Deverill in Wiltshire.

Alfred met the enemy at Edington near the Danish camp at Chippenham. After a siege of fourteen days he won the decisive engagement of the war. It was said that the Danish standard, a raven with outstretched wings which had been woven by the daughters of Ragnar Lodbrok in a single day, drooped and did not fly before the battle. It was an omen of the defeat to come by the White Horse of Wessex, the emblem which adorned Alfred’s banner. So complete was the rout of the Danes that Alfred was finally able to dictate the sort of terms which pleased him, including forcing the Danes to accept Christianity. The Danes made a treaty, wrote the chronicler, ‘such as they had never given to anyone before’. By the Treaty of Wedmore in Somerset the pagan army had to vacate Wessex and surrender southern and western Mercia to Alfred. Guthrum, the pagan king, would have to be baptized, with Alfred standing as godfather. Guthrum, who was given the baptismal name of Athelstan, thus became Alfred’s adopted son, and there was now a relationship between them which would be taboo to break.

Although Alfred had won a major victory, his kingdom was still surrounded by hostile Danish territory. And that autumn yet another Viking force under a leader named Haesten appeared at the mouth of the Thames aided by Guthrum, despite his treaty with Alfred, and proceeded west up the river to make its winter headquarters at Fulham. Though it disappeared briefly to Ghent after two years of terrorizing Fulham, the Viking fleet then sailed back and forth between England and France laying waste to Kent and besieging the city of Rochester in 884. Only the bravery of Alfred’s army succeeded in frightening it off for good.

Alfred had learned a valuable lesson from the siege of Rochester. His towns needed to be better defended and should be able to function as fortresses. The fyrd also had to be reformed into a more reliable army with a longer period of service. Alfred’s solution was to divide it into two, with one half on active service, the other on home leave. He also created a network of defences in southern England which had never been attempted before, centred on fortified walled towns called burhs (from which derives the word borough). These were built in a girdle round Wessex so that no member of the kingdom would be more than twenty miles from a refuge against the Danes. There were about thirty of them and they ranged from Southwark in the east through Oxford, Cricklade and Malmesbury to Pilton in north Devon and all along the south coast from Halwell in Devon to Hastings in east Sussex.

In tandem with the invention of burhs went Alfred’s reform of local government in Wessex. Made autocratic by the desperate nature of his situation he increased royal power by overriding the ancient boundaries of the hundreds, and divided the country into official shires. Each shire’s government was centred on a burh containing a shire court, the shire and burh being run by one of Alfred’s royal ealdormen, whose powers could override those of the local lord. These men were responsible for implementing royal commands to raise taxes or call out the fyrd and would be expected to find men to garrison the burh in time of war as well as to undertake general public works for the shire such as repairing bridges or the walls of the burh itself. As the house of Wessex took over more of England the shire system spread throughout the country, so that by the beginning of the eleventh century the whole of England south of the Tees was divided into shires.

The local bishop was as important a figure in the shire as the royal ealdormen, who in time saw their powers transferred to the shire reeve, or sheriff. The bishop would help preside over the shire court and would often have partial responsibility for the money supply because, as fortified places created by a charter from central government, the burhs usually contained a mint.

Despite the strengthening of the monarchy under Alfred, like every Anglo-Saxon king since the most ancient times he continued to rule and pass laws with the approval of the institution known as the witena gemot, the king’s council. As the Wessex kings took over more and more of the country the witan acquired the character of a national assembly.

By 866 Alfred had become a symbol of hope for the English. He had reconquered their most important city, London, from the Danes–burning many of the Danish settlements there to teach the treacherous Guthrum a lesson. London could once again be the entrepôt of English national and international trade. This was the first time that other Englishmen realized that the Danish occupation was not necessarily a permanent state of affairs, but might one day be reversed. Alfred gave permission for the Danes to remain in a ghetto, the Aldwick (that is, Aldwych, commemorated by the church of St Clement Danes), but he rebuilt London to emphasize its importance as a centre of English life. He founded much of the area of today’s modern city, creating new streets between Cheapside and the Thames and building a palace for himself at Old Minster. Instead of leaving it as the undefended open settlement it had become under the Mercians, running along the side of the Thames in the area now covered by the Strand and Fleet Street, he moved the city back within the Roman walls. He also founded Southwark to protect the river at its shallowest point, as that was the main route into London.

The English Mercians asked Alfred to be their overlord in return for his protection. But the king thought it best to be tactful about ruling their territory, which had such a proud history. He therefore made a Mercian nobleman, Ethelred, the ruler of the Mercians with rights over London, and married him to his daughter Ethelflaed. Many of the Welsh princes thought it wise to follow suit, so he became their overlord too. He was described by a contemporary as ‘king over the whole kin of the English except that part which was under the power of the Danes’. Many authorities see this moment, when Alfred is acknowledged as a leader of the English against the Danes, as an important stage in the advance of the English peoples towards political unity, a unity which had been forged by national danger. Alfred was the first person to call the English ‘Angelcynn’, which means the ‘English folk’. However it would not be until the end of the tenth century in the reign of Alfred’s great-grandson Edgar that the concept of ‘Englaland’ as a political unit would be adopted.

A second treaty, known as Alfred’s and Guthrum’s Peace, between Wessex and the cowed Danes provided a new boundary between Alfred’s kingdom and the Danish territory, or Danelaw. West Saxon Mercia was to consist of the land north of the Thames to the River Lea on the frontier of Guthrum’s kingdom of East Anglia, up to Bedford where it followed the old Roman road of Watling Street before ending at Chester on the Welsh borders. The boundary of Wessex with Danish East Anglia was redrawn at the latter’s expense. Though the area Alfred controlled was large, the Danelaw was larger still, but such was the respect the Vikings had for the king of Wessex that the treaty also secured the rights of English subjects living within Guthrum’s Danelaw so that there was no discrimination against them in law.

As the first king to defeat the Vikings Alfred’s fame spread all over the continent. He was so highly esteemed by the pope as a Christian hero who had driven off the heathen that the Anglo-Saxon school in Rome was not taxed and the pope sent him what was supposedly a piece of the True Cross on which Christ had been crucified–the greatest honour he could bestow. Now that Alfred had secured the kingdom against further external and internal threats the rest of his reign could be dedicated to rebuilding a kingdom whose institutions had been almost destroyed by the Danish wars. Half the royal taxes were donated to the Church each year to rebuild monasteries at home and abroad and so begin the revival of learning, while, since so few of the English people knew any Latin, the king personally oversaw the translation into Anglo-Saxon of books he considered important. Alfred himself translated Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, saying it was ‘one of the books most necessary for all men to know’, as well as Orosius’ history of the world. His translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s suggestions for pastoral care in the running of a parish was distributed to every bishop with instructions to make copies of it. Alfred also added notes to his translations where he thought it might help the reader, for he believed that everybody should have access to knowledge whosoever they were. His translation of Orosius contains descriptions of the ninth century’s idea of the geography of northern and central Europe, obtained from adventurous Scandinavian visitors to his court, such as a Norwegian named Ohthere who had lived inside the Arctic Circle, as well as from his own sailors whom he urged to explore the unknown. In order that his people should enjoy what he had sorely missed Alfred paid for scholars to come from abroad–Frisians, Franks and the Welsh–to help him raise educational standards. Asser remembered him remarking sadly that ‘Formerly people came hither to this land in search of wisdom and teaching and we must now obtain them from without.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dunstan did not live to see his prophecy fulfilled. But in the fourth year of Ethelred’s reign it seemed to come to pass when after almost a century of absence a new Danish army arrived in England. These Vikings landed at Southampton in 982, as piratical and cruel as their ancestors of a hundred years before, probably inspired to invade by rumours that England was ruled by boy-kings and priests. In the next decade the whole of the south coast and East Anglia were continually attacked.

Ethelred had none of his great-great-grandfather Alfred’s iron will. In 991 after a Danish victory at the Battle of Maldon in Essex he notoriously made the first payment of Danegeld in England’s history–that is, he paid the Danes to go away. The first payment was £10,000, an enormous sum, and was taken from everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. But £10,000 was not enough. Encouraged by the ease with which they had obtained it, the Danes soon returned for more. They demanded £16,000, then £24,000, then £32,000–the equivalent in today’s terms of millions of pounds. Having to find the money for the Danegeld tax led to a dramatic increase in the number of free peasants forced to become serfs: many had to abandon their own subsistence farming and become farm labourers tied to the manor’s fields in order to pay back the tax money lent them by the local landowner.

The word Danegeld has become infamous ever since in English culture as shorthand for a cowardly and ultimately shortsighted course of action. Ethelred tried to buy freedom when he should have fought for it, never thinking that the Danes would ask for more when the money ran out. During his reign, the English lost the old fighting spirit that had defeated the Danes before. Morale plunged. Out of the thirty-two English counties, the Danes had soon overrun sixteen.

The whole country groaned under the assaults from the sea and the oppressive taxation. Ethelred now became known as Ethelred the Redeless or Unready. The meaning of this soubriquet has changed in the centuries since it was coined, for the English were making a rude pun out of his name. In Anglo-Saxon Ethel meant noble or good and rede meant counsel or advice. The name Ethelred thus meant good counsel. But because his actions always seemed the result of poor counsel Ethelred became known as Ethelred the Redeless, or Ethelred No Counsel.

To compound the feeling of hopelessness in England, Ethelred now married a Viking himself in order to curry favour with the Danes. He took for wife Emma of Normandy, whose father the duke was an ally of the aggressive Danish kings behind the new Viking raids. But Ethelred was incapable of a consistent course of action. In 1002 he turned on his Danish subjects living in the old Danelaw, giving secret orders that on 13 November, the feast day of St Brice, all the Danes in England should be butchered. Neighbours were told by the shire reeve to kill neighbours, hosts to massacre their Danish guests. It was a despicable act, violating all laws of hospitality, as well as intensifying racial divisions.

Gunhildis, the king of Denmark’s sister, was then living in England as the wife of an English nobleman. Unlike her brother King Sweyn Forkbeard, Gunhildis was a Christian and had pledged to improve relations between the Danes and the English. Though she threw herself on her knees before Ethelred crying for mercy and reminding him of all she had done for her adopted country, he commanded that she and her son be beheaded just the same.

But Ethelred had made the most disastrous miscalculation of his reign in refusing to spare the king of Denmark’s sister and nephew. Outraged by these murders and those of his fellow Danes, Sweyn Forkbeard avenged them by invading England in 1013. After ten years of softening England up by means of coastal raids while he made preparations for a full-scale invasion, Sweyn arrived in person at the head of an immense army. Showing as little mercy to the English as Ethelred had showed to the Danes, he killed all the English he encountered as he marched through East Anglia to Northumbria. Having received the submission of most of the country, he then besieged London–which was sheltering King Ethelred. The citizens of London, who then as now were known for their independence of mind, were preparing themselves to fight to the last man to save Ethelred.

But there was no need. The minute he saw Sweyn’s tents going up round the city walls, Ethelred, who was as indolent as he was cowardly, announced that he could not endure the boredom of a long siege. He fled in the night to Normandy, where he had sent his wife Emma and their two children to be protected by her brother. Sweyn would have become ruler of England had he not died suddenly, leaving Denmark and England to his son Cnut, a superb military strategist. But the English still harboured fond thoughts of their ancient West Saxon monarchy. At their invitation a reluctant Ethelred returned to England to lead the resistance against Cnut. When Ethelred died soon after, in 1016, the struggle was carried on by his son Edmund, offspring of an earlier marriage to an Englishwoman, and thanks to his tremendous physique known as Edmund Ironside. After six battles the two kings realized that they were so evenly matched that it was better to come to a power-sharing agreement. By the Treaty of Olney, a small island in the Severn river, Cnut became king of Northumbria and Mercia while Edmund Ironside remained King of Wessex. On Edmund’s death in November 1016 the ealdormen of Wessex chose Cnut to be their king as well and England was once again ruled by a single monarch.

To give greater legitimacy to his reign Cnut now married Ethelred’s widow Emma of Normandy, the mother of the future king Edward the Confessor. Although Cnut did not kill any of the old Anglo-Saxon heirs to the throne he did the next best thing. He despatched Edmund Ironside’s two sons to the king of Sweden with orders that they be executed. In the event they were preserved on account of their innocent appearance before being sent south-east to the court of the king of Hungary; their descendants married into both the Hungarian and Scottish royal families. Meanwhile the only other two serious claimants to the English throne, Emma’s sons Alfred and Edward, were protected in Normandy by their uncle Duke Richard. They were growing up more Norman than English.

England prospered under Cnut. By 1027 he had successfully invaded Scotland, forcing the king of the Scots, Malcolm II, to do homage to him as his vassal or under-king. Quite soon Cnut felt sure enough of his position in England to despatch home the remnants of the Danish army with which his father had seized England. Unlike the old West Saxon kings, however, he was perpetually watched over by a giant palace guard, his 3,000 Danish ‘housecarles’, and he still had a large standing navy. But though Cnut gave a good deal of English land to fellow Danes, there was no dispossession of the native aristocracy as there would be later under the Normans. He relied on English advisers to help him rule.

Cnut was in many ways very similar to the old German kings. He loved the military life, and evenings were passed relating campaigns in his great hall. But as a simple soldier what mattered to him was the truth, and he despised the flattery that many English courtiers used to curry favour with him–as the best-known story about him illustrates.

The king with several Englishmen was walking by the sea. ‘Your Majesty,’ said the boldest and most sycophantic Englishman, ‘we were thinking that Your Majesty is so powerful that everything in our country obeys you. Why, even the waves would obey you if you commanded them.’ At last Cnut had had enough of their absurdities. Turning on them he told them to bring a chair down to the waves and set it a little way from where the tide was coming in. ‘Now,’ he said, seating himself on the throne and watching the waves wet his feet, ‘I bid the waves retreat, but they pay no attention to me. I am not a fool, and I hope that next time you embark on silly compliments that you expect me to swallow, you will remember this and hold your tongues.’

The diminutive Cnut gave England an important new legal code. It reinforced the position of the Church and restated many of the ancient English customs as well as innovatively requiring every freeman to be part of the hundred and the tithing (a ten-man grouping within the hundred). By making its subjects responsible for preventing criminal activities by their fellows the kingdom became more orderly. Cnut was anxious to differentiate himself from other Vikings and to join the commonwealth of Christian nations. Attracted by the splendour and ancient nature of the Church, he went on pilgrimage to Rome to attend the coronation of Conrad II as Holy Roman Emperor, and could not resist exploiting the occasion to get customs relief for English pilgrims. The Danes who had accompanied him to England were made to adopt Christianity and he sent English bishops to Norway and Denmark to convert their populations. Cnut’s insistence that Sunday be kept as a day of rest and his enforcement of Church tithes soon won him the support of the Church bureaucracy, as did his sense of his royal duty as a moral preceptor.

The Danegeld Cnut exacted from his English subjects was enormous. Nevertheless some important Saxon families came to prominence during his reign. Cnut was often called away from England to rule his immense Nordic empire overseas, which consisted of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, as well as the Hebrides, and his English advisers had to rule in his absence. One particular Saxon family, the Godwins, who were thanes from Sussex, began a rise to power which would eventually lead to the throne. They profited from Cnut’s decision to divide England for administrative purposes into four earldoms, covering areas which followed the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms–East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria and Wessex. Unfortunately these earldoms had the effect of undoing much of the political unity of England created by Alfred and his descendants. Regional loyalties revived around them and became a source of weakness when a national will to resist was needed against the Normans. At first the earldom of Wessex was ruled by Cnut himself, but by 1020 the energetic and crafty Godwin had flourished sufficiently to become earl of Wessex. And as a result of his friendship with Cnut he was married to a Danish lady connected to the court.

Cnut died in 1035 aged only forty, like many a campaigner worn out by a life in the saddle, and his empire died with him. It had been held together partly by fear of his formidable personality. But its break-up was also a sign of changing times. For the previous 200 years the dominant force in Europe had been Scandinavian, whether it was the landless Vikings themselves or their kings. But for the next century European history would be shaped by those descendants of the Vikings, the Normans, who had settled in northern France after receiving a grant of land from the French king and theoretically becoming his vassals. Thirty-one years after Cnut’s death, the military genius of the Normans would conquer England, and their Duke William would become known as William the Conqueror.

The Normans were first alerted to the possibility of England as a new fiefdom when they heard news of the struggle for the royal succession in that kingdom. Their informants were the Norman servants of Cnut’s widow Emma. Was the rightful heir to the English throne Cnut’s eldest son, the Dane Harold Harefoot, who did briefly succeed his father, or was the better claim that of Alfred and Edward, the sons of the last Saxon king of England, Ethelred? There were also in Hungary the sons of the heroic Edmund Ironside, potential heirs to the royal West Saxon throne. Matters were further complicated by Cnut’s favourite son Harthacnut, by Emma of Normandy, whom Earl Godwin had fixed on as a suitable pawn to further his own ambitions, though he claimed to be representing the interests of a fatherless son.

Godwin now took Queen Emma and the considerable royal treasures into what he called ‘safe custody’ and began to promote Harthacnut’s cause. Thanks to the backing of the Danes and the city of London Harold Harefoot had taken the crown and he expelled Emma and Harthacnut to Bruges. Only a few years later, when Harold Harefoot died in 1040, Ethelred’s elder son Alfred ventured out of hiding in Normandy to claim the throne in London before Harthacnut could return. But the masterful Earl Godwin was having none of that. On his secret orders Alfred was arrested, blinded, incarcerated and subsequently murdered in the monastery at Ely, and Harthacnut was crowned king.

Godwin, whom the chroniclers describe as a man ‘of ready wit’, managed to overcome the feeble Harthacnut’s protests at the death of his half-brother by paying him some of the treasure he had accumulated over years of plotting. But on the death of Harthacnut in 1042, which ended the short line of Danish kings, Godwin moved rapidly to become the mentor of Ethelred’s younger son Edward. Known to history as Edward the Confessor, he was also living in Normandy and was now the outstanding candidate for the throne.

But Edward, whose nickname arose out of his religious disposition, as he was said to go to confession at least once a day, was not the natural material of which rulers are made. It is said that, lost in uncertainty, he threw himself on his knees before the burly Godwin and asked what he should do. Godwin promised that if Edward would place himself entirely in his hands, grant great offices of state to Godwin’s sons and marry Godwin’s daughter, he would shortly see himself acclaimed king.

And so it proved. Controlled by Godwin, on Easter Sunday 1043 Edward the Confessor was crowned with tremendous pomp at his ancestor Alfred’s capital of Winchester, specially chosen to remind the country of his royal West Saxon blood. Edward married Edgitha or Edith, Godwin’s beautiful and cultured daughter, but he remained more like a monk than a husband, and indeed more like a monk than a king. Above all, the new monarch was a Norman first and foremost. Far from being proud that he was an Anglo-Saxon king, Edward’s passion was for everything Norman. Norman monks had brought him up when his mother decamped to live with Cnut; the Norman language and Norman customs were what he was used to and what he preferred. As soon as he came to the throne, he surrounded himself with Norman advisers, which helped protect him against the overpowering Godwin, of whom he was always afraid given the rumours about his role in the terrible death of his brother Alfred. As a celebration of Norman culture Edward soon began to build a great church in the Norman style on the north bank of the Thames which would become Westminster Abbey.

The English royal income was prodigious by now for under the strain of the Danish wars and then of Danegeld the raising of taxes had become immensely efficient. Ethelred the Unready had created the rudiments of a civil service of clerks to raise money from the shires. These royal officials communicated with the shire reeves so frequently that a special form of letter from the king to the shire court called a writ had developed before anywhere else in Europe. It was identified by the king’s seal attached to it and had the force of law. By the eleventh century it was the shire reeve or sheriff who oversaw the shire court and was the king’s official representative (even if that meant conflict with the local earl), in charge of ensuring that the king received the taxation owed to him.

The colossal sums which these improved fiscal methods raised should have been spent on maintaining England’s shore defences; instead they were used by Edward to buy relics, or the bones of saints, in silver caskets shaped like miniature churches. He did not keep up the small permanent navy that had become an important guarantee of England’s security. The Confessor’s days were passed at Mass in the company of the Normans he had imported. They were avaricious, disciplined men who watched the king like hawks and were always looking for ways to get rid of the over-powerful Godwin and his sons.

Quite soon two bitterly opposed parties grew up at Edward’s court, the Normans versus the English magnates headed by Godwin. The Normans, with their almost oriental courtesy, disliked the free and frank ways of the English, who did not stand on ceremony. They also objected to the arrogance of the Godwin family, who seemed to place themselves on a level with the king. The Godwins frequently ridiculed Edward’s holy simplicity–and even did so in his hearing, as shocked observers noted. Godwin’s hold over the king enabled his sons to take huge areas of England into their fiefdoms. Thanks to Godwin’s pressure on the king, Sweyn, Godwin’s bad-penny son now had an earldom embracing shires from Mercia and Wessex, while his eldest child Harold had been made earl of Essex.

For their part the Godwins, especially Godwin himself and his most able son Harold, resented the arrival of more foreigners at court and detested their growing influence over the king. Normans took over many of the great offices of state, though few of them could speak English, and the Norman monk Robert of Jumièges was made Archbishop of Canterbury. Norman clerks were employed in the royal secretariat, so it came to be believed that only those who spoke Norman French had their petitions heard. In one part of the palace Queen Edith’s father and brothers and their supporters spoke English and wore the Anglo-Saxon long mantle. In another part the Normans laughed openly at the Saxon earls’ beards and moustaches. The Saxons were permanently in a fever to wipe the supercilious smiles off the Normans’ clean-shaven faces. Shaving was an affectation, said the angry Saxons, which made them all look like priests anyway.

It was a situation which could ignite at any minute, and it soon did–with the Godwins to fan the flames–when Edward’s brother-in-law Count Eustace of Boulogne paid England a visit in 1051. Like all Franks Count Eustace regarded Saxons as born slaves, despite their common Teutonic ancestry. On his way to London he spent the night at Dover. There, instead of paying for an inn, the count told his men to dress in full armour and demand accommodation from the townspeople at the point of a sword. The burghers refused point blank, and were promptly attacked by Count Eustace’s knights. Though they were mainly shopkeepers, they managed to kill nineteen of his professional soldiers.

The incident developed into a full-scale diplomatic row. An angry Edward turned on Earl Godwin within whose domain Dover lay and asked him to visit the port with summary justice–that is, to execute the men involved without holding an inquiry. But instead Godwin the over-mighty subject raised an army from the south coast against Edward, for his lands stretched from Cornwall to Kent, and started for London. It was only when two of the other great earls, Leofric of Mercia (whose wife Godiva became famous for her charitable work) and Siward of Northumbria began moving south with superior forces to support the king that Godwin saw that he should back off. He was forced to attend a meeting of the witan at London, and was exiled with his sons Harold and Tostig and his wife, while Sweyn was condemned as an outlaw. Meanwhile Edward turned on his wife Edith, Godwin’s daughter. He renounced her, stripped her of her jewels and had her locked up in a monastery.

At last out of Godwin’s shadow, Edward was now free to make his own decisions about the future of the English throne. He almost certainly came down in favour of his cousin William, the bastard son of the Duke of Normandy, in preference to his half-nephew Edward, the son of Edmund Ironside, whom he had never seen. The same year, 1051, most unusually William left his country to pay Edward what was probably a state visit to settle the succession in his favour. The Norman chroniclers of the period all agree on this, and William the Conqueror’s many later assertions that he planned to rule England according to the customs of the old English kings, ‘as in the days of King Edward’ himself, suggest that he saw himself as the legitimate heir. Nevertheless Duke William had no popular support in England, and those who met him in 1051 found him forbidding; he was described as a ‘stark man’. Despite the king’s own Norman leanings, the Normans were very unpopular in the shires, where they were increasingly being appointed as sheriffs. Since most of them could not speak English, they appeared to have little interest in procuring justice in the shire courts.

Taking advantage of this a year later, Godwin was back on a high tide of anti-Norman feeling. This time he had an enormous navy at his back and numerous enthusiastic seamen recruited from coastal towns. Having obtained the support of the City of London, he surrounded the king’s ships at Southwark and dictated terms to the weary king, whose only enthusiasm now was for the building of Westminster Abbey. To the mortification of the king, whose spirit never recovered, an open-air meeting of the witan voted to restore Godwin to his previous position. Many Normans were expelled from England and the queen came back from her convent to resume her rightful place at court. The Norman Archbishop of Canterbury Robert of Jumièges left the country and much of the archepiscopal land was redistributed to the Godwins. The Anglo-Saxon Bishop Stigand, a supporter of the Godwins, was appointed to Canterbury in his stead, without papal permission. The Godwins were now in complete control of the country. With the unusual appointment of Tostig Godwin as earl of Northumbria on the death of the famous Siward, the family’s rule stretched over the length and breadth of England.

The ambitious founder of this upstart house passed away soon after his return from exile, during a banquet. Legend has it that his death occurred just after King Edward had asked him, ‘Just tell me something, did you really put out the eyes of my brother Alfred and kill him?’ Godwin replied, ‘May God strike me dead if I did,’ whereupon he choked on a piece of meat.

Despite the death of the master plotter, Edward the Confessor’s childlessness meant that the succession continued to be a live issue for the Godwins and those who received their patronage. They were determined that the throne should not be settled on Duke William. At their insistence, now that the Norman party had fallen from power, King Edward at last sent for his half-nephew Edward to name him heir to the throne. Mysteriously this rival to William the Conqueror died shortly after arriving in England. Although Edward left a son, Edgar the Atheling, children were almost never crowned under the Anglo-Saxon monarchy and thus once again Duke William seemed the most likely heir.

Despite the king’s own leanings toward Normandy, Duke William’s claim was not clear cut. There was in fact no obvious natural successor to Edward the Confessor. Meanwhile the evident weakness at the heart of the English monarchy which Godwin’s rebellious behaviour had betrayed had aroused considerable interest in England from abroad. In Norway the ambitious young King Harold Hardrada now revived a claim to the throne as Cnut’s heir. Meanwhile the friendship between Tostig Godwin, the new earl of Northumbria, with Malcolm III of Scotland did not bode well for the future. It might lead to a Scottish-backed invasion of England.

The last years of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy saw a struggle against Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, the increasingly powerful king of Gwynedd and Powys. Gruffydd had united most of Wales under him. He had been encouraged by the disgruntled Aelfgar of Mercia, many of whose hereditary possessions had been given to Gyrth, the youngest Godwin, to invade England in alliance with a fleet from Norway. At this moment of national danger Harold Godwin began to attract attention for his daring Welsh campaign, which crushed Gruffydd and annexed his provinces to the English state in 1063.

Three years later, on the death of Edward the Confessor, to the witan Harold as head of the Godwins seemed the best possible English candidate for the throne. Apart from what remained of Mercia the Godwin family in effect ruled most of England. Though Harold was not of royal blood he was the natural choice to defend England from the threat of foreign invaders with claims to the crown, and as an Englishman he was far more welcome to the witan. By then the Godwins’ chief rival Aelfgar, the head of the still powerful house of Mercia, was dead, so Harold Godwin’s election went through unopposed. During the tenth century so many heirs to the throne had been minors at the time of the king’s death that the old English monarchy had become far more elective. There was precedence for this in the Holy Roman emperorship, but it followed a natural tendency in a country where from its most ancient beginnings Anglo-Saxon kings had tended to have their decisions approved by a council of lords. By the time of the Conquest the witan was well used to being consulted on major national issues. The assent of its members–thanes, bishops and sheriffs from every part of the country–to new laws, new taxes, military measures and foreign alliances was sufficiently important to be recorded as part of the ruling process.

Edward died on 5 January 1066 and was buried in the crypt of his new church, Westminster Abbey. The external situation was considered so dangerous that the very next day Harold was crowned king. Though quite contrary to precedent, since the Godwins were without a drop of royal blood in them, it indicated the family’s immense influence. But Harold’s was to be a very short reign. By Christmas of the same year William the Conqueror was being crowned in the same abbey.

For William of Normandy was convinced that he was the rightful heir to Edward the Confessor. Not only had the former king told him so, but according to the Norman version of events, which is all that survives, as Edward weakened over Christmas 1065 Harold sent a message to William on behalf of the English government declaring that the duke should be ready to receive the crown of England as soon as Edward breathed his last. When William, who was hunting in the forest of Rouvray outside Rouen, received word from England that Harold Godwin had been illicitly crowned in his stead, his rage knew no bounds.

The situation was further complicated by an unfortunate accident which had befallen Harold some years before. In exchange for being ransomed by William, Harold, who was prisoner of the local count after a shipwreck on the French coast, had been forced to swear to be William’s liege man, that is his servant. He had sworn an unbreakable oath of loyalty to William on a reliquary containing the remains of some of Normandy’s most holy saints and martyrs. In the period in question, when national law was rudimentary and legal charters were in their infancy, the orderliness of society was guaranteed by the sacred nature of the oath; oathbreaking was punishable by forty days’ imprisonment. William thus believed that he had been doubly insulted by Harold, who ought in any case to yield the throne to his liege lord.

Throughout 1066 William sent threats to the new king of England to remind him of his broken vow and to warn him that before the year had expired he would come and claim his inheritance. But Harold refused to take any notice, claiming that in return for vowing to be the duke of Normandy’s man he had been betrothed to William’s daughter, and that his oath was now void because she had since died. Unfortunately Harold seems to have had a reputation for being a slippery character like his father. One chronicler noted that he had a tendency not to respect the sacredness of his word. He was said to be ‘careless’ about abstaining from a breach of trust ‘if he might by any device whatever, elude the reasonings of men on this matter’.

Although Harold had gained the throne he never captured the imagination of the nation, and neither did the rest of the Godwins. His brother Tostig was unpopular enough to have been expelled from Northumbria after a popular uprising, and had to be replaced by Morcar, brother of Edwin of Mercia, who had succeeded his father Aelfgar. Mercia and Northumbria were thus controlled by two members of a rival and hostile family. The lack of countrywide support for Harold would be a fatal element in the next nine months, as would be the air of illegitimacy that continued to cling to the new king and his family. The Godwins’ impetuous replacement of the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury by the Anglo-Saxon Stigand without approval from Rome would enable William of Normandy to present his invasion as having a higher moral purpose: the duke announced that he planned to remove the illegal archbishop and replace him with the approved papal candidate. Archbishop Stigand had in any case caused offence by his independent behaviour, not least refusing to send the Church collection money called Peter’s Pence to Rome. The pope was happy to provide a papal banner for the expedition, beautifully decorated with pearls and jewels, to spur the duke’s men on.

William had also taken care to obtain the support of the other most important international figure in western Christendom, the Emperor Henry IV. Ever since 800 when the title Emperor of the West was created for Charlemagne by the papacy as a rival to the power of the Byzantines, the emperor had been the earthly magnate designated protector of the Church. With both emperor and pope onside, Duke William’s soldiers were united by a sense of the rightness of their task. Such a feeling was not present in an increasingly fragmented England. William’s soldiers also had a leader of great military renown who had seen off all comers from the kingdoms bordering Normandy, including France. This enabled him to be confident that the duchy would not be attacked in his absence, if he kept it short–particularly given that his greatest enemy, neighbouring Anjou, was wracked by civil war.

William of Normandy had perfected a new method of warfare which would make the conquest of England surprisingly easy to achieve. His Normans fought on horseback and at short intervals threw up primitive castles made out of earthworks to hold the surrounding countryside. His great reputation meant that the expedition, for which he began building boats in the summer of 1066, attracted landless Norman knights of Viking origin in large numbers. Under the sacred papal banner at the ancient town of Lillebonne, with its old Roman amphitheatre, William assembled his force of 5,000 of the most daring men in western Europe. From Brittany, Flanders, Sicily, central France and Normandy itself they flocked to a man who promised them English land and English wives in exchange for their help in conquering England–for he had no gold to offer them. They loved to fight and saw a real prospect of gain for themselves across the Channel in England.

But so did many others. In May 1066 Harold’s brother Tostig–at the head of a menacing Norwegian fleet sent by Harold Hardrada of Norway–appeared off the Isle of Wight. From there he moved northwards up the east coast burning ports until he was seen off by Earl Edwin and Earl Morcar and fled north to sanctuary in Scotland.

To make matters worse, by midsummer Harold’s spies had confirmed that there would soon be an attack from Normandy. Harold frantically started rebuilding the neglected English navy, and kept the kingdom’s militia on standby, for across the sea the duke of Normandy was building more ships than had ever been seen together, perhaps a thousand in all. Though they were not much bigger than fishing smacks they would be more than adequate for their task. We can see them in the Bayeux Tapestry, which was commissioned by William’s half-brother the bishop of Bayeux to commemorate the occasion, and which shows them being dragged to the sea by ropes and loaded with horses and armour. In order to bind his men more tightly to him, the duke increased their pay and promised more. By August 1066 the dusty fields of Picardy were full of soldiers waiting for a propitious wind to carry them across the Channel from the port of St Valéry. For a month they lay in their tents as the great harvest moon waxed and waned and the black night sky filled with smoke from their campfires. But still no signal came.

Towards the end of September the soldiers began to mutter nervously that the lack of wind was a sign that God opposed the expedition. At this the brutal Duke William caused the body of St Valéry to be exhumed and paraded round the town while the soldiers watched. At last, a few days later, on 27 September, William got the wind he had asked for. As the soldiers knelt in thankful prayer William was already at anchor midway across the Channel waiting in his crimson-sailed ship for the other vessels to join him. Soon the invasion force was blown lightly across to England, where they landed at Pevensey (the Anglo-Saxon name for the former Roman port of Anderida). The remains of a Roman fort stood there, and William in the Norman fashion immediately made of it a rough defensive castle of ditch and earthwork to protect his troops. In fact the superstitious Norman knights might already have been disheartened, for William had tripped when he landed and sprawled his full length. But as they inveighed against the ill omen the duke leaped up with earth clutched in his fists, and exclaimed that he had only wanted to grasp his new kingdom more closely.

But what of King Harold? Why was he not there to repel the warriors clattering unopposed down the wooden gangplanks? Why was there no one to stop the whole host moving off east down the coast to Hastings, where William’s scouts had told him that the land was hillier and would be easier to hold? Indeed why had there been no ships in the Channel to stop the Norman fleet? By the most unfortunate of coincidences, the same wind conditions which had prevented the Normans from sailing had allowed Tostig and his ally the king of Norway, Harold Hardrada, to invade the north of England. On 25 September, two days before William and his troops arrived at Pevensey, Harold had defeated Tostig and Harold Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge near York. It would take Harold at least ten days to reach the south coast and meet Duke William. But his men were exhausted from a battle in which so many of them had been wounded.

Worse still, after 8 September the English fleet had had to be disbanded because its sailors and the militia had been guarding the Channel ports since early summer and it was feared that they might mutiny if they continued to be left to their own devices. The militia was allowed to be called out for only forty days, and that period had elapsed. So the Channel had been left quite empty, with the English navy withdrawn up the Thames to London.

With characteristic energy but rather too great impetuosity, the minute he heard the Normans had landed Harold began to march south from York. But he lacked the full complement of troops he needed. The men of the earls of Northumbria and Mercia did not accompany him as they were still recovering from Stamford Bridge and so could not provide the great reinforcements which might have held off the Normans. Nor can the enmity between the Godwins and Edwin and Morcar have helped. The army which faced William consisted mainly of Harold’s own bodyguard, the 3,000 housecarles invented by Cnut, men supplied by his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine, and Londoners, thanes and churls living near enough to Sussex to join the host immediately.

Harold seems to have decided not to wait for the full English militia to be assembled before he moved on Hastings. It would have taken too long to go through the motions of summoning it out again from more distant shires, many of which were several days’ journey away. Perhaps in the confusion of those September days there was little time to think clearly, with danger facing him from north and south, and Harold was himself exhausted.

The Battle of Hastings was to be a very uneven contest, of highly trained Norman knights against a tired and disorganized English force. Too many of them were peasants in woollen shifts called straight from the fields. They were untrained in warfare but forced by the institution of the fyrd to do service perhaps with just a pitchfork, with a spear if they were lucky. They stood little chance against warriors on horses which were trained to rear and attack. The defeat of the English at the Battle of Hastings hinged on the quality of William’s knights. They could follow military orders in a disciplined manner owing to the Norman practice of educating males in warfare from childhood onwards in the castles of the great lords. It was a way of life which was soon to become commonplace in England.

Hearing from his headquarters, a temporary wooden castle at Hastings, that Harold was fast approaching down what is today the A21, William seized the day. Moving his troops forward the Duke of Normandy made the English king halt at the highest point in the area, then called Senlac, while he positioned his own men on a ridge opposite. Harold had to draw up his forces round the royal standard in an uncomfortably narrow space with little room for manoeuvre. As soon as the sun rose on 14 October 1066, after the Normans had received Holy Communion from a silver chalice, William sent his knights down the hill towards the English while Harold and his men struggled to get into formation after the Saxon fashion, the king’s housecarles positioned in the centre, and all of them on foot–already a disadvantage against the mounted Normans. The Saxons were armed with their great battleaxes which they whirled round their heads. Closely packed next to one another and creating a wall with their long kite-shaped shields, they formed such an impenetrable mass that even horses could not get near them–so long as they did not break ranks. Harold particularly warned his men to resist the temptation to pursue the enemy, for then they would be lost.

In the very middle of the shield wall stood King Harold and his two brothers with the royal standard of England between them, so that no one would dare flee the battle when the king was in the middle of it. Flanking the shield wall on both sides were two wings of the lightly armed local farmers from Sussex and Kent. Among them were monks from Winchester: after the battle, as they lay dead on the field, their brown habits were discovered concealed within their armour.

At first the advantage seemed with the Saxons, because the steepness of the ground made frontal attack by the invaders very difficult. The Normans fought in the style they had brought back from the east–that is to say, making use of the Arab stirrup. This invention freed a rider’s arms to fight while the lower part of his body was secured to the horse. Again and again the Norman cavalry charged up the slopes of the hill where Harold was positioned, but each time it failed to break through the Saxon shield wall.

For six hours the battle was undecided, though victory seemed imminent for the more technically advanced Normans. William now threw his main energy into attacking the more lightly armed Saxon troops on the wings. His archers sent repeated flights of arrows over their heads. This inflicted heavy losses among the ranks of the English peasantry, who were not protected by the chainmail of the housecarles; nevertheless they stood their ground. Then the cunning duke gave his knights a signal. The whole cavalry wheeled round and appeared to flee. This was too much for the Saxons in the shield wall. With shouts and whoops they broke formation and began to pursue the enemy down the hill, heedless of Harold’s shouted orders to stay where they were.

As soon as the Saxons began to follow them, with a great roar the Norman knights turned back and rode them down. Soon the valley between the two hills was filled with the screams of dying men and horses. Bravest of all the Saxons that day was Harold Godwin. It was only when William realized that his troops would never get near the top of the hill, where Harold and his housecarles still kept the shield wall packed in tight formation, that he again ordered his archers to fire their arrows straight into the air over their heads. One of those arrows entered Harold’s brain through the eye and killed him.

The duke of Normandy was no less brave. His was the voice in the thickest of the fray urging his men on. He was always the first to rush forward and attack. Eyewitnesses said he was ‘everywhere raging, everywhere furious’, and, as with Harold, several horses were killed under him that day. He fought until night fell and crowned him with complete victory. As he made his way in the misty twilight across the battlefield he came to where the fighting had evidently been fiercest on the Saxon side, as could be seen by the bodies strewn over the frozen ground. There among them, covered by the now ragged and torn royal standard, lay Harold.

William was so moved by the terrible bloodshed that he decreed that henceforth Senlac would be known as Battle, or Bataille, one of the many Norman words which were to transform the language of England. On the spot where Harold lay William caused the high altar of the new Battle Abbey to be raised as a memorial to the king, which can still be seen today.

Although the Battle of Hastings was a watershed in English history, at the time it was not clear whether the country would rally again either under Edwin and Morcar in the north or under the new party for Edward the Confessor’s great-nephew Edgar the Atheling developing in London. For a month the Conqueror, as he would be known to later generations, bided his time, securing the country round Dover and Canterbury. Then he moved west out of Kent to London, encouraged by the submission of Winchester led by Edith, Harold’s sister and widow of Edward the Confessor.

Though the Conqueror burned Southwark–a constant feature of its history–he could not break through the guard into the walled city at the crossing which is now London Bridge. He therefore decided that the best way of taking London, then as now the key to England, was to ride west. He would lay waste the countryside round it on which the Londoners depended for their food. Great stretches of Surrey, Berkshire and north Hampshire, the fertile country that the people of Reada and Wocca had settled 600 years before, were set alight by descendants of England’s old enemies, the Vikings. When the duke crossed the Thames at Wallingford, apparently intending to return to London again and renew the attack, at the urging of Archbishop Stigand those leading the resistance decided to give in.

Edwin and Morcar had never meanwhile moved their troops south to rally the country. There was no real focus for a national resistance, and William the Conqueror benefited from that. Wealthy London magnates who had earlier declared the youthful Edgar the Atheling king, now accompanied Edwin and Morcar to meet William at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire in the shadow of the Chiltern Hills just west of what today is Hemel Hempstead. There they offered him the crown. Having sworn an oath to be the Conqueror’s men and hostages for peace, they watched as before their eyes William burned every grain of wheat between Berkhamsted and London, a distance of almost thirty miles, to make sure that there was no backsliding when he arrived in London.

On a bitterly cold Christmas Day in 1066 William the Conqueror became King William of England in Westminster Abbey. Although he had taken the crown by military conquest, initially he was very anxious to be considered the legitimate heir and to have the consent of his new subjects. At the moment of coronation he therefore ordered the Englishman Ealdred, archbishop of York and the Norman bishop Geoffrey of Coutances, who were jointly crowning him, to ask the people in the abbey if they accepted him as their king. Although it was unlikely that the English would say no when the abbey was ringed with William’s knights, the shouts of acclamation in English and Norman French alarmed those very knights. In a panic they started setting fire to the buildings surrounding the abbey. As the congregation rushed out, the Conqueror and the priests were left alone at the altar. Despite the confusion without, there was deep silence within. William was anointed king according to the Saxon tradition instituted by St Dunstan, and took the oath of the Anglo-Saxon kings to rule his people justly.

Although the Conqueror’s intention was to live in peace with his new subjects he could not disguise the fact that England was a country held by military garrison. Within three months William had built the White Tower out of earth and timber to overawe the inhabitants of London, which today is part of the complex known as the Tower of London. It was just one of the series of castles thrown up all over England to prevent rebellions.

For several hundred years the elective kingship of Anglo-Saxon England and the existence of the witan had given England consultative traditions. But the new Norman king did not consult. He dictated. There was to be no more asking for the approval of the witan. The role of the new curia regis, the court of the king, was to implement, not to advise. In March 1067, six months after the Battle of Hastings, the two remaining great magnates of Anglo-Saxon England, Edwin and Morcar, as well as Edgar the Atheling and Archbishop Stigand, were forced to accompany the new master of England over the Channel to Normandy, where they were paraded in triumph.

In charge of England in the Conqueror’s absence were the new Norman earl of Kent, formerly Bishop Odo of Bayeux, William’s half-brother, and William FitzOsbern, William’s seneschal or steward who became earl of Hereford. And soon, as the native English landowners began to rebel against harsh treatment by the Normans, William would return to extirpate the old English ruling class and replace them with a Norman military aristocracy. Most Anglo-Saxon buildings in brick and wood, especially the churches, were replaced by Norman stone. The Saxons became an underclass whose language, as we shall see, was the despised argot of the stable. French became the language of the new aristocracy.

The Normans inherited a country with the strongest government in eleventh-century Europe, whose distinctive efficiency continued to be outstanding despite the weakness of the last Old English kings themselves. The English administrative system would form an excellent base for the new Norman government. William was keen to be seen as the legitimate successor of Edward the Confessor and everything was done in the name of that king to wipe out the year of the usurper. But, whatever the justification, the inescapable fact remained that foreigners now ruled the land.