First of all, a confession. I don’t know a huge amount about history in the Dark Ages and most of what I do know is biassed towards what is now England. Moreover, much of what I do know is based on linguistics rather than straightforward history. Nonetheless I’m going to have a go at this.
Roman Britain had been one edge of the Empire, and it has that in common with very far-flung parts of Afro-Eurasia such as the northern Sahara, the Middle East and the Caucasus. There is still to some extent a cultural unity between the areas which used to be part of it and I have only ventured out of the former territory of the Empire to the north and west, namely Ireland and Scotland. The rest is unknown to me, and that emphasises, I think, how huge it really was. There have been bigger ones of course, notably the Mongols and the British had them, and the Songhai Empire in Afrika was twice the size, but this is more about the sheer size of this planet than celebrating their “achievement”, although there were positives.
There are of course many hypotheses about the Fall of Rome. I read Gibbon as a teen and am therefore aware of what he said about it, but I don’t know if it stands up to contemporary scrutiny. I do strongly suspect that Christianity had a rôle because it only lasted about a century after the Empire became Christian, so I would agree with some others in saying that because the Empire had adopted the Christian faith, they turned their backs on doing things in this life in the expectation that they would be in Paradise, from their perspective, soon after death. The offence of suicide was, I understand, created by the Church in order to stop people from rushing it and getting to the Hereafter more quickly at about that time too. I also disagree that this is a sensible interpretation of Christianity, although it is one which has plagued the world ever since and there’s a case for saying it helps people cope in dire personal situations. Other hypotheses include the idea that the army had recruited so many Germans (that’s “us” by the way, to a limited extent, but it would’ve included people the first speakers of our language would have easily understood and been able to have conversations with) that they effectively had an enemy army on their own soil, that the Empire had to feed Rome and was doing so by conquering ever more distant territories and having to bring stuff back over ever greater distances (that seems to be what Asimov thought), and even that the barbarian invention of the horseshoe enabled them to fight back against the Empire and invade it more successfully. I neither know what happened nor if there’s a consensus on this matter.
I’m going to start with the Caistor-by-Norwich astragalus. This is a bone from a roe deer dating from between 1175 and 1225 AUC – okay, I’ll explain that dating. AUC is ab urbis conditæ, “from the founding of the city”, the dating system used in the Empire, and numbers its years from 753 BCE, so those dates are in the fifth Christian century. Anyway, this bone has runes from the Elder Fuþark scratched on it, reading “ᚱᚨᛇᚺᚨᚾ”, “roe” or “RAIHAN”, and notably has only one bar on the H or Hagalaz (“hail”), meaning that it predates the appearance of English runes, which have two bars on it. It may have been imported from Scandinavia or be a sign of Germanic presence in Britain. There is also evidence that Germanic tribes were settling along eastern rivers from the mid-twelfth century AUC onward, so the transition may not simply have been belligerent or a dramatic conquest.
This next bit I remember learning at school, so I presume it’s practically common knowledge for any Sassenach. Some time around the turn of the thirteenth Roman century or about 450 CE, Britain made a final appeal to the Roman army for defence against the Picts and Scots, but Rome couldn’t spare any resources. It reads as follows:
| Agitio ter consuli, gemitus britannorum. […] Repellunt barbari ad mare, repellit mare ad barbaros; inter haec duo genera funerum aut iugulamur aut mergimur. |
To Agitius [or Aetius], thrice consul: the groans of the Britons. […] The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death, we are either killed or drowned.
Vortigern, a Celtic chieftan, then invited Hengist and Horsa to this land to aid him in defeating the Romans. Hengest and Horsa may in fact have been the same person – this is all from Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, written around 731 CE (incidentally, Bede is also responsible for inventing the current calendar dating system from the birth of Jesus and got it out by about four years, so that year number is his fault and reflects his considerable influence on the human world). I’m not now going to rely on anything but my own memory. My understanding is that Hengist and Horsa came over with a number of German tribes, substantially from the area around Angeln, hence the name “England”, including the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, the last being inevitable but not mentioned in chronicles of the Dark Ages for some reason, fought alongside the Celts and then with them, after which they settled here and proceeded to have the audacity to call the Celts living here the “Welsh”, meaning “foreigners”. I think this may say a lot about the White English mindset, and it reminds me of the stereotype of our own emigrants going over to the Med and refusing to learn the language, and basically just enjoying the sunshine while feeling the place is infested with “furreners”. It’s a bit like Basil Fawlty’s opinion that his hotel would run just fine if it weren’t for all the guests.
Anyway, what they call Sub-Roman Britain would’ve been an interesting place. It would’ve included, for instance, Christians and also Black people, and people able to write in the Latin script as we do today. Britain had had a Black governor and the Empire a Black emperor by this stage, because racism was not based on skin tone or anything else like that in the Roman world. There are known to be Black people in Roman Britain because DNA tests on remains dating from that era demonstrate that this was so, and there are still families, in rural Yorkshire for example, which have no significant genetic input from outside the area for many centuries and yet could only have had ancient Black ancestry. Again using my fairly unreliable memory, I think people identify reliably as Black once at least a quarter of their genes are of Black Afrikan origins. The concept of ethnicity was different in any case back then, and there was certainly active racism – for instance, the word “barbarian” is racist and similar to “Hottentot” in that it mocks the sound of the language spoken by a particular group – but wasn’t centred around skin tone. Given the twenty-five percent genetic characteristic, a Black person born in Roman Britain in about the year 400 CE, assuming they conceived children with a White person, could have notably Black grandchildren born in around the year 460 CE who could have survived into the mid-sixth century. I mention this to emphasise that sub-Roman Britain would have been ethnically diverse to some extent in modern terms. Remains of a young Black girl have been found in a tenth century grave and Vikings are known to have brought Afrikan slaves back in the ninth, who were referred to as “blue men”. Black people have been here for longer than the Germanic tribes have.
Concerning religion, although Roman Britain had been officially Christian, there were pagan temples in the West of Great Britain, and once the Germans had invaded it returned to paganism. There was also a firm division between urban and rural environments, in that the towns were more Roman and the countryside more Celtic. Hence Canterbury, Wroxeter, London and a few other places would still have had people in them speaking British Latin, of which there’s practically no trace. British Romance is one of several “submerged” Romance languages which have disappeared completely, leaving hardly any written or other record, the most important other one being in Africa and Libya, which seems to have been a little like Spanish. British Romance is likely to have been very radical compared to Classical Latin because it was so isolated from the rest of the Empire and also quite distant, so it may have had features in common with the ancestor of French, Gallo-Romance. The rest of the populace would have spoken a Celtic language similar to Welsh rather than Irish. It used to be thought that there were non-Indoeuropean tribes as well but that’s now been discredited.
The population of Britain at the end of Roman occupation was around 3.6 million, but suffered a sudden crash in numbers as Rome fell. 125 000 of those were Roman military and their families, so the Latin contribution to British culture might be thought considerable, but one of the differences between much of the continental Empire and Britain was that the former continued to be Christian and was therefore preserved to some extent by the social structure of the Church hierarchy, whereas in Britain this was destroyed by invasion. This also led to the rapid “Germanisation”, to coin a phrase, of the settlements as there were no longer any clergy. One reason for the population crash may have been a series of epidemics, including the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death and smallpox, which arrived from India at about that time.
There are a couple of linguistic quandaries about Britain stemming from this time. One is the question of why a Romance language didn’t develop here, but it’s fairly easy to explain that because of the general trashing of the Roman element. Harder to explain is the absence of a Celtic tongue spoken over the whole island today, because at the time, even after the Germanic tribes settled here, many people would’ve been speaking British. Celtic culture, such as it is, is reflected in the presence of Cambria, modern-day Cumbria, in the northwest of what is now England, and Yr Hen Ogledd into Strathclyde up to the Antonine Wall in what became Scotland. Cornwall and some of Devon also stayed Celtic. These regions were all P-Celtic rather than Q-Celtic, and spoke a language now referred to as Cumbric, traces of which survive in placenames and the counting rhymes used by shepherds in the North of England, from which it can be gleaned that it used a virgesimal system like other Celtic languages – base twenty.
Before the emergence of the Heptarchy, there were more than two dozen nations in Great Britain, although this is probably better understood as loose agglomerations of tribes. In the south and east of the island up into today’s Northumberland, they would’ve spoken various dialects of Anglo-Saxon, although they were heavily influenced by the fact that they had been different tribes already before they crossed over into Britain. They were aware that there had been a great fall from the Roman condition. The imperial level of technology was about the same as it would be just before the Industrial Revolution. For instance, there is even a third Christian century printed version of the Bible in Gothic, they were able to make concrete and there were rudimentary mechanical computers for navigation, automatic doors, vending machines and so forth. All this knowledge was lost, and this is expressed in the poem ‘The Ruin’, composed in the eighth century:
Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon;
burgstede burston, brosnað enta geweorc.
Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras,
hrungeat berofen, hrim on lime,
scearde scurbeorge scorene, gedrorene,
ældo undereotone. Eorðgrap hafað
waldend wyrhtan forweorone, geleorene,
heardgripe hrusan, oþ hund cnea
werþeoda gewitan. Oft þæs wag gebad
ræghar ond readfah rice æfter oþrum,
ofstonden under stormum; steap geap gedreas.
Wunað giet se …num geheapen,
fel on
grimme gegrunden
scan heo…
…g orþonc ærsceaft
…g lamrindum beag
mod mo… …yne swiftne gebrægd
hwætred in hringas, hygerof gebond
weallwalan wirum wundrum togædre.
Beorht wæron burgræced, burnsele monige,
heah horngestreon, heresweg micel,
meodoheall monig mondreama full,
oþþæt þæt onwende wyrd seo swiþe.
Crungon walo wide, cwoman woldagas,
swylt eall fornom secgrofra wera;
wurdon hyra wigsteal westen staþolas,
brosnade burgsteall. Betend crungon
hergas to hrusan. Forþon þas hofu dreorgiað,
ond þæs teaforgeapa tigelum sceadeð
hrostbeages hrof. Hryre wong gecrong
gebrocen to beorgum, þær iu beorn monig
glædmod ond goldbeorht gleoma gefrætwed,
wlonc ond wingal wighyrstum scan;
seah on sinc, on sylfor, on searogimmas,
on ead, on æht, on eorcanstan,
on þas beorhtan burg bradan rices.
Stanhofu stodan, stream hate wearp
widan wylme; weal eall befeng
beorhtan bosme, þær þa baþu wæron,
hat on hreþre. þæt wæs hyðelic.
Leton þonne geotan
ofer harne stan hate streamas
un…
…þþæt hringmere hate
þær þa baþu wæron.
þonne is
…re; þæt is cynelic þing,
huse …… burg….
This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it
courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying.
Roofs are fallen, ruinous towers,
the frosty gate with frost on cement is ravaged,
chipped roofs are torn, fallen,
undermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possesses
the mighty builders, perished and fallen,
the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generations
of people have departed. Often this wall,
lichen-grey and stained with red, experienced one reign after another,
remained standing under storms; the high wide gate has collapsed.
Still the masonry endures in winds cut down
persisted on__________________
fiercely sharpened________ _________
______________ she shone_________
_____________g skill ancient work_________
_____________g of crusts of mud turned away
spirit mo________yne put together keen-counselled
a quick design in rings, a most intelligent one bound
the wall with wire brace wondrously together.
Bright were the castle buildings, many the bathing-halls,
high the abundance of gables, great the noise of the multitude,
many a meadhall full of festivity,
until Fate the mighty changed that.
Far and wide the slain perished, days of pestilence came,
death took all the brave men away;
their places of war became deserted places,
the city decayed. The rebuilders perished,
the armies to earth. And so these buildings grow desolate,
and this red-curved roof parts from its tiles
of the ceiling-vault. The ruin has fallen to the ground
broken into mounds, where at one time many a warrior,
joyous and ornamented with gold-bright splendour,
proud and flushed with wine shone in war-trappings;
looked at treasure, at silver, at precious stones,
at wealth, at prosperity, at jewellery,
at this bright castle of a broad kingdom.
The stone buildings stood, a stream threw up heat
in wide surge; the wall enclosed all
in its bright bosom, where the baths were,
hot in the heart. That was convenient.
Then they let pour_______________
hot streams over grey stone.
un___________ _____________
until the ringed sea (circular pool?) hot
_____________where the baths were.
Then is_______________________
__________re, that is a noble thing,
to the house__________ castle_______
This is widely believed to be a description of Bath or Chester. In other words they knew what was possible but they didn’t know how to do it. To me, this poem comes across as rather like ‘Ozymandias’, and it may be enlightening to remember that for a very long time everyone was expecting the world to end quite soon. Much has also been forgotten, or was at least unknown to the poet, as the description of mead-halls for example clearly indicates they are projecting quite an English image of what life must’ve been like back then. But this is still in the future of my narrative, and living memory of Roman Britain would have persisted until the late fifth Christian century at least. Judging by my own family history, the earliest heirlooms I’m aware of as a fifty-three year old in 2021 date from 1778, so that gets us to the mid-seventh century CE. By that time, the future England had become Christianised. It’s quite something to contemplate what it must’ve been like living in a time when one was fully aware of the heights from which civilisation had crashed in such a short interval. The scenario is almost post-apocalyptic.
Writing persisted in a limited form as runes and oghams, carved on stone, wood, bone and ivory. Oghams were in use in the west, particularly in Pembrokeshire, and there are said to be Druidic alphabets, but these are probably invented in modern times. Anglo-Saxon developed its own runes from the Elder Fuþark, a script in which I’m as adept as Latin due to an intense interest in my adolescence. Each letter has a name referring to a concept in the Rune Poem, which was Christianised after the arrival of Augustine in 597 CE, and they were for a time used as ideograms in English Latin script writing, after the manner of the ampersand and Tyronian “et”.
The Frisians are obscure and forgotten, but show up in analyses of our DNA. They had problems with the Franks and their land tended to get flooded, so they colonised the Kent coast, but their genes mainly show up in the English Midlands. They are in fact genetically indistinguishable from most of the White population of the Midlands. A different issue affects the Jutes. This folk was from Jutland, which is the modern Danish peninsula also including Schleswig-Holstein. The name is cognate with “Goth” and also the “Geats” of Beowulf. The Jutes also settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight and Solent, but seem to have suffered some kind of genocide after being invaded in the seventh century CE. The Kingdom of Kent was originally Jutish. The “Maid Of Kent” and “Kentish Maid” division, much eroded nowadays by the growth of Greater London into the county, is thought by some to be derived from the Jutish presence in the east of the kingdom and this is also said to have been reflected in dialect differences through the county, although nowadays this is not very strong. I think there probably was a genocide practiced by the West Saxons on the central South Coast and I suspect it was to do with their reluctance to convert to Christianity.
At this point I’m acutely conscious of my ignorance of British history beyond what has become England. I’m aware of a trans-insular kingdom called Dal Riata in the north between Ireland and Scotland, but I can’t presume to know much more than that. In the future England the Heptarchy arose. This consisted of seven kingdoms: Wessex, Mercia, Kent, Essex, Northumbria, Sussex and East Anglia. One thing I don’t understand about this is where Middlesex came from, because it sounds like it ought to have been a kingdom on a par with Essex and Sussex (Wessex was much bigger) but apparently it was a province of Essex, which was ruled over by two kings at a time, so possibly Middlesex was the western king’s territory. It’s also notable that there’s a concentration of small kingdoms in the Southeast and the others are much larger, which I’d put down to differences in climate and terrain along with proximity to the mainland. The idea that there was a four-century period of seven easily identifiable kingdoms is an imposition made in the later Middle Ages, as is perhaps evidenced by my confusion over Middlesex. There were smaller kingdoms such as the Middle Angles, Magonsæte and Hæstingas, in Leicestershire, Worcestershire and Sussex respectively. It’s said that it would still be possible to consider the kingdoms separate into the tenth century. But there is another process to be considered in English history at this time: the Christianisation of this island.
Augustine arrived in Kent in 597 CE, becoming the first Archbishop of Canterbury, famously because of a pope’s pun about the Angles looking like “angels” and then discovering that they weren’t Christian, or so it’s said. At the same time, Irish missionaries were converting people in the northwest. There had also been a Pelagian civil war in late Roman times in Britain. The Pelagians were a heterodox religious movement which rejected the notion of original sin and believed in salvation by works, and therefore had a more positive view of human nature, believing, for example, that unbaptised babies didn’t go to Hell. This was long gone by the time Augustine got here. It’s worth bearing in mind that less than two centuries passed between the fall of Rome and his arrival. He is also said to have founded the King’s School in Canterbury, which is therefore the first place since Roman times that Latin script was taught.
Due to invasions by the Norsemen from the late eighth century, the English people found it necessary to unite against a common enemy, although both Wessex and Mercia had become very strong by that time. Most written English from this period was in the West Saxon dialect, which is not the direct ancestor of Modern English, which is Mercian. Moreover, insofar as there was a capital, it was for some time near Winchester rather than in London. The Danes invaded and succeeded in settling in the modern Midlands, establishing five boroughs known as the Danelaw. These were Leicester, Lincoln, Stamford, Nottingham and Derby, and can be identified by the use of the “-by” suffix in many of the place names in this area. Due to the facts that the Danes settled here and that English as spoken today is descended from this dialect, which incidentally is not now considered standard, present-day English contains many Danish words and constructions, and it’s even been argued that English is not West Germanic at all but Scandinavian.
One fairly common way of marking the start of English history is by considering the accession of Egbert to the throne of Wessex in 802, because he ended the dominance of Mercia and Northumbria, then united all of England under Wessex, which persisted for the next two centuries. The famous Offa of Mercia’s son in law Beorhtric had exiled him to France, where he may have married one of Charlemagne’s relatives. Most people of European descent today are descended from Charlemagne. This wife then poisoned Beorhtric and Egbert returned to Britain and claimed the crown of Wessex. In 825, he defeated the King of Mercia at the Battle of Ellendune in present-day Wiltshire, claimed Essex, Sussex, Surrey and Kent, and then East Anglia. Having taken control of the mint in London, he was able to issue coins in his name as the king of Mercia, and Northumbria accepted his lordship. Then in 830, Wiglaf took control of Mercia and wrested some of the power back from Egbert, but by that time the Danes were becoming a greater threat and Egbert fought several battles with them. He conquered Cornwall in 838. Once he’d done that, he summoned a meeting called the Council of Kingston where he gave lands to the sees of Canterbury and Winchester in return for the Church’s recognition of his son Æþelwulf. At the time, the Church was responsible for writing the wills of kings and determining their heirs. That, then, is how England began, although at this point a great deal of it was under Viking rule.
Æþelwulf became king on Egbert’s death in 839 and gave Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Essex to his son Æþelstan. He defeated the Danes in Surrey in 851, then married his daughter Æþelswiþ off to the Mercian King Burgred, thereby uniting the Mercian and West Saxon monarchies. While he was on the mainland marrying Iudiþ his daughter to Charles the Bald and sending his youngest son Alfred to Rome, Æþelstan died and was replaced by Æþelbald, his brother, who forced him to abdicate, who then married his sixteen year old stepmother Iudiþ. I have to admit I find this bit very confusing and disturbing although that marriage was later annulled. Æþelbald died in 860 and was succeeded by his brother Æþelberht. The word “æþel”, by the way, means “high-born”, and is often written as “ethel” in these names. The next brother to become king was Æþelred I in 865, not to be confused with the later Æþelred the Unready who came a century later. It’s notable here that the succession preceded “horizontally” rather than “vertically”, which I’m guessing is due to deaths in battle and perhaps other causes. When he died in 871, which didn’t seem to be in battle so maybe I’m wrong, he left two sons who, had they lived to adulthood, would probably have become kings, but instead Alfred became king – Alfred The Great.
By Alfred’s rule, the Mercians had bought the Vikings off by ceding them the Danelaw. Alfred’s English is to me and probably most people the standard dialect of Old English although it is now long since dominated by Mercian English. Some of its features survive in the Yeovil area, though even that style of the language cannot really be said to derive directly from it. Nonetheless it had its day in the Sun. Alfred is well-known for being educated and scholarly, and this still shows, but because the kingdom was under attack he didn’t end up getting to do much with it. He’s also known for accidentally letting some cakes burn a woman had asked him to take care of who didn’t realise he was king because he was distracted by the fact that he was in the middle of waging a war. She took umbrage at him and was then mortified when she found out who he was, but he said he was the one who should apologise. He’s also the only king in English history to whom the epithet “The Great” has ever been applied. He idolised Charlemagne and tried to model himself after him.
I’m aware that the bloke was probably a typical patriarchal tyrant, but I have a soft spot for Alfred because I’ve read a lot of his words. He translated various works into English, including Bede’s. This may have been because the Viking raids were perceived as divine punishment and he wanted to rekindle reverence through learning. It’s an odd juxtaposition to today’s sensibilities. He also supervised ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, which was copied and circulated, and continued to be updated until 1154 in Peterborough, and advocated for education in English. He even translated parts of the Bible.
Anglo-Saxon handwriting and calligraphy is much clearer than some later hands. It isn’t cursive and resembles printed matter in some ways. Alfred’s English has a kind of rustic sound to it which would be absent from Mercian or Northumbrian of the time. Y and I were still distinct, unlike later in the millennium when they began to be used as if they were the same letter. The Latin alphabet as written by him borrowed “Þ” and “Ƿ” from runes, as opposed to some other versions of English which used “UU” for what is now written as “W”.
Anglo-Saxon literature is mainly verse. It includes a number of extremely bawdy riddles which use a lot of double entendres, which seems to be the start of the long kind of “smutty” tradition which we know from the Carry On films, and whereas they’re nothing to be celebrated they are at least the last gasp of a tradition leading up to them which began over a millennium previously. There’s also the very obvious epic ‘Beowulf’, which has always puzzled me because it seems to portray the Danes in a really positive light, and I can’t imagine that going down well with anyone. English used a lot of kennings at the time, like the Icelandic Eddas, where “hron-rad” – “whale-road” – and many other coinages means “sea” and “heofen-candel” – “heaven candle” – for “Sun”. There’s also a poem called ‘The Wanderer’ which puzzles me as it refers to a retainer’s woe that his lord and companions were killed in battle and he is now alone, because there’s a very strong sense of passionate love and longing in it which is refreshingly divorced from a sexual or romantic context but seems to me to be a kind of idealised view of how someone might view their better. It makes me wonder whether our way of looking at such relations between nobility and serfs, and the like, far from being romanticised, actually fail to capture the genuine feeling of care and love which the poor may have had for the rich, which is a very foreign idea to a twenty-first century mind.
Alfred the Great died in 899 and was, for once, followed by his son Edward, whose name is interesting as it’s the first time a regnal name is familiar to us from lists of monarchs post-Conquest. He recaptured first Mercia and then Northumbria. His son and successor Æþelstan became king in 924 and fought the Battle of Brunanburh, where he defeated an alliance of Olaf Guþfriþson of Dublin, Constantine II of Scotland and Owen, King of Strathclyde. This didn’t unite the island of Great Britain but did ensure the integrity of England. I’m aware of two things here. One is that it’s a shame that we only ever seem to hear about battles. The other is that I like to hear the other side on this. I don’t expect the other kings to have been particularly magnanimous to their own subjects, and this is probably about people fighting over land while the majority of the country continues in penury and misery, and again that calls the oddity of ‘The Wanderer’ to mind.
Æþelstan was succeeded by his half-brother Eadmund in 939, known today as Edmund I, as opposed to the later Edmund Ironside. During his rule, Olaf Guþfriþson conquered Northumbria and invaded Mercia, but was confronted at Leicester and a peace was brokered by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. He took the territory back after Olaf’s death. Then, in 945, he captured Strathclyde and handed it over to Malcolm I of Scotland, establishing a peaceful relationship between the two nations which kept the border relatively stable for a while. I don’t know much about history but it sounds like this ended up being honoured in the breach more than the observance. Then, in 946, a convicted robber and outlaw called Leofa attacked Eadmund’s seneschal and as the king defended his servant, he got stabbed to death in the ensuing fight. However, this is disputed and it’s also claimed he was assassinated.
His brother Eadred then came to the throne and two years later Erik Bloodaxe, who had killed two of his brothers to get Norway and was ejected by a third brother, seized Northumbria. Eadred forced him out but the Northumbrians then sided with Amlaíb mac Sitric, a Norse-Gael who was king of Denmark and Ireland, then deposed him in 952 and invited Erik Bloodaxe back in. In 954, they pushed him out again and he died in battle soon after, leaving Eadred with the nation once again. Eadred then came down with a chronic gastrointestinal complaint that forced him to survive by sucking the juices out of his food and died at the age of thirty-two.
Since he had been unmarried and had no children, his nephew Eadwig took the throne. At his coronation, Eadwig left the ensuing banquet with a female relative and her daughter Ælgifu, apparently to engage in a threesome and when Archbishop Oda the Severe remonstrated with him about disgracing himself at his coronation, he sent both him and St Dunstan into exile. He then married Ælgifu but Oda annulled the marriage on account of them being too closely related. He then purloined the other royals of their possessions, gave away ninety pieces of land and plundered the Treasury. He only ruled for four years but by the time he died at the age of nineteen, the kingdom only extended as far as the Thames.
Edgar, his younger brother, was already king of Northumbria and Mercia when he took over, thus reuniting England. He was also very young, becoming king of England at the age of sixteen. He brought Dunstan back and founded forty monasteries, so it sounds to me like he was trying to make up for what his brother had done. His time was free of Viking raids but he plundered Thanet and may have killed a romantic rival by “accidentally” impaling him with a javelin. He also humiliated six kings of Scotland, Man and Wales by having them row across the Dee and introduced press-ganging for the navy. Although he presented an image of piety to the public, he married his sixteen year old stepsister Eþelfleda Eneda and got a nun, Wilfrida, pregnant. After that, Dunstan suggested he do penance by not wearing his crown for seven years, with which he complied. The nun’s daughter and his, Eadgyþ of Wilton, herself became a nun and was famed for her beauty, sanctity and learning. Dunstan had a premonition that she would die in three weeks and she did so, after which she was said to appear in a vision to her mother, and both of them were made saints. Edgar was known as “The Peaceable” by comparison with his predecessors.
After Edgar’s death in 975, his son Edward was king for three years until he was apparently murdered by his stepmother Eþelfleda at Corfe Castle in Dorset. His kingship was disputed despite him being Edgar’s eldest, with some wanting his legitimate half-brother Æþelred to be king, but he was supported by Dunstan and Oswald, the archbishops of Canterbury and York. He was only sixteen when he was murdered, later became a saint, and was followed by the much better known Æþelræd The Unready, who was ten at the time.
Æþelræd’s name is a pun. “Æþelræd” itself means “nobly advised”. “Unræd”, on the other hand, means “badly advised” because the “un-” prefix could be used not only to negate but also to judge negatively, so it’s kind of pejorative. The reason he was “unready” was that he left his brother unburied for three years and didn’t punish his brother’s murderer, which made him very unpopular. It was rumoured that he might have been involved in the murder. He was also afraid of candles because his mother used to beat him with them. The public disquiet at his becoming king allowed the Vikings to take advantage of the poorly-defended country and Æþelræd sought to pay them off to leave it alone. This only encouraged them to continue to invade and he was forced to flee the country to Normandy. Sweyn Forkbeard successfully took over England in 1013 but died after a fall from his horse on 3rd February 1014, enabling Æþelræd to return as king. He then died during a series of battles with Cnut (Canute), enabling Cnut to become king of England.
Cnut is of course famous for his publicity stunt of attempting to prove that God was sovereign over all by pretending to order back the tide, which may not have happened. He was then said to have hung his crown on a crucifix and never wore it again. A less elaborate version of the tale says that he just did the last bit. Although he was Danish, he became considerably Anglicised during his time, and filled his court with English nobility. He also agreed to “rule according to the law of Edgar”. It all sounds a bit like the Georgian Era to me. Unlike any of the Georges though, he tried to conquer Norway but was opposed by a Swedish-Norwegian coalition, although he did succeed in a way. He then got fealty from Scotland, meaning that at one point he was King of Britain and all of continental Scandinavia.
Cnut died in 1035 and was replaced by Harold I, also known as Harold Harefoot. This is not Harold who was killed by William the Conqueror. Cnut’s son Ælfred Æþeling made his way from Normandy, where he had been born to his mother Emma of Normandy, to claim the throne but was captured and brought to Harold, who had his eyes taken out and he died in the process. Hardicanute, another of Cnut’s and Emma’s sons, took over when Harold died in 1040 and was buried at Westminster, the first monarch to be interred there. Hardicanute, however, had him dug up and thrown into a bog. Hardicanute was unpopular. He imposed heavy taxes to pay for his ships and when two tax collectors in Worcester were killed, he gave orders that all men in the county be killed and had Worcester burned to the ground. He was not generally healthy and in 1042, he died of alcoholic poisoning owing to overindulgence at a wedding reception. By that time, he had sent for his brother, Edward, later known as “The Confessor” from Normandy to take over the kingdom. As Edward had been brought up in Normandy, he had a lot of Normans in his court, which annoyed the royal houses of England. The Earl of Wessex, Godwine, married his daughter to Edward in an attempt to get the English houses in with the King again, but in 1051, with Leofric or Mercia’s help, Edward had the earl exiled and the couple separated. The year after, Godwine returned to England with supporters and forced Edward to compromise, allowing Harold II, yes, that Harold, to be the successor. Edward the Confessor was made a saint because he was the first monarch to touch for the King’s Evil, a practice which continued until James II of England. William III of William And Mary, who I mention here, refused to do it, but it was practiced for over six centuries.
Harold II became King on 4th January 1066 and the rest is history. Unfortunately, Edward the Confessor had promised the crown to two different people. The population of England in 1066 was 2.5 million.
I want to turn my attention now to the wildlife of Great Britain during this period. The Romans had introduced the house mouse, which is why it has a Latin name in English, but there were no rabbits at this time, since they are Iberian. The only native lagomorph here is the mountain hare, although the Romans had also introduced the brown hare. British wolves were not affected by insular dwarfism and were therefore disproportionately large relative to the other animals. Either Æþelstan or Edgar imposed a fine of three hundred wolf skins a year on the Welsh king Hywel Da, although that was in Wales. Some criminals were expected to provide a certain number of wolf tongues per annum on pain of death. Wolves in Scotland probably died out in about 1400 although it is claimed that there was a wolf in Morayshire killed in 1743.
Brown bears have a rather complex history here. The Romans imported them for fighting but there may also have still been native bears at that time. There is evidence of bears in caves in Yorkshire around a century after the Roman Empire fell. They were rare in Scotland, Wales and the East Midlands of England but more common in Yorkshire, these being today’s divisions of the island. Bear claws have been found in Anglo-Saxon funeral urns and the arrival of the Romans caused the bear population to increase. After the Norman Conquest they were used for bear-baiting, but apparently not during the Anglo-Saxon period, and they were also kept for medical purposes.
Wild boar have a somewhat similar history to bears, with a native population waxing and waning but being replaced or topped up by escaping pigs. They seem to have died out in the seventeenth century, but have been back for a while since then. They were becoming rare by 1066, as William the Conqueror introduced a law forbidding the killing of wild boars.
Beavers, who have been reintroduced here recently, died out in about 1600. They were last referred to in 1526.
There are probably a lot of other aspects of the Dark Ages I haven’t covered, and I’m acutely aware that I haven’t talked much about Scotland or Wales, which is entirely because I know practically nothing about their history during this period. I also focussed rather heavily on royalty because that tends to be more clearly recorded. The term “Dark Ages” wasn’t invented until the fourteenth century, so unlike the Iron Age, people didn’t actually think they were living through it when it happened, although they did seem to be aware of a materially better standard of living before their own time. There’s also a Protestant bias in describing them as such, due to the Church being so dominant and mainly unchallenged. I have to say I’m pretty much fine with that idea. Later on, the main reason was the lack of written records. This seems to apply to Britain during the time runes and oghams were the main scripts in use here, and it is quite difficult to tell what was going on except through archæology. As I’ve mentioned though, the actual period during which there were apparently no continuous texts lasted less than two centuries and during that time oral history would’ve bridged the gap to some extent. It isn’t clear to me whether the situation was in fact more brutal than later in the European Middle Ages, but certainly the way royalty behaved in the tenth and eleventh centuries seems to have been pretty extreme.
Writing this has really revealed to me how little I know about this time. In particular, I would like to know more about the climate and ecology, and the lives of ordinary people. I’m aware, for instance, that the Danelaw was supposed to be less oppressive than the Anglo-Saxon system, but that could just be rumour. So for now I’ll leave it there, but there might be more.
A Box Of Chocolates 