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Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy
David Starkey
From one of our finest historians comes an outstanding exploration of the British monarchy from the retreat of the Romans up until the modern day. This compendium volume of two earlier books is fully revised and updated.The monarchy is one of Britain’s longest surviving institutions – as well as one of its most tumultuous and revered. In this masterful book, David Starkey looks at the monarchy as a whole, charting its history from Roman times, to the Wars of the Roses, the chaos of the Civil War, the fall of Charles I and Cromwell's emergence as Lord Protector – all the way up until the Victorian era when Britain’s monarchs came face-to-face with modernity.This brilliant collection of biographies of Britain’s kings and queens provides an in-depth examination of what the British monarchy has meant, what it means now and what it will continue to mean. Bringing to life a cast of colourful characters, Starkey’s trademark energy and authority make him the perfect guide on this epic, accessible and compelling journey, as he offers us a vivid portrait of British culture, politics and nationhood through an institution that has defined the realm for nearly two thousand years.



Crown and Country
A History of England through the Monarchy
DAVID STARKEY


Copyright
Published by HarperPress in 2010
Copyright © Jutland 2010
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
The Monarchy of England: Volume I, The Beginnings first published by Chatto and Windus, a division of Random House, 2004 © Jutland 2004
Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity first published by HarperPress 2006 © David Starkey 2006
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David Starkey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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HB ISBN 9780007307708
TPB ISBN 9780007307715
Ebook Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780007424825
Version: 2018-08-08
To all those who worked with me on the Channel 4 Monarchy series for helping me understand history better and write it more clearly
Contents
Cover (#u46bf20f7-aed1-5dac-b83e-e63e58c4d17a)
Title Page (#u06c9429f-c238-514e-a62f-294e8d4b330e)
Copyright

Family Trees
Houses of Godwin and Wessex
Houses of Normandy, Anjou and the Plantagenets
Houses of York, Lancaster and Tudor
Houses of Tudor, Stuart and the Hanoverians
House of Windsor

Foreword

PART I - BEGINNINGS
Chapter 1 - The Shadow of Rome
Chapter 2 - Christian Kingship
Chapter 3 - Wessex
Chapter 4 - Triumph and Disaster
Chapter 5 - Confessor and Conquest

PART II - THE MEDIEVAL MONARCHY
Chapter 6 - Subjugation
Chapter 7 - Sons of Conquest
Chapter 8 - The Triumphant King
Chapter 9 - Civil War
Chapter 10 - ‘Touch Not Mine Anointed’
Chapter 11 - The Curse of Anjou
Chapter 12 - War Monarchy
Chapter 13 - Death of a Dynasty

PART III - THE IMPERIAL CROWN
Chapter 14 - The Man Who Would Be King
Chapter 15 - King and Emperor
Chapter 16 - Shadow of The King
Chapter 17 - Rebellion
Chapter 18 - New Model Kingdom

PART IV - EMPIRE
Chapter 19 - Restoration
Chapter 20 - Royal Republic
Chapter 21 - Britannia Rules
Chapter 22 - Empire
Chapter 23 - The King is Dead, Long Live The British Monarchy!

PART V - MODERNITY
Chapter 24 - The Modern Monarchy
Chapter 25 - New Kingdom

Index

Also By David Starkey
About the Publisher (#ue7e7a3e1-c073-553f-9b2f-cd07ad83f349)
FAMILY TREES
HOUSES OF GODWIN AND WESSEX


HOUSES OF NORMANDY, ANJOU AND THE PLANTAGENETS


HOUSES OF YORK, LANCASTER AND TUDOR


HOUSES OF TUDOR, STUART AND THE HANOVERIANS


HOUSE OF WINDSOR


Foreword
THIS BOOK IS THE STORY of the crown of England and of those who wore it, intrigued for it and died for it. They include some of the most notable figures of English and British history: Alfred the Great and William the Conqueror, who shaped and reshaped England; the great Henrys and Edwards of the Middle Ages, who made England the centre of a vast European empire; Henry VIII, whose mere presence could strike men dumb with fear; Elizabeth I, who remains as much a seductive enigma to us as she was to her contemporaries; and Charles I, who redeemed a disastrous reign with a noble, sacrificial death as he humbled himself, Christ-like and self-consciously so, to the executioner’s axe.
Such figures leap from the page of mere history into myth and romance. I have painted these great royal characters – and the dozens of other monarchs, who, rightly or wrongly, have left less of a memory behind – with as much skill as I could.
But this is not a history of Kings and Queens. And its approach is not simply biographical either. Instead, it is the history of an institution: the Monarchy. Institutions – and monarchy most of all – are built of memory and inherited traditions, of heirlooms, historic buildings and rituals that are age-old (or at least pretend to be). All these are here, and, since I have devoted much of my academic career to what are now called Court Studies, they are treated in some detail.
But the institution of monarchy – and I think this fact has been too little appreciated – is also about ideas. Indeed, it is on ideas that I have primarily depended to shape the structure of the book and to drive its narrative. These are not the disembodied, abstract ideas of old-fashioned history. Instead, I present them through lives of those who formulated them. Sometimes these were monarchs; more usually they were advisers and publicists. Such men – at least as much as soldiers and sailors – were the shock-troops of monarchy. They shaped its reaction to events; even, at times, enabled it to seize the initiative. When they were talented and imaginative, monarchy flourished; when they were not, the crown lost its sheen and the throne tottered.
So monarchy depends on its servants: its advisers and ideologues; its painters, sculptors and architects, and – not least – its historians. And these, too, are given voice, sometimes as chorus to the swelling scene, occasionally as actors themselves.
The result is a task completed. It began in 2004 with the publication of The Monarchy of England: The Beginnings. That book covered the period from the fall of Roman Britain to the Norman Conquest and its aftermath, and was intended to be the first of three volumes to accompany a Channel 4 series of the same name. A further volume, Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity, appeared in 2006. But the Middle Ages themselves remained untreated. This book brings together the two previously published volumes. And it fills in the missing centuries in the same style and with similar emphases.
I have also changed the book’s title. Monarchy was chosen because of the fashion at the time for portentous one-word titles for major television series. And it did the job well enough. But Crown and Country does it better. The crown is the oldest English institution and the most glittering. But its story, as I tell it, is finally the means to an end: the history of England herself.
The Red House
Barham, Kent
July 2010
PART I
BEGINNINGS
Chapter 1
The Shadow of Rome
SOMETIMES, EVEN WHEN you are a case-hardened professional, you see history differently. I had one such moment when I first visited the Great Hall of the National Archives in Washington. I was faintly shocked by the way in which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were displayed, like Arks of the Covenant, on a dimly lit altar and between American flags and impossibly upright American marines.
But what really struck me was the presence of a copy of Magna Carta. It was, as it were, in a side chapel. Nevertheless, here it was, this archetypically English document, in the American archival Holy of Holies.
It was placed there out of the conviction that it was the ancestor, however remote, of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And its presence set me thinking. Was this assumption correct? Does it help explain current concerns – like Britain’s, or England’s, reluctance to be absorbed in the European Union? Does it mean that there is an Anglo-Saxon way and a European way, as the French undoubtedly think? Does the difference derive from the contrast between Roman Law and English Common Law? Is it, finally, England versus Rome?
The first part of this book attempts to answer some of these questions. It uses the medium of narrative, which I think is the only proper means of historical explanation. And it goes back to the beginning, which is the only right place to start.
Indeed, if I may be excused Irish, it goes back before the beginning. The idea of the English does not appear until the eighth century, and the reality of England not till two hundred years later still. But I start a millennium earlier with the Roman invasions and occupation of Britain. I do so for two reasons. The first is that the great Anglo-Saxon historian Bede, who, more than anyone else, invented the idea of England, thought that this was the right place to start his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The second is that Rome is indeed ‘our common mother’ and is the fount from which all modern western European countries spring.
But, in the case of England, Rome is at best a stepmother. There is, uniquely in the Western Empire, an absolute rupture between the Roman province of Britannia and the eventual successor-state of Anglo-Saxon England. Elsewhere, in France, Italy or Spain, there are continuities: of language, laws, government and religion. In Britain there are none. Instead the Anglo-Saxon invaders of the fifth century found, or perhaps made, a tabula rasa.
This is normally regretted. Civilization was destroyed, the common story goes, and the Dark Ages began. I am not so sure. For Rome was not as civilized as we think and the Dark Ages – at least in Anglo-Saxon England – were by no means so gloomy. The roots of the misunderstanding, I think, lie in the importance we attach to material culture. We too live in a comfortable age, so we are impressed – too impressed – with the apparatus of Roman comfort: the baths, the sanitation, the running water, the central heating and the roads.
All these are, indeed, very sophisticated. But the politics that underpinned them was surprisingly crude. Not only was the Empire a mere military despotism, it was also peculiarly mistrustful of any form of self-help, much less self-government, on the part of its subjects. This is shown by a famous exchange of letters between the Emperor Trajan and the senatorial aristocrat and man of letters Pliny the Younger, who was then governor of the province of Bithynia in Asia Minor. The important provincial city of Nicomedia, Pliny informed the emperor, had suffered a devastating fire. Might he encourage the citizens to set up a guild of firemen to fight future conflagrations? On no account, replied the emperor, since such bodies, whatever their ostensible purpose, become fronts for faction and political dissent.
It was this enforced passivity on the part of its civilian populations that helped make the Empire such easy meat for the barbarian invaders. It is also its sharpest point of contrast with the kingdom of Wessex, round which England coalesced in the ninth and tenth centuries. Wessex was not a democracy, or even a peasant commonwealth, as some of its more enthusiastic Victorian historians assumed. But it was a participatory society, which balanced a powerful and effective monarchy at the centre with institutions of local government which required – and got – the active involvement of most free men. It was this combination, which was unique in Europe at the time and long after, as well as good luck and inspired royal leadership, which enabled Wessex to survive, and finally to thrive, in the face of the Viking invasions that destroyed all the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
The result was England. It was an early, perhaps indeed the earliest, nation-state, with a remarkable unity of language, culture and politics. The vernacular, Anglo-Saxon or Old English, not Latin as elsewhere, was the language of politics and administration. It was also the language of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This was no episodic monastic annal; it was a book of national record that charted, self-consciously and deliberately, the birth and development of a nation. All this gave Anglo-Saxon England a powerful sense of national solidarity: it could negotiate collectively with its kings even when they were conquerors; it could also strive to settle political disputes without the bloodshed of civil war.
It was, in short, different.
I
Two thousand years ago there was only one power that counted in the Western world: Rome. It was perhaps the purest, the most absolute monarchy the world has ever seen. The emperor incorporated in his own person all the powers of the state: military, executive, judicial and (in practice if not at first in theory) legislative. As imperator, he was commander of the army; as holder of the ‘tribunican powers’, he represented the sovereign majesty of the people and was protected by the terrible penalties of laesa maiestatis or treason; as pontifex maximus, he was chief priest. He was even regarded as a god himself, who was worshipped by many of his subjects in life and by more in death. His person, his palace and his very treasury were ‘sacred’.
And Britain, the province of Britannia, was just a tiny part of this monarchy, which, at its maximum extent, stretched from the Bay of Biscay in the west to the River Euphrates in the east and from the moors of Scotland in the north to the sands of the Sahara in the south.
The myriad peoples inhabiting the Empire spoke many different languages and honoured many different gods. But there were also powerful, supervening forces of unity as well. First, there was the army. It was the Roman army which had conquered most of the known world for Rome and it was the army which kept it Roman. So everywhere in the Empire the imperial army performed the same drills; built similar forts and wore the same uniforms. Close behind the soldier marched the tax collector and the lawyer. So everywhere too the imperial bureaucracy, which was mind-numbing in its size, hierarchical complexity and expense, collected the same taxes; enforced the same Roman law on all free men and used the same Roman weights and measures.
In these and all other forms of governmental administration, one official language was employed: Latin – though in the Eastern Provinces Greek also enjoyed a high status as a second, as yet unofficial, language. Everywhere, therefore, anybody who aspired to be anybody had to speak, read and write one or preferably both of these languages, which also carried a common Classical literature and culture with them. The same went for the visual arts where, yet again, there was a single official style – the Roman version of Classicism – which was used for buildings, arte-facts and decoration throughout the Empire.
How would Britain, which the Romans disparaged as the ‘ends of the earth’, fit in with all this?
The first Roman expeditions to Britain were led by the proto-emperor Julius Caesar, in 55 and 54 BC. Born in c.102 BC. into a noble if impoverished family, Caesar soon proved himself as ambitious as he was multi-talented. And, in achieving his ends, he set in train the events which transformed Rome from a Republic – a commonwealth of free men, if bitterly divided by class and interest group – into the absolute monarchy of the Empire.
Caesar’s expeditions to Britain were an interlude in his conquest of Gaul. This established his reputation both as the power-broker of the Roman world and, thanks to his account of the conquest in his De Bello Gallico (The Gallic War), as a great, if self-serving, military historian. The first British expedition was little more than an armed reconnaissance raid. But in the second Caesar brought a substantial force of five legions with their auxiliaries, amounting to about 27,000 men. He defeated Cassivellaunus, and penetrated north of the Thames. Caesar never makes clear Cassivellaunus’s precise status. But the best guess is that he was tribal king of the Catuvellauni. There was some attempt among the warring British tribes to sink their differences with the appointment of Cassivellaunus as overall commander, and some success with guerrilla tactics. But, finally, what turned the day for Caesar was not the force of the Roman army but the weakness and divisions of the British coalition. Nevertheless, Cassivellaunus had held out long enough to stop Caesar capitalizing on his gains. Instead, after signing treaties, Caesar withdrew to deal with more pressing problems in Gaul. The Roman legions would not return to Britain for nearly a hundred years.
In 44 bc, ten years after he had left Britain, Caesar was made life-dictator, though he ostentatiously refused the crown itself. Months later he was dead of multiple stab-wounds from the daggers of former friends and foes alike. The assassination was intended to save the Republic. In fact, it administered the death blow. For the man who emerged victorious from the years of civil war that followed Caesar’s assassination was Caesar’s great-nephew by marriage and adoptive son and heir Octavius, later surnamed Augustus.
Unlike Caesar, Augustus was as subtle as he was ruthless. So, instead of treating republican institutions with contempt, he cherished them. Indeed, he loved them to death. The Republic was ‘restored’, with much fanfare, in 27 BC. But, one by one, Augustus took over all the powers which had been carefully separated under the republican constitution.
But what to call this monarchy that dared not speak its name? Augustus himself liked to be addressed as princeps – that is, ‘first (among equals)’. But he also used the style imperator or general. Since the command of the army was now the real key to power, his successors soon started to use imperator or emperor as their principal title. The title was deliberately not royal to avoid alienating residual republican feeling. But it betokened, as it still does, power that was greater, in both extent and intensity, than that of any mere king.
In ad 43, Claudius, one of the most historically minded emperors, determined to complete the task that Caesar had started. Claudius was eager to establish his warlike credentials, but could not afford to take any personal risks. The result was that this second Roman invasion of Britain became as much a piece of theatre as a military expedition, with its two initial leaders effectively acting the corresponding roles of impresario and general. They were Aulus Plautius, whom the Roman historian Tacitus called a ‘famous soldier’, and Narcissus, Claudius’s all-powerful secretary and an imperial freedman, who accompanied Plautius as a kind of political commissar. But the oddly matched soldier and the manumitted ex-slave proved an effective double act. Plautius, with his Gaulish auxiliaries, fought his way to the Thames, at which point Narcissus informed the emperor that it was time for him to set out. Claudius eventually arrived, complete with ceremonial elephants and a vast cavalcade – and stayed only sixteen days. But it was long enough for him to take part in a set-piece campaign masterminded by Narcissus. He crossed the Thames ‘at the side of his troops’; ‘caused the barbarians to come to hand in battle’ and entered Colchester, capital of the Catuvellauni, in triumph. He was repeatedly acclaimed imperator by the troops and received the submission of no less than eleven British kings.
And all this in barely more than a fortnight! The sense of theatrical artificiality was only heightened by the fact that, when he had returned to Rome, Claudius immediately ordered a repeat performance. He took part in an even grander triumph and laid on a re-enactment of the highlights of his campaign in the Campus Martius. The scenes included ‘the assault and sacking of a town’ and ‘the surrender of the British kings’. We don’t know who played the British kings. But Claudius, ‘presiding in his general’s cloak’, appears to have played himself.
Meanwhile, back in the real world of Britannia, the political situation was more complex. For in ad 43 the Romans, whatever the textbooks might say, did not conquer Britain. Instead, in the smallest of small colonial wars, they defeated a single dominant tribe, the Catuvellauni, and took over their territories in the south-east. Outside this area, other tribal kings continued to exercise their sway under Roman protection. Indeed, the Romans added to their number by setting up the renegade British prince Cogidubnus as king of a new, artificially created tribe called, significantly, the Regnenses (‘The King’s Folk’).
The reason for this apparent generosity was straightforward. British kings, who had started to issue Roman-style coins and to give themselves the Latin title of rex, had been the most effective agents of Romanization before Claudius’s invasion and, led by that accomplished quisling Cogidubnus, they continued to play the same role afterwards.
But not for long. For rebellions, like that of Boudicca, queen of the Iceni, in ad 60, and deliberately fostered quarrels in the British royal families took their toll. The result was that, within thirty years, direct Roman rule covered most of southern Britain and was being aggressively extended far into modern Scotland.
There were to be no more kings in Britain till the Romans had gone.
With the coming of direct Roman rule, Romanization became a matter of public policy. It was pursued especially effectively by Agricola, who was governor for the unusually long period of six years from ad 78 to 84. Within a year of his arrival he had embarked on a major building programme, giving ‘private encouragement and public aid to the building of temples, courts of justice and private dwelling houses’. He also provided a sophisticated Classical education for the sons of the British elite.
His campaign seems to have enjoyed quick success. As early as ad 79 or 81, an inscription was set up at Verulamium (St Albans) to commemorate Agricola’s role in the creation of a splendid new Forum or marketplace. And the British elite at least eagerly embraced Latin, the toga, hot and cold baths and banqueting while reclining on couches. ‘They called [it] civilization’, Tacitus sardonically observes, ‘when it was but a part of their servitude.’
Perhaps. But the prosperity brought to Britain by the pax Romana – ‘the Roman peace’ – was real enough: some six thousand miles of well-engineered, solidly metalled roads were built; towns grew and flourished; farmsteads expanded into substantial, luxurious villas; the spa-complex at Aquae Sulis (Bath) reached its greatest extent in the third and fourth centuries and the population of Britain rose to about four million, a figure that would not be reached again for a millennium.
But there was a price to be paid for this prosperity as Britain, like the rest of the Empire, became a target for raids by less civilized peoples beyond the frontiers. The Romans, borrowing a piece of racial snobbery from the Greeks, called such peoples ‘barbarians’. The word meant ‘non-Roman’ or ‘non-Greek’. But it quickly acquired overtones: of contempt, because the barbarians were uncivilized; and of fear because they were a threat to civilization. For the German tribes, in particular, had never accepted rule from Rome and not even Rome had been able to force them to bend the knee.
There were internal problems as well. All power, in theory and usually in practice, was in the hands of the emperor. He, as we have seen, was a god on earth, whose task it was to rule and defend the Empire. The duty of his subjects was to obey and pay their taxes. The idea that there might be any limit on what the emperor could do, or that his subjects should have a say in what got done, was simply inconceivable.
With no constitutional means of opposition, force was the only – and the frequent – resort. The result was that the later Empire was plagued with rebellions, military revolts and palace coups. Britain, with the strong garrison required by its exposure to barbarian raids, supplied more than its fair share of military usurpers who aspired to the purple. It was also, like other remote outposts of empire, used as a place of internal political exile. The exiles conspired with each other; suborned the troops and generally subverted the province from within.
All these problems came together in the single great crisis of ad 367, known as the barbarica conspiratio, ‘the Conspiracy of the Barbarians’. Britannia was attacked from three sides: by the Picts from the north and the Scots (who then inhabited Ireland) from the west, while the Saxons rampaged on the Channel coast of Gaul and perhaps of Britain too. The Roman generals were killed or overwhelmed; internal conspiracy was given free rein and the fall of the Roman regime seemed certain. But the arrival of an expeditionary force commanded by a general-cum-politician of genius, Theodosius the Elder, saved the day. The barbarians were seen off; military discipline restored and the leading traitors executed.
So Roman Britain lived to fight another day. But just how Roman was it? For some time now it has been gospel among historians that Britannia was a province like any other, as loyal to Rome and as fully integrated into Roman ways. But there are some important pieces of evidence which refuse to fit the theory. For instance, the only Romano-British author whose works survive, Gildas, always distinguishes the ‘Romans’ from the ‘British’ and is almost uniformly hostile to the former: the Romans, he writes, had seized Britain by guile rather than honest victory in the field and they had imposed a rule that was both alien – ‘so that [the country] was no longer thought to be Britain but a Roman island’ – and oppressive, with ‘taskmasters’ and ‘cruel governors’. Historians have explained away Gildas’s hostility by arguing that, though he wrote fluent Latin, he reflected the views of those outside the Romanized elite.
Maybe. But there also have to be doubts about the political, as opposed to the social, Romanization of the elite itself. For even they failed to participate in the imperial administrative machine. Provincials, of course, were not allowed to hold office in their native province. But they could – and, in the case of the Gauls, frequently did – hold office elsewhere. Not so the British. Why? Perhaps, then as now, the Oceanus Britannicus (the English Channel) was seen as a real barrier. Perhaps, bearing in mind the booming prosperity of Britain in the third and fourth centuries, they were simply doing too well at home to want to risk their luck abroad.
We shall, finally, never know.
Whatever the reason, however, the British then remained semi-detached from the Empire, just as the British now are semi-detached from the European Union. And it is as different, semi-detached and even semi-barbarous, that they appear in our final glimpse of Roman Britain. It comes from the poem De Reditu Suo (‘On his Return’) by the Gallo-Roman poet Rutilius Claudius Namatianus, who was returning home after serving as a high official in Rome. He travelled by sea from port to port and in one of these he met his friend Victorinus, the former vicarius (governor) of Britain. Namatianus then gives a pen portrait of Victorinus, which turns into a back-handed picture of late Roman Britain. Victorinus, the poet writes, had been a just and upright administrator, who had worked to win the affection of the British people despite the fact that they were so remote and primitive.
Why such language after four centuries of Roman rule? There is only one explanation. Victorinus and Rutilius, Gauls though they were by birth, saw themselves as Romans and heirs to the culture and Empire of Rome. The Britons, on the other hand, were different. They might be within the Roman Empire. But they were outside the charmed circle of Romanness. They were subjects and natives. They were not Romans.
Such, probably, is the background to the strange death of Roman Britain. For the Romans did not abandon Britain in ad 409 of their own volition. Rather, it seems, they were expelled by their discontented British subjects, who thought that they could defend themselves better than the decadent power of Rome. Such provincial risings had occurred before and Rome had always fought back. Moreover, the leaders of the British ‘cities’, as the old tribes had been renamed, soon had second thoughts and appealed to Rome for help. But this time the Emperor Honorius had more important concerns on his mind as in ad 410 Rome itself had been captured by Alaric the Goth. The city, inviolate for a thousand years, was sacked and the emperor’s own sister was among the booty carried off. In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Honorius rejected the British appeal and ordered the cities to look to their own defences.
Britannia was now on its own. How would it fare?
II
With the break between Britain and Rome, all legitimate political authority – which had been vested in the emperor – came to an end. Who filled the vacuum we do not know. Perhaps the representative British Council of the cities, which had existed in the early third century with largely ceremonial functions, was revived as a working government, like the Congress of the Revolutionary American Colonies.
And, like the Revolutionary Congress, the Council’s first task was defence. For Britain’s barbarian enemies took advantage of the departure of Roman officialdom and the field army to redouble their attack. At first the British, long unused to defending themselves and with inexperienced and divided leadership, did badly. But they soon learned to use the formidable defensive works which the Romans had left behind. Each was targeted against a different enemy. Hadrian’s Wall defended the northern frontier against the Picts; a chain of forts along the west coast, from the Solway Firth to Cardiff, held off the Scottish raiders from their Irish homeland; while the massive fortifications of the Saxon Shore, which stretched from Branodunum (Brancaster) in the north to Portus Ardaoni (Porchester near Portsmouth) in the west, were built to protect the East Anglian, Kentish and Channel coasts from the Saxon pirates from across the North Sea. Even today, the remains of the Saxon Shore forts are impressive. The walls of Gariannonum (Burgh Castle) in Norfolk are ten feet thick and still stand some twenty feet high; similarly, the vast circuit of the walls of Porchester seem framed to enclose a substantial town rather than a mere fortress.
How could barbarian raiders overcome such obstacles? The answer, probably, is that they did not. Instead, like the Greeks before the walls of Troy, they were inadvertently let in.
As it happens, we have, albeit imperfectly, both sides of the story. The British perspective is given by Gildas’s The Ruin of Britain; the invaders’ by Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
Bede was a Northumbrian, born in 673 on the lands of the monastery of St Peter at Wearmouth. At the age of seven, his parents sent him to St Peter’s to begin his education. And there he remained, first as student and then as master, either at Wearmouth or at the twin monastery of St Paul at Jarrow on the River Tyne, till his death in 735 at the then ripe age of sixty-two.
It would be hard to think of a career that was more circumscribed or less eventful. But that is to see it simply in physical terms. Instead, Bede was an adventurer of the mind and his terra incognita was the great library accumulated by his own patron and teacher, Bishop Benedict Biscop, at Jarrow. Bede explored this library thoroughly and meticulously. But he was no dry-as-dust scholar. Rather, as with those who go into the unknown, there was a touch of boldness about him, and a willingness to think afresh.
The result was that this provincial monk, who never stirred more than a few dozen miles from his place of birth, became responsible for a remarkable series of scholarly innovations which changed the intellectual life of Europe.
He was particularly interested in chronology – that is, the ordering of events in time. This is the basic tool of the historian, and to help himself and others to date events accurately he wrote two handbooks. They listed world events from ancient times to his own day and – in place of the chaos of different eras used then and for long after – they popularized what has become our standard means of dating by the year bc or ad. He was also, since he was unusually scrupulous both about naming his sources and quoting from them accurately, one of the pioneers of the footnote and the bibliography. He had a clear understanding of causation, and wrote in a plain style which was refreshingly different from – say – Gildas’s excitable rhetoric. Finally, Bede invented the idea of England, or at least the idea of the English as a single people. And he applied all of this to his late masterpiece, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which he finished only four years before his death. If the writing of history is one of the glories of England as a country and of English as a language (as I think it to be) then Bede, though he wrote in Latin, deserves an honoured place as the founder of a national tradition.
The British Gildas, like the Anglo-Saxon Bede, was a monk and he too wrote in Latin. But that is all the two men have in common. Otherwise, they and their works were as different as chalk and cheese. Gildas’s is a diatribe; Bede’s a sober history. The former is written in the heat and terror of events; the latter retrospectively, when the dust had begun to settle a little. But it is no emotion recollected in tranquillity; instead, Bede’s contempt for the vanquished British is as fresh as when the two peoples first met and took an instant and lasting dislike to each other.
And the British were by no means the only ones to detest the Saxons. The Saxons were part of the great diaspora of Germanic peoples, who first threatened the Roman Empire and then, in the fifth century, overran it. Their homeland lay in the north German plains between the River Elbe to the east and the River Ems to the west in a region still known today as Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony). Here, the North Sea coast is flat and low-lying and even the hinterland rises only to a hundred-odd feet above sea-level. The result is that the frontier between land and water is uncertain: there are marshlands and fenlands; great rivers which are tidal for scores of miles and huge storms which sweep in across the coastal flats. And, above all, there is the sea.
Even now, the sea is dominant. Then, it was omnipresent, both as a threat and an opportunity: it forcibly inducted the Saxons into the arts of seamanship; it also drove them out, to search for plunder and for territories in softer lands to the west and south. Here they struck terror, along the coasts of Britain and Gaul, from the Wash to the Bay of Biscay. ‘The Saxon’, wrote the Gallo-Roman nobleman Sidonius Apollinaris, ‘is the most ferocious of all foes.’ Their ships were long, clinker-built and with high, curving prows, each carved with the image of a sea-serpent. The men on board were strange in appearance too to those accustomed to Mediterranean build and coloration. They were tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed and with their blond hair shaved at the front, ‘till the head looks smaller and the visage longer’. Neither the sea nor shipwreck, Sidonius continued, held any terrors for them; nor did the common rules of humanity. Instead, at the end of each summer’s raiding party, they would drown one in ten of their captives as a sacrifice to their savage gods.
The Saxons first appeared in British waters in about ad 285, when the admiral sent against them, Carausius, rebelled against Rome and set up the first seaborne British Empire. His regime issued a remarkable series of propagandistic coins, and it was probably he who had the strategic imagination to conceive of the defensive scheme of the Saxon Shore forts. Subsequently, after Constantius Chlorus had re-established Roman power in Britain, the forts became one of the great frontier commands of the Empire, under a high military official known as the Count of the Saxon Shore. The Saxons, and their fellow Germanic tribesmen to the west, the Franks, also played a part in the penultimate act of Roman Britain, the barbarica conspiratio of AD 367.
There was another reason for the almost superstitious dread which the Saxons aroused: their unrepentant, aggressive and, it would appear, bloodthirsty paganism. For Rome and Empire had become Christian. This story too began in Britain, when on 25 June 306, in the great legion-ary fortress of Eboracum (York), the troops of Constantius Chlorus, who had just died, acclaimed his son Constantine as emperor. Constantine, known to history as The Great, completed the evolution of the Empire into an oriental despotism; his ‘conversion’ in 312 also began the transformation of Christianity from a savagely persecuted sect into the official religion of the Empire – including the province of Britannia. Basilica-like churches were built in the major British cities and British bishops took part in the Councils of the Church.
But, despite the Saxons’ ferocious credentials as heathens as well as barbarians, in the early fifth century it was the Picts and Scots who seemed the greater threat to post-Roman Britain. The result was one of the great miscalculations of history. Under the pressure of constant warfare against the Celtic invaders, the representative regime of the British cities had been quickly supplemented by the rule of military strongmen, who dignified themselves with the revived name of rex or king. And, in the middle years of the century, a certain Vortigern, whose name means ‘Mighty King’, may have established an overlordship over all Britannia.
Quite how the two forms of government, the royal and the representative, related to each other is uncertain. But, faced with renewed incursions from the Picts and Scots, both groups, according to Gildas, came together in the fateful decision. ‘Then all the councillors, together with that proud tyrant, … the British King, were so blinded’, Gildas reports, ‘that, as a protection to their country, they sealed its doom by inviting among them (like wolves into the sheep fold) the fierce and impious Saxons, a race hateful both to God and men, to repel the invasions of the northern nations.’ The Saxons, Gildas continues, who arrived in ‘three ships of war’, ‘landed on the eastern side of the islands, by the invitation of the unlucky King’ and there made their first settlement. The terms of Vortigern’s invitation gave the Saxons ‘an allowance of provisions’, handed over each month, in return for their military support.
This sounds like the kind of arrangement which the Romans themselves had frequently made with their barbarian neighbours. For relations between Rome and the barbarians were not simply of hostility. They were more complex – and ambiguous – than that. Indeed, they bear a striking resemblance to our own, equally ambiguous, attitudes to immigrants and asylum seekers. On the one hand, we fear them and the threat they pose to our way of life and security; on the other, we recognize the vital contribution they make to our economies by doing the jobs our own people won’t. The barbarians came to play a comparable role for Rome. For the people of the Empire soon began to disdain the hardships of the soldier’s life. Instead, the best soldiers were drawn first from the hardy mountain tribesmen of the Balkans and later from Germany itself. Whole tribes were settled on the border territories of the Empire in return for military service. And individual Germans rose far and fast in the imperial armies until they started to dominate the senior ranks.
And it was in some such role as hired mercenaries that the Saxons first settled in post-Roman Britain. The arrangement was always risky. But in Britain it encountered the additional difficulty that the Roman structures of administration and taxation, which alone could guarantee a regular handover of supplies, had been dismantled – either deliberately by the Romano-Britons themselves, or consequentially following the drying-up of coin supplies from the Empire. The results were predictably disastrous as quarrels broke out over the sufficiency and regularity of the supplies. Gildas claims that the Saxons deliberately played up the quarrels. But they could equally have interpreted the irregularities as a sign of bad faith on the part of their hosts. At any event, the Saxons first threatened and then carried out reprisal raids. Soon, these escalated into an all-out war of conquest.
In the war, the initial Saxon settlement, as Gildas saw with the blinding clarity of hindsight, had handed all the advantage to the invaders. It acted as a Trojan Horse, getting the Saxons past the coastal fortifications which served as the first and chief British line of defence. It was also a beachhead, enabling the Saxons to bring over reinforcements as and when they pleased from their homeland. The Britons could not fight against these odds and their towns were sacked and their populations massacred from east to west of the island.
Gildas may have witnessed a late example of such a sack:
All the columns [he writes] were levelled with the ground by the frequent strokes of the battering-ram, all the husbandmen routed, together with their bishops, priests, and people, whilst the sword gleamed and the flames crackled round them on every side. Lamentable to behold, in the midst of the streets lay the tops of lofty towers, tumbled to the ground, stones of high walls, holy altars, fragments of human bodies, covered with livid spots of coagulated blood, looking as if they had been squeezed together in a press.
Judging the writing of another age and in another language is always difficult. But this passage, though it may borrow from Classical models, is, to my ear at least, no mere rhetorical exercise but a piece of vivid war reporting. And it still chills.
As also does Gildas’s description of the consequences. The survivors, who had managed to flee, soon faced either starvation or death from the elements. In this extremity, some surrendered to the invaders, to be killed or enslaved at their pleasure. Others fled abroad. While others took refuge among the mountains, forests and cliffs of the west of the island.
Gildas’s account is, for once, history written by the losers. But the story did not change much when Bede came to rewrite it two and a half centuries later from the perspective of the victors. Bede supplies a date – ‘in the year of Our Lord 449, Martian being made Emperor with Valentinian’ – for Vortigern’s invitation to the Saxons. And he gives the names of the Saxon leaders: ‘Hengist’ and ‘Horsa’. But the date is clearly the result of intelligent guesswork while, with his usual scrupulousness, he qualifies the statement about Hengist and Horsa with the warning: these ‘are said to have been’ their names.
Where Bede is useful instead is in his account of the ethnography of the invasions. For he is clear that the Saxons were only one of several distinct German peoples to invade Britain, each of whom settled in a different part of the old Roman province.
Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany – Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent, and of the Isle of Wight, and those also in the province of the West Saxons [Wessex] who are to this day called Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight. From the Saxons, that is, the country which is now called Old Saxony, came the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons [that is, the peoples of Essex, Sussex and Wessex]. From the Angles, that is, the country which is called Anglia, and which is said, from that time, to remain desert [i.e. unpeopled] to this day, between the provinces of the Jutes and the Saxons, are descended the East Angles, the Midland Angles, Mercians, all the race of the Northumbrians, that is, of those nations that dwell on the north side of the River Humber, and the other nations of the English.
Bede’s account was a product of the best antiquarian scholarship of his own day. And it has been confirmed, in astonishing detail, by modern archaeology. Cremation urns of the same type, and probably indeed by the same potter, have been found in Wehden, Lower Saxony, and Markshall, Norfolk. Grave-goods discovered in both places, especially bracteates (decorated discs of gold), likewise confirm that there was a close connection between Kent and Jutland on the west coast of Denmark. The author is even right about the depopulation of Angeln, the homeland of the Angles. There rising sea-levels made long-established villages uninhabitable and their populations joined, almost certainly, in the emigration to Britain.
But, beyond these broad outlines, it is remarkably difficult to go. True, the much later compilation known as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does appear to give a detailed account of the conquest with dates and battles. But it is easy to show that the Chronicle narrative is riddled with repetitions, inconsistencies and glaring omissions. It is also shot through with formulaic foundation legends (the landing parties almost always sail in three ships) and mythical genealogies (almost all the royal houses spring from the Anglo-Saxon god Woden). In view of this, the best that can be said is that the invaders first settled on the coast and then penetrated inland along navigable rivers and Roman roads. The broad movement was from east to west and south to north. But it was patchy, often slow and faced occasional serious reverses, like the Battle of Mount Badon, in which the British, led by Ambrosius Aurelianus, whom Gildas calls the sole survivor of ‘the Roman nation’ in Britain, inflicted a heavy defeat on the Anglo-Saxons, probably in the ad 490s. The area around Luton and Aylesbury in the modern Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire did not fall till ad 571 and Bath not till six years later, after the battle of Dyrham. And there were pockets of resistance even in the east – such as Verulamium, the site of the death of the proto-martyr, St Alban, and the principal cultic centre of British Christianity, or the little British kingdom of Elmet in the modern Yorkshire – which held out longer still.
By the end of the sixth century, however, the future political geography of Britain was becoming clear. The Britons had held on to the territories to the north of Hadrian’s Wall, to Cumbria and to the west of the Severn and Wye valleys, while the Anglo-Saxons had conquered everything to the east and to the south.
Give or take a little, these are the approximate frontiers of modern England.
III
We tend to think of the Norman Conquest as the turning point in the history of England. But the Saxon Conquest was even more important, since it created both the reality and the idea of England itself. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the scale of the Saxon incursions. Perhaps 200,000 people flooded into a native population which by then had been reduced by raids, famine and disease to less than two million. Proportionately, it was the largest immigration that Britain has ever known. Moreover, as most of the incomers were men, it quickly turned from immigration into conquest. In the areas of densest Anglo-Saxon settlement, in the east and the Midlands, DNA evidence shows that up to ninety per cent of the native male population was displaced – they were driven west or killed – and their women, their villages and their farms taken over by the incomers. This was ethnic cleansing at its most savagely effective.
And it was not only blood that changed. The Anglo-Saxon immigrants imposed their own language: Old English. Most former places of habitation – towns, villages and villas – were abandoned and new ones established, to which new, English names were given. They also gave new names to natural features, such as mountains and rivers and woods. And they remade as well as renamed the landscape. In the fullness of time, they even gave the country they had conquered a new name: Britannia became the land of the Angles or Ængla Land.
This immigration at the point of the sword led to an outcome that was unique in the former territories of the Empire. For the sack of Rome in ad 410 had been followed sixty years later by the fall of the Empire itself in the west in ad 476. Nevertheless, in most places – in Italy and what were to become France and Spain – things continued pretty much as before. The cities with their bishops survived; ‘senatorial’ aristocrats continued to entertain each other in their opulent villas; the trade routes to the East remained open. The difference was that in place of the emperor, barbarian German leaders took over the imperial role. They divided it and localized it. But they kept all of the wealth, pomp and authority they could. For it was that which had made Rome such a magnet in the first place.
Even the Visigoths, who had sacked Rome, got in on the act. ‘At first’, Athaulf, the Visigothic king is reported as saying, ‘I ardently desired that the Roman name should be obliterated.’ But then he realized his mistake. ‘I have therefore chosen the safer course of aspiring to the glory of restoring and increasing the Roman name by Gothic vigour.’ Athaulf ’s lineage did not survive. But his aspirations did. The result was that, throughout the continental provinces of the Empire, a hybrid sub-Roman society continued to propagate Roman and Christian ideas of politics under the rule of Germanic kings; Roman buildings, such as churches and palaces, were still put up to enrich their capitals; their new Germanic nobility retained the names of the senior Roman military ranks – comes or count and dux or duke – as aristocratic titles; and, above all, Latin – if increasingly debased and diluted – continued to be the spoken and written language, used by the invaders and the native populations alike.
But in Britannia it was a different story. Here the fall of Rome really marked the end of Romanness. Despite their height and strength, the walls of Rutupiae (Richborough) and the other forts of the Saxon Shore were overwhelmed and abandoned. So were the walled towns. And their ruin marks the ruin of Britain. Or at least it marks the annihilation of everything that was Roman about Britain: the law, the language, the literature, the religion and the politics all vanished.
Quite why the Anglo-Saxons should have behaved so differently from their fellow Germanic tribesmen across the Channel it is hard to say. Perhaps the Britons, who, unlike the demoralized and by this time largely barbarian Roman field-army, were defending their own homes and families, simply fought too hard. Perhaps, in the fifty years since cutting off the imperial ties in ad 409, Romanized Britain had ceased to be a going concern, where, unlike the Continent again, there was nothing much for the barbarian invaders to buy into. Perhaps the Anglo-Saxons (and some of the Britons too) simply wanted to be different.
But the important thing is that in Britannia, uniquely in western Europe, there was a fresh start. For along with their new language, the Anglo-Saxons brought a new society, new gods and a new, very different set of political values. And from these, in time, they would create a nation and an empire which would rival Rome. A version of their tongue would replace Latin as the lingua franca; English Common Law would challenge Roman Law as the dominant legal system; and they would devise, in free-market economics, a new form of business that would transform human wealth and welfare. Most importantly, perhaps, they would invent a new politics which depended on participation and consent, rather than on the top-down autocracy of Rome.
It is a story to be proud of and, at its heart, lies a single institution: the monarchy.
Chapter 2
Christian Kingship
Redwald, Æthelfrith, Æthelbert, Penda, Offa, Egbert
THE ANGLO-SAXONS HAD BROUGHT MANY THINGS from Germany. But the idea of kingship was not among them. As late as Bede’s own day, the Anglo-Saxons’ ancestral people in the German homeland were kingless; likewise, the leaders of the first expeditions to Britain – Cerdic, Cynric and the rest – were called chiefs and never kings. Only in subsequent generations did their children and grandchildren begin to style themselves kings and invent impressive genealogies for themselves.
English kingship, that is to say, was a plant of English growth, developing in England out of the conditions which followed the Anglo-Saxon conquest.
I
The background was the peculiarly egalitarian nature of Germanic social structure and political values which the Anglo-Saxons brought with them to Britain. Since the Anglo-Saxons themselves, like other Germanic peoples, were illiterate, we have to depend for our knowledge of these on the account of a civilized Roman outsider, Tacitus. His Germania (Germany) has a double aspect. It was political propaganda, addressed to the Romans of his own day. But it was also a piece of serious ethnography.
Tacitus was a grand senatorial aristocrat, historian and biographer and son-in-law of Agricola, the conquering governor of Britain. He was born around AD 55 in the reign of the Emperor Nero and died c. AD 120 under Hadrian. Like many of his class, Tacitus was nostalgic for the Republic. So in Germania he turned its inhabitants into Noble Savages. They were physically handsome. They were morally virtuous. They remained uncorrupted by civilization and its delights. And, above all, they had preserved their manhood and their freedom.
Tacitus’s essay, as well as being a serious piece of ethnography, is also remarkably accurate as prophecy. For, three centuries before the barbarian invasions which overran the Western Empire, Tacitus proclaimed that the Germans were Rome’s most dangerous foe. Not even the great Middle Eastern empire of Parthia (in effect, the later Persia) presented such a challenge.
The Germans, Tacitus writes, have no cities and dislike close neighbours. Instead they live in separate dwellings in widely scattered hamlets. Their buildings are of wood and their dress is of the simplest, with both men and women, apart from the richest, wearing a simple one-piece garment held in place with a clasp. This clasp, elaborated into a brooch, was the most characteristic form of female adornment; for a man, however, it was the spear. Indeed, the spear was manhood and presentation with it was the rite de passage from a boy to a man: ‘up to this time he is regarded as a member of the household, afterwards as a member of the commonwealth’.
Happy chance has preserved the remains of a series of such communities in the Lark valley in Suffolk. They belong to the earliest days of the Anglo-Saxon settlement in Britain and their archaeology confirms Tacitus’s picture in striking detail. The hamlets were widely separated and the houses built of wood. They clustered in three groups, which probably formed the accommodation of three extended families. The larger building in the centre of each group was the hall where the family met, ate and caroused, and where, too, probably the young unmarried men slept. The immigrants depended on simple mixed farming, while their grave-goods suggest a remarkably homogeneous and egalitarian society. Each female grave contained a brooch and only a handful of males were buried with a sword rather than the ubiquitous spear.
For the right to bear arms was as important to the Anglo-Saxons as it was to the framers of the Second Amendment to the American Constitution. And for much the same reason: only a community that could defend itself was free and only someone who could share in that defence had the right to call himself a free man. ‘They transact’, Tacitus noted, ‘no public or private business without being armed.’ The result was a sort of armed democracy. ‘When the whole multitude think proper, they sit down armed … the most complimentary form of assent is to express approbation with their spears.’ This was participatory politics and the polar opposite of the imperial command model of Rome.
Nevertheless, such communities still needed leaders, especially in times of war. But how did they arise? Our earliest sources on the German people, Tacitus and Bede, offer the same answer: they chose or ‘elected’ their kings. And, as the kings were made by the people, they had, as Tacitus again emphasizes, neither ‘unlimited [n]or arbitrary power’ over them. This, then, is the idea of government by consent, in which the leader is chosen by the people, or at least is answerable to them. It was an idea taken by the Anglo-Saxons from their homeland in Germany and transplanted to their new home in England, where it flourished and remains an essential element in the monarchy to the present day.
The contrast with the Rome of Tacitus’s own day – where the emperor ruled and a fawning court adored; where the rich had sold their liberty for luxury and the poor for bread and circuses; where freedom was a memory and liberty an illusion – was all the stronger for being unspoken.
Meanwhile, England, in the immediate aftermath of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, offered special circumstances which encouraged the development of kingship beyond anything the Germans were familiar with back home. Most important was the long, hard-fought nature of the conquest itself. For the Anglo-Saxons’ more-or-less permanent state of war to the death with the British required equally permanent leaders. Moreover, war in a prosperous country like Britain produced booty, which made the war leaders rich. From their new wealth they could reward their followers. This attracted fresh followers and consolidated the loyalty of the old, which made the leaders more powerful still. And so on. Finally, the power and the permanence coalesced into kingship.
The clearest evidence of the change from the relatively egalitarian communities of the early conquest period to a more complex society with greater extremes of rich and poor, of haves and have-nots, comes from the graves known to archaeologists as Fürstengräber (‘princely graves’). They appear by the middle of the sixth century and have a distinctive style. A large mound or barrow was raised over the grave and a rich array and variety of goods placed within it, such as the silver-gilt-hilted sword, silver-studded shield, spear and knife, Kentish glass claw-beaker, Frankish bronze bowl and Frankish silver-gilt-and-garnet-encrusted belt buckle found under the largest barrow of the ‘burial field’ at Finglesham in East Kent.
We shall never know the exact names or ranks of the people buried at Finglesham. But the name Finglesham is itself a clue. Its earliest form, contemporary with the cemetery, is Pengels-ham: ‘the Prince’s manor’; while a couple of miles to the north-west is Eastry, a royal vil of the eventual kingdom of Kent. Almost certainly, therefore, the burials at Finglesham were those of Kentish princes. Were they cadets of an existing royal house? Or were they princes on their way to becoming kings? And what was the source of their wealth? From trade? Or war? Or both?
This halfway world to monarchy is also reflected in the great Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, which is written much later but appears to preserve folk memories of these earlier times. The poem’s hero, Beowulf, was a local war leader chosen by the people of his district on the mainland. Thanks to his prowess, he eventually became a king, reigned gloriously for fifty winters and was given a magnificent funeral.
The Geat People built a pyre for Beowulf,
stacked and decked it until it stood foursquare,
hung with helmets, heavy war-shields
On a height they kindled the hugest of all
funeral fires; flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house
burning it to the core … Heaven swallowed the smoke.
Then, after the body and weapons were consumed in the flames,
… the Geat people began to construct
a mound on a headland …
It was their hero’s memorial; what remained from the fire
they housed inside it …
And they buried torques in the barrow, and jewels
and a trove [of golden treasure] …
But Beowulf, impressive though it is, is only literature and scholars were inclined to dismiss its tale of lavish buried treasure as mere embroidery. Then, in 1939, archaeologists began to excavate a mound at Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge in Suffolk. It revealed a burial of epic magnificence. The largest Dark Age ship yet known – ninety feet in length and fourteen feet across at its widest – had been dragged from the River Deben to the top of the hundred-foot-high ridge and laid in an enormous, pre-excavated trench. Then a gabled hut was built amidships and the body, dressed in the deceased’s richest clothes, and surrounded with his weapons, insignia and treasures, was placed within. Finally the trench was filled in and a high mound raised over the ship and its precious cargo.
The mound stood out boldly on the skyline, like an English earth pyramid. Within, the deceased, who had been buried rather than cremated, was sent off on his voyage to the Other World with as rich an array of grave-goods as any pharaoh. The splendour of the contents paralleled or even exceeded the tomb-goods described in the epic. There is gold and garnet jewellery that is unequalled in Europe; weapons for the chase and battlefield; a bronze cauldron for cooking; silver-plate from Byzantium decorated with lavish Classical ornament for feasts; and a harp to accompany the festivities.
But who is buried here? Is he a prince, as at Finglesham? Or was he a king? The fact that the Anglo-Saxons were still illiterate means that the answers to these questions can never be known for certain. Nevertheless, there are several powerful indications, all of which point to Redwald, king of East Anglia and bretwalda or overlord of England. The Merovingian coins in his purse have been redated to c. 625, which corresponds closely to the date (627) given by Bede for Redwald’s death; the location of the burial is a known centre of East Anglian royal power, while the wealth of the grave-goods echoes Bede’s description of Redwald’s great military and political success.
Moreover, the grave-goods seem to be more than just those of a very rich man or even of a prince. Instead, they point to the ‘ceremony’, which Shakespeare’s Henry V identifies as the peculiar attribute of kings. For instance, there is a pattern-welded sword of the finest steel, of the kind we find named and celebrated in the epic poetry of the time; a silvered and gilt helmet based on the design of a late Roman general’s helmet; a decorated whetstone polished from the hardest rock. These surely are regalia – the symbols of a ritualized monarchy – and they include many objects which feature, later in English history, in formal coronation rituals: the sword; the sceptre (for it seems that the whetstone is a sceptre) and the crown (for in later times the Saxon word for crown was cynehelm or helmet of the people).
So it is clear that Redwald, if it be he, was much more than an elected war leader. He was a true king. Indeed, he was a king like Henry VIII. He was rich, like Henry, and his purse was filled with gold coins struck in Merovingian France. Like Henry, he was fond of music and he is buried with a lyre. Like Henry, he was a discerning patron of the arts, and he had court craftsmen who were able to make the finest jewellery in Europe. And like Henry, he delighted in the weaponry and accoutrements of the warrior world.
But Redwald’s grave-goods show something else: he had contacts beyond the world of the North Sea. He reached out into France and, beyond that, into the surviving Roman Empire in Byzantium. Both of these were Christian. And there are traces of this too in two of the smaller items of the Sutton Hoo treasure: a pair of silver spoons of Mediterranean manufacture. One is clearly inscribed in Greek letters ‘Paulos’, and the other, more clumsily and debatably, ‘Saulos’. They are the only things to be touched by literacy. And they are the only ones that may be Christian.
For Redwald was an English king on the cusp of a new world, the world of Christian monarchy.
II
The Anglo-Saxon world of the sixth century was rich, strange and bloody. It was peopled with monsters and dragons, miracle-working swords and kings who all claimed descent from Woden, chief of the Anglo-Saxon pagan gods.
As these genealogies suggest, both the kings and their peoples remained pagan. This meant that religion in post-Roman Britain continued to be divided along racial lines: Britons were Christian, after their fashion, and Anglo-Saxons pagan, after theirs. And traces of the Anglo-Saxons’ beliefs survive in our language to the present: in the names of days of the week (Tuesday, Thursday and Friday are named, respectively, after the Anglo-Saxon deities for order and law, thunder and fertility and Wednesday after Woden himself); in place-names (Wednesbury in Staffordshire means ‘Woden’s burgh’ [fortified town]) and in the names of festivals (‘Yule’ is the modern form of the Anglo-Saxon Giuli, while Easter, the greatest feast of the Christian Church, derives its name from the pagan goddess Eostre, whose festival was also celebrated in the spring.
Later, Bede condemned the Britons in stinging terms for having made no attempt to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. ‘Among other most wicked actions [of the Britons]’, he observed, ‘which their own historian Gildas mournfully takes notice of, they added this: that they never preached the faith to the Saxons, or English, who dwelt amongst them.’ Nor did any of the Anglo-Saxons’ other Christian neighbours, whether from Ireland or Gaul, make any moves towards their conversion either, and there is no reason to suppose they would have found them receptive if they had.
Then, in the last decade of the sixth century, there were signs of movement on the Christian and pagan sides alike. The first steps were probably taken by Æthelbert, king of Kent. Periodically, by guile or military prowess, one of the petty Anglo-Saxon kings would make himself first among equals, or even overlord (bretwalda) of most of England. Æthelbert was one of the most successful. His prestige seems to have derived from his access to the material and cultural riches across the Channel. There, in contrast to the former Britannia, where everything that was Roman had been wiped out, Roman institutions had survived the political collapse of the Empire. They did so because of the very different behaviour of the barbarian conquerors of Gaul, the Franks.
The Franks, another Germanic people, were the Saxons’ neighbours to the west, with their lands lying along the lower Rhine. They spoke a similar language to the Saxons, and, to begin with, were equally feared as pirates. But their history was transformed by their king Clovis, or Chlodwig (Louis in modern French). Born in c. 466, he married a Christian princess, Clotilda, and was himself baptized into Roman Christianity at Reims in 496. Thereafter, the Gallo-Romans, led by their bishops, hastened to submit themselves to him, and by the age of forty he was master of all Gaul. The Franks long retained their own laws, language and identity, and even gave a new name, Francia (France), ‘the land of the Franks’, to Gaul. But equally, under their rule, most aspects of sub-Roman society – the architecture, language, literature, manners and, above all, Roman Christianity – continued to flourish in the most successful regime since the fall of the Western Empire.
A connection with Francia was thus a glittering prospect for an ambitious Anglo-Saxon king like Æthelbert. So, probably in the 580s, he married Clovis’s great-granddaughter, Bertha. In the marriage, two contrasting worlds – Anglo-Saxon paganism and Roman Christianity – were to meet and, in so doing, to transform the face of English kingship.
As was usual with royal inter-faith marriages, arrangements were made for Bertha to retain the practice of her own religion. She brought clergy, including a Frankish bishop, Luidhard; while her husband, a conscientious, believing pagan, gave her the little Romano-British church of St Martin’s outside the walls of his ‘metropolis’ or capital at Canterbury to worship in. Perhaps Bertha’s family had made it a condition, spoken or unspoken, of the marriage that Æthelbert would convert. Perhaps Æthelbert, for his part, saw himself as another Clovis who would complete his domination of Britain through his own baptism. At any rate, after a few years, word reached Pope Gregory in Rome that the people of England wished to be converted to the Christian faith.
Gregory was a great man in a great office. For the popes were already claiming to be heirs, not only of St Peter, but of the Roman emperors as well. Gregory’s power was different, of course. It consisted not of legions of soldiers but of regiments of priests and monks. But they were organized with all the old Roman respect for discipline, hierarchy, efficiency and law. According to the famous story in Bede, Pope Gregory the Great first encountered the English when a party of merchants offered a group of boys for sale as slaves in the Forum: ‘their bodies [were] white, their countenances beautiful and their hair very fine’. He was told they came from Britain, were pagans and were known as Angles. ‘Not Angles but angels’, he is supposed to have replied.
The tale has the air of being a little too well polished in the telling. Nevertheless, there is no reason to doubt its essential truth. This is shown by Gregory’s own letters which make plain his interest in young Anglo-Saxon slave-boys. ‘Procure with the money thou mayest receive,’ he instructed the papal agent in Gaul, ‘English boys of about seventeen or eighteen years of age, who may profit by being given to God in monasteries.’
Now Bertha’s marriage to Æthelbert presented Gregory with the opportunity to go further and launch a new Roman conquest of England for Christianity. His chosen general in the campaign was an Italian monk of good family, named Augustine.
Augustine and his party of monks and priests set out from Rome in 595. They planned to travel by the usual route – by sea to Provence and thereafter across Gaul by land – and they carried letters of introduction to Gallo-Roman and Frankish notables, including the heads of Bertha’s own family. But, hearing tales of the Anglo-Saxons’ savagery, Augustine soon returned to Rome to beg for their recall. Instead, Gregory sternly ordered him to proceed, redoubling, at the same time, his own diplomatic efforts. The mixture of stick and carrot worked, and Augustine and his followers, complete now with Frankish interpreters, arrived in Kent in 597. They landed at Richborough, like those previous invaders Hengist and Horsa in 449 or the Emperor Claudius in AD 43.
Æthelbert, as soon as he was informed of Augustine’s arrival, ordered him to remain in quarantine on the Isle of Thanet, which was then cut off from the mainland by the Wantsum Channel. After a few days, the king decided on a meeting. So he crossed into Thanet and held his court there in the open air. This was to protect him from Augustine’s magical powers, which, the king and his advisers feared, might prove irresistible indoors. But, when he was summoned to the presence, Augustine employed instead the weapons of liturgical ceremony, which the Church had already polished to a fine art. Augustine entered the assembly robed and in procession, accompanied by his monks ‘bearing a silver cross for their banner, and an icon of Jesus (“the image of Our Lord painted on a board”) and singing the litany [in Latin]’.
Bede describes this entry as embodying ‘divine, not magical, virtue’. But the strangeness of it all – the dress, the symbols, the language and the music – must have been as potent as any spell to the Anglo-Saxons. It was a new way of doing things. And, as we shall see, it was to prove profoundly attractive.
Augustine then preached ‘the Word of Life’ to the king and his courtiers and his ‘interpreters of the nation of the Franks’ translated. Æthelbert heard them out courteously before making his reply. ‘Your words and promises are very fair’, the king said to his visitors, ‘but, as they are new to us, and of uncertain import, I cannot approve of them so far as to forsake that which I have so long followed with the whole English nation.’ But, he continued, he would welcome the missionaries. He would also allow them to ‘preach and gain as many as you can to your religion’.
Æthelbert was playing a subtle political game. He was well aware of the advantages which had accrued to the Franks after their conversion to Roman Christianity. But he needed to be convinced that it would work for him, for the political risks of conversion were enormous. So, in effect, he was inviting Augustine to market-test Christianity: there would be no Constantinian heroics of conversion; instead, Æthelbert would convert only when the people had shown it safe to do so.
Augustine got to work right away. The mission, with its formal preaching, teaching and services, was based in Bertha’s little church of St Martin’s, Canterbury. But equally effective in attracting converts, according to Bede, was the missionaries’ exemplary monastic life. The result was a mass baptism of 10,000 Kentish people at Christmas 597. Some historians take this to mean that Æthelbert himself must have converted already. But Gregory makes no mention of this fact in his report of the incident. Instead, it seems clear that Æthelbert held out for some years more. Finally in 600–1, Gregory vented his feelings at the continuing delay in a letter to Queen Bertha. She had done much, he had heard. But she could – and should – have done more: ‘you ought before now, as being truly a Christian, to have inclined the heart of our glorious son, your husband, by the good influence of your prudence, to follow, for the weal of his kingdom and of his own soul, the faith which you profess’.
Gregory’s is the earliest surviving letter to an English queen consort and the first picture of her role. It is a remarkably familiar one. She is pious and literate and her husband is expected – rather optimistically in Æthelbert’s case – to be putty in her hands. Gregory’s letter also gives a sense of Bertha’s place in the world, and, by extension, of England’s too. Naturally, the ‘world’, as Gregory saw it, was – despite all the vicissitudes of the city – resolutely Roman. ‘Your good deeds’, he assured Bertha, ‘are known, not only among the Romans … but also through divers places, and have even come to the ears of the most serene prince [the emperor] at Constantinople.’
Within a few months of Gregory’s letter to Bertha, Æthelbert was baptized, almost certainly at the hands of Augustine himself.
What had carried the day? True, the psychology of Augustine and Gregory in dealing with Æthelbert had been subtle. They had presented the Christian God as a great king, who would reward Æthelbert’s service in this world and the next, just as he, the bretwalda of England, rewarded his own faithful servants. But, finally, the key was probably political. For Christianity would enhance Æthelbert’s kingship with two things that were very attractive to a Dark Age ruler: Roman ideas about power and Roman ways of doing things. Like Rome, the Church used Latin. It had an elaborate system of law and administration, and it built in stone. Above all, the Roman Church was ruled by a monarch, the pope, who, like the emperors, claimed absolute and divinely ordained authority. The pope even used one of the imperial titles: supreme pontiff.
All this the Church made available to Æthelbert, now that he had converted to Christianity. The advantages for the king were obvious. One of the first things Æthelbert did after his conversion was to issue a Law Code, like Justinian and other Christian Roman emperors. But, though the form is Roman, the content of the Code is wholly Anglo-Saxon and merely sets down in writing the existing law of the folk in their own language, with the necessary adaptations to their new Christian status. Indeed, the Code may be the first document written in English and the story goes that Augustine himself had to devise additional new letters of the alphabet in order to write Anglo-Saxon down. And it is revered: at the top of the document, written in red, it reads: ‘These are the dooms [judgements] that King Æthelbert fixed in Augustine’s days.’
But could the Anglo-Saxon ideal of elective kingship survive these new trappings of divine and imperial authority and the power that went with them?
Over the next few years, the structure of the English Church was worked out in an exchange of letters between Gregory and Augustine. The English Church was to be self-governing under the pope. There were to be two provinces, each under a metropolitan or (as he was later known) archbishop: the northern based at York and the southern at London. Augustine himself was to be the first archbishop of the southern province with final authority over the whole English Church and (which became a point of bitter contention) over the surviving British bishops as well. The scheme was based partly on memories of the administration of later Roman Britain and partly on the current reality of the geopolitics of the Anglo-Saxons, who divided themselves into South- and Northumbrians (those living south and north of the River Humber). In the event, Augustine and his successors continued to be based at Canterbury. Otherwise, the lineaments of the scheme have survived and continue to the present.
Augustine died in c. 605 and Æthelbert a decade later in about 616. Both were buried in the splendid abbey, later known as St Augustine’s, which Augustine had founded after his mission outgrew St Martin’s. Augustine’s fellow missionaries and successors as archbishops were buried on one side of the church, and Æthelbert and Bertha and their successors as kings and queens of Kent on the other.
It was a symbolism of death to equal and outdo Sutton Hoo itself. It also spoke eloquently of the alliance of Church and king that, for a thousand years, would be one of the principal driving forces of English political life and practice.
III
The reigns of Æthelbert and Redwald marked the end of the domination of the south-east. Thereafter, the Anglo-Saxon balance of power swung away from the area of earlier settlement towards the north and west. Here, larger, newer kingdoms were being forged at the margins of Anglo-Saxon power: Northumbria in the north; Mercia in the Midlands and Wessex in the south-west. Each in turn was to dominate until finally, partly by accident and partly by design, a unified kingdom of Ængla Land (England) was created.
The outstanding contemporary of Redwald was Æthelfrith, king of Northumbria. Æthelfrith was a great warrior, and, thanks to his victories over the Scots under Aedan in 603 and the Britons of Powys in 613, he was the real founder of Northumbrian power. He was also a pagan. But this did not stop Bede from seeing him as the instrument of God’s vengeance against the Celts, who were not only (Bede thought) of the wrong race but had also espoused the wrong sort of Christianity. Æthelfrith was another Benjamin, Bede enthused, and, like the Old Testament hero, ‘[he] shall ravin as a wolf; in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil’.
It was a verse that might have been the motto of any successful Anglo-Saxon king.
But in this dog-eats-dog world, even Æthelfrith got his comeuppance. It was administered by Redwald, who had given refuge to Edwin, a rival claimant to the Northumbrian throne. Æthelfrith demanded Edwin’s surrender. But Redwald, deciding that attack was the best form of defence, launched a surprise campaign and defeated and killed Æthelfrith in battle in 616. Edwin succeeded to Northumbria while Redwald became unchallenged bretwalda. A decade later, Redwald died in c. 627 and Edwin emerged as bretwalda in turn. One of Edwin’s first steps was to seek the hand of Æthelbert’s daughter, Æthelberg, who arrived in Northumbria with Augustine’s disciple, Paulinus, as her spiritual adviser. After the marriage, Edwin converted and Paulinus became archbishop of York. But when Edwin went the same way as most early Anglo-Saxon kings and was overcome in battle and killed in 633, Paulinus fled south, to become successively bishop of Rochester and archbishop of Canterbury.
The new king of Northumbria, Oswald, was also a Christian. But he drew his inspiration from the very different tradition of the Celtic Christianity of the Scotto-Irish world, where he had spent many years of exile. This is seen in the case of the Lindisfarne Gospels. Lindisfarne monastery on Holy Island, off the Northumbrian coast, had been founded by St Aidan, an Irish monk from Iona, as a base for his missionary activity under Oswald. The splendid decoration of the Gospels, produced in the late seventh century, testifies to the rich mixture of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Roman elements in Northumbrian Christianity.
Under Oswald’s younger brother and successor, Oswy, the tensions between the two strands of Christianity, the Celtic and the Roman, became acute: it even divided the king and the queen, who took different sides on the matter. To settle the dispute, Oswy summoned a Council at Whitby in 664. Both sides argued their case with passion, particularly over the vexed issue of the dating of Easter. But the king declared that the Catholics had been victorious. He did so on simple grounds of authority. If he had to decide, the king said, between St Columba, the apostle of the Scots, and St Peter, the disciple to whom Jesus had given the Key of Heaven, he would choose St Peter.
In the wake of his decision, the Celtic leaders of the Northumbrian church withdrew and returned to Scotland. But much of their influence lingered on to contribute its share to the astonishing efflorescence of Northumbrian culture in the century and a half from c. 650–c. 800. Monasteries were richly endowed with lands and books and relics and became outposts of sophisticated Mediterranean civilization in the north. They copied and illuminated magnificent manuscripts; sent out missionaries to convert their former homeland in Germany, and in Bede produced the greatest European polymath of the day. The intellectual centre of the world, it seemed, had moved from the banks of the Tiber to the Tyne.
But it was not to last.
Very different was the rival kingdom of Mercia. Here King Penda (c. 626–55) held out as an unrepentant pagan. Moreover, in an alliance of convenience with the Britons, he enjoyed a series of crushing victories over the Christian Northumbrians, defeating and killing King Edwin in 633 and King Oswald in 642. The struggle was crucial to the future of England, and the largest, richest and most important Anglo-Saxon archaeological discovery of the last fifty years may be a product of it.
The Staffordshire Hoard was discovered in 2009 in a field near Lichfield, then in the heart of Mercia. It consists of over 1,500 objects made of gold and silver and decorated with precious stones. The silver weighs about 1.3 kilograms and the gold an astonishing 5 kilograms. Only the Sutton Hoo treasure can compare with it. But the two are very different. The Sutton Hoo burial is a careful ritual deposit; the Staffordshire Hoard seems to have been quickly thrown together and hastily buried. Moreover, it consists of fragments: 86 pommel caps from swords; 135 hilt plates from swords and the decorative pieces of at least one Sutton Hoo-style helmet. All are items of male adornment; there is no female jewellery. There are also the crumpled remains of four or five Christian crosses, including one inscribed with the warlike verses from Psalm 68: Surge domine, ‘Rise up, O Lord, and may Thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate Thee be driven from Thy face’.
Was this a processional cross, carried by the losing side in one of Penda’s victories over the Christians of 633 or 642? And were the fragments of male adornment – the warrior bling of the day – torn from the bodies and weapons of the fallen Northumbrian warriors?
It seems very possible. But, alas, we are most unlikely ever to know for certain.
But, finally, Penda succumbed in turn, being defeated and killed by the Christian Oswy of Northumbria in 655. The previous year, in a temporary lull in the hostilities, Penda’s son had married Oswy’s daughter, who, as usual, arrived with Christian missionaries. This gave Christianity a toehold in Mercia even before Penda’s death and it made rapid strides afterwards. One of the old pagan’s sons even retired to an English monastery, while a grandson abdicated to become a monk in Rome. Soon after, Penda’s direct line died out and the succession passed to his great-great-nephew, Æthelbald, who at last proved equal to his formidable ancestor.
The kingdom Æthelbald acquired was already extensive. Its base lay in the Tame valley north of Birmingham, with Tamworth and Lichfield as its main centres. Thence, the power of the kings of Mercia reached out in every direction along the two great Roman roads, Watling Street and the Fosse Way, which intersected in its heartland: north-east towards Lincoln; north-west into the borders of Wales, south-west to Bath and, above all, south-east to London, which, then as now, was the commercial heart of Britain.
Accurately, but prosaically, the Mercian kings have been called Lords of the A5.
Æthelbald was a man shrewd enough, and ruthless enough, to exploit this inheritance to the utmost. He also enjoyed, as all successful politicians must, good luck in the shape of the relative weakness of his most obvious rivals, the kings of Northumbria and Wessex. The result was that he quickly became dominant in the whole of southern Britain. Moreover, he maintained his sway throughout an unprecedentedly long reign of forty years (716–57).
But did that make him a true king of England, rather than a mere overlord? Many, then and now, have thought so. Indeed, a charter of 736 heaps titles on him: he is ‘king not only of the Mercians, but also of all the provinciae which are called by the general name “South English”’; rexSuutanglorum (‘king of the South English’) or even rex Britanniae (‘king of Britain’). But this was courtly hyperbole. Long-established kingdoms, such as Wessex and East Anglia, kept their separate identities and at least some freedom of action. Moreover, Æthelbald’s dominance came at a price. His private life was denounced as wicked by St Boniface; he was also reviled as a ‘tyrant’ once he was safely dead.
Indeed, it is the manner of his death which reveals the real fragility of his kingship. For, after reigning forty-one years, he was murdered at the height of his power and in the heart of his kingdom by his own men. The deed was done at Seckington, near Tamworth, where Æthelbald was ‘treacherously killed by his bodyguard at night … in shocking fashion’. The king’s remains were brought to Repton Church and buried in the mausoleum of the Mercian kings in its crypt. The crypt survives, though its alcoves and shelves are long stripped of the jewels and reliquaries they once contained. But then it would have been the setting for another spectacular royal funeral like those at Sutton Hoo and St Augustine’s, Canterbury.
Perhaps, however, there’s a wicked twist to the story. Was Æthelbald’s murder really the work of nobodies with a grudge? Or was the man who seems to have been responsible for Æthelbald’s splendid funeral also the man behind his murder? Certainly he was the one who profited from it, since, after a brief power struggle in which his rival too was murdered, he succeeded Æthelbald as king. He is one of the forgotten heroes of English history; a man who operated on a European scale and dominated the England of his day. His name was Offa, king of Mercia.
IV
Despite the sensational circumstances of his accession, Offa’s reign (757– 96) seems in many ways a rerun of his predecessor’s: he even reigned for a similarly long period. In fact, there were important differences of scale and method.
Like Æthelbald, Offa had generally good relations with the two large rival kingdoms of Northumbria and Wessex, which were cemented in the usual way by marriage alliances. But elsewhere, in the south and east, he increasingly imposed direct rule. And by often brutal means. He took control of Kent in the 760s; lost it for nine years after his rare defeat at the battle of Otford in 776, and then moved decisively to recover it. Sussex, whose fortunes were closely linked with Kent’s, followed a similar pattern, as a result of which Offa demoted its ancient kings to ealdormen or nobles. But most sensational was the case of Redwald’s former realm of East Anglia, where, in 794, Offa ordered King Æthelbert to be beheaded. It was an assertion of pure, untrammelled power.
Offa was equally assertive with the Church. The archbishop of Canterbury was head of the English Church. But he was also a great Kentish magnate and, as such, appears to have played a part in local resistance to Offa’s encroaching power. Offa’s response was stunning: he would have an archbishop of his own. The scheme was negotiated with two papal legates at a Council of the English Church in 787. The Council was close fought. But, as usual, Offa got his way and Lichfield, in the Mercian heartland, was elevated into an archbishopric, with its incumbent safely in Offa’s pocket.
The creation of the archbishopric of Lichfield opened the way to another project that was even closer to Offa’s heart: to ensure the succession of his son, Ecgfrith. He proclaimed him king of Mercia in his own lifetime; he also decided that he should be anointed. The ceremony also took place in 787. We do not know where or who performed it. Perhaps it was the new archbishop of Lichfield. Or perhaps the papal legates. Or perhaps, since Offa never did things by halves, it was both together.
At any rate, Ecgfrith’s is the first recorded consecration in English history, and it deployed the whole panoply of the Church to declare that the boy was inviolably royal and his father’s unchallengeable successor. The ceremony was a Christian adaptation of the inauguration rites of Old Testament kings. But, as so often in Anglo-Saxon England, it was a hybrid, since it combined Judaeo-Christian anointing with older Anglo-Saxon traditions that went back to Sutton Hoo and beyond. For the boy was invested, not with a crown, but with a cynehelm, a royal helmet.
Offa’s handling of the coinage was almost as novel. He issued a new-style coinage, in which the coins were bigger and thinner, had a better bullion content, were stamped with his image and prominently displayed his name and title of Rex M[erciorum] (‘king of the Mercians’) in bold capital letters. Offa was not quite the first English king to mint such a coinage. But his is incomparably the most important, in terms of both quality and quantity. Millions of coins seem to have been struck and they show an exuberant variety of ‘portrait’ types: some use Roman models; others appear to be based on the representations of the kings of Israel in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. Obviously, Offa cared about the image-making power of the coinage. But it was its economic and fiscal functions that mattered more. The numbers struck reflected Offa’s takeover of the wealth of the south-east; they helped that wealth to grow, especially by trade with Francia, and, in turn, they allowed Offa to tap the burgeoning economy for his own purposes.
A similar balance between image-making and practicality is to be found in the greatest achievement of his reign and the work for which he is still popularly remembered: Offa’s Dyke. It originally stretched from sea to sea along the Welsh frontier. This is a distance of 135 miles or double the length of Hadrian’s Wall. It consists of a ditch, originally six feet deep, backed by an earth rampart that was about twenty-five feet high. The rampart was probably reinforced with timber, and its siting displays great tactical ingenuity, commanding, as it does, long views into Wales.
But what was it for? Did it mark an agreed frontier, as an act of peace? Or was it a warlike gesture: to defend Mercia against Welsh attacks and to provide Offa with a forward base from which to launch his own campaigns against the Welsh? The latter now seems much more likely. In which case the Dyke was ‘a work of almost studied contempt for the Welsh’. For, by a strange reversal of roles, its building would suggest that it is the former Anglo-Saxon invaders who now see themselves as rich and civilized while the Welsh have become wild, untrustworthy raiders. In short, it is the Welsh, the Dyke says, who are the barbarians now.
But does that mean that Offa had gone the whole hog and imagined himself in turn as an imperial Roman? There is some evidence to support this view. And certainly, it is what happened to the Anglo-Saxons’ Frankish cousins across the Channel. For these are the years of the Carolingian revolution. It took place in two stages: the first royal, the second imperial. In 751, Pepin the Short, who had usurped the Frankish throne, was made king by the new royal inauguration ceremony of anointing. Forty-nine years later, his son Charlemagne, who had succeeded his father in 768 and had expanded the frontiers of Francia to run from the banks of the River Ebro to those of the Elbe, was crowned emperor in Rome by the pope on Christmas morning 800. The renewed empire was intended to be both Roman and Christian and Charlemagne took himself seriously in both capacities: he was soldier of the Faith and reformer of the Church, on the one hand, and, on the other, restorer of the Roman Empire, whose inheritance of law, language, literature, architecture and forms of government he was determined to revive.
Pepin and Charlemagne were thus Offa’s contemporaries and the latter at least was well known to him. They had diplomatic relations; unsuccessfully negotiated a marriage alliance and corresponded. The only surviving letter from a European ruler to an Anglo-Saxon king is from Charlemagne to Offa in 796. In it he recognized Offa ‘to be not only a most strong protector of your earthly country, but also a most devout defender of the holy faith’. He also addressed Offa as ‘brother’ and acknowledged him as an equal. Offa, for his part, was influenced by Charlemagne’s revival of the apparatus of Roman power. But there is no sign that Offa understood or imitated its cultural dimension.
On the other hand, Englishmen played an important role in the Carolingian achievement and one, Alcuin, who was born in Northumbria and educated at York, was a central figure in the regime as a sort of minister for culture and education. Finally, Offa’s takeover of the southeast of England brought him into close and direct commercial contact with Francia. This is why he modelled his changes in the currency on Pepin’s monetary reforms. Pepin also provided the ultimate model for Ecgfrith’s anointing. But there was a more immediate input since Alcuin, acting as envoy from Charlemagne, had accompanied the papal legates on their mission to England in 786. He played a major part in the ensuing Church Council; probably attended Ecgfrith’s coronation and returned to England on another diplomatic errand a few years later. Alcuin’s correspondence thus provides a sort of commentary on the apogee of Offa’s power and on the nemesis which followed soon after.
At first, all seemed well. Offa was, Alcuin wrote in one letter, ‘the glory of Britain’; in another, he saw him as having ‘the kingdom … of all the English’ within his grasp. And in Ecgfrith he had provided a worthy heir. Alcuin called the boy ‘my son’; enjoined him to learn ‘authority’ from his father and ‘compassion’ from his mother and saw him as ‘the hope of many’. It is not hard to see why. For, irrespective of Ecgfrith’s personal qualities, Alcuin interpreted his anointing, which he may have helped to devise, as the promise of a new, better monarchy: more ordered, more Christian and better attuned to its responsibilities to the people of God. In short, Alcuin seems to have hoped that the ceremony of 787 would lead to a renewed kingdom of the English, just as the Carolingian revolution had restored the kingdom of the Franks and would, in the fullness of time, revive the Roman Empire itself.
But it was not to be. Offa died on 29 July 796. Ecgfrith duly succeeded. But he died less than six months later, on 17 December. The hopes had been cheated and ‘the divinity that doth hedge a king’ had failed at its first English test. Alcuin was forced to ask why. His answer was that the sins of the father had been visited on the son. ‘For you know very well’, he wrote to a leading Mercian noble, ‘how much blood his father shed to secure the kingdom on his son.’
There were sins of omission on Offa’s part as well. Though Alcuin had expressed his delight that Offa was ‘so intent on education’, there is no evidence that it came to very much. Certainly, there is nothing to compare with the Carolingian or the Northumbrian achievement: there is no Mercian renaissance or chronicle, no Life of Offa, no writings by the king himself. In short, if Offa were attracted to ideas of empire, it was to imperium in its simplest, crudest sense as the mere absoluteness of power. His conquest of the south-east, his construction of Offa’s Dyke, his bloodlettings and regicides can all be read as embodying that. But it was not enough. Indeed, in the Anglo-Saxon political tradition, it may have been worse than useless. Or, in Alcuin’s own words: ‘this was not a strengthening of the kingdom but its ruin’.
But we must not anticipate. The man who emerged victorious from the power struggle which followed the royal deaths of 796 was Cenwulf. He, at best, was only a distant member of the royal kindred. But his style was pure Offa, as his treatment of Kent shows. The Kentishmen took advantage of the succession crisis and the consequent temporary eclipse of Mercian power to rebel and erect a certain Eadbert as their own king once more. But Cenwulf exacted a terrible revenge. The revolt was suppressed and Eadbert taken to Mercia. There he was ritually mutilated to disable him from kingship: his eyes were put out and his hands cut off. Not surprisingly, Kent subsequently remained quiet, though Cenwulf in turn made some concession to local pride by setting up his brother Cuthred as puppet-king of Kent.
Cenwulf himself died in 821. His death was followed by another, even more drawn-out struggle for the succession, which once more gave Mercia’s enemies, internal and external alike, their opportunity. And this time the whole edifice of Mercian imperial power was brought crashing down. Fittingly, the man who struck the decisive blow was another victim of Offa’s, Egbert.
Egbert was a scion of the royal house of Wessex. Somehow he had fallen foul of Offa, and, like many others, had fled ‘in fear of death’ to take refuge in Francia at the court of Charlemagne. But in 802, after the death of Offa’s son-in-law King Beorhtric, Egbert the exile returned to succeed effortlessly to the throne of Wessex. Now, twenty years later, Cenwulf ’s death offered him the opportunity to avenge the slights he had suffered at Mercian hands. The year 825 was his annus mirabilis: Egbert himself defeated the new Mercian king Beornwulf at Ellendun; the East Anglians then rose against Mercian domination and killed Beornwulf as he tried to suppress the revolt; meanwhile, Egbert’s son, Æthelwulf, occupied the remaining provinces of the former Mercian empire in Sussex, Kent and Essex, and, by some at least, was greeted as liberator. Four years later, Egbert scaled fresh heights: he conquered Mercia and marched against the Northumbrians, defeating them in battle and receiving submission and tribute.
A new great power had arisen in England: Wessex. But it would have to confront a new and even greater threat: the Vikings.

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