The Earliest English Kings

D. P. Kirby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000082869
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The Earliest English Kings is a fascinating survey of Anglo-Saxon History from the sixth century to the eighth century and the death of King Alfred. It explains and explores the 'Heptarchy' or the seven kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, as well as the various peoples within them, wars, religion, King Offa and the coming of the Vikings. With maps and family trees, this book reveals the complex, distant and tumultuous events of Anglo-Saxon politics.

Chapter 1

The Peoples and Kingdoms of Pre-Viking England

The ‘Heptarchy’

In 865, following over half a century of Viking raiding activity, what contemporaries came to call the ‘great heathen army’ landed in East Anglia. Across the next decade these Scandinavian warriors shattered the political map of England. In 867 they defeated Aella, king of the Northumbrians, and put him to death at York, dismembering his kingdom. In 869 they slew Eadmund, king of the East Angles, and annexed East Anglia. In 873–4 they drove out Burgred, king of the Mercians, and in 877 divided Mercia. Only Wessex avoided conquest and partition at this time under King Alfred and by 886, when all the Anglecyn, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle A (s.a. 886),¹ not under subjection to the Danes submitted to him, the West Saxon ruling family would seem to have been the only native dynasty still holding royal power.

These Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (see Map 1) which disintegrated in the face of Viking attack, together with the surviving West Saxon kingdom (with its by now dependent territories in Essex, Sussex and Kent), had roots deep in earlier history. The fifth and early sixth centuries AD witnessed the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west and the emergence in a sub-Roman, though still largely Catholic, world of Germanic barbarian ‘successor-states’ in Italy, Gaul and Spain. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms similarly had their origins in the post-Roman period of the conquest and settlement of much of Britain by pagan Germanic peoples from Denmark and north Germany under leaders for whom later generations claimed royal status and descent from ancient Germanic gods. Poets such as Widsith – ‘the ideal wandering minstrel’² – sang their praises and long regaled the kings of their day with heroic tales (of which the epic Beowulf is a fine surviving example),³ set in the age of the migration. The rulers of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of early England regarded themselves as the successors and descendants of the heroic figures of the migration period and are so represented in their king-lists and royal genealogies.⁴

At a time when royal power was rooted in lordship over an armed following, Germanic leaders attracted to themselves warriors (not infrequently young men in their mid-teens) who joined their retinues and hoped to be rewarded with treasure and eventually with landed estates. Bede says that noble youths came from almost every kingdom to serve Oswine, king of the Deirans in Northumbria, in the mid-seventh century (HE III, 14). Such young men were a landed aristocracy in the making. In later life they served as royal officials (ealdormen) and acted as the king’s principal counsellors, constituting his witan or wise men and advising him on the conduct of affairs, the dispensing of justice, the raising of taxes and the resolution of internal disputes and feuds. They were expected to uphold the law and to guarantee with the king a perpetuation of a right order in society.

Anglo-Saxon society was clearly graded, though probably more so in legal theory than in actual practice. The bulk of the population was composed of wholly dependent slaves and of peasants who normally lived in varying degrees of personal and economic bondage. Though merchants were probably often prosperous individuals, the urban population was small. Wealthy peasants and successful merchants might aspire to improve their social standing though the process took generations. The aristocracy constituted a dominant élite. Whereas the life of a peasant, expressed in terms of his wergild (man-price), was valued at 200 West Saxon or Mercian shillings (or their equivalent), even a member of lesser class among the nobility had a value placed on his life of 600 shillings and the standard value of the life of a nobleman or thegn was 1200 shillings, so that a nobleman of this rank was worth, literally, six peasants. A bishop’s life and an ealdorman’s was valued at twice as much as this. The pinnacle of society was the royal family. The life of an aetheling or prince was valued at six times that of a 1200 shilling nobleman, that of a king at as much again, half of which sum belonged to the royal kindred and half to the king’s subjects.⁵ Nothing encapsulates so concisely the paramount position of the king in Anglo-Saxon society.

The coming of Christianity brought the earliest English kings into contact with the Latin culture of Catholic Europe and introduced bishops, abbots and priests into the deliberative processes of the witan. Wihtred, king of Kent, for example, in 695 legislated with the consent of his leading men in the presence of Church dignitaries and so did Ine, king of the West Saxons, at about the same time, with his bishops, ealdormen and councillors. Kings founded churches and monasteries and made generous grants of land in return for ecclesiastical blessing and support. Across the seventh century the helmet-crowned warrior rulers of the Anglo-Saxons emerged as patrons and protectors of a Church which validated their actions, not as descendants of pagan deities but as kings by the divine grace of the Almighty, their pre-eminence and transcendent royal authority sanctified further from the late eighth century at the latest by the ecclesiastical rite of anointing with holy oil.⁶

The kingdoms of early England enjoyed in the main a lively cultural and artistic life. The Christian Church saw them as poor transitory creations by comparison with the fair kingdom of the high King of Heaven over which angels kept watch and Christ guarded, but in the heroic imagery of vernacular prose and verse their strongholds were repositories of wealth and riches which wide-ruling, gold-bestowing, ring-giving kings and their spear-warriors protected. Such kingdoms were perceived as peoples (Northumbrians, East Angles, Mercians) but were rather units of government, in which royal power was exercised over territories⁷ on which were imposed fiscal⁸ and military⁹ obligations. Moreover, resources were finite. Bede expressed concern in 734 in a letter to Ecgberht, bishop of York, that so lavish had been the endowment of monasteries in Northumbria that there was no longer enough available land in the kingdom to reward young warriors.¹⁰ In socioeconomic terms these kingdoms can be characterized less as states than as chiefdoms, that is, they were not so much centralized regimes, the economic base of which was a thriving market economy, as noncentralized communities with a relatively weak market economy and fissiparous (separatist) tendencies which precluded any overlord, however powerful, from establishing anything other than a merely personal hegemony in the absence of a sound enough economic base.¹¹

This is not to say that their economy was so primitive that kings had no choice but to embark on a ceaseless peregrination around the territories of their kingdoms to sustain themselves by living off local dues and food renders.¹² Large estates were probably already characteristic of Anglo-Saxon England by the seventh century as was the collection of local dues organized through royal tuns upon which whole districts were dependent and which were administered by royal reeves.¹³ By the last quarter of the seventh century the more widely spread silver sceattas had replaced an earlier gold coinage of limited duration and circulation. They testify to the re-emergence of a money-using economy and possibly to a ‘gradual expansion of commercial exchanges’.¹⁴ Centralized places of exchange during the seventh and eighth centuries acted as stimuli to urban growth. London is described by Bede in the early eighth century as an emporium for many nations (HE II, 2). Trading emporia on the European mainland at Quentovic, south of Boulogne, and Dorestad, near Utrecht, disseminated manufactured goods and luxuries through Anglo-Saxon trading portals in Kent and through London, Ipswich and Hamwic, near Southampton.¹⁵ Offa, king of the Mercians (758–96), is thought to have constructed a series of relatively large burhs or forts (for example, at Bedford, Hereford, Northampton, Nottingham, Oxford and Stamford), which served both as defensive and administrative centres and as regional markets and mark an intermediate stage ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• List of figures
• Dedication
• Preface to Second Edition
• Preface
• 1 The peoples and kingdoms of pre-Viking England
• 2 Early Kent
• 3 The early kings of the western Saxons
• 4 The Anglian territories in the late sixth and early seventh centuries
• 5 The northern Anglian hegemony in the seventh century
• 6 The southumbrian kingdoms from the mid-seventh to the mid-eighth century
• 7 Northumbria in the eighth century
• 8 Offa
• 9 The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the first three-quarters of the ninth century
• 10 The coming of the Vikings
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index