Kingdom of Wessex / England

A client kingdom breaks free

formationDrafted from Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943)

For most of the eighth century Wessex answered to Mercia. King Beorhtric had married a daughter of the Mercian overking Offa, and the man who might otherwise have succeeded him, Egbert, spent years in exile on the continent, driven out by Offa and Beorhtric together. Only when Beorhtric died in 802 was Egbert able to return and take the West Saxon throne - and for the first twenty years of his reign he had little influence beyond his own kingdom's borders.

Ellendun

The change came in 825. Egbert met the Mercian king Beornwulf in battle at Ellendun and broke his army decisively. The victory did more than remove a rival: within the year, Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Essex all transferred their allegiance from Mercia to Wessex, and a chronicler writing under Egbert's own successors gave him the old title Bretwalda - a word better rendered "Britain-ruler" than any literal translation of its parts - the eighth king, on that chronicler's own reckoning, to hold it.

A supremacy without an institution

What Egbert had not created was any lasting machinery of overlordship. The title itself belonged to poetry more than to law; it named a recognized pre-eminence rather than a defined office, and the kingdoms that submitted to Wessex after Ellendun kept their own separate identities and, in Mercia's case, before long their own kings again. Wessex had stopped being anyone's client. It had not yet become anything more permanent than the strongest kingdom among several - and within a generation a new threat, arriving from the sea, would decide whether it survived as even that.

Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943) · St Albans District Council, Julian Watters · CC BY-SA 2.0

The kingdom that did not fall

formationDrafted from Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943)

By the 870s the other three kingdoms that had shared England with Wessex a generation earlier were gone. Northumbria, East Anglia and most of Mercia had been fought over and settled by Danish armies, and in the first days of 878 Wessex itself came within a season of joining them. A Danish force under Guthrum seized Chippenham in midwinter, an attack timed against the ordinary rhythm of campaigning, and within weeks a large part of the West Saxon people had submitted. King Alfred fell back into the marshes of Somerset around Athelney with whatever following he had left.

Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943) · Simon Burchell · CC BY-SA 4.0

Athelney to Edington

From that base Alfred spent seven weeks harrying Danish raiding parties before he judged himself strong enough to risk open battle. Gathering the levies of Somerset, Wiltshire and the part of Hampshire west of Southampton Water, he met Guthrum's main army at Edington, some fifteen miles south of their camp, and broke it. The defeated Danes held out at Chippenham for a fortnight before agreeing to terms: Guthrum would leave Wessex, and he would accept baptism. Three weeks later Alfred stood as his godfather at Aller, near Athelney, giving the Danish king the English name Athelstan.

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford · Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943) · Giles Watson · CC BY-SA 2.0

What one battle decided

The scale of what Edington had settled only becomes clear against the wider collapse of the previous fifteen years. Of the four kingdoms that had divided England in the middle of the century, Wessex alone now survived entire; Danish armies had found permanent settlement across what had been Northumbria, East Anglia and eastern Mercia, and the imposition of West Saxon rule on their descendants would occupy the next seventy years. None of that reconquest was yet certain in 878. What Edington had secured was narrower and more essential: that there would still be a West Saxon kingdom left to attempt it.

A brother and a sister

expansionDrafted from Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943)

Alfred's son Edward the Elder inherited a kingdom that had held its ground; the reconquest of the Danish-settled midlands and east was his own achievement, and he did not accomplish it alone. When his brother-in-law Æthelred of Mercia died in 911, Æthelred's widow - Edward's own sister Æthelflæd - was recognized as "Lady of the Mercians," an office with no real precedent. She held it for eight years, kept a Mercian military household loyal to her personally, planned campaigns and led them in person, and built a chain of fortresses whose siting shows a genuine feel for the ground she was defending.

Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943) · E. A. Bond, Facsimiles of Ancient Charters · Public domain

Fortress by fortress

The West Saxon advance that followed was less a matter of great battles than of a fortress built, a submission taken, and the process repeated. Edward secured the Thames-side lands the Danish army at Bedford had held, then, methodically, brought the East Anglian and Essex Danes to submission by 917 - "a crowded year," in the account that survives, ending with the army of Cambridge giving way along with the rest. In the new year Æthelflæd took Leicester without a fight, and most of the Danish force settled there transferred its allegiance to her directly.

A death that closed one door

Æthelflæd's reach was already extending toward Northumbria: the leading men of the country around York had sent her a formal promise of allegiance, hoping for her support against Norse raiders arriving from Ireland. She died at Tamworth before she could act on it, on 12 June 918, and no comparable offer was ever made to Edward. What might have been a peaceful absorption of southern Northumbria did not happen; a Norse kingdom took shape at York instead, and dealing with it would fall to the next generation. South of the Humber, though, Edward's reconquest went on without her. By the time of his own death in 924, every Danish army between the Thames and the Welland answered to Wessex.

British Library · Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A king in York

expansionDrafted from Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943)

Æthelstan came to Mercia's throne with an advantage his father had lacked: he had been raised in the household of Æthelred and Æthelflæd, was already trusted by the Mercian aristocracy, and was recognized as king there independently of his election in Wessex. That double authority gave him a freedom of action in the north that Edward had never had. When Sihtric, the Norse king of York, died in 927 leaving the throne to his young son Olaf, Æthelstan answered the succession dispute that followed with an invasion of Northumbria itself.

Eamont

The campaign was short. Olaf and his uncle Guthfrith were driven out of Northumbria, Æthelstan took York, tore down the Danish fortifications built inside its walls, and distributed what he found in its treasury. On 12 July 927, at Eamont near Penrith, the kings of Scotland and Strathclyde and the English lord of Bamburgh all became his men, each undertaking to suppress the pagan practices still current among the Norse settlers of the north. A West Saxon king now ruled, in person, the territory a contemporary chronicler was already starting to call England - north and south of the Humber alike, for the first time under one crown.

Yorkshire Museum · Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943) · York Museums Trust · CC BY-SA 4.0

Wales and Cornwall brought to the same table

Within four years Æthelstan's reach extended further still. He met the Welsh princes at Hereford and secured a yearly tribute, along with an agreement fixing the Wye as the boundary between English and Welsh territory near that city - a line that still separated Herefordshire and Gloucestershire from Welsh Erging generations later. Several of the Welsh kings, Hywel Dda of Dyfed most conspicuously, became regular guests at Æthelstan's court, adopting English coinage and English habits of government. From Hereford, Æthelstan marched directly against the Britons of Cornwall, refortified Exeter, expelled its British inhabitants, and fixed the Tamar as Cornwall's own boundary with England. A kingdom that had been fighting for its survival a half-century earlier was now the power every neighbouring ruler in Britain answered to.

A single crown, tested and then unchallenged

peakDrafted from Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943)

The settlement Æthelstan had imposed at Eamont held for six years before it was tested. In 934 he marched against Scotland by land and sea, in response to some breach of the agreement the sources do not specify, and pushed as far north as Caithness - a demonstration that the collapse of Norse York had brought an English army within striking distance of the Scottish kingdom's own heartland. Three years later the coalition that resulted from that demonstration came for him: Olaf, king of the Dublin Norse, allied with the kings of Scotland and Strathclyde, both now openly hostile, and invaded England in force.

Corpus Christi College, Cambridge · Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Brunanburh

Æthelstan and his brother Edmund met the invasion at the head of an army drawn from both Mercia and Wessex together - the alliance Brunanburh's own memory would do as much as anything to cement - and broke it after a long struggle, pursuing the survivors until nightfall. Five kings and seven Irish earls were left dead on the field, along with a son of the Scottish king; Olaf returned to Dublin with the wreckage of his fleet. The site itself has never been securely identified, but the battle's place in the kingdom's own memory was never in doubt - later writers ranked Æthelstan alongside Alfred and Edgar as one of three kings whose histories might steady a nation under threat.

A peace that needed no more battles

What Æthelstan had won by fighting, his grand-nephew Edgar inherited already settled. Edgar's sixteen-year reign is recorded as strikingly free of incident - no barbarian invasion to repel, no rival English kingdom to absorb - and its one dramatic moment was a ceremony rather than a battle: a long-deferred coronation at Bath on Whit Sunday, 973, under a rite reached only after the archbishop and his colleagues had drafted at least two earlier versions. An eyewitness account of the day survives, and it makes clear that the ceremony's essence was not the crown itself but the anointing that set a king apart from other men - a form of coronation that outlived Edgar's own dynasty. A contemporary writer, working when England again faced invasion, placed Edgar last of the three kings he named as a model for troubled times: not the one who fought the Danes to victory, like Alfred, nor the one who broke an invading army, like Æthelstan, but the one whose enemies sought peace from him without a battle at all.

British Library · Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Tribute and a massacre

contractionDrafted from Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943)

Renewed Viking raiding returned to England in Æthelred's reign after a lull of two generations, and the response that set the pattern for what followed came in 991. After a Danish fleet defeated and killed Byrhtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, at Maldon - he had refused a demand for tribute shouted across the tidal causeway at Northey Island, and paid for the refusal with his life and his militia's defeat - Æthelred's government chose a different answer: a heavy tax raised to buy the raiders off. The precedent held for the next twenty-five years, repeated levy after levy, and later Norman kings inherited the same device under the name Danegeld.

Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943) · Christopher Hilton · CC BY-SA 2.0

St Brice's Day

By 1002 a truce cost 24,000 pounds of tribute-money, and a few weeks after paying it Æthelred married Emma, sister of Duke Richard II of Normandy - a marriage whose consequences neither party could have foreseen that year. Then, that autumn, Æthelred ordered the killing of Danish men across England on 13 November, St Brice's Day, telling one monastery afterward that he acted because he had been told the Danes were plotting to kill him and take his kingdom. The order could never have been carried out through the Danish-settled north and east - York and Lincoln were themselves Danish towns - but a massacre did take place, remembered long afterward, and among its victims, by a well-recorded tradition, was Gunnhild, sister of the Danish king Swein.

What the marriage bought, too late

Swein's invasions that followed would end in the conquest St Brice's Day had been meant to prevent. Æthelred's marriage to Emma, whatever its original purpose, turned out to matter for a different reason entirely: it entitled him to shelter in Normandy once the Danes had in fact conquered England, and the sons of that marriage were raised at the Norman court. One of them would return to England as king with a strong sense of obligation to his mother's homeland - and the tie his father had made in 1002 would, six decades later, give a Norman duke his own claim to English soil.

British Library · Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A Danish throne, and a native one restored

contractionDrafted from Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943)

Cnut's victory over Edmund Ironside at Ashingdon in 1016 was followed, not by an immediate conquest, but by a compact: the two kings met on an island in the Severn near Deerhurst and divided England, Edmund taking Wessex and Cnut everything north of the Thames. It was a settlement built to fail, imposing divided loyalty on any nobleman who held land in both halves - but it never had the chance to fail on its own terms. Edmund died on 30 November, within weeks of the agreement, and the West Saxons accepted Cnut as king of the whole country he had so recently only half held.

Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943) · Saffron Blaze · CC BY-SA 3.0

A Danish king who ruled as an English one

Cnut's nineteen-year reign left the machinery of English government largely as he found it, run through earls and the existing framework of shires and hundreds rather than replaced by a Danish administration imported wholesale. When he died in 1035 the kingdom he had built did not survive him intact: rival claims from his sons by different wives split England for several years, with Harold Harefoot recognized first as regent and then as king while Harthacnut, delayed by troubles in Denmark, waited. Harthacnut finally succeeded to the whole kingdom in 1040, ruled barely two years, and died suddenly at a wedding feast on 8 June 1042 - "as he stood at his drink," in the account that survives. With him the male line of Cnut's Danish house ended.

Yorkshire Museum · Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943) · York Museums Trust · CC BY-SA 4.0

The native line comes home

The succession that followed was decided quickly and, for once, without a battle. Edward, son of Æthelred II by his Norman marriage and Harthacnut's own guest and adopted heir since 1041, was raised to the throne by popular acclamation in London before Harthacnut was even buried, and crowned at Winchester on Easter Day 1043. It was a return, after twenty-six years of Danish kingship, to the house that had ruled Wessex since Egbert - but the new king had spent most of his life at the Norman court his father's marriage had opened to him, and the ties he had formed there would outlast his own reign in ways nobody crowning him that Easter could have expected.

Two armies in a month

endDrafted from Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943)

Edward the Confessor died at Westminster on 5 January 1066, his health broken since a rebellion against his own brother-in-law Tostig the previous autumn, too ill even to attend the consecration of his own new abbey eight days before. He left no son. The leading men of his council met in London while his death was still expected and settled, apparently without dissent, on Harold Godwinson - the king's own chief counsellor, and by every account the one Englishman capable of organizing the kingdom's defence against the two invasions everyone expected that year.

Bayeux Museum · Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943) · Myrabella · Public domain

Fulford and Stamford Bridge

Both invasions came within the same month. Tostig, exiled after his own Northumbrian earldom rose against him, joined Harald Hardrada of Norway in an invasion of the north; the Norwegian army defeated the earls Edwin and Morcar at Fulford outside York on 20 September, a victory costly enough to leave the northern earls unable to help Harold in the campaign that followed. Harold marched north with extraordinary speed and destroyed the Norwegian army at Stamford Bridge on 25 September, ending more than two centuries of Scandinavian invasion of England in a single battle - and killing both Hardrada and Tostig.

Hastings

Three days later, while Harold's army was still in the north, a change of wind let William of Normandy cross the Channel unopposed and land at Pevensey. Harold covered roughly 190 miles from York to London and then marched another fifty to Sussex within thirteen days, assembling what army he could as he went - the core of it, by every account, his own household troops and those of his brothers, since there had been no time for the thegns of distant shires to join him. William forced the battle on 14 October, catching the English army, by a contemporary's own account, before it was fully arrayed on the ridge where Battle Abbey would later stand. Harold was killed in the fighting, along with his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine.

Submission at Berkhamstead

There was no second English army to meet William afterward. Edgar Ætheling, the last male of the old royal house, was proclaimed king by some of the surviving nobles but never crowned; within weeks the leading Englishmen still able to negotiate - Edgar himself, the earls Edwin and Morcar, and the archbishop of Canterbury among them - submitted to William at Berkhamstead and swore fealty, and William allowed his army to ravage the country between there and London as a last demonstration of force before entering the city. The kingdom Egbert had begun to build at Ellendun two hundred and forty-one years earlier now answered to a Norman duke.

What the thegn handed on

afterlifeDrafted from Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943)

By 1087 every English landowner of real political weight had been replaced. Fewer than half a dozen lay lords of any standing were still Englishmen; no Englishman held an English bishopric; French sheriffs ran all but a handful of shires. It would never be guessed from Domesday Book, or from the witness-lists on William's own later charters, that he had begun his reign hoping to govern with Englishmen and Frenchmen together on equal terms. The old ruling class did not survive the conquest that ended this kingdom. Its institutions did.

What the new lords kept

The chief administrative divisions of the country - shires, hundreds, and wapentakes - were accepted by William's barons as a matter of course, not replaced or redrawn. They ran their new estates by Old English methods and tolerated the same inconvenient, inherited variety of manorial arrangements King Edward's own landowners had lived with. The few institutions the Normans did introduce - the honorial court for a great fief's internal business, the castlery built to support a single fortress - left the accustomed working of shire and hundred untouched. Even where William legislated in his own name, the substance was rarely new: the one enactment that reads as a deliberate change to English practice replaced the death penalty with mutilation for certain offences, and even the new machinery built specifically to protect the incoming French population - a fine on the hundred if a murdered Frenchman's killer went unfound within five days, a choice for an accused Englishman between the native ordeal of iron and the Norman judicial combat - was grafted onto courts that already existed rather than courts invented to replace them. In most of its detail, the law an Englishman answered to in 1087 was still the law of King Edward, and before him of Cnut and Æthelred.

Stenton's own judgement on the continuity is direct: there is a genuine continuity of function between the thegns of the shire to whom Edward the Confessor had addressed his own writs and the knights of the shire whose cooperation, a century later, made the Angevin kingdom's experiments in centralised government possible at all.

Stenton, The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943) · Unknown scribe · Public domain

What it cost the men who carried it

None of this was any comfort to the Englishmen who lived through it. A thegn who made his peace with the Conqueror kept, at best, enough of his land to live on in modest circumstances, stripped of the standing his family had held before 1066 and governed thereafter by a foreign aristocracy that regarded him with tolerant indifference at the very best. It was, in Stenton's own phrase, as the depressed survivor of a beaten people that such a man handed on the tradition of local government to the men who had overthrown the state that tradition belonged to.

The Normans who inherited it had produced little in art or scholarship and nothing in literature that could be set beside the work of the kingdom they had just destroyed. But they were, as Stenton puts it plainly, the masters of their world - and the machinery of shires and hundreds that let them govern it without having to invent one of their own was the one part of Egbert's kingdom that answered to nobody's conquest at all.