IN SEARCH OF THE DARK AGES IN SEARCH OF THE DARK AGES Michael Wood Facts On File Publications New York, New York Oxford, England For my mother and father IN SEARCH OF THE DARK AGES Copyright © 1987 by Michael Wood All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the pub­ lisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wood, Michael. In search of the Dark Ages. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Great Britain—History—To 1066. 2. England— Civilization—To 1066. 3. Anglo-Saxons. I. Title. DA135.W83 1987 942.01 86-19839 ISBN 0-8160-1686-0 Printed in the United States of America 10 987654321 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 7 Genealogy Table 10 CHAPTER 1 13 Boadicea CHAPTER 2 37 King Arthur CHAPTER 3 61 The Sutton Hoo Man CHAPTER 4 77 Offa CHAPTER 5 104 Alfred the Great CHAPTER 6 126 Atheistan CHAPTER 7 151 Eric Bloodaxe CHAPTER 8 177 Ethelred the Unready CHAPTER 9 204 William the Conqueror Postscript 237 Book List 243 Picture Credits 244 Index 245 Acknowledgements I must first thank the staffs of the following libraries for their kindness and helpfulness, without which this book would not have been possible: Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Jesus College Oxford, the Bodleian Library Oxford, the Cathedral Library Durham, the British Library, Worcester Cathedral Library, the Public Record Office, and the British Museum Coin Room. I am indebted to Bob Meeson at Tamworth, Robin Brown at Saham Toney and Paul Sealey at Colchester Museum, who were all kind enough to let me use their unpublished researches. In Caen Michel de Bouard was unstintingly helpful to an unrepentant Anglo-Saxonist, and in Oxford John Griffiths generously gave his advice and provided me with a photograph of the Florentine manuscript of Tacitus: to both go my warm thanks. In particular I must express my gratitude to two friends: Phil Barker for his encouragement and criticism, and David Hill whose conversation always throws out new insights into Anglo-Saxon England. My editor, Sheila Ableman, has had to work on a nightmare of a typescript; without her constructive criticism this book would have been much the poorer; a special thanks to her. Finally, I must thank the producer of the In Search of. films, Derek Towers, and the cameraman, Richard Ganniclifft, both of whose special talents gave so much to the series, and the executive producer, Roger Laughton. 6 INTRODUCTION The modern British are a nation of immigrants. This book spans a period of a thousand years of their history. Its framework is the gradual transformation of mainland Britain under the impact of various invad­ ing peoples. The original inhabitants, the Celtic-speaking Britons (ancestors of today's Welsh), were overcome by the Romans after AD 43. There was initial, bitter resistance, culminating in the savage revolt of Boudica in 60-61, but for over three centuries Britain was a relatively prosperous province of the Roman Empire. Between AD 400 and 500, the period traditionally known as the Fall of the Roman Empire, the Romano-British society in lowland Britain which had lasted over 300 years was invaded and partially conquered by Anglo-Saxon immigrants who came from Denmark and Saxony. These fifth-century invasions form the background of the period to which later traditions assign the wars of King Arthur in which he defended British society against the invading English. (Today we often use the terms 'British' and 'English' indiscriminately, but, historically, the British were the original islanders and the English the Anglo-Saxon newcomers, and this distinction is used throughout this book.) In the ninth and tenth centuries Britain was swept by new waves of invaders from Scandinavia - the Vikings. They came for plunder, but most of all for land to settle and farm. At this time a number of Anglo- Saxon kingdoms flourished in what was to become known as England. Most were destroyed by the invaders. The careers of the three greatest Anglo-Saxon kings, Offa (757-96), Alfred the Great (871-99) and Athelstan (924-39) were all touched by the Vikings - to Offa they were a shadow on the horizon; to Alfred they were enemies in a life and death struggle; Athelstan was their conqueror and assimilator. The course of the Viking invasions left Wessex the chief power in Britain, and by 939 'England' existed in roughly the same geographic terms as it does today. But in the eastern and northern parts of England the Vikings had settled permanently, irrevocably changing the character of the society. The heavy settlement of a Scandinavian free peasantry and warrior class in the Midlands and East Anglia meant that the Anglo-Saxon kings had to be an effective power there to outface Viking kings from over­ seas. At first the English succeeded, for example procuring the downfall of Eric Bloodaxe, the last king of an independent Viking Northumbria in 7 954. But failure to maintain this influence by Ethelred the Unready (978-1016) led to the fall of the English monarchy and a generation of Danish rule under Canute and his successors. Although the line of Alfred was restored in 1042 in the person of Edward 'the Confessor', the royal house had lost its vigour. When Edward died childless in January 1066, a powerful earl with no great claim to the throne, Harold Godwin- son, became king, only to fall in battle at Hastings the same year fighting one of his rivals, Duke William of Normandy, 'the Conqueror'. The Norman Conquest signifies the end of Anglo-Saxon England, though the English people still speak an Anglo-Saxon language, and their social and political organisation has its roots in the society founded in this island by Germanic invaders 1500 years ago. As might be expected, the sources for such a long period are not only diverse but variable in quantity and quality. We can divide them into three main categories: narrative history (chronicles, annals, histories), documentary records (laws, charters, wills, writs, Domesday Book), and material sources (coinage, metalwork, sculpture, manuscripts, embroideries, etc). In the last category we might also include the whole range of archaeological evidence. Other kinds of sources appear in these pages, particularly literary compositions - poems, letters, saints' lives, royal biographies - but it is perhaps the chronicles and charters which require a brief explanation. Chronicles are year-by-year notes recording important events - accessions, battles, deaths, and so on. They are not shaped works which interpret history in the manner of the classical historians. They were perhaps originally jottings set down by monks in calendars and tables used to calculate the date of Easter. At first they might be as simple as 'Day dark as night' (Annals of Wales AD 447); gradually they give more detail: 'In this year Aldfrith king of Northumbria passed away on 14 December at Driffield' (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle AD 705). In 731 the first great work of English historical writing was published by a monk called Bede at the monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People transformed the bare framework of annals into a true historical synthesis with vision and style. Bede's work was to remain the framework for much that followed - for instance, he was the first to use dating by the Incarnation - AD - for historical purposes, and his book became the international best seller of the early Middle Ages. Bede's sources were mainly oral, though he had access to documents from some of the English churches, notably in Kent. The classical tradition of historical writing was still known. For exam­ ple, although Tacitus' works were not rediscovered until the Renais­ sance, Suetonius' biographies of the Roman emperors were very influential; they gave barbarian kings an idea of what a ruler should be, and they were also a model for a shaped work of history with a 8 'message' which could serve the interests of a royal dynasty. These ideas grew stronger after the reign of Charlemagne in Francia (modern France) from 768 to 814, the epoch we now call Carolingian after him. Charlemagne's forceful and glamorous kingship was an ideal for later kings like Alfred the Great. Accordingly a work like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, though based on earlier West-Saxon monastic annals, becomes expansive in the Frankish style in the reign of Alfred in a way which suggests that it was compiled under Alfred's personal supervi­ sion in order to advertise the success of his own dynasty. Copies of the chronicle (handwritten of course) were then disseminated to churches throughout England, and it survives in several somewhat different versions. (Generally I have not distinguished between them in my text.) The later a chronicle is written after the events it describes, the less value it has. But that is not to say that some later chronicles do not sometimes preserve valuable material from sources now lost. For instance, early thirteenth-century chroniclers from the great history school at St Albans record what look like genuine fifth- and sixth- century Mercian traditions, and one of these writers, Roger of Wendover, is alone in preserving details of the death of Eric Bloodaxe in 954 from a now lost northern chronicle. The value of all such works depends on a combination of the circumstances of their composition and the sources and bias of their author. The most important cases are discussed in the relevant chapters - what makes Tacitus trustworthy on Boudica, the Annals of Wales unreliable on King Arthur, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ambivalent on Ethelred, and so on.