In Search of the Dark Ages Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE

  Boadicea

  CHAPTER TWO

  King Arthur

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Sutton Hoo Man

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Offa

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Alfred the Great

  CHAPTER SIX

  Athelstan

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Eric Bloodaxe

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ethelred the Unready

  CHAPTER NINE

  William the Conqueror

  Postscript

  Picture Section

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Picture credits

  Copyright

  About the Book

  This edition of Michael Wood’s groundbreaking first book explores the fascinating and mysterious centuries between the Romans and the Norman Conquest of 1066. In Search of the Dark Ages vividly conjures up some of the most famous names in British history, such as Queen Boadicea, leader of a terrible war of resistance against the Romans, and King Arthur, the ‘once and future king’, for whose riddle Wood proposes a new and surprising solution. Here too, warts and all, are the Saxon, Viking and Norman kings who laid the political foundations of England – Offa of Mercia, Alfred the Great, Athelstan, and William the Conqueror, whose victory at Hastings in 1066 marked the end of Anglo-Saxon England.

  Reflecting recent historical, textual and archaeological research, this revised edition of Michael Wood’s classic book overturns preconceptions of the Dark Ages as a shadowy and brutal era, showing them to be a richly exciting and formative period in the history of Britain.

  About the Author

  Michael Wood is a distinguished broadcaster and film-maker, and the author of several highly praised books on English history, including The Domesday Quest and In Search of Shakespeare. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Oriel College, Oxford, where he did post-graduate research in Anglo-Saxon history. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

  For my mother and father

  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 invading 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 7 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 overseas. At first the English succeeded, for example procuring the downfall of Eric Bloodaxe, the last king of an independent Viking Northumbria in 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 Godwinson, 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 example, although Tacitus’ works were not rediscovered until the Renaissance, 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 ‘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 Franki
sh style in the reign of Alfred in a way which suggests that it was compiled under Alfred’s personal supervision 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.

  Charters are a quite different kind of source. They are title deeds, the records of land transactions, for example the gift of an estate by a king to a monastery. They may sound dry as dust but they tell us a tremendous amount about the king’s power and pretensions. They show us where kings did or did not possess land; they give us clues as to how they managed the royal estates; they enable us to trace the rise of the great families and the lesser military aristocracy. Charters can even give us insight into character: Offa’s hard-nosed grasp of the workings of kingship, Athelstan’s love of high-flown titles, Ethelred’s self-justifying ineffectiveness. Anglo-Saxon charters date from before the period of systematic governmental archives and were preserved in the muniments rooms of the local bishoprics. They were often copied and recopied, and most only survive in later copies which are often tampered with and usually corrupt. But charters are one of the prime sources by which modern historians have been able to build up a picture of the fabric of Anglo-Saxon society.

  There is now debate about the roots of English and British identity. This book centres on the emergence of the English state and an English identity during the Dark Ages. The nature of this legacy is now of interest to all inhabitants of the British Isles – and indeed, to a wider world.

  ONE

  BOADICEA

  She was very tall, the glance of her eye most fierce; her voice harsh. A great mass of the reddest hair fell down to her hips. Around her neck was a large golden necklace, and she always wore a tunic of many colours over which she fastened a thick cloak with a broach. Her appearance was terrifying.

  Dio Cassius Roman History

  BOADICEA HAS A place of her own in British folk history. The warrior queen who fought her terrible, unavailing struggle against the might of Rome. Her story is so strange and dramatic it is odd that Hollywood has not seized on it. These days the virago on the scythed chariot is so ingrained in the popular imagination that cartoonists could portray the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as Boadicea immediately after her election victory, knowing that everyone would get the point.

  Boadicea first became known to the British public in the reign of Elizabeth I, but fittingly enough it was under that other great queen, Victoria, that she really became enshrined in popular myth, a myth symbolised by the famous colossal group on the Thames embankment next to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. In fact it was Prince Albert himself who sponsored the statue. It was created at the height of the British empire, a period of romantic obsession with myths of free democratic peoples: the Britons, who were free before they fell beneath the Romans, the Anglo–Saxons, who lost their liberty to the Normans.

  To the Victorians Boadicea was a patriotic queen, a freedom fighter who died defending the liberty of her country against a ruthless and alien power. ‘Regions Caesar never knew thy posterity shall sway,’ reads the inscription on the group: for an Edwardian Englishman the message was clear enough. But the statue encapsulates a nineteenth-century myth, not first-century reality.

  The queen’s name was not Boadicea (a spelling mistake in an influential Renaissance manuscript) but Boudica, which means ‘Victoria’, ‘Victory’. Her chariots were light, springy, wicker vehicles, not armoured carts (nor, in all probability, did they have scythes on their wheels). As for Boudica herself, whatever she may have looked like – Dio’s description which heads this chapter was written in the second century – she did not look like Isadora Duncan. However, the evidence that archaeologists are finding suggests a far more strange and complex story than Prince Albert could have imagined. It is the story of the bitterest war ever fought in Britain; a desperate colonial war between a backward, underdeveloped ‘Third World’ people and a remorseless, highly organised and ‘civilised’ imperial power; a war of terrible atrocities; a war which saw the destruction of the largest Roman towns yet planted in Britain, and the deaths of 70,000 colonists and untold numbers of Britons. None of these things was new to the Roman conquerors; what made this war exceptional was that they had to fight for their lives against a woman.

  BRITONS AND ROMANS

  This book covers a period when society in Britain was changed by several waves of invaders – Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Norman – all of whom settled and permanently altered life here. In the period from the arrival of the Romans to the Norman Conquest, Britain lay outside the Mediterranean world around which classical civilisation had grown, ‘like frogs around a frogpond’ as Plato said. Britain was felt to be at the edge of the world itself, not just of the Euro-Asian landmass. It was ‘at the outermost edge, almost into the whirlpools’. Roman writers refer to its remoteness, ‘set apart in the boundless ocean’ with its inaccessible shores, treacherous tides and wintry climate, ‘another world’ as a panegyric to the emperor Constantius calls it. It is clear that the islands were often visited by traders, as they had been since early Greek times, and there was frequent contact between the Celts of Gaul and Britain. But when Julius Caesar landed in 55 and 54 BC it was not a successful venture for the Romans. The British Isles were still not very well known to them. A famous passage in the Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus, on the wreck of a Roman fleet in the North Sea in AD 16, is a classic example of sailors’ tall stories: those survivors who were swept across to Britain came back with tales which lost nothing in the telling: ‘terrible hurricanes, unknown birds, creatures half man and half beast – all of which they had seen, or believed they had seen, in their fear’. It was well known, adds Tacitus, that this ocean was ‘more stormy than any other sea in the world’.

  Throughout its history Britain has been a refuge or a goal for tribes pushing westwards, and the successive immigrants have left their mark, shaping landscape, culture and language over 5000 years. The first people in Britain were nomadic hunters, food gatherers, who were followed in around 3500 BC by settlers who first cultivated land and raised crops. These people were of Celtic stock and spoke a Celtic language, the distant ancestor of today’s Welsh, Cornish and Breton. The Iron Age civilisation which the Romans conquered seems to have diffused westwards from the Alpine region during the late second millennium and the early first millennium BC, bringing with it the characteristic feature of Iron Age culture – metalworking, wheeled vehicles and horsemanship. They are also responsible for the great fortified hilltop forts and settlements which were all over southern Britain.

  In about 75 BC a new wave of settlers invaded Britain. We call them the Belgae, as the Romans did. They came from a part of France called by the Romans Gallia Belgica. They were great metalworkers and produced gold, silver, bronze and iron ornaments of marvellous workmanship; they also revolutionised agriculture by inventing a new, heavy plough. At this time the process of clearing the heavily wooded valleys of the south-east started, and has gone on ever since. This was the period when the south-east first began to be ex
ploited properly by man, and the Belgic field systems can still be seen there on the high ground. Grain was the staple – wheat, spelt and barley; and the native vegetables – turnip, cabbage and parsnip.

  The Belgic tribes conquered south-east Britain, but not East Anglia where the Iceni lived in what is now Norfolk. The Iceni were Boudica’s tribe, and they seem to have been relatively isolated and culturally backward. The Belgic peoples were more ‘modern’ than the Celtic; they minted coins on Roman models with Latin inscriptions; they traded with the Romans, who by then had made Gaul (France) part of their empire; they bought luxury goods in exchange for slaves won in war. The Belgic tribes also fought each other, and the original native tribes, for dominance. During the period around the birth of Christ the Catuvellauni and the Trinovantes under King Cunobelinus extended their control over much of what is now south-eastern England. Colchester was their chief centre. It was then called Camulodunum, a vast Iron Age settlement surrounded by a massive and complex series of defensive earthworks whose focal point was a 700-acre site two miles southwest of the centre of modern Colchester; it is now called the Gosbecks and is as yet only known through aerial photography of crop marks. It included a large ditched enclosure, an extensive system of trackways and dykes, and a temple precinct within a walled area; later additions built after the Roman Conquest were a Roman fort, a theatre and a road linking the site with the Roman colony to the north-east where Colchester now stands.

  Until excavation, the full significance of this huge Belgic site will be unclear, but it represents a late Iron Age site which probably only waned after Boudica’s revolt in AD 60–61. Camulodunum has been called the most outstanding late Iron Age – early Roman site in the country. It was the centre of the most powerful overlordship which had yet arisen in Britain, something of a parvenu monarchy with Roman tastes, but nevertheless possessed of wealth and influence. Cunobelinus, who ruled from AD 10 at Camulodunum, issued fine coinages on a vast scale in bronze and silver from there and from Verulamium (St Albans). Some coins were made in the native Celtic fashions, others were based on Roman coins and showed a sphinx instead of the Celtic horse. The golden age of Cunobelinus ended around AD 40, on the eve of the emperor Claudius’ invasion of Britain.