Making England, 796-1042

Richard Huscroft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429893179
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Making England, 796–1042 explores the creation and establishment of the kingdom of England and the significant changes that led to it becoming one of the most successful and sophisticated political structures in the western world by the middle of the eleventh century.

At the end of the eighth century when King Offa of Mercia died, England was a long way from being a single kingdom ruled by a single king. This book examines how and why the kingdom of England formed in the way it did and charts the growth of royal power over the following two and a half centuries. Key political and military events are introduced alongside developments within government, the law, the church and wider social and economic changes to provide a detailed picture of England throughout this period. This is also set against a wider European context to demonstrate the influence of external forces on England's development.

With a focus on England's rulers and elites, Making England, 796–1042 uncovers the type of kingdom England was and analyses its strengths and weaknesses as well as the emerging concept of a specifically English nation. Arranged both chronologically and thematically, and containing a selection of maps and genealogies, it is the ideal introducion to this subject for students of medieval history and of medieval England in particular.

Part I

The origins of a kingdom, 796–899

1
The events, 796–899

796–839

These years saw a dramatic and decisive change in the balance of political power in England. Mercia’s supremacy was ended, and another kingdom, Wessex, became preeminent. Moreover, a royal dynasty was established in Wessex which, over the course of the ninth and tenth centuries, would come to rule the whole of England as a single kingdom.

King Offa’s achievements were threatened as soon as died in 796. His son Ecgfrith succeeded him but was dead by the end of the year, and the task of preserving Mercia’s dominance fell to a remote cousin, Cenwulf (796–821). Cenwulf immediately had to deal with an uprising in Kent, and he did so in 798 by capturing the leader of the insurgents, Eadberht Praen, and taking him to Mercia where his hands were cut off and his eyes put out.¹ He then installed his brother, Cuthred, as sub-king in Kent, and after Cuthred died in 807 Cenwulf ruled there himself. But if Cenwulf eventually managed to hang on to some kind of authority in Kent and in other parts of southern England, he did so with difficulty, and when he died in 821, ‘much discord and innumerable disagreements’ followed, ‘between various kings, nobles, bishops and ministers of the Church of God, on very many matters of secular business’.² Cenwulf’s brother Ceolwulf I, who succeeded him, was deposed in 823 and succeeded by Beornwulf.

Cenwulf’s power across the rest of England also waned as his reign went on. There is no evidence that he exercised any kind of meaningful influence in Wessex or Northumbria, for example, and those kingdoms were left to develop during the first quarter of the ninth century, largely free of Mercian interference. In northern England, King Aethelred of Northumbria, Offa’s son-in-law, was murdered in 796, and once his immediate successor had been deposed after only twenty days, the kingdom came into the hands of one of Aethelred’s former rivals, returned from exile, Eardwulf. Eardwulf faced plenty of internal opposition and on one occasion, in 801, he led an army against the Mercians because King Cenwulf had given shelter to his enemies. In 806, Eardwulf was overthrown, only to be reinstated two years later with the backing of the pope and (by then, having been given an imperial coronation at Rome in 800) the emperor Charlemagne. After that, the chronology of Eardwulf’s reign is confused and unclear. He probably lived until about 830, although he could have survived longer than this, and the numismatic evidence might actually support the theory that the rest of Eardwulf’s reign was relatively stable. At the very least, he seems to have been able to pass the throne on to his son Eanred, who may have ruled until the mid-850s.³

The situation in Wessex during this period is more clear, because the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records some of the things that happened. Some notes of caution need to be sounded about this, however. Having been produced in Wessex at the end of the ninth century, its emphasis on West Saxon affairs might sometimes endow them with a significance they did not in reality have. Second, and more specifically here, even the Chronicle does not provide much meaningful detail about events before the 820s, so it is difficult to get any clear sense of what was happening south of the Thames in the first two decades of the ninth century. The Chronicle does record how, in 802, King Beorhtric of Wessex, who had married Offa’s daughter Eadburh in 789, died and was succeeded as king by Ecgberht. But even this simple statement probably conceals a much more complex story. On Ecgberht’s death in 839, the chronicler described how, before he became king, Ecgberht had been forced by Beorhtric and Offa to take refuge in Francia for three years, and it may be that the exile returned in 802 with Frankish help. The Chronicle’s entry for 802 also describes how, on the same day as Beorhtric himself died, so did one of the king’s leading men, Ealdorman Worr. And not only that, still on the same day, a Mercian army entered Wessex and was defeated at Kempsford in Gloucestershire by a force from Wiltshire. It is hard to know what to make of all this, but it is at least clear that Ecgberht’s reign began violently, and that he is unlikely to have been Beorhtric’s chosen heir. It has also been argued that Ecgberht’s origins were Kentish rather than West Saxon (his father, Ealhmund, may have been one of the last independent kings of Kent) and that therefore his exile at the hands of Beorhtric and Offa was intended to nip some kind of Kentish resurgence in the bud. So there is every chance that, in 802, Beorhtric was killed in a takeover led by his successor.⁴

Having described, albeit not very helpfully, the events of 802, the Chronicle proceeds largely to overlook the first twenty years or so of Ecgberht’s reign. He is not mentioned again until the entry for 815 when he launched a campaign in Cornwall and ravaged ‘from east to west’, and later sources suggest that this might not have been Ecgberht’s only expedition to the far south-west.⁵ Much more important, however, and the Chronicle emphasises this by recording these events in some detail, was the battle Ecgberht won in 825 at Ellendun (Wroughton) in modern Wiltshire against King Beornwulf of Mercia.⁶ The consequences of this defeat were catastrophic for the Mercians and momentous for Wessex. It was decisive enough to encourage the East Anglians to throw off Mercian control once and for all and look to Ecgberht of Wessex for protection instead. As proof of their good faith, they killed King Beornwulf in battle. At the same time, Ecgberht himself, buoyed by his success, sent a West Saxon army under his son Aethelwulf into Kent. The Mercian puppet-king there, Baldred, was driven out, the kingdom was occupied by the West Saxons and this in turn persuaded the people of Kent and Surrey, along with the South Saxons and the East Saxons, all of whom had been subject to Mercian authority of some kind since Offa’s reign, to submit to Ecgberht and accept West Saxon overlordship.

The Chronicle’s entry for 825 reads as if all these events happened quickly one after the other. In reality, the process it describes may have been more drawn out than it first appears, and it was certainly not over by the end of that crucial year. King Beornwulf was probably not killed until 826, and Ecgberht’s overlordship may not have extended to the kingdom of the South Saxons until 828. The Mercians were not completely overcome by the defeat at Wroughton, either. Beornwulf’s immediate successor as king, Ludeca, was quickly killed, probably in battle, in 827, but the truly pivotal moment did not come until 829 when Wiglaf, who had replaced Ludeca as king, was driven out of Mercia by Ecgberht. At this point the Chronicle pauses to assess Ecgberht’s achievement. He had ‘conquered the kingdom of the Mercians and everything south of the Humber; and he was the eighth king who was Bretwalda’.⁷ Bede had compiled a list of seven English kings who, in his view, had exercised authority (imperium was the Latin word for it) over the English kingdoms south of the Humber. Ecgberht, in the Chronicle’s view, was the latest in that line of masterful rulers and, from the chronicler’s West Saxon perspective, the greatest yet. The special designation Bretwalda, meaning roughly ‘Ruler of Britain’, was coined to reflect his importance. His uniqueness was confirmed when, after taking control of Mercia, he travelled to Dore in Derbyshire and received the submission of the Northumbrians and when, in 830, he did the same in Wales. There is no suggestion that Ecgberht planned to rule these lands directly, but the symbolism of these events was obvious. Between 825 and 830 Ecgberht had overseen the disintegration of Mercian political power and successfully asserted West Saxon supremacy within Britain.

In 830, the Chronicle records how ‘Wiglaf again obtained the kingdom of the Mercians’.⁸ How he did this is unclear, and it may be that his recovery of power was sanctioned by Ecgberht. Ecgberht was certainly content to delegate royal authority elsewhere, and from 825 his son Aethelwulf ruled as sub-king of Kent. Arrangements like this, and perhaps the one in Mercia, may have amounted to an acknowledgement by the West Saxon king that he needed help to rule the extended territories which he had brought under his control. And, to be sure, as his reign drew to a close, he was confronted by new threats which would have challenged any ruler.

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the first ‘Northmen’ came to England in 789, but the Vikings’ first recorded and most notorious raid was on the great monastery of Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast in 793, an event which shocked western Europe. There may then have been further intermittent attacks and raids over the next forty years, particularly in and around Kent. The writers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle may not have been very interested in, or indeed aware of, these events; hence their failure to record them. So the evidence for them is patchy and inconclusive, and the prevailing impression continues to be that the viking threat did not become serious and sustained before the 830s. In 835, the Chronicle records, ‘heathen men’ ravaged the Isle of Sheppey off the Kent coast, and in the following year, King Ecgberht of Wessex himself fought and lost against the crews of thirty-five viking ships at Carhampton on the coast of north Somerset. Bruised but not fatally weakened, Ecgberht had to fight the Vikings once again in 838 when they joined forces with an army of locals at Hingston Down in Cornwall. This time Ecgberht was victorious, but it may be no coincidence that he died in the following year, from exhaustion perhaps if not injuries, after over thirty-seven years as king.⁹ It is impossible to know what Ecgberht and his followers made of this formidable new enemy. They certainly would not have appreciated that ‘the Viking Age’ had begun or that, over the course of the next 250 years or so, these raiders and their successors would shape the course of English history and play a central role in the making of the kingdom of England.

Debate 1

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: facts or fake news?

‘The fundamental authority for Old English history is the series of annalistic compilations known collectively as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’.¹ There is no dispute about this. Nevertheless, there are problems with the Chronicle which nobody studying this period can ignore. It is generally agreed that the first version of the Chronicle (the so-called common stock) was compiled in Wessex in the latter stages of Alfred the Great’s reign. It is also conventional to claim that the compilation took place at Alfred’s court itself. This view is not unreasonable: the contents of the Chronicle until the end of the ninth century are overwhelmingly oriented towards the affairs of Wessex and its kings, and especially towards Alfred and his struggle with the Danes; the creation of the Chronicle, which was written in English, would seem to fit in with the aims of Alfred’s translation programme; an early version of the Chronicle was in circulation at Alfred’s court in the early 890s, as Asser used a text of it in composing his Life of Alfred; and the various manuscripts of the Chronicle largely share the same material up to that point. It is important to remember, however, that there is no direct evidence (of the kind to be found in other works translated at Alfred’s court, for example) linking the common stock to either the king or his circle. Additionally, once the common stock had been circulated and made available for copying after 892, different versions of the Chronicle began to be created by those who had access to it. What they chose to add, remove or change was down to them. As a result, multiple texts of the Chronicle were created, all of which had their own local and personal preoccupations and concerns. So the Chronicle is not now one source, but several: often they coincide, but frequently they differ. There are eight surviving manuscripts in all, labelled from A to H by historians. They were all compiled at different places and different times, and none of the surviving texts is contemporary before the mid-tenth century. The main purpose of the Chronicle was to provide a year-by-year (‘annalistic’) account of English history from its beginnings. Whether the account it gives is complete or reliable, though, is another question. The emphasis on the rise of Wessex in the ninth century is arguably self-serving, the description of the reign of Edward the Elder fails to give meaningful credit to his sister Aethelflaed, and the treatments of individual episodes such as Brunanburh and Edgar’s coronation in 973 are decidedly grandiose. Issues such as these have led to the Chronicle frequently being seen as the ‘official version’ of West Saxon history. But this idea is too simplistic, and ‘We should resist the temptation to regard it as a form of West Saxon dynastic propaganda’.² It is hard to fit the gloom-laden description of Aethelred the Unready’s reign into this model, for example, and other parts of the Chronicle, on the mid-tenth century for example, when there were plenty of reasons why the spin doctors of southern England might have wanted to massage and manipulate evidence, are disappointingly thin and uninformative. But whatever the Chronicle’s shortcomings, its influence has been profound. It was used in the twelfth century by John of Worcester, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, all of whom adapted and modified it in their own way and set historical writing in England on a new course through the middle ages. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is arguably the most important book ever written about English history, but it is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, warts and all, which underpins everything we think we know about the making of the kingdom of England.

1F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England 3rd edn (Oxford, 1971), p. 688.

2K&L, p. 40.

839–858

Ecgberht was buried at Winchester and succeeded as king of the West Saxons by his eldest son, Aethelwulf (839–58). The date of Aethelwulf’s birth is u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chronology of main events
• A note on money
• References and abbreviations
• List of debates
• Maps
• Lists and Genealogies
• Introduction: England and the English in 796
• Part I The origins of a kingdom, 796–899
• Part II The birth of a kingdom, 899–975
• Part III The testing of a kingdom, 975–1042
• Glossary of terms
• Suggestions for further reading
• Index