Chapter 1
Introduction Myth, Rulership, Church
and Charters in the Work of
Nicholas Brooks
Julia Barrow
Nicholas Brooks has, for more than 40 years, been reshaping our understanding of the Anglo-Saxons. The four principal themes of this book, myth, rulership, the Church and charters, are all central to his scholarship and all represent areas within which he has been able to open up new lines of enquiry and to establish new bases of knowledge. The aim of this introduction is to provide an overview of Nicholasâ contribution to each of these four themes and to link this up with the papers which follow, showing how he has inspired and influenced his friends and pupils.
Myth, our opening theme, was not one of Nicholasâ earliest interests, but had become one of his areas of study by the mid-1980s, by the time he moved from St Andrews to take up the chair of Medieval History at Birmingham.1 For a scholar whose work has been rooted in the history of Kent and its early kingdom, the issue of the creation and development of myth was inescapable: Hengist, Horsa and Vortigern occur in many different sources and an important task for historians of early Kent is to confront them.2 Nicholasâ solution was to work out the development of the myth from the differences appearing in each retelling of the story, leading him to suggest that the original story could have been invented for Ăthelberht of Kent to bolster the identity of his kingdom and give his ancestry a much longer and grander past than those of contemporary Anglo-Saxon dynasties.3 In providing a pair of adventurous brothers as the co-founders of the kingdom of Kent, the creator of the myth made use of a widely-found motif in Indo-European origin myths and, by naming them âStallionâ and âHorseâ, linked them up with the cult of Woden, in which horses seem to have played a role.4 In this collection of essays Barbara Yorke makes use of this approach to re-examine all the Anglo-Saxon origin myths to see if further light can be shed on the circumstances of their production, and she also surveys burial evidence to show how that, too, allowed those who buried the dead to make statements about their identity.5
Nicholasâ earliest published comments about myth are to be found in his inaugural lecture at Birmingham, given in 1986: at the start of this he referred to the thesis of his predecessor at Birmingham, R.H.C. Davis, that the Normans deliberately created a myth to give themselves an identity, and proceeded to illuminate this with an insight from one of his own areas of study, the iconography of warriors in the Bayeux Tapestry. The Normans shaved the backs of their heads in a conscious attempt to look different from their neighbours.6 Norman identity was the subject undertaken by Nicholasâ pupil Nick Webber for his doctoral thesis;7 his paper in this volume deals with the role of England in the Norman myth, and shows that although England occurs frequently in the narrative of Norman history from the time of Dudo of St-Quentin onwards, it was not âincorporated into Normannitasâ until the twelfth century.8
Anglo-Saxon kingship, of which origin myth was a vital component, has been one of Nicholas Brooksâ main areas of research from the outset. In particular it is the range of resources available to Anglo-Saxon rulers and the ways in which they could enforce demands for these on their subjects that have aroused his interest: above all the three âcommon burdensâ of fortresses, bridges and army service. Already in 1964 Nicholas had begun to work on the identification of the forts of the Burghal Hidage;9 much more recently, for a Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies conference on âThe Defence of Wessexâ (published in 1996), he returned to the subject to explore the administrative problems faced by Alfred and his successor in setting up the system.10 These were also problems for Alfredâs daughter ĂthelflĂŠd in the West Midlands in the early tenth century, the subject of Pauline Staffordâs article below, on which more shortly.11 More generally on the topic of Anglo-Saxon reactions to Viking attacks in the ninth century, in 1978 Nicholas delivered a powerful rebuttal of Peter Sawyerâs thesis that the size of Scandinavian fleets and armies in the ninth century had been greatly exaggerated by contemporary chroniclers and subsequent generations of historians: rather, as Nicholas demonstrated, the smaller Viking fleets of the earlier ninth century had amalgamated to form the large fleet carrying the âGreat Armyâ, leaving most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms unable to cope.12
The second of the three common burdens, bridge-building, became one of Nicholasâ interests rather more recently, when he was invited to contribute to a volume on the history of Rochester Bridge (published in 1993). Here a charitable trust founded in the late fourteenth century took over the task of building and maintaining a bridge which earlier in the middle ages had been a responsibility shared out among local landowners; a document copied into the twelfth-century Textus Roffensis explains how manpower was organised in the Anglo-Saxon period to work on each of the piers.13 From the Medway, Nicholasâ bridge-inspecting remit has extended across Europe to other examples of bridges with ancient pasts and continuity of use.14 In this volume, Barbara Crawford examines the significance of the cult of St Clement to comment on the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman fear of dangerous river-crossings: at Pontefract (as its name suggests, a âbrokenâ and thus a failed bridge in a part of England where Anglo-Saxon royal administration was markedly less efficient than it was in the area south of the Humber) a dedication to Clement may reveal William the Conquerorâs gratitude for a successful passage over the River Aire.15
The last of the three common burdens, army service, has been a particular interest of Nicholas throughout his academic career. Nicholasâ interest in armour and weapons was aroused when he was a pupil at Winchester College. Together with his history teacher at Winchester, H.E. Walker, he explored the evidence of the Bayeux Tapestry for body armour and weapons, in the process comparing the portrayal of Anglo-Saxon byrnies in the Tapestry with a fragment of relief sculpture, probably dating to the reign of Cnut, from Old Minster, Winchester, and this was published in an early volume of the proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies.16 Also in the late 1970s, through analysis of heriots recorded in wills and those stipulated in law codes, he was able to show that Ăthelred greatly increased the quantity of military equipment that earls, bishops and kingâs thegns were expected to provide;17 subsequently, in the millenary volume for the Battle of Maldon, he provided an explanation for this â references to Anglo-Saxon weapons and armour in the Battle of Maldon suggest that the Anglo-Saxons were ill-equipped, and above all ill-protected, and it was probably as a delayed reaction to this that Ăthelred insisted in the early eleventh century that the higher-ranking members of the Anglo-Saxon forces should own helmets.18 The study of heriots is only one of several areas (bridges form another) in which Nicholas has pointed to closely contemporary parallel developments across in Europe;19 similarly he has always encouraged his pupils to look at Anglo-Saxon developments within a comparative European framework.20
More generally on the three common burdens it is to Nicholas that we owe a full understanding of the significance of the charter issued by Ăthelbald of Mercia at the Synod of Gumley in 749, the earliest Anglo-Saxon charter to reserve a kingâs right to the common burdens even when granting immunity from other duties to churches: thanks to Nicholas we can see that Offa introduced the three common burdens into Kentish charters once he had finally taken power in Kent and then, in the ninth century, the system was adopted by the kings of Wessex, some time after they in their turn had brought Kent under their rule, once they recognised the necessity of building fortifications.21 Discussion of the theme of the three common burdens has an ancient history and Jame...