The Story of England, page 11
The southern shores of the Mediterranean were now conquered by the Arabs, the Visigothic kingdom of Spain was overthrown and Constantinople manned its defences against Islam and hardened its Eastern orthodoxy against the Latins. No wonder that the popes in Rome, rebuffed by the Greek world, now looked north for help, money and new souls. To the papacy, underdeveloped northern Europe was a new world just as Latin America would be in the sixteenth century. This looking north is a characteristic of the age. It has been seen as a turning away from the Mediterranean world of late Antiquity, the beginning of a new Europe on the Atlantic seaboard, a shift in gravity from the old classical world round the shores of the Mediterranean ‘like frogs around a frog pond’ as Plato had put it. And indeed, as an Arab civilization was flowering across the Mediterranean, beyond the Alps, albeit at a much lower level of material achievement, a new northern civilization was beginning to emerge.
The village in the eighth century
In the eighth century the peasants of Kibworth, free and unfree, found themselves part of that civilization, under a lord protected by a great king, who proclaimed himself ‘King of the whole patria of all the English’. The Mercian kings were itinerant, constantly travelling their kingdom, always on the move, showing themselves to friends and foes alike, raising their food rents, bribing, rewarding, cajoling and threatening. Such was the reality of Dark Age rule. In documents of the eighth and ninth centuries we can see them staying on the royal estates around Kibworth, receiving ambassadors from Charlemagne who came to negotiate marriage alliances or to buy English woollen cloths woven and dyed in workshops in villages like Kibworth. English needlework and metalwork were also coveted, made in royal workshops like that at Smeeton close to the royal hall at Gumley above Kibworth. There the king was praised by poets for his royal deeds and his famous ancestry back to the legendary Offa of Angeln and the later kings who came across the sea, ‘overcame the Welsh’ and carved themselves a kingdom in Britain.
But in the background of these splendid feasts were the peasants of the village who provided meat, food and beer for the kings and their guests; who provisioned the kings’ huntsmen and their hawks and hunting dogs; and fed his horses and grooms. At Kibworth, chance finds have added colour to this picture: metalworkers’ slag, silver sceattas, and the Ipswich ware, which perhaps contained the salt carried on carts from the salt houses and furnaces at Droitwich. These were the first signs that even the peasants of Kibworth were touched by the slow rise of the Dark Ages.
The archaeological finds suggest that the three main villages that make up the old parish of Kibworth already existed before the ninth century. First was the lord’s ‘worth’, which will become Kibworth Harcourt. Inside the enclosure was the lord’s hall, his cookhouse and weaving huts, barns, stables, workshops and maybe a wooden chapel. His peasants had several ox teams, kept sheep, pigs and beehives. They had a communal bread oven and perhaps a horse mill as well as later a water mill on Langton stream. For protection from wolves and bandits there was the ditch. Harcourt is still partly surrounded by its early ditch – to the north-west and north-east the housing plots and gardens run away from the main road and end at the village hedge and fishponds. This formed a protection used throughout the Middle Ages, when there were bars on the entrances at night, all the more necessary no doubt in the violent world of the Dark Ages.
A few hundred yards to the south was the village of dependent peasants, unfree serfs and estate workers, which in time would become Kibworth Beauchamp. Surviving field names here suggest at least part of the village may have been owned by the king, in which case these serfs may originally have owed their labour to the royal estate at Gumley. Finally, in the south of the present parish, along a low ridge was the artisanal settlement of smiths and metalworkers at Smeeton. In material terms the life of the ordinary people must have been strikingly similar to the late-Roman and Dark Age estates (except that now Anglian not Welsh was spoken). Pigs, oxen, horses, hens, goats and geese were kept in all the villages. The houses of the better-off were on the rise near the church, while the serfs and cottagers dwelt by the stream where the railway now runs, or in the wet boggy land still called The Marsh whose inhabitants even in the nineteenth century lived in mud houses, their aching bones prone to rheumatism and malaria.
Such then was the beginning of ‘Cybba’s worth’. Historians can look at the coins and treasure and the illuminated manuscripts of the Mercian kings, and point to their achievements in creating order; the forerunner of the kingdom of England. But at the grass roots the view is very different. In England in the eighth century our community, like the bulk of the population, laboured to feed and sustain their betters, and only then themselves. Privation, disease and (especially in harsh winters like those of the 760s) hardship were their lot. Working with inadequate tools on thick clays our peasants were surrounded by a still wild landscape with great forests. Place names like Wolvey on Watling Street (owned by the last Saxon lord of Kibworth) point for example to the ubiquity of the wolf; the many ‘wolf pits’ to their lairs or the places where they were trapped. All this was a far cry from the glittering treasures massed in the royal hall, the kind of things described in their poems and discovered to our amazement in the Staffordshire hoard.
The sustainers of that heroic world, the villagers in the seventh and eighth centuries no doubt fell back on the comforts that are left to their like all over the globe: the soothsayer, the wise woman, the medicus, the gods of the countryside, the sacred wells, the tree of Thunor hung with prayers too, propitiations at the demons’ pit, coins and offerings thrown in Grendel’s Mere, prayers too to the saint in his shrine; while the nobles assiduously cultivated the new religion in a half Christian, half pagan world, in a conversion culture. Such times in so many ways are poised on the cusp of history, between the no longer and the not yet. One local nobleman from the ‘most distinguished line of the Middle Angles’, a man who had spent the last decade of the seventh century as a warrior in the king’s hall, turning his eye to the transitory nature of the world and to the end of time, left his family and withdrew to the fens south-east of the Welland where Welsh could still be heard among the eel trappers and basket makers. With Guthlac were his sister Pega and his kinswoman Tibba. Here, driven by the message of the early fathers, he began to ‘remake himself’ as Origen had said ‘in the hope that a better humanity would arise’. On an island in the fens he found his own wilderness, his paneremos, just as the early Christian hermits had chosen the Egyptian desert, and he lived out the rest of his life in that liminal landscape ‘neither land nor water’ where he heard demons and saw bears, boar and wild cats. His sister would even go on pilgrimage to find her final rest in Rome. For the peasants, as yet, there were no such choices. But in time – and sooner than might be imagined – they would come.
5. Under the Danelaw
In winter the mists sometimes hang like a veil across a mile of flooded fields from the old bridge of the Trent at Willington to the soft emerald green folds of the hills above Repton. The Old English Hrypadun, ‘the hill of the Hrype tribe’, Repton was a famous royal monastery, the burial place of the Mercian kings. The church, the mausoleum of Kings Aethelbald and Wiglaf and the murdered saint Wistan, stood on a plateau of land a steep twenty feet above the old course of the river which once flowed right under the churchyard. Here in the winter of 873–4 an extraordinary event took place. A Viking army had made its winter camp here and laid out a fortified base inside the precinct of the royal monastery. The place had been chosen not only for its symbolic value but for practical reasons: it was a naturally protected position bounded by river marshes to the west, and to the east by a stream bed coming down from the ‘dun’. Inside the monastic grounds the Vikings had thrown up an inner defence work, a ditch and bank with a timber palisade, a curving semi-circle 100 metres across, anchored at both ends on the Trent and centred on the stone nave of the church, now desecrated and perhaps serving as the headquarters of the Viking leaders. Here on that winter’s day a sombre ritual took place which would trigger a defining phase in early-medieval English history.
In the old monastic cemetery to the west of the church stood an eighth-century mausoleum, a now roofless, subterranean structure, with a stone floor and walls fifteen feet square. Around it that day was gathered a crowd of perhaps two or three thousand Viking warriors, with their servants and camp followers, including many Anglo-Saxon women and children. Then a group of warriors moved through them bearing a body on a catafalque, down the steps of the mausoleum and through the doorway into the inner tomb chamber, now stripped of its Christian furnishings, its floor laid with a thick layer of marl. In the centre of the chamber was an empty stone coffin, the bones of its former royal occupant summarily thrown out to make it ready for the dead man to receive his final honours.
We can recover more details of this extraordinary scene from the excavators’ report. The dead man had been well-built, six feet tall, and about forty years old. By his left side was an iron sword in a fleece-lined wooden scabbard covered with leather, attached to a belt with a decorated copper buckle. By the sword hilt was a folding iron knife and a dagger with a wooden handle, by the scabbard an iron key. Around the man’s neck a thong held two glass beads and a silver hammer of Thor. On his legs, mysteriously, was a bag containing the humerus of a jackdaw, and between his thighs the tusk of a wild boar. Perhaps he had been disembowelled and his genitals cut off by those who killed him? His death wound had been a heavy blow to the skull but whilst on the ground he had been finished off with a sword slash that had severed the femoral artery in his upper thigh. As for his identity, it seems that this was none other than the most famous Viking of his era, the son of Ragnar Lothbrok, ‘that most cruel pagan king’, ‘king of all the Norsemen of Ireland and Britain’ and founder of the greatest and most long-lasting dynasty of the Viking Age: Ivar, nicknamed ‘the Boneless’.
While the dead chief’s women began to lament, a young man was brought down to the graveside, aged around twenty, wearing an iron knife at his waist. Perhaps he was the squire or armour bearer to the dead man. Unsteady on his feet from a draught of opiates, he was supported to the edge of the coffin and then killed with a single blow to the right side of his head. Buried in an adjacent grave inside the mortuary chamber he would accompany his lord to the halls of the dead.
Still more extraordinary scenes were to follow. The bones of over 200 men and the remains of forty-nine women – who were believed by the excavators to have been Anglo-Saxons – had been gathered inside the cemetery, the remains of warriors and camp followers who had died of wounds or disease that winter. These were now buried in rows fanning out from the central chamber and neatly stacked around the central coffin. Heavy timber joists were laid on the tops of the cut-down walls to form a roof which was covered with flat slabs and earth. The whole sunken structure was then sealed by a low stone cairn, topped by a mound of pebbles and edged by a kerb of upright stones. All the ritual proprieties of pagan Viking religion seem to have been followed: even the leftovers of the funeral feast were carefully buried in four sunken pits filled with stones.
Finally the tumulus was closed and the last sacrifice took place. Four young captives, perhaps English hostages, were killed and buried in a large pit with a sheep’s head at their feet. Then the army raised their shout to Odin the leader of souls, the incarnation of fury and exaltation, the god of battle, death and prophecy. To the army chaplain, the shaman, perhaps fell the duty of speaking the acclamation prayer: ‘Gakk i haoll horskr’ – ‘Welcome to Valhalla, brave one.’ Then the whole elaborate funeral monument (surely the most extraordinary royal burial ever found in Britain) was sealed and at its edge a tall marker post was erected, carved and painted with pagan symbols, a mnemonic of the tree of Odin in this graveyard of a revered Christian monastery. Such was the funeral of Ivar the Boneless. As a later saga writer said approvingly, ‘He was buried in the true fashion of the old days.’
The Viking army present at Repton that day had already cut a swathe of terror through England, with its allies crushing the kingdoms of the East Angles and the Northumbrians. When it left Repton that spring the army split up, its sights set on new fields of conquest. But these were no longer mere plundering raids. For like the Anglo-Saxons four centuries before, the Danes had come to stay. In the late ninth century their permanent settlement of large tracts of the Midlands north and east of Watling Street, and in East Anglia and Northumbria, would change the culture of England for ever. The people of Kibworth and its neighbouring villages soon found themselves in the border zone between the English and Anglo-Scandinavian worlds in a partitioned country. Like hundreds of similar villages across the Midlands, East Anglia and the north they now owed their allegiance to Viking overlords of the Danelaw. And there a new Anglo-Scandinavian society is about to emerge in which the old aristocracy of the Mercians, those who have survived, are joined as neighbours and landowners by the leaders and rank and file of the army of Repton and the many Danes who came into the country in their wake in secondary migrations.
Remarkably, in the countryside around Kibworth the names of some of the men in the Viking Great Army of the 870s may still survive in today’s village names: men like Slagr ‘the Sly’, Hrolfr, Iolfr, Gauti, Aki and Bladr, ‘the Blade’. These men take us into the next phase of the story of England, and of the village, and the next layer in English identity: the Vikings.
The terror of war
On the eve of the Viking Age the people on the ridge where the village of Kibworth lies today had lived under the rule of the Mercian kings for two and a half centuries. The villagers as we have seen were of mixed ancestry, British, Roman, Anglian and Frisian, but by the ninth century they belonged to the estate named after a nobleman called Cybba in the kingdom of Mercia. Occasionally great events had swirled round their lives, as in 849, in the troubled dog days of the kingdom, when rival claimants in the royal clan came to a meeting on the River Glen by Kibworth, and a young prince of the Mercians, Wistan, was assassinated at Wistow in the water meadows below Kibworth. Locals subsequently told of miracles – a pillar of light had been seen for thirty days in the sky above the murder spot – and though Wistan was carried to Repton for burial, Wistow remained a local pilgrimage place until the Reformation. But of the events of their lives we still have no detail. Then in a few years between the 860s and 870s the old world they had grown up with was swept away as the Vikings changed the English political landscape for all time.
War was endemic in the West in the Dark Ages. Given the prevalence of disorder, violence and raiding in the northern world, whether there really is a moment when the Viking Age can be said to have begun is a moot point. The perceived difference perhaps was the size and frequency of the attacks, and their coordination. Contemporaries certainly thought that something new and deeply threatening had begun to unfold towards the end of the eighth century, and related these events with a growing sense of shock and foreboding. In Kent the first sign was thought to be a sacking of Thanet recorded in 753. West Saxon annals first describe a landing at Portland in 787, an attack by three ships – at most, say, 120 heavily armed men, but enough to overpower the royal coastguard and to strike terror. Believing them to be traders the port reeve, the customs officer, came down to question them, but they drew their swords and killed him and his companions. Then in 794 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle comes this:
In this year dire portents appeared over Northumbria and deeply terrified the people. They consisted of huge whirlwinds and flashes of lightning and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. A great famine immediately followed those signs and a little after that in the same year on 8 June the ravages of the heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne with plunder and slaughter.
Northumbrian annals tell the tale with more brutal immediacy, perhaps from an eyewitness account of the atrocities:
in the church of Lindisfarne they plundered and trampled the holy places with polluted steps, they dug up the altars and seized all the treasures of the holy shrine. Some of the monks they killed, some they took away in chains; many they drove out naked and loaded with insults; some they drowned in the sea.
The story was greeted with horror across Britain and soon reached friends abroad: ‘The news of your tragic sufferings daily brings me sorrow,’ wrote the Northumbrian Alcuin in a letter back home. An alumnus of the school of York, now one of Charlemagne’s think tank, Alcuin was part of the great chain of scholarly transmission in the West down from Theodore and Bede, and immediately saw the disaster in terms of Christian history: ‘The pagans have destroyed God’s sanctuary,’ he wrote from Aachen; ‘But don’t be dismayed by this disaster … you survive and must stand like men and fight bravely. Is this the beginning of greater sufferings?’ Alcuin’s long consolatory letter to the monks of Jarrow is a little too sententious to our modern taste, but behind its religious certainties lay a genuine and deep-felt fear of the fragility of civilization experienced by all early-medieval thinkers:
The pagans have appeared on your coasts; carefully hold on to the rule. Put your faith in God, not weapons. Who is not scared by the terrible fate that befell the church at Lindisfarne? You live by the sea where the danger first appeared … so remember the words of the prophet, ‘from the North evil breaks forth … a terrible glory will come from the Lord.’
Look, the pirate raids have penetrated the north of our island. Let us grieve for the suffering of our brothers and beware the same does not happen to us … Remember the nobility of your predecessors. Look at the treasures of your library, the beauty of your churches … the order of your religious life …
