Unruly, p.4
Unruly, page 4
My point is that I don’t think religions are themselves to blame for all the violence in the name of religion, though it has to be said that the religions also totally failed to stop it.
So, is religion a good or a bad thing? Perhaps the answer is no.
Christian? Well, you know, just Christmas and Easter and when I’m committing genocide
That wasn’t Bede or King Ceolwulf’s answer. For them, the advance of Christianity made sense of everything. The horridness and occasional goodness was all part of some plan. It was a nice plan even if it was counterintuitive and tricky to unpick.
A king who abdicates to become a monk is a very different sort of person from the warlords of a century or more earlier who came up with the notion of kingship to dignify their violent amassing of power and wealth. There’s a sincerity to Ceolwulf’s piety, an implication of duty that comes with his abdication, that would have seemed very strange to those self-proclaimed kings. He comes across as decent, is I suppose what I’m saying – though they seem more of a laugh.
In the seventh century there are several rulers who were splendidly cynical in their use of Christianity. For example, King Raedwald of East Anglia, who died in 624 and is probably the main Sutton Hoo corpse, hedged his bets by building a temple with two altars: one to the pagan gods and one to Christ. Bede is predictably contemptuous of this and, given a moment’s thought, it’s not as canny a strategy as it initially sounds. Whether it turned out to be God or the gods who really existed, you imagine He or They would be pissed off at this equivocation when Raedwald turned up in the afterlife. Perhaps that’s why he thought it important to be buried with all that treasure – he reckoned he might have to tip heavily on arrival.
Similarly the Christian British King Cadwallon of Gwynedd, who reigned until 634 when he was killed in battle by the also Christian Anglo-Saxon King Oswald of Northumbria, had, a year earlier, been very happy to make an alliance with the very very pagan King Penda of Mercia in order to defeat Oswald’s predecessor the Christian King Edwin of Northumbria. That’s quite a sentence, I know. The point I’m trying to make is that, even by the time Christianity was very much around, it wasn’t necessarily the dominant factor.
Another example: later in the century, the brutal King Caedwalla of Wessex was, with the enthusiastic support of St Wilfrid, happy to use Christianity as an excuse for slaughtering everyone on the Isle of Wight (at that point the last pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdom) and taking the place over. But Caedwalla himself wasn’t baptized Christian. He was hedging his bets as well. Though, to be fair on him, he then abdicated and went on a pilgrimage to Rome where he was baptized by Pope Sergius I in 689 before promptly dying.
Fifty to a hundred years later, leaders like Ceolwulf are a lot more serious about it, even when they didn’t go on to become monks. A bit like smoking to look cool and then becoming addicted, medieval kings soon came to believe their own Christ-proclaiming hype. Most of the rulers after this time, brutal and self-interested though they may have been, were genuinely God-fearing. They turned that fear to their advantage by asserting that the very fact they were kings was a sign of celestial favour.
Ceremonial elements were gradually introduced, following trends already established on the continent where there hadn’t been such a post-Roman pagan blip. The Old Testament mentions kings having crowns put on them and being anointed, and the word ‘Christ’ comes from the Greek meaning ‘anointed one’ – so the way of legitimizing, even sanctifying, secular power under the big new religion was obvious.
Hence, back in the fifth century, the emperors of the surviving Eastern half of the Roman Empire, which these days gets called the Byzantine Empire, had started getting themselves crowned by the Patriarch of Constantinople. This gave ecclesiastical endorsement to that ancient pagan office, and the trend had been spread westwards by the cool Byzantines’ soft power. In the seventh century the Visigoth kings of Spain started being crowned and anointed in holy oil and, by the middle of the eighth, the practice had been adopted by the Frankish kings who held sway in most of what is now France, the Low Countries and western Germany.
This need outwardly to assert a massive holy link between God, Christ and some beardy guy with a sword and a colossal sense of entitlement was becoming entrenched on the mainland and followed Christianity into the lands of the Anglo-Saxons. Christianity and the right to rule were welded together. By the time of Bede, for a king to remain unbaptized, as Caedwalla had been, would be as unlikely and egregious a lapse in professional housekeeping as a presenter of The One Show forgetting to renew their television licence.
4. King Offa of Mercia
When my wife and I are visiting a nice town or village for the first time, the question we always ask is ‘Where’s the bit?’ That’s what we’re looking for: the main bit. The nice bit. The bit you’re supposed to go and walk round where the stuff is. The bit that, once seen, gives you the authority to say you’ve been to the place. Tourists judge a place by its bit, even if locals eschew the bit because they’re inured to its beauties and obsessed with the difficulty of parking.
Anything from a substantial village to a small city will have one bit. Sorrento in Italy, where we have spent a few holidays, is blessed with two bits and we’d been going there for several years before we discovered the second one (it’s the old port!). Metropolises like London and New York can have several bits, and LA has no real bit at all, but quite large places still have only one. Cambridge and Bath, for example, have relatively sizeable bits, but only one each.
The bit isn’t really the place, though. It’s only a small part of the place. It’s just the bit you don’t want to miss, because it’s most characteristic of the place. Well, in the history of Anglo-Saxon England, we’ve finally found the bit. It’s the mid- to late eighth century. That’s the main bit, the normal bit, when the era of Anglo-Saxon England was properly up and running but hadn’t started to run out.
During this bit, there were several stable kingdoms broadly covering the area soon to be known as England, one of which was, at any given time, in the ascendancy. The Britons had been pushed back into the west – parts of what is now Devon and Cornwall and pretty much all of what is now Wales.
In fact, the words Wales and Welsh are derived from the words the Germanic-speaking tribes all over Europe gave to the retreating and cowed citizens of the collapsing Roman Empire: walas, which meant foreigners or strangers, from which we get Walloon (the French-speaking Belgians) and Gaul, of Asterix the Gaul (somehow the ‘w’ turned into a ‘g’), as well as the Old English wealh which became Wales and Welsh. (Hence the modern French for Wales is ‘Pays de Galles’, country of the Gauls, which is massively confusing. France, Gaul, is the actual country of the Gauls, you’d think. It’s almost like the French are calling Wales France, as if, to the French, the Welsh seem more French than the French. And, having been to both France and Wales many times, that strikes me as an eccentric opinion.)
Meanwhile the Welsh word for Wales, Cymru, derives from a Brittonic word meaning ‘fellow-countrymen’. Strangers or fellow-countrymen. The Welsh for Wales basically means ‘us’ and the English for it means ‘them’.
Us and them. That sums up the relations between the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons at this point. Sharing a religion only seemed to divide them further and there were persistent differences over how to calculate the date of Easter despite the extreme disinclination of people on both sides to send one another festive eggs. (My strong advice is not to worry about the specifics of this difference because it is complicated and unimportant. Basically, the Celtic church calculated the date of Easter Sunday on an eighty-four-year cycle, while the Roman church that the Anglo-Saxons had largely adopted did it on a nineteen-year cycle. If that information is not enough to put you off further enquiry, then I think you should seriously consider putting this book down and developing a drug habit.)
Northern Europe enjoyed a significant economic recovery in the late seventh and eighth centuries that enriched the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms but didn’t much benefit the Britons, who had too many Anglo-Saxons between them and all that trade. This further boosted the Anglo-Saxons’ increasing feelings of communality, of a racial and linguistic bond from which the Britons were explicitly excluded. The two sides defined themselves against one another and the Anglo-Saxon world was buoyed up by a consequent sense of unity.
This unifying enmity finds its physical embodiment in Offa’s Dyke. You may have heard of it. People do walks along it these days. It’s a very long earthwork – a ditch with an embankment – that runs roughly along the Welsh–English border or, at time of construction, the Mercia–Powys border. It’s been called Offa’s Dyke since time immemorial and, unusually for something like that, it’s probably correctly named and was indeed constructed by order of King Offa of Mercia.
People don’t exactly know why. The answer ‘just for fun’ can be ruled out because constructing a ditch that long would take a huge amount of effort and resources today – for a small eighth-century kingdom it would have felt as difficult as acquiring a nuclear deterrent. Was it supposed to be a deterrent, a defensive military line? Maybe, but it wouldn’t be a very good one, unless it was manned and it doesn’t seem likely that it was – it’s too long. Assuming an invading army didn’t require disabled access, it wouldn’t stop them – they could scramble over it.
It would have made stealing livestock tricky, as herding lots of animals back over it would be difficult. Also, it will have been symbolically powerful. Perhaps it was just literally drawing a line, asserting power: the Anglo-Saxons hold sway up to here.
When Offa was king, from 757 to 796, Mercia was the dominant kingdom and had been for some time, certainly for most of the reign of his almost immediate predecessor, Aethelbald, who had been king since 716. (I say ‘almost immediate’ because another man, Beornred, ruled briefly and unsuccessfully between Aethelbald’s assassination, possibly orchestrated by Beornred, and his own, definitely orchestrated by Offa.)
If you’re looking for a way to remember the chronological order of dominance of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (and you might be – you could use it as the basis for a series of internet passwords), it’s this: start at the bottom and then go round anti-clockwise. That’s not how the Anglo-Saxons remembered it, though, as none of them had ever seen a clock.
It starts at Sussex, back in the mists of time when Aelle was king. He was supposedly the first bretwalda but may not have existed at all, so this Sussexian dominance could be fictional. Then, we move into fact and round to Kent, when Aethelberht was in charge, and then to East Anglia under Raedwald. After that, there were several dominant kings of Northumbria but this was fading in the time of Bede to be replaced by – we’re moving down the left now – Mercia, which we’ve just got to, and finally (spoiler alert) Wessex.
Of the seven kingdoms that later historians, in an effort to tidy up this disordered era, referred to as the Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’ only Essex doesn’t seem to have had its moment in the sun, even in myth. This slightly spoils the mnemonic but there it is. Perhaps we should just pretend that Essex briefly ruled the roost between Kent and East Anglia and I suspect there’ll be insufficient evidence to comprehensively refute the claim.
An Offa you can’t refuse
Boom! I’ve dropped the pun. I couldn’t help it. It’s been hanging over me all chapter. My justification for making it is – bear with me – that Offa asserted dominance over, or took over, all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except Northumbria. For those kingdoms King Offa’s domination was what he offered and, if you refused Offa’s offer, he would respond with lethal violence. So you can’t refuse it. It’s actually a completely apposite pun and, on reflection, I’m extremely proud of myself.
One of the main reasons Mercia was able to dominate was that it controlled London. That seems a bit strange. Mercia’s heartland was the Midlands – the word is still used to refer to that part of England, as in the West Mercia Police that arrests people in Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire. London is in the south-east. To a modern perspective, it is the dominant core of the south-east. The south and east of Anglo-Saxon England were dense with other kingdoms. Kent, Sussex, Wessex, Essex and East Anglia all seem like much more natural kingdoms to centre around Britannia’s old Roman capital.
Yet none of them cemented control over it while they had the chance. One of the reasons for this is that, throughout the early Anglo-Saxon period, London, or Londinium as the Romans called it (and they founded it, so it’s actually quite offensive that we don’t still call it that), was abandoned. I don’t mean abandoned in the Sunday colour supplement sense of ‘professional couples are abandoning the cities for a simpler life out of town’. It wasn’t a drift, a trend, a thing about house prices. Everybody left. Or died, which is a form of leaving. London, a large walled conurbation, was simply empty for nearly 200 years. It was used as nothing but the inspiration for baffled and mournful poetry.
I know I’ve alluded to this abandonment before but it’s worth pausing to contemplate it for a moment. It’s really strange. It means there was a complete cessation of one form of human occupation of that part of southern Britain and the start of a new one. The original Londoners died, or fled, to go and gradually become Welsh, and the newcomers looked at what they’d left behind – a city way beyond their technical abilities to construct – and thought, ‘We don’t want anything to do with that.’ They built hovels somewhere else instead and left London empty. I reckon that is weird. These are people who definitely wouldn’t have taken the Covid vaccine. It’s important to bear that in mind before we get too adulatory about the fact that a few of the knick-knacks found at Sutton Hoo came from Byzantium.
The beginning of the repopulation of London came in 604 when Augustine appointed a man called Mellitus as bishop of London and of the East Saxons – Essex the kingdom that controlled the area at the time. (Perhaps we could squeeze in its period of dominance soon after this? It only needs to be a few minutes.) Mellitus had been sent from Rome and wasn’t afraid of buildings, so he set up his church inside the city walls. By that time, a trading settlement or wic as they were called in Old English, had already built up, not inside the city walls (too scary!), but just to the west, round about where the Strand and the Aldwych (or old wic) are now. This place was known as Lundenwic and, by the end of the seventh century, it was a major centre for the same reasons that Roman London had been and the city has prospered to this day: it’s a very good place to put a port.
Once nominally under the aegis of the relatively feeble kingdom of Essex, then tussled over by Kent and Wessex, by the early eighth century it was being run by the Mercians whose king, Aethelbald, was making a fortune from the tolls he charged the traders.
This powerful and prosperous situation continued to improve later in the century under the reign of Offa. As with most kings at this time, we know pitifully little about him. We have lots of unrealistic images of him on the many coins that were minted in his reign (another sign that greater stability and prosperity were being enjoyed than at any time since the Romans left). We also know he kept most other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in subjection to him and built a fuck-off great big dyke to say fuck off to the Welsh. Plus he corresponded with his illustrious contemporary Charlemagne, the dazzlingly successful European ruler who consolidated most of what is now France and a fair chunk of what is now Germany and Italy, into one empire. Offa borrowed from Charlemagne the idea of having his son consecrated as king while he was still alive.
This strategy was very fashion forward. It was another part of the transmogrification of the office of king from top thug into something supposedly sacred and noble. Offa wanted his son Ecgfrith to be anointed and proclaimed his successor because this would add a sense of grandeur to the whole family and might obviate the period of savagery and chaos which was the usual consequence of a reign ending. That’s what had happened between Aethelbald and Offa.
The tricky aspect of Offa’s plan was that such an anointing needed to be done by an archbishop and there were only two in Anglo-Saxon England: one in York, part of the entirely independent kingdom of Northumbria, and one in Canterbury in the kingdom of Kent, which Offa had treated with considerable savagery. Neither archbishop was willing to oblige. So Offa persuaded the pope to create a new archbishopric inside Mercia: the archbishop of Lichfield. It was not an archdiocese destined for a great future but it existed long enough to anoint Ecgfrith, which must have made Offa feel very secure about the future of his kingdom and his legacy.
That’s the feeling his reign gives. The brutality of Anglo-Saxon kingship is still there, but it’s less chaotic, more organized, with an increasingly stable and well-funded infrastructure and a strengthening religious and ceremonial underpinning to the notion of kingship. Offa doesn’t seem too different from the monarchs of centuries later who were also corresponding with continental rulers, bargaining with the church and nervously securing their sons’ succession. It’s a much more relaxing picture. Perhaps history is going to be nice and normal from now on.
5. ’King Hell, it’s the ’King ’Kings!
Sometimes things just happen. That’s worth bearing in mind. It’s a great get-out clause if you’re writing a history book. ‘Look it just happened, okay?’ I can always say. ‘Sometimes things do. Never mind why. Deal with it. It simply occurred, and that’s that. Ask the scientists, they’re up to their eyes in this stuff – butterflies’ wings and so on. Everything’s just a chaos of microparticles. Things just happen – don’t get comfy.’
We’re probably more than usually aware of this at time of writing because the coronavirus pandemic was like that, all the jokes about bat-eating notwithstanding. And, frankly, even if some bat-eating was contributory, I don’t buy all that wise-after-the-event admonition. The whole ‘Well, if you’re going to eat bats, what do you expect?’ attitude.
