Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy

over the broad sea. Britain they sought,

Proud war-smith who overcame the Welsh,

glorious warriors they took hold of the land.

The message was clear: united we stand in a new, consolidated Ængla Land.

Administrative unity, too, was soon imposed on all England south of the Humber. Like Alfred’s resistance, the reconquest from the Vikings had depended on the building of burhs – such as Hertford, Leicester, Nottingham and Huntingdon – to push the disputed frontier forward and to hold land taken. These burhs quickly followed the path of the southern burhs and became prosperous centres of population and trade. But they were made the administrative centres of new shires as well. These were modelled on the shires of Wessex and were likewise divided into hundreds. The difference was that they were largely artificial creations, imposed by a powerful and centralized administration and paying little or no regard to former regional and tribal boundaries which had existed before the Viking invasions.

I

This story of more or less unbroken success received a rude shock after the death of Eadred in 955. He was succeeded by his nephew, Eadwig, the elder son of Edmund I, who was crowned at Kingston a few months later. But, aged only about fifteen, Eadwig had his mind fixed on something other than ceremony and, at the feast which followed the day after the coronation service, the king suddenly withdrew. St Dunstan, the outspoken and reforming abbot of Glastonbury, who had had the ear of both Edmund and Eadred, was deputed to bring him back. Dunstan marched into the royal bedchamber, where he found the king in a threesome with his future wife and mother-in-law, while ‘the royal crown, which was bound with wondrous metal, gold and silver gems, and shone with many-coloured lustre, [lay] carelessly thrown on the floor’.

It was an inauspicious beginning. Within two years, Mercia and Northumbria had transferred their allegiance to Eadwig’s younger brother, Edgar, and Eadwig’s power was reduced to England south of the Thames. Two years later still, Eadwig died on 1 October 959 and was succeeded as king of all England by Edgar.

Edgar had won support by presenting himself as being as serious as his brother was irresponsible. And, once he had succeeded to his whole inheritance, he continued to win golden opinions. One of his first acts was to appoint Dunstan as archbishop of Canterbury. Edgar and Dunstan, who was a frequent attender at court, then went into partnership to enforce the programme of monastic reform which Dunstan had begun as abbot of Glastonbury. Each had his particular concern. Dunstan wanted to impose the order and discipline made possible by the rule of St Benedict. Edgar also saw the political possibilities of the reformed monasticism.

Most important, symbolically, was his purge of the two great adjacent minsters in his capital at Winchester, the Old, where Alfred was buried, and the New, founded by Edward the Elder. In 964, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes with some surprise, Edgar ‘drove’ the existing clergy out of the two minsters, and ‘replaced them with monks’. Two years later, in 966, he refounded the New Minster and his munificent gift was recorded in an unusually long and magnificent charter, written in book form. The frontispiece shows Edgar wearing the crown with four fleurons, which Eadwig had cast aside, and presenting the book-charter to Christ in Majesty.

By gifts such as these, Edgar was serving another god: he was promoting the idea of a united Ængla Land. Monasteries like Winchester were national institutions; they held land all over the country; they were centres of a self-consciously English culture and, above all, they were royal. Endowed by the king and reformed under his patronage, they were so many counterbalances to the overweening local power of ealdormen and other aristocrats. Naturally, some of the ealdormen were resentful. But, faced by the united front of king and archbishop, they had no choice but to submit to the reform programme, which carried all before it. At the beginning of his reign there was only one properly constituted Benedictine monastery, Dunstan’s at Glastonbury; by the end there were twenty-two.

Another illustration of the ordered, reforming power of Edgar’s government is the currency. Since Offa, as we have seen, the quality of the Anglo-Saxon coinage had tended to be high. But the Viking invasions had brought chaos here as everywhere else. In about 973 Edgar felt strong enough to issue a reforming ordinance. Thenceforward, every six years all the silver pennies in circulation were called in and melted down, and reminted with new designs. The reminting was done in local burh-mints. But the designs and dies were centrally supplied to the moneyers by the king. This arrangement not only ensured uniformity and maintained standards, it also allowed for a sophisticated management of exchange rates by increasing or decreasing the silver content. No other government in Europe would have been able to conceive or carry out such a programme, which continued to the end of Anglo-Saxon England and beyond. It gave England a currency that was unmatched in quality in Europe, and it laid the foundations for an enviable national prosperity.

But just as striking is the inscription on Edgar’s coins. It read: EADGAR REX ANGLO(RUM), ‘Edgar, king of the English’. And where there are English, there is an England, or Ængla Land, as the Anglo-Saxons called it. The unification of England, as we have seen, was the work of Edgar’s immediate predecessors, starting with his great-grandfather, Alfred the Great. Now, seventy years after Alfred’s death, his great-grandson Edgar came to Bath to be crowned on Whit Sunday 973. Almost certainly, he had already been crowned long before, perhaps as king of the Mercians. But now, in a vastly grander ceremony, he was to be anointed king of the English; honoured as emperor of Britain, and revered as a second Christ.

Hence the choice of Bath for the ceremony. For here there was a unique combination of a Christian abbey next to the largest, most impressive ruins of Roman Britain. It was an incomparable setting and the ceremony matched the occasion’s significance. St Dunstan himself, as archbishop of Canterbury, acted as ecclesiastical master of ceremonies and Edgar performed his part devoutly and decorously. First, he swore a threefold oath, administered by Dunstan: to keep the Church of God and the Christian people in true peace; to forbid rapacity and iniquity in all ranks; to do justice equitably and mercifully. Then he was acclaimed by the people as their king and anointed, as the choir sang the anthem ‘Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon King’. Next he was invested with the insignia of kingship: the ring, the sword, the crown, the sceptre and the rod. Finally, there came the coronation banquet, at which no one, we are told, drank more than he could hold. The king presided, wearing an imperial diadem of laurel interwoven with roses, while the queen had her own separate table.

Immediately after the coronation, Edgar sailed with his fleet to Chester, where, in an acknowledgement of his imperial overlordship, he was rowed on the Dee by six or eight British, Scottish and Irish kinglets. To symbolize his kingship of England and overlordship of Wales, Scotland and the Western Isles his fleet would, every year, sail round the whole island of Britain. Finally, even the strange delay in this second coronation was turned to advantage since, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported, the king was in his twenty-ninth year – the same as Christ when He, ‘the lofty king/guardian of light’, had begun His public ministry. Edgar’s reign thus represents the apogee of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy with its idiosyncratic fusion of Germanic, Roman and Christian traditions.

Edgar’s coronation ceremony impressed contemporaries – as was intended – and it is the first English coronation of which a full account survives. It also impressed foreigners as well since its text, almost unaltered, was used for coronation ceremonies as far afield as Normandy, Hungary, Milan and perhaps Poland. Even the French coronation, which had at first so influenced the West Saxon, now adopted the magnificent structures, rhythms and rhetoric of Edgar’s service. What is most remarkable of all, however, is that the substance of Edgar’s service has endured in England to the present, so that the same rituals were enacted and often the same words (in English rather than in Latin) rang out in Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953 when Elizabeth II was crowned queen, aged twenty-seven and a week after Whitsuntide.

II

Only two years after the ceremony in Bath, Edgar died, still only in his early thirties. Immediately there was trouble, since, for all the political sophistication of England, there were no fixed rules of succession. Edgar left two surviving sons: the elder, Edward, by his first wife, and the younger, Æthelred, by his third, Ælfthryth. Edward was crowned king at Kingston. But Ælfthryth, who had shared in the triumph of Edgar’s second coronation at Bath, felt that her son should have taken precedence. The opponents and advocates of monastic reform, the political hot potato of the day, also took sides: the former supported Æthelred and the latter Edward. The result was one of the darkest deeds in Anglo-Saxon history. On 18 March 978, only three years after his accession, Edward was attacked and killed at Corfe in Dorset by his half-brother’s retainers, probably on the orders of his stepmother. Edward seems to have been a violent and unattractive young man, but the manner of his death meant that he quickly joined St Edmund as one of England’s two most popular royal saints. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle commemorated the transformation from sinful king to royal martyr in verse:

Men him murdered,

But God him glorified.

He was in life an earthly king;

He is now after death a heavenly saint.

Despite the horror at the assassination, the murder succeeded in its purpose and Æthelred became king.

Æthelred II had one of the longest reigns in English history and is still remembered today as one of our most disastrous kings. This is largely because of his nickname: ‘Æthelred the Unready’. The proper Anglo-Saxon form of his nickname, however, was Unraed, that is, ‘badly advised or counselled’. It is a pun on his name Æthelred, which means ‘noble counsel’, and it is a product of hindsight first appearing almost a century after his death.

It is also unfair, at least for the earlier decades of the reign. True, his brother’s murder tainted his accession and Æthelred himself sowed wild oats in his youth. But, by the 990s, England was enjoying something of a golden age of church-building, and legal and administrative reform. It had also developed a politics of astonishing maturity. There was a rich and powerful aristocracy, whose ranks included scholars and eccentrics as well as soldiers and statesmen. At its apex stood the royal court. This too was peopled with familiar figures: there was a scheming queen mother, an ambitious, foreign queen consort and an unpopular and, as it turned out, treacherous royal favourite. The witan, which looked more and more like a proto-parliament, solemnly debated the issues of the day but rarely came up with a solution. Taxes rose to unheard-of levels. There were scandals, faction-fighting and palace coups. Give or take the odd murder or mutilation, it is a picture that could come from any time in the next thousand years of English history, till the death of aristocratic politics in the second half of the twentieth century.

Nevertheless, the essential charge against Æthelred II remains. In his reign, England faced a renewed Viking attack. His ancestor Alfred had made his name and his dynasty’s reputation by the courage and resourcefulness with which he had seen off the first. Æthelred, in contrast, failed either to muster an adequate response himself or to inspire others to do so. The result was more than a personal failure. For, without adequate royal leadership, the English achievement of the tenth century turned against itself and the country became a rich, tempting and finally defenceless prey.

The Vikings had always been a dangerous enemy. But, when they returned to England in the 990s, they were stronger and better organized than ever. This was because, in Denmark as in England, the previous century had seen a rapid growth in royal power. Probably under the leadership of their first Christian king, Harold Bluetooth, the Danes had created a formidable military machine. It centred on purpose-built, circular fortresses, such as Trelleborg on the west coast of the island of Zealand. They are laid out with geometrical precision and embody engineering and organizational skills of a high order.

Trelleborg’s initial purpose was to enable the Danish king to impose order on Denmark itself. But the Danish warrior-elite did not take kindly to order and there were many rebels. These rebels, dispossessed at home, probably formed the first wave of the renewed Viking attack on England. But they did so well that the Danish kings decided to take over the campaign themselves. The full force of the formidable military machine of Trelleborg was now to be turned on England. It was blitzkreig, even shock and awe, as the English troops assembled on the East Anglian coast were about to find out.

In 991, the Viking fleet sacked Ipswich and then made landfall on an island in the Blackwater estuary near Maldon in Essex. The whole of eastern England was threatened. The Danes’ first move was to send a messenger to the English, demanding money to buy them off. The English commander, the ealdorman Byrhtnoth, retorted that they should come across the causeway, which linked the island to the mainland at low water, and fight it out like men.

The battle began badly for the English, as Byrhtnoth, who was easily picked out by his height and grey hair, was killed in the first engagement. But his men, outnumbered and outgeneralled though they were, fought on till they were overwhelmed. It was a defeat, but, in its way, a glorious one. The result was that, like the victory of Brunanburgh, the defeat at the Blackwater became the subject of another notable Anglo-Saxon war poem: The Battle of Maldon. The poem captures perfectly the Dunkirk spirit of the doomed army. But it also tells us in remarkable detail about the men who composed it: these are no faceless, helmeted figures, but real, named individuals. There is an aristocrat from the Midlands, called Ælfwine, a local man, the Essex ceorl (yeoman) called Dunnere, and, from far-off Northumbria, a warrior called Æscferth.

So every region of England was represented in this roll-call of the army and each rank of society from the top almost to the bottom. The result was to emphasize the unity of England as a country in which a common sense of nationhood overrode distinctions of locality and class. The poem is propaganda, of course; but it is unusual propaganda at a time when, in most of Europe, horizons were much narrower and loyalty to a local warlord came first and last.

The Battle of Maldon may succeed as literature. But it failed to stimulate another, Alfredian, campaign of resistance. Instead, in the immediate aftermath of the defeat, the English decided, on the advice of the archbishop of Canterbury, to pay a tribute or Danegeld to the Vikings. The intention was to persuade them to leave; the result, of course, was to encourage them to come back for more. And with each raid the violence, and the payments, rose: £10,000 was paid in 991, £16,000 in 994, £24,000 in 1002 and £30,000 in 1007.

The Viking campaign of 1006–7 marked a turning point. Thoroughly contemptuous now of the lack of effective English resistance, the raiders behaved with a flamboyant insolence. They made camp at Cuckhamsley Hill, the meeting place of the Shire Court of Berkshire. And they marched with their spoil past the gates of Winchester itself. They had struck into the heart of Wessex, and neither the shires nor the burhs, it seemed, availed anything. The reason, of course, was that these were royal instruments but the king, Æthelred, refused to wield them. Instead, as the people of his ancestral lands were despoiled, the king spent the winter of 1006–7 in safety in Shropshire, far from the raiders’ range.

III

Only in foreign policy did Æthelred show any initiative with his decision to take Emma, daughter of Duke Richard I of Normandy, as his second queen. The core of Normandy, named after the Normanni (‘Northmen’), had been granted by the French king to the leader of a party of Vikings in 911. The Normans had quickly assimilated to French language and culture. But they preserved an ancestral sympathy for their Viking cousins, who were allowed to overwinter in Normandy in 1000 before making the short Channel crossing to the Solent and attacking England in the spring. Æthelred’s marriage put a stop to such help. Otherwise, he might have got more than he bargained for.

Emma is the first English queen to emerge fully into the light of history. She was handsome, astute and fertile. And she knew how to use a woman’s power, which consisted largely in marriage and childbearing. The result was that, from the moment she married Æthelred and took up residence at Winchester, she became the axis around which English politics turned. For Emma was determined that – let who will be king – it should be her children who would sit on the throne of England.

Emma also had a profound effect on the politics of Æthelred’s reign. His mother, to whom he was devoted, died in about 1000. This meant that Emma was not overshadowed by her, as Æthelred’s first wife had been. Instead, she soon emerged as a political player in her own right. She may have had a role in the palace coup of 1006, in which several leading ealdormen were expropriated, executed or blinded. And she was almost certainly an ally of the man who rode to power on the back of the coup: Eadric Streona (‘the grasper’). Eadric was made ealdorman of Mercia the following year and became the king’s favourite and minister. His rise, as usually happens when a favourite monopolizes power, triggered deep resentment. This further weakened English resistance and led directly to the self-destruction of the great fleet which the English assembled to use against the Vikings in 1009.

By this time it was clear to Swein Forkbeard, Bluetooth’s son and successor as king of Denmark, that England was his for the taking. He invaded in force in 1013, and the north and east quickly submitted to him. Then followed Winchester, until only London, where Æthelred had taken refuge, held out. But finally the Londoners, ‘because they dreaded what [Swein] would do to them’, surrendered as well. Æthelred sent Emma and his two sons by her to safety in Normandy, while he first retreated to the Isle of Wight before joining his family in exile.

But Swein was only a winter-king of England and died on 3 February 1014. What English arms had been unable to do, English weather, perhaps, accomplished. His death was followed by a succession crisis. The Danish occupying force chose Swein’s younger son, Cnut, as king. But the English had other ideas and sent to Æthelred to invite him to return – but on certain conditions. As a pledge of good faith he sent his young son, Edward, as a hostage, to begin negotiations. The complaints against Æthelred included high taxation, extortion and the enslavement of free men. By the end of the talks, Æthelred was forced to agree to govern within the rules established by his predecessors. And the terms of the agreement still exist today, for they were copied at the time into the national book of record, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It reports Æthelred’s undertaking as follows:

that [Æthelred] would be their faithful lord, would better each of those things that they disliked, and that each of the things would be forgiven which had been done or said against him. Then was full friendship established in word and in deed and in compact on either side.

Embedded here in the prose of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the text, probably even the actual words, of a formal written agreement between the king and his people. It is the Anglo-Saxon Magna Carta. The circumstances in 1014, moreover, were very similar to those 200 years later. A political crisis and a foreign pretender brought the king, more or less naked, to the negotiating table. The throne would be his, but on conditions. The king agrees, since he has no choice. The terms and his consent to them are made public and the whole enshrined in a written document. The result is the first constitutional settlement in English history, and it began a tradition which descends through Magna Carta, the Petition of Right and the Reform Acts, down to the present.

And, even at the time, it seemed to open up a new chapter. Wulfstan, archbishop of York, soon afterwards preached a highly political sermon, almost certainly in the presence of the king and the witan, on the present discontents and their remedies:

the rights of free men are taken away and the rights of slaves are restricted and charitable obligations are curtailed. Free men may not keep their independence, nor go where they wish, nor deal with their property just as they desire …

Nothing has prospered now for a long time either at home or abroad, but there has been military devastation and hunger, burning and bloodshed in nearly every district time and again … And excessive taxes have afflicted us …

But the real indication of change was that Æthelred moved decisively and unexpectedly against the Danes, who found their position untenable and retreated back home.

Æthelred’s new resolution stemmed, almost certainly, from the new prominence of Edmund, his eldest son by his first wife. Father and son were opposites in character: the former took a firm stand on nothing but his kingly dignity; the latter, as his nickname ‘Ironside’ indicates, was a man of action in the best traditions of his house. But Edmund’s rise meant Streona’s decline, and the favourite resisted with all the black arts at his command.

The result drove Edmund to take over the former Viking dominions in the north and east, the so-called Danelaw, in an act of virtual rebellion against his father. At this point, the Danes reinvaded and father and son were reunited. Streona, slighted, betrayed Mercia and Wessex to the Danes, and on St George’s Day, 23 April 1016, Æthelred died. Rival meetings of the witan took place: that in Southampton elected the Danish claimant; that in London chose Edmund.

Edmund now proceeded to show what Æthelred II, with all the time and resources at his command, could have accomplished if he had tried. In a whirlwind campaign, he fought the Danes to a standstill until finally a partition of England along the line of the Thames was agreed: Edmund took the south and the Danes the north, including London. But a month later, on 30 November 1016, Edmund died, aged about twenty-three. His Danish opponent, Cnut, who was even younger, was now acknowledged as Rex totius Angliae (‘king of all England’).

Would the constitutional ideas of 1014 survive and flourish? Would England? In the circumstances of 1016 it seemed rather unlikely.

IV