Battle for the Island Kingdom: England's Destiny 1000–1066

For my patient wife, Teri, so that she is remembered too.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Author’s Note

Dramatis Personae

Introduction

Afterword: Domesday: 1066–1154

Sources

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Plates

eCopyright

List of Illustrations

The vast majority of 11th-century Anglo-Saxons lived in humble thatch-roofed shacks no bigger or better than these recreations at West Stow village in Suffolk, England. (Midnightblueowl, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)

In 1013, with Viking Svein Forkbeard on the verge of conquering the Island Kingdom, the English king Aethelred sent his wife Emma of Normandy and their children to safety with her Norman kin. Illustration by Matthew Paris, 13th century. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, MS Ee.3.59, f. 4r)

In 1016 Forkbeard’s son Cnut and Aethelred’s son Edmund Ironside agreed to rule England as co-kings, as shown in this romanticized 19th-century depiction. (Photo by: GHI Vintage/Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

In this illustration from the Encomium Emmae Reginae (Elegy of Queen Emma), the anonymous author presents her with her copy of the book, as her sons Harthacnut and Edward the Confessor look on. (© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)

Under the gaze of Christ, saints and angels, King Cnut and his queen Aelfgyfu donate a golden cross for the altar of the New Minster at Winchester. Aelfgifu was Queen Emma’s regnal name, but also the name of Cnut’s first, handfast wife. (The British Library, Stowe MS 944, f. 6, https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=stowe_ms_944_fs001r)

In this 13th-century illustration by Matthew Paris, King Harold Harefoot orders the blinding of his rival Alfred Aetheling, while his housecarls bully the English. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, MS Ee.3.59, f. 6r)

Where Harold made an oath to Duke William. Whether by trickery or coercion, William claimed Harold swore fealty to him on holy relics. Scene from the Bayeux Tapestry, 11th century. (Photo by: Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Anglo-Saxon England was twice the size of Normany, even including its dependencies. To invade required William to leave his duchy defenseless against the Continental enemies surrounding it. (The Map Studio)

The Norman invasion fleet first sailed at night, following a lantern at the masthead of Duke William’s flagship Mora. However, the Normans were not skilled sailors and did not complete the crossing until the next day. (Artwork by Steve Noon © Osprey Publishing)

Legend has it that at Stamford Bridge one Viking warrior single-handedly held the entire English army at bay, killing 40 of them with an axe before he was himself slain. (Artwork by Peter Dennis © Osprey Publishing)

The height of the Battle for the Island Kingdom. At Hastings, Norman knights charge the Anglo-Saxon shield wall. On the Bayeux Tapestry both Duke William and his half-brother Bishop Odo are shown wielding a baculus, a wooden club symbolic of religious or royal authority but also used to beat a man to death inside his mail armor. (Painting by Tom Lovell)

The famous arrow in King Harold’s eye on the Bayeux Tapestry is thought to have originally been a spear upraised by an Anglo-Saxon housecarl, shortened and fletched by a later embroiderer to better depict the legend. Judging by more contemporary descriptions of the battle, the king is more likely the axeman struck down at right. (Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

After the battle King Harold’s body was said to be so mutilated that his handfast widow Edith Swanneshals (Swan Neck or Gentle Swan) was brought to search the battlefield for it, identifying it by marks known only to her, as shown in this romanticized Victorian-era illustration. (traveler1116/Getty Images)

Senlac Hill. On October 14, 1066, the Normans and their Continental allies made repeated charges from this position, up the slope toward the Anglo-Saxon line across the crest. King Harold Godwinson is generally thought to have made his stand where Battle Abbey was built. (Ealdgyth, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)

Author’s Note

In the year 1724 historian, archivist and royal secretary Monsieur Antoine Lancelot presented a series of sketches to Paris’s Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, in charge of royal inscriptions and mottoes on monuments and medals. The academy’s task entailed the study of ancient medals, relics and rarities, and therefore archeology and history in general. Lancelot had recently acquired his drawings from the estate of the late Nicolas-Jean Foucault, a state councillor, intendant and scholar of Normandy. Their depiction of mounted knights, kings crowned and a bloody hilltop battle was, in his opinion, copied from some tomb carving, wall fresco, stained glass window or tapestry. The original source was unknown.

The drawings swiftly came to the attention of Dom Bernard de Montfaucon, a monk of the Benedictine Congregation of Saint Maur, renowned for their literary and historical scholarship. A former captain of grenadiers who had served two campaigns in the Franco–Dutch War of 1673, since taking the cloth Montfaucon had become France’s premier archaeologist. Today he is still considered a founder of the science, who invented the term paleography for the study of historic writing systems and the deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts by studying their script. His Palaeographia Graeca, dating Greek manuscripts according to their lettering and abbreviations, was a work of such expertise that it would still be the leading source on the subject 200 years later. None of this was to the neglect of his religious studies, either; in 1719 he had been appointed as confessor to nine-year-old King Louis XV.

Montfaucon had doubtless heard rumors and legends of some tapestry dating from the Norman era, but like most Frenchmen of the day thought nothing more of it. Yet the clues had been there all along….

Around the year 1100 the French chronicler and prelate Baudri of Bourgueil composed a poem for Countess Adele of Normandy, daughter of William the Conqueror, in which he wrote of a silken tapestry embroidered in gold and silver, depicting the Norman conquest of England. As described, Countess Adele’s tapestry (which perhaps never existed) could not be Foucault’s, but had plainly inspired Baudri’s poem.

Then again, in AD 1476, an inventory of the possessions of Bayeux Cathedral listed a very long and narrow hanging of linen, embroidered with images and inscriptions, representing the conquest of England, which is stretched around the nave of the church during the day and during the octave of the Feast of Relics [July 1].

In 1562 the monks of Bayeux, forewarned of the imminent arrival of a troop of Huguenots (French Protestants in that country’s Wars of Religion), had hidden the tapestry away – wisely, as the Huguenots sacked the cathedral, destroying its stalls, organs, icons and relics. Perhaps the tapestry was thought long lost as well. Over 160 years later, Montfaucon wrote:

It took a long time to discover the place where this artwork was found. Not doubting that M. Foucault, who had been Intendant in Normandy, had taken this masterpiece from Caen or Bayeux, I turned to our colleagues in that country. From the letters that they sent me, I believe that it is a length of tapestry that is kept in the Cathedral of Bayeux, and that is exhibited on certain days of the year. This cloth taking the length of the Church, it is to be believed that what we have here is only a small part of the story.

No French historian worth the title could be unfamiliar with that story: the conquest of England by Duke William of Normandy. By Montfaucon’s time the tale had been told by any number of chroniclers, historians and writers, on both sides of the Channel. In addition to their duke, there was a plethora of Williams among them: William of Malmesbury, William of Jumièges, William of Poitiers; few people used surnames in those days. In retelling the story for a modern audience, let us differentiate them like English aristocracy, by their place names only, by the abbeys in which they wrote: Malmesbury, Jumièges, Poitiers. And for consistency, our other sources as well: Worcester, Gaimar, Huntingdon, Wendover, Rievaulx. (I’ll introduce them at length where each comes into the story, but for easy reference, see the complete list in the back of this book.) Many of these writers were anonymous, and some so far back in time that they did not even write in Latin, but in archaic forms of their own languages, which has made trouble for historians and authors ever since.

The tongue in which Anglo-Saxons framed their thoughts, Old English, Aenglisc, was very different from modern English, more resembling modern German. The meaning of a sentence depended less on word order than on inflections denoting case and gender. For readers who might like a slightly deeper dive into the mechanics of Anglo-Saxonish – and why this story is written as it is – we might (briefly, I promise) dig right down to the letters used. Initially, the literate Anglo-Saxons wrote with the old runic alphabet, futhorc,¹ suitable for short inscriptions on weapons, runestones, magic incantations and the like. Long passages were not written down but, in the tradition of most illiterate societies, passed on orally. When it became necessary to compile the annals of their history as a people, Anglo-Saxon scribes employed the Læden stæfrof, the version of the Latin alphabet used to write Old English. Before the Norman Conquest, with J, K, Q, V and Z unused, it consisted of just 24 letters. Two – ash (Æ, lowercase æ) and eth (Ð, lowercase ð) – were derived from existing Latin letters, and two others – wynn (Ƿ, lowercase ƿ) and thorn (Þ, lowercase þ) – were from the runic system. Since none of these letters appear in the modern English alphabet, I have followed convention in substituting ae or e, d, w and th respectively, so that a modern English audience may read, for example, King Aethelred rather than Æþelræd. In a few instances, though, I have chosen to keep the original letters for sheer effect. (My book, my rules.)

As in The Last Viking, I have used a similar approach for Old Norse names in this book, and have dropped the nominative case endings (for example, Haraldr becomes Harald, and Sveinn becomes Svein). In addition, bearing in mind that certain spellings will be more familiar to readers, I have gone with Anglicized versions of names such as Eric Hakonsson (Eirikr Hakonarson).

Also, in Old English the letter C originally represented the hard C sound, for which Old Norse uses the letter K, which is how Danish Prince Knut became English King Cnut. (It was later Norman and French authors, writing in Latin and unsure how to phonemicize Cn, who spelled out his name as Canute.) Since this is a book about England, I have gone with his English name throughout.

I have also updated translations, whether from the original Old English, Latin, French, archaic or even Victorian English (which never uses five words when ten will do) to more modern speech patterns, not striving for a word-for-word match but, to the best of my ability, preserving the original writers’ intent as I see it. Any transcription errors are therefore mine.

I suppose I should address any objections to the use of BC/AD dating (Before Christ/Anno Domini, In the Year of the Lord), rather than the religiously neutral BCE/CE (Before Current Era/Current Era). Since both systems use Christ’s admittedly arbitrary birthdate as a dividing line, and both refer to the same numerical years before and after, it seems to me rather contrived to require non-religious terms for dates still framed in terms of religion. The Venerable Bede for one, although writing in Latin, used BC and AD in his 8th-century treatise, De Temporum Ratione, The Reckoning of Time. The Anglo-Saxons measured their years in terms of BC and AD; therefore, so shall we.²

More recently, and sadly, as I write it appears the term Anglo-Saxon itself is deemed by some to be offensive and a term of pride among so-called white supremacists. The argument seems to be that the medieval English did not refer to themselves as Anglo-Saxon – in Old English, Angelcynn – and that the term only came into vogue during the period of imperial British colonialism and expansion, and of American slavery and racial division. I am lucky enough to have gained audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, and the term Anglo-Saxon has traditionally had a less toxic connotation in the United Kingdom than that being assigned to it in the United States. However, since this is a book in part about the historic Anglo-Saxons, let me just say this.

I suspect none of us will ever really know what the great majority of the Anglo-Saxons called themselves, because it was hardly ever written down in their language. I would concede that most of them did not think of themselves as Angelcynn, or even English, but as Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, West Saxon, et cetera. Those kingdoms originally spoke separate, unique dialects of Old English, mutually comprehensible but clearly identifying the speaker as different, the way international speakers of English can recognize each other today – evidence of how insular those peoples were. By far the vast majority of Anglo-Saxons, illiterate and tied to their own little plots of land, thought of themselves as nothing more than members of their village, viewing anyone from beyond a radius of a few miles as an outsider. That disunity is one of the reasons why they were overrun by the Danes, who were from a country smaller and more tightly knit than most of those in England at the time, and who further altered the speech of their eastern and northern parts of England with their Old East Norse.

All that said, what matters is not what the medieval English called themselves, but what others called them. It was medieval chroniclers on the Continent who first referred to Angli Saxones, Angulsaxones, Angolsaxones or Anglosaxones, to distinguish them from the continental Saxons who didn’t make the Channel crossing. Pre-Conquest English kings adopted Latin terms in manuscripts, charters (land deeds), legal documents and, importantly, their title, even in their very coronation rites: rex Anglorum [et] Saxonum, rex Angulsaxonum and rex Anglo Saxonum, King of the Anglo-Saxons. The very first inscriptions in the late M. Foucault’s sketches were of a seated king, REX, and a horse-borne warrior, HAROLD DUX ANGLORUM.

Montfaucon recognized those figures on sight. Later he recalled:

To draw it I sent to Bayeux M. Antoine Benoît, one of the most skillful draftsmen of that time, with orders to reduce the images to a certain size, but not to change anything in the historical style of the artwork. Even flavor of the coarsest and most vulgar kind must not be changed, the preservation of crudity being, in my opinion, an important part of historiography. We learn here many customs of that time, of arms, of war, of the navy, and of many other subjects. The history represented in the artwork and in the inscriptions of the tapestry is in perfect conformity with the best historians of its era, and teaches us many things that they passed over in silence.

In that same manner, let us now uncover that which is also too often passed over in silence: the six and a half decades leading up to those first panels on the Bayeux Tapestry, and the eighteen or so months leading to its bloody conclusion.

Don Hollway

December 2022

Notes

1 The Anglo-Saxon futhorc differed from the Germanic Elder Futhark in having 26 runic characters instead of 24. The Elder Futhark rune ᚨ, called ansuz (transliterated as the letter a), became three: ᚫ, æsc (æ); ᚪ, ac (a); and ᚩ, ōs (o).

2 As shall be seen, exact dating for events in our story will prove problematic, since January 1 was not universally accepted among Anglo-Saxons as the start of a new year. Some annalists set it at the preceding Christmas or winter solstice, others with the spring equinox in March or even the fall equinox in September. According to Bede, the Anglo-Saxon calendar, following the cycle of the moon, was further complicated by the occasional addition of a thirteenth month in midsummer, to stay in step with the seasons. For much of the Middle Ages in most of Western Europe, including England and Scotland, New Year’s Day was March 25. Scotland did not convert to modern dating until January 1 of the year 1600, and England not until 1752.

Dramatis Personae

The Vikings

Cnut Sveinsson, the Great: Son of Svein Forkbeard, King of England 1016–1035, King of Denmark 1018–1035, King of Norway 1028–1035

Eilif Thorgilsson: Brother of Ulf, jarl under King Cnut

Eric Hakonsson: Jarl of Norway 1000–1012, Earl of Northumbria 1017–1020s, father of Hakon Ericsson

Hakon Ericsson: Son of Eric Hakonsson, Jarl of Norway 1012–1015 and 1028–1029

Harald II Sigurdsson, the Hard Ruler: Half-brother of Olaf, uncle of Magnus, King of Norway 1045–1066

Harald II Sveinsson: Son of Svein Forkbeard, King of Denmark 1014–1018

Harold I, Harefoot: Son of Cnut, King of England 1035–1040

Harthacnut: Son of Cnut, King of England 1035–1042

Heming Haraldsson: Jomsviking, brother of Thorkell the Tall

Magnus Olafsson, the Good: Son of Olaf, King of Norway 1035–1047

Olaf I Haraldsson, the Stout: Father of Magnus I, King of Norway 1015–1028

Stigand: Chaplain and advisor to Cnut, Harefoot, Harthacnut, and Emma of Normandy, Archbishop of Canterbury 1052–1070

Svein Haraldsson, Forkbeard: Father of Cnut the Great, King of Denmark, 986–1014, King of Norway 986–995 and 1000–1014, King of England 1013–1014

Thorkell Haraldsson, the Tall: Leader of the Jomsvikings

Ulf Thorgilsson: Jarl of Skane, later jarl and regent of Denmark

The Anglo-Saxons

Aelfgar Leofricsson: Earl of Mercia 1057–1062

Aelfgifu of Northampton / Alfifa: Daughter of Aelfhelm of York, wife of King Cnut, mother of Svein Cnutsson and Harald Harefoot

Aelfhelm of York: Ealdorman of Northumbria, father of Aelfgifu of Northampton

Aelfric of Hampshire: Ealdorman of Hampshire, turncoat

Aethelred II, the Ill-Advised: King of England 978–1013 and 1014–1016

Aethelstan Aetheling: Eldest son of Aethelred II

Alfred Aetheling: Eighth son of Aethelred II

Eadric Streona: Ealdorman of Mercia, turncoat

Ealdgyth: Widow of thegn Sigeferth or Morcar, later wife of Edmund, Queen of England 1016

Ealdred: Bishop of Worcester, Archbishop of York, diplomat

Edith of Mercia: Daughter of Aelfgar, Earl of Mercia, widow of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, wife of Harold Godwinson and Queen of England 1066

Edith of Wessex: Daughter of Earl Godwin and Gytha Thorgilsdottir, wife of Edward I, Queen Consort of England 1045–1066

Edith Swanneshals, the Fair: Common-law wife of Harold Godwinson, 1045–1066

Edmund Aetheling, Ironside: Third son of Aethelred II, King of England 1016

Edward I, the Confessor: Seventh son of Aethelred II, King of England 1042–1066

Edwin Aelfgarsson: Second son of Earl Aelfgar, Earl of Mercia 1062–1071

Godwin Wulfnothson: Son of Wulfnoth Cild, Earl of Wessex and Kent 1020–1053, father of Sweyn, Harold, Tostig, Edith et al.

Gytha Thorgilsdottir: Sister of Jarl Ulf Thorgilsson, wife of Earl Godwin. Also known as Gytha Thorkelsdottir

Hakon Sweynson: Son of Sweyn Godwinson, hostage

Harold II Godwinson: Son of Godwin, Earl of Wessex, King of England

Leofric: Son of Leofwine, Earl of Mercia, husband of Godiva, father of Aelfgar

Leofwine: Under Aethelred, ealdorman of the Hwicce; under Cnut, Earl of Mercia

Morcar Aelfgarsson: Youngest son of Earl Aelfgar, Earl of Northumbria 1065–1066

Northman: Son of Ealdorman Leofwine, brother of Leofric, follower of Eadric Streona

Sweyn Godwinson: Eldest son of Godwin, English earl, outlaw, exile

Tostig Godwinson: Third son of Godwin, Earl of Northumbria 1055–1065, exile, usurper

Uhtred the Bold: Ealdorman of Northumbria 1006–1016

Ulfcytel Snilling: Ealdorman of East Anglia 1004–1016

Waltheof Siwardsson: Son of Earl Siward, Earl of Northamptonshire and Huntingdonshire 1065–1072, Earl of Northumbria 1072–1076

Wulfhild: Daughter of King Aethelred, widow of Ulfcytel Snilling, widow of Thorkell the Tall

Wulfnoth Cild: Ealdorman of Sussex to 1014, father of Godwin

The Normans

Emma of Normandy: Queen consort of England 1002–1013, 1014–1016, 1017–1035, Queen consort of Denmark 1018–1035, Queen consort of Norway 1028–1035

Fulbert of Falaise: Father of Herleva, grandfather of William I

Gilbert of Brionne: Count of Eu and Brionne, 1015–1040

Guy of Burgundy: Cousin of Duke William, rebel

Herleva of Falaise: Consort of Duke Robert I, mother of William I

Mauger: Son of Duke Richard II, Archbishop of Rouen 1037–1054

Néel I de Saint-Sauveur: Vicomte of the Cotentin to 1040

Néel II de Saint-Sauveur: Son of Néel I, Vicomte of the Cotentin 1040–1047

Osbern fitzArfast, the Steward, the Peacemaker: Steward of Duke Robert I 1027–1035, Steward of William I 1035–1040

Ralf de Gacé: Lord of Gacé, son of Archbishop Robert II, cousin of Duke Robert I, first cousin once-removed and regent of Duke William I

Ralf of Mantes, the Timid: Nephew of Edward I, Earl of Hereford 1051–1057

Richard II, the Good: Father of Richard III and Robert I, brother of Emma, Duke of Normandy 996–1026

Richard III: Son of Richard II, Duke of Normandy 1026–1028

Robert I, the Magnificent or the Devil: Son of Duke Richard II, father of Duke William I, Duke of Normandy 1028–1035

Robert II: Son of Duke Richard I, brother of Duke Richard II, uncle of Duke Robert I, uncle of Mauger and William of Arques, great-uncle of Duke William I, Archbishop of Rouen 989–1037

Robert fitzWimarc: Landholder and castle-builder in Essex, died c. 1075

Robert of Jumièges: Archbishop of Canterbury 1051–1052

Roger de Beaumont, the Bearded: Seigneur of Beaumont, father of Roger, advisor to Duke Willam I

Roger de Montgomery: Seigneur of Montgomery, vicomte of the Hiémois, rebel, exile

Roger de Montgomery, the Great: Son of Roger, Earl of Shrewsbury, Earl of Arundel

Roger I of Tosny, the Moor Eater: Seigneur of Tosny, rebel

Walter of Falaise: Brother of Herleva, protector of William I

William I, the Bastard, the Conqueror: Son of Robert I, Duke of Normandy 1035–1087, King of England 1066–1087

William de Montgomery: Son of Roger de Montgomery, brother of Roger the Great, murderer

William fitzOsbern: Son of Osbern, seneschal of Duke William I 1040–1066

William of Arques: Son of Duke Richard II, brother of Duke Robert I, Count of Arques 1037–1054, rebel

William of Bellême: Father of William Talvas, Lord of Bellême 1005–1028

William Talvas: Son of William of Bellême, Lord of Bellême c. 1028–c. 1060

Other

Alan III: Duke of Brittany 1008–1040, cousin of Duke Robert I, guardian of young Duke William

Baldwin IV: Father of Baldwin V, Count of Flanders 988–1035

Baldwin V: Father of Matilda, half-brother of Judith, Count of Flanders 1035–1067

Conan II: Son of Alan III, Duke of Brittany 1040–1066

Enguerrand II: Brother-in-law of William I to c. 1049, Count of Ponthieu 1052–1053

Eustace II: Count of Boulogne 1049–1087

Geoffrey II Martel, the Hammer: Count of Anjou 1040–1060

Gruffydd ap Llywelyn: King of Wales 1055–1063

Henry I: King of France 1027–1035

Henry III: Holy Roman Emperor 1046–1056

Judith of Flanders: Daughter of Baldwin IV, half-sister of Baldwin V, wife of Tostig Godwinson, Countess of Northumbria 1055–1065

Matilda of Flanders: Wife of William I, Duchess of Normandy 1052–1087, Queen of England 1066–1087

Introduction

A New Millennium

We, too, should translate those books which are of highest importance for most men to understand…until they learn how to read English writing. Let men afterwards also teach Latin to willing students, whom they desire to educate to a higher state.

Alfred the Great

Today the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity in Winchester, England is one of the largest cathedrals in Europe.¹ Every year several hundred thousand visitors marvel at its architecture, a pastiche of styles from across the centuries of its construction: the Norman-style transepts, seventy-five feet high; the Early English-style retrochoir, built over a century later to house a shrine for Saint Swithun; and its late-Gothic nave, with spectacular vaults over eighty feet across, soaring almost as high. The church was built over the course of nearly 500 years, using hand tools to carve marble, honey-colored Bath stone, and limestone from as far away as the Isle of Wight and Normandy. Visitors wandering the outer grounds, craning their necks upward to admire the 150-foot Norman-era bell tower, might completely miss the odd brickwork paths beneath their feet: right angles and semicircles, leading nowhere.

Those outlines were there when Winchester was Wintanceaster, the capital of Wessex (to the extent there was one) and, for much of the island’s subsequent history, of Anglo-Saxon England. They trace the foundations of the town’s Old Minster, the church that stood on the site for over 400 years prior to the construction of the modern cathedral, and probably for a good 200 years before St. Swithun himself was born. More modest than its replacement, the Old Minster nevertheless had been one of the largest, most impressive and most important buildings in England. In those days churches were not only the center of civic life but seats of learning, home to the very few people who were literate: monks, priests and clergy. Sons of nobility, and some daughters, too, were sent to monastic schools to learn Latin and, as shall be seen, written English (Old English). Churches became repositories of knowledge, where books of the day were laboriously copied by hand in monastic scriptoria and stored in their libraries, bibliothecae.

A thousand years ago, in the scriptorium of Wintanceaster’s Old Minster, an anonymous scribe sat bent over a writing table, carefully replicating, word by word, a medieval folio, itself perhaps a hundred years old. Every step of the process required meticulous labor. Lamb-, kid- or calfskin vellums had to be soaked in urine to remove flesh and hair, then washed, scraped, stretched and dried before being cut into sheets and scored with parallel scratches to mark lines and margins. Black ink was manufactured from crushed oak galls, scarlet from red mercury and egg white, and green from malachite, all using gum arabic from African acacia trees as a stiffener and applied with quill pens. Wing feathers from geese or swans (the curvature of left-wing feathers being preferred by right-handed scribes) constantly needed their quills sharpened, up to sixty times a day. Each scribe kept a small knife ready in his off hand for that purpose, and to scrape away errors in transcription before the ink set on the skin. The work was slow, tedious and exacting.

As a result of all this intensive labor, books were incredibly valuable. Our medieval scribe at millennium’s end would not be working on mundane texts. Among many others, of course, he – or they, as, to judge by the handwriting, over the centuries up to fifteen monks carried on the work at Winchester alone – was updating a year-by-year recounting of people and events, the greatest annal in early English history. It had no known title in its day. The first printed edition, in 1692, was arbitrarily titled the Chronicon Saxonicum. Since 1861 it’s been known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Its writing had probably first been undertaken right there in Winchester, by the vision and at the command of King Alfred the Great (r. 871–899). Knowing that his capital was constantly at risk from a sack by Vikings, most of whom considered books as little more than handy fire starters, he had seen to it that copies of the original were sent for safekeeping to monasteries across England – Abingdon Abbey, Worcester Cathedral, Peterborough Abbey and others, probably including a number whose copies have been lost. (Today at least seven editions and a number of fragments survive, though not all date to the beginning of the millennium, being transcribed later. The copy from Winchester is thought to be third-hand, a copy of a copy of the original.) Each site updated its edition independently, sometimes taking second-hand news, rumor and hearsay as fact. This naturally led to some divergences, discrepancies and errors, and only by comparing and contrasting the various accounts can something of a consensus be made. Taken as a whole, however, the Chronicle offers the first post-Roman European history written by a people in their own language.²

Its earliest entries far predate its actual inception, going as far back as 60 BC, the date of the Roman invasion of England, and a genealogy in the Winchester chronicle claims the descent, and therefore the legitimacy, of West Saxon kings all the way down from Adam. For events prior to Alfred’s reign the annalists could draw – as might we – on earlier historians and their monastic forebears.³

Even after the fall of Rome, many of these historians continued to write in Latin, in which even Anglo-Saxon clergymen were educated, and as would their counterparts on the Continent, the anonymous authors of, say, the Encomium Emmae Reginae and Vita Aedwardi Regis. Alfred, however, recognizing that few of his subjects spoke the Roman tongue, and that most were illiterate and would never read the annals themselves, decreed that an Anglo-Saxon chronicle should be written in Anglo-Saxon English, for an Anglo-Saxon audience. With its reliance on alliteration (both vowels and consonants), Old English was meant to be heard, not read. But Anglo-Saxons might listen to their history read to them by a cleric educated in Latin, who in turn might not be able to read the old Scandinavian runic alphabet, the futhorc. So the scribes used Roman lettering to approximate Old English word sounds.

The difference is telling, and important. In medieval society the church’s mastery of the written word gave it control of narrative, of recorded history – in effect, of the truth. The writers of the Encomium and the Vita wrote on behalf of aristocratic sponsors, to present their version of events for posterity, and the annalists of the Chronicle likewise, on behalf of the king in the name of the English people. By recording Old English words in the Latin script popular across the rest of Europe, Alfred was striving to preserve his people’s heritage for foreign readers as well, to prove them worthy of inclusion among the great peoples of history.

For hundreds of years that worthiness had been in dispute. Most of England, except for Wessex and Mercia, had long been under Danish domination, in effect part of Scandinavia. The Anglo-Saxons considered Viking depredations as God’s divine punishment, perhaps for the crime of allowing their own culture to decline so far from the greatness gifted them by Rome. The annalists, ticking off the years on their pages, could attest that, more than a century after Alfred’s death, Anglo-Saxon versus Viking was still an ongoing struggle.

It had always been the Island Kingdom’s curse to be just visible enough to observers across the water, to tempt the boldest to try conquering it.

Before the Romans it had been the Celts, crossing the Channel from Gaul. It was a Celtic tribe, the Belgae, who had settled the site of three Iron Age forts and called it Wenta or Venta, town. The Romans, when they in turn conquered the Belgae and fortified the place, named it Venta Castrum, town castle. The Romans themselves had been, if not the most enduring, by far the most advanced and successful of these waves of invaders. Over more than 350 years they had cultivated a high level of art, culture and engineering among the natives, enforcing a kind of Pax Britannia. By the end of their tenure, though, when their own empire was falling apart at home, the island’s eastern coast was already plagued with Germanic raiders: Jutes, Angles, Saxons. In the power vacuum left by Rome’s departure, these had come to stay, either assimilating the native Celts or driving them into Cornwall, Wales and Scotland. (It was the Germanics who had named the ex-Roman town Wintanceaster.) For four and a half centuries these Angles and Saxons mingled, interbred, founded kingdoms, and ultimately fell to fighting among themselves. First the King of Kent took dominance, then the lords of Northumbria and Mercia, then Wessex. They had proven unable to unite to form a common front when a savage new breed of raiders, Scandinavians whom they called the Denes, the Danes, arrived to prey on them as they had once preyed on the Celts. Their mindset in those hard-pressed years is likely best captured in the Codex Exoniensis, the Exeter Book, a collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry dating from the late 10th century, though probably composed much earlier. The poems are full of lament and woe, mourning lost loved ones and dead lords. Looking back, the 12th-century Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx described those times simply: Fear, death, desolation, and mourning reign everywhere.

Only Wessex and Mercia held out against the Danish onslaught, and those only by the virtue of Alfred’s guile and force of will. He saw all Anglo-Saxons as one people, the Angelcynn, the English race. Together they withstood the Viking pressure and began to push back. In 878, at the Battle of Edington, Alfred defeated the Viking king Guthrum, had him baptized under the Aenglisc name Aethelstan, and named him King of East Anglia.

The peace was uneasy. In 885 Guthrum resorted to calling the Viking chieftain Hrolf away from his siege of Paris to help put down an uprising among his subjects. According to the Picardish historian of the Normans, Dudo of Saint-Quentin, Hrolf dropped his siege and came to England, pledging Guthrum he would remind the Anglo-Saxons of the Vikings of old:

I will crush whomever you please, I will destroy whomever you choose. I will level their cities and I will set fire to their houses and villages, I will tread them underfoot and scatter them, I will make them your slaves and kill them, I will take their wives and children captive and I will devour their herds.

Hrolf made good on his promise. After Guthrum was restored to power, he was so grateful (according to Dudo) that he offered the Viking half his kingdom to stay in England. Hrolf nobly declined, choosing instead to return to Francia. Though he never did conquer Paris (if he had, it might have changed European history as much as a later invasion of England by his descendants), the Franks ceded Neustria, the western, coastal part of their kingdom, to him. Over successive generations, as shall be seen, that land and its people – part French, part Viking – would acquire a new name, the same way Hrolf would be remembered as their father, Rollo.

Meanwhile in England, for seventy years Anglo-Saxons and Vikings maintained an uneasy, troubled equilibrium, but when the last Norse ruler of York, Eric Bloodaxe, died in 954, in battle or murdered, the Danish tide finally washed back out to sea. What had been Britannia under the Romans; Britene, Brytene or Britenlond among the Germanics; and the Danelaw, Mercia and Wessex to Alfred’s Anglecynn, was now united as one: the Angelcynnes lond, Aenglelande, Engla-land.

The northern Anglo-Saxons, though, having lived so long under Viking rule, were half-Viking themselves, clinging to Scandinavian ways. In the 980s the Danes returned, and though they did not manage to reestablish their ancestral Danelaw on English soil, they soaked it in blood. For the entire reign of English King Aethelred II (at thirty-seven years, the longest of any Anglo-Saxon king), Vikings were the bane of his existence. Not for nothing would he become infamous as Aethelred Unraed, the Unready.⁴ He had tried fighting, but at Maldon in 991 the Norwegian reiver Olaf Tryggvason dealt his army a decisive defeat. Aethelred then tried to buy them off, but payments of gafol, later to be known as Danegeld, the Danish tax or Danish tribute, only encouraged more raiding.⁵ In 994 Tryggvason allied with the Danes under King Svein Haraldsson, called Tjuguskegg, Forkbeard. They returned to besiege Lundenburh, Fort London, built within the walled confines of Roman Londinium, already the largest city in England and Aethelred’s capital. Both Tryggvason and Forkbeard were Christians, but apparently only Olaf had a Christian conscience. Aethelred and Winchester’s bishop Aelfheah prevailed upon him (with the added encouragement of 16,000 pounds of gold and silver) to agree to raid England no more.⁶ Olaf had gone home, become king, and forcibly converted Norway to his faith. In England, for the time being, it had seemed the Viking menace was over.

But now Olaf was dead, outnumbered, surrounded and slain at the naval Battle of Svolder in the western Baltic, by his erstwhile ally Forkbeard. Nor was Forkbeard – so cruel that he had driven his own father Harald Bluetooth to death in exile – satisfied to be king of Denmark and Norway. He had turned avaricious eyes toward England, which in those days was seen as the most southerly, warmest part of Scandinavia. Vikings raided right up the Thames, laid waste almost all of Kent, and threatened London, while the Chronicle lamented Aethelred’s feckless response:

The king and his councilmen decided to move against them with both the army and navy, but every time the ships were ready there was a delay, which was very annoying for the eager sailors aboard. Again and again the more urgent anything was, the longer it took to begin it. Meanwhile they were allowing their enemies’ strength to increase, and whenever they retreated from the sea the enemy moved closer. When all was said and done these naval and army plans were an utter failure, succeeding only in alarming the people, wasting money, and encouraging the enemy.

Aethelred did, however, manage to take out his frustration on any neighbors who supported the Vikings. He marched his army north to ravage Strath-Clota, valley of the river of (the Celtic goddess) Clota, in Alba, modern Strathclyde in Scotland. His fleet raided the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. And the English chroniclers, in charting the Vikings’ depredations, took note to add one more hostile neighbor to their list: The enemy fleet had sailed off to Richard’s realm.

This realm, just across the English Channel (which the Anglo-Saxons called the Sud-see, South Sea) was the dukedom of Richard II of Normaundie, modern Normandy. Unlike the Danes in the Danelaw, however, and more like the Angles and Saxons in England, rather than remain a Scandinavian colony the descendants of Rollo had interbred and assimilated with the local Franks and Celts, becoming vassals of Francia. They stopped being Norsemen and became Normans. Yet they were hardly less warlike than their forebears, and maintained better connections with Scandinavia than with England. Relations between Aethelred and the previous count, Richard I, called Sans-Peur, the Fearless, had soured to the point that in AD 991 Pope John XV intervened, sending a legate to bring them to an agreement. By the Peace of Rouen, both agreed not to aid each other’s enemies. In 996, however, both Richard and John died, and as Richard II – the first Norman to be styled as Duke – was still in his minority, his Danish mother and Norman uncle ruled as regents. For them to allow Forkbeard and his Vikings to cross the South Sea, shelter safely in their harbors, and sell their ill-gotten English booty was a violation of the peace.

Now it was 1001, the dawn of the new millennium. To the poor beleaguered English it seemed nothing had changed. As the Chronicle records, In England this year there were constant raids by the pirate army, who harried and burnt almost everywhere.

The Danes came raiding into Hampshire, practically to the doorstep of the Old Minster at Winchester. They sailed up the River Exe and laid siege to Escanceaster (Fortress on the Exe, modern Exeter), but the town was more than the typical Anglo-Saxon burh, a village defended by earthworks and stockade. Like London, it had been founded and fortified by the Romans as a military post, with stone walls the Vikings were unable to overcome. They vented their frustration on the surrounding villages, and defeated the armies of Devon and Somerset in the field.

But if Aethelred could not stop Vikings from preying on England, he could at least see to it they found neither shelter nor markets in Normandy.

Our story begins the way it will end: with invaders from the sea.

Notes

1 It has also inspired two pieces of modern popular music: Winchester Cathedral by the New Vaudeville Band, 1966 (which reached No. 1 in the USA and Canada, and No. 4 in the UK) and Cathedral by Crosby, Stills & Nash, 1977.

2 Since these multiple versions and fragments of the Chronicle for the most part paraphrase each other, I will not be noting which version I’m quoting unless that quote differs greatly from others.

3 After a thousand years, we have access to sources unknown or unavailable to the old scribes. Again, see the complete list in the back of this book.

4 As is now well known, Unraed is more accurately translated as the Ill-Advised, a pun on Aethelred’s name, which means Nobly Advised. He was not widely called Unraed until at least 150 years after his death, and it is doubtful anyone called him that during his lifetime.

5 In Aethelred’s defense, payment of tribute to Vikings was a tradition going back to the days of Alfred the Great and even among the Franks across the Channel, most of whom had little more luck than Aethelred did in battle against the Vikings.

6 It’s nearly impossible to make a straight conversion of an Anglo-Saxon pound – a unit of finance as opposed to weight – to modern currency. In those times one pound equaled 240 silver pence, at very roughly a gram each, so in terms of weight the 994 payment might have come to some 8,400 pounds of silver, four and a quarter tons. (I leave it to the reader to look up current silver melt values.) Back then, however, silver pence had much greater purchasing power, perhaps as much as ten to thirty modern pounds sterling apiece. (According to contemporary accounts, a slave girl could be expected to live all winter on three pence.) One Anglo-Saxon pound might be worth £2,400 to £7,200 in today’s money, bringing the 994 payment from £38,400,000 to £115,200,000.

Part One

The Vikings

AD 1001–1043

Night-shadow darkens, sending from the north fierce hailstorms to punish warriors.

Everything is hardship in the earthly realm.

The fates’ creation changes the world under the heavens.

Here wealth is fleeting, friendship is fleeting, man himself is fleeting, kinship is fleeting.

All the underpinning of the earth will become as nothing.

From The Wanderer

Anglo-Saxon, late 9th/early 10th century

I

Normandy Invasion

1001

How Aethelred, King of England, who married Emma, sister of the Duke, sent an army to conquer Normandy, and how Néel of Cotentin defeated and utterly destroyed this army.

Jumièges

The sight would have been terrifyingly familiar to anyone living along the Channel coast in the centuries leading up to the turn of the millennium…that is, anyone lucky enough to have survived it the first time: longships, high-prowed, low in the water, closing in from the horizon with astonishing speed, oars sweeping across a high tide and hulls scraping to a halt on the silty shore. Men in chain-mail hauberks and leather byrnies, bearing shields and naked blades, leaping over the gunwales into knee-deep surf to wade onto foreign soil. And soon, the screams of victims and the glower of flames rising from thatched roofs.

Except these invaders weren’t Vikings. By their leaders’ elaborate full-face helmets, their single-edged, clipped-point swords, and their banners – Roman-style windsocks in the form of golden wyverns, the two-legged winged dragons symbolic of Wessex – they would have shown themselves to be Anglo-Saxons, sent by their king Aethelred to punish the Norman duke Richard II for his flirtation with Vikings. The 11th-century monk William, of the Benedictine abbey at Jumièges in Normandy, was born right around the time of this raid, and devoted a chapter of his Gesta Normannorum Ducum (Deeds of the Dukes of the Normans) to it. According to him, Aethelred had ordered the raiders to lay waste Richard’s land with iron and fire: He further commanded them to capture Duke Richard, bind his hands behind his back, and deliver him into the royal presence alive.

They had landed on the banks of the Saire River, which winds halfway across the Cotentin Peninsula to its outlet on the east coast. In their shallow-draft longships, the Vikings had routinely exploited river routes to penetrate deeply and unexpectedly into enemy