Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy

Chapter 2

Christian Kingship

Redwald, Æthelfrith, Æthelbert, Penda, Offa, Egbert

THE ANGLO-SAXONS HAD BROUGHT MANY THINGS from Germany. But the idea of kingship was not among them. As late as Bede’s own day, the Anglo-Saxons’ ancestral people in the German homeland were kingless; likewise, the leaders of the first expeditions to Britain – Cerdic, Cynric and the rest – were called chiefs and never kings. Only in subsequent generations did their children and grandchildren begin to style themselves kings and invent impressive genealogies for themselves.

English kingship, that is to say, was a plant of English growth, developing in England out of the conditions which followed the Anglo-Saxon conquest.

I

The background was the peculiarly egalitarian nature of Germanic social structure and political values which the Anglo-Saxons brought with them to Britain. Since the Anglo-Saxons themselves, like other Germanic peoples, were illiterate, we have to depend for our knowledge of these on the account of a civilized Roman outsider, Tacitus. His Germania (Germany) has a double aspect. It was political propaganda, addressed to the Romans of his own day. But it was also a piece of serious ethnography.

Tacitus was a grand senatorial aristocrat, historian and biographer and son-in-law of Agricola, the conquering governor of Britain. He was born around AD 55 in the reign of the Emperor Nero and died c. AD 120 under Hadrian. Like many of his class, Tacitus was nostalgic for the Republic. So in Germania he turned its inhabitants into Noble Savages. They were physically handsome. They were morally virtuous. They remained uncorrupted by civilization and its delights. And, above all, they had preserved their manhood and their freedom.

Tacitus’s essay, as well as being a serious piece of ethnography, is also remarkably accurate as prophecy. For, three centuries before the barbarian invasions which overran the Western Empire, Tacitus proclaimed that the Germans were Rome’s most dangerous foe. Not even the great Middle Eastern empire of Parthia (in effect, the later Persia) presented such a challenge.

The Germans, Tacitus writes, have no cities and dislike close neighbours. Instead they live in separate dwellings in widely scattered hamlets. Their buildings are of wood and their dress is of the simplest, with both men and women, apart from the richest, wearing a simple one-piece garment held in place with a clasp. This clasp, elaborated into a brooch, was the most characteristic form of female adornment; for a man, however, it was the spear. Indeed, the spear was manhood and presentation with it was the rite de passage from a boy to a man: ‘up to this time he is regarded as a member of the household, afterwards as a member of the commonwealth’.

Happy chance has preserved the remains of a series of such communities in the Lark valley in Suffolk. They belong to the earliest days of the Anglo-Saxon settlement in Britain and their archaeology confirms Tacitus’s picture in striking detail. The hamlets were widely separated and the houses built of wood. They clustered in three groups, which probably formed the accommodation of three extended families. The larger building in the centre of each group was the hall where the family met, ate and caroused, and where, too, probably the young unmarried men slept. The immigrants depended on simple mixed farming, while their grave-goods suggest a remarkably homogeneous and egalitarian society. Each female grave contained a brooch and only a handful of males were buried with a sword rather than the ubiquitous spear.

For the right to bear arms was as important to the Anglo-Saxons as it was to the framers of the Second Amendment to the American Constitution. And for much the same reason: only a community that could defend itself was free and only someone who could share in that defence had the right to call himself a free man. ‘They transact’, Tacitus noted, ‘no public or private business without being armed.’ The result was a sort of armed democracy. ‘When the whole multitude think proper, they sit down armed … the most complimentary form of assent is to express approbation with their spears.’ This was participatory politics and the polar opposite of the imperial command model of Rome.

Nevertheless, such communities still needed leaders, especially in times of war. But how did they arise? Our earliest sources on the German people, Tacitus and Bede, offer the same answer: they chose or ‘elected’ their kings. And, as the kings were made by the people, they had, as Tacitus again emphasizes, neither ‘unlimited [n]or arbitrary power’ over them. This, then, is the idea of government by consent, in which the leader is chosen by the people, or at least is answerable to them. It was an idea taken by the Anglo-Saxons from their homeland in Germany and transplanted to their new home in England, where it flourished and remains an essential element in the monarchy to the present day.

The contrast with the Rome of Tacitus’s own day – where the emperor ruled and a fawning court adored; where the rich had sold their liberty for luxury and the poor for bread and circuses; where freedom was a memory and liberty an illusion – was all the stronger for being unspoken.

Meanwhile, England, in the immediate aftermath of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, offered special circumstances which encouraged the development of kingship beyond anything the Germans were familiar with back home. Most important was the long, hard-fought nature of the conquest itself. For the Anglo-Saxons’ more-or-less permanent state of war to the death with the British required equally permanent leaders. Moreover, war in a prosperous country like Britain produced booty, which made the war leaders rich. From their new wealth they could reward their followers. This attracted fresh followers and consolidated the loyalty of the old, which made the leaders more powerful still. And so on. Finally, the power and the permanence coalesced into kingship.

The clearest evidence of the change from the relatively egalitarian communities of the early conquest period to a more complex society with greater extremes of rich and poor, of haves and have-nots, comes from the graves known to archaeologists as Fürstengräber (‘princely graves’). They appear by the middle of the sixth century and have a distinctive style. A large mound or barrow was raised over the grave and a rich array and variety of goods placed within it, such as the silver-gilt-hilted sword, silver-studded shield, spear and knife, Kentish glass claw-beaker, Frankish bronze bowl and Frankish silver-gilt-and-garnet-encrusted belt buckle found under the largest barrow of the ‘burial field’ at Finglesham in East Kent.

We shall never know the exact names or ranks of the people buried at Finglesham. But the name Finglesham is itself a clue. Its earliest form, contemporary with the cemetery, is Pengels-ham: ‘the Prince’s manor’; while a couple of miles to the north-west is Eastry, a royal vil of the eventual kingdom of Kent. Almost certainly, therefore, the burials at Finglesham were those of Kentish princes. Were they cadets of an existing royal house? Or were they princes on their way to becoming kings? And what was the source of their wealth? From trade? Or war? Or both?

This halfway world to monarchy is also reflected in the great Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, which is written much later but appears to preserve folk memories of these earlier times. The poem’s hero, Beowulf, was a local war leader chosen by the people of his district on the mainland. Thanks to his prowess, he eventually became a king, reigned gloriously for fifty winters and was given a magnificent funeral.

The Geat People built a pyre for Beowulf,

stacked and decked it until it stood foursquare,

hung with helmets, heavy war-shields

On a height they kindled the hugest of all

funeral fires; flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house

burning it to the core … Heaven swallowed the smoke.

Then, after the body and weapons were consumed in the flames,

… the Geat people began to construct

a mound on a headland …

It was their hero’s memorial; what remained from the fire

they housed inside it …

And they buried torques in the barrow, and jewels

and a trove [of golden treasure] …

But Beowulf, impressive though it is, is only literature and scholars were inclined to dismiss its tale of lavish buried treasure as mere embroidery. Then, in 1939, archaeologists began to excavate a mound at Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge in Suffolk. It revealed a burial of epic magnificence. The largest Dark Age ship yet known – ninety feet in length and fourteen feet across at its widest – had been dragged from the River Deben to the top of the hundred-foot-high ridge and laid in an enormous, pre-excavated trench. Then a gabled hut was built amidships and the body, dressed in the deceased’s richest clothes, and surrounded with his weapons, insignia and treasures, was placed within. Finally the trench was filled in and a high mound raised over the ship and its precious cargo.

The mound stood out boldly on the skyline, like an English earth pyramid. Within, the deceased, who had been buried rather than cremated, was sent off on his voyage to the Other World with as rich an array of grave-goods as any pharaoh. The splendour of the contents paralleled or even exceeded the tomb-goods described in the epic. There is gold and garnet jewellery that is unequalled in Europe; weapons for the chase and battlefield; a bronze cauldron for cooking; silver-plate from Byzantium decorated with lavish Classical ornament for feasts; and a harp to accompany the festivities.

But who is buried here? Is he a prince, as at Finglesham? Or was he a king? The fact that the Anglo-Saxons were still illiterate means that the answers to these questions can never be known for certain. Nevertheless, there are several powerful indications, all of which point to Redwald, king of East Anglia and bretwalda or overlord of England. The Merovingian coins in his purse have been redated to c. 625, which corresponds closely to the date (627) given by Bede for Redwald’s death; the location of the burial is a known centre of East Anglian royal power, while the wealth of the grave-goods echoes Bede’s description of Redwald’s great military and political success.

Moreover, the grave-goods seem to be more than just those of a very rich man or even of a prince. Instead, they point to the ‘ceremony’, which Shakespeare’s Henry V identifies as the peculiar attribute of kings. For instance, there is a pattern-welded sword of the finest steel, of the kind we find named and celebrated in the epic poetry of the time; a silvered and gilt helmet based on the design of a late Roman general’s helmet; a decorated whetstone polished from the hardest rock. These surely are regalia – the symbols of a ritualized monarchy – and they include many objects which feature, later in English history, in formal coronation rituals: the sword; the sceptre (for it seems that the whetstone is a sceptre) and the crown (for in later times the Saxon word for crown was cynehelm or helmet of the people).

So it is clear that Redwald, if it be he, was much more than an elected war leader. He was a true king. Indeed, he was a king like Henry VIII. He was rich, like Henry, and his purse was filled with gold coins struck in Merovingian France. Like Henry, he was fond of music and he is buried with a lyre. Like Henry, he was a discerning patron of the arts, and he had court craftsmen who were able to make the finest jewellery in Europe. And like Henry, he delighted in the weaponry and accoutrements of the warrior world.

But Redwald’s grave-goods show something else: he had contacts beyond the world of the North Sea. He reached out into France and, beyond that, into the surviving Roman Empire in Byzantium. Both of these were Christian. And there are traces of this too in two of the smaller items of the Sutton Hoo treasure: a pair of silver spoons of Mediterranean manufacture. One is clearly inscribed in Greek letters ‘Paulos’, and the other, more clumsily and debatably, ‘Saulos’. They are the only things to be touched by literacy. And they are the only ones that may be Christian.

For Redwald was an English king on the cusp of a new world, the world of Christian monarchy.

II

The Anglo-Saxon world of the sixth century was rich, strange and bloody. It was peopled with monsters and dragons, miracle-working swords and kings who all claimed descent from Woden, chief of the Anglo-Saxon pagan gods.

As these genealogies suggest, both the kings and their peoples remained pagan. This meant that religion in post-Roman Britain continued to be divided along racial lines: Britons were Christian, after their fashion, and Anglo-Saxons pagan, after theirs. And traces of the Anglo-Saxons’ beliefs survive in our language to the present: in the names of days of the week (Tuesday, Thursday and Friday are named, respectively, after the Anglo-Saxon deities for order and law, thunder and fertility and Wednesday after Woden himself); in place-names (Wednesbury in Staffordshire means ‘Woden’s burgh’ [fortified town]) and in the names of festivals (‘Yule’ is the modern form of the Anglo-Saxon Giuli, while Easter, the greatest feast of the Christian Church, derives its name from the pagan goddess Eostre, whose festival was also celebrated in the spring.

Later, Bede condemned the Britons in stinging terms for having made no attempt to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. ‘Among other most wicked actions [of the Britons]’, he observed, ‘which their own historian Gildas mournfully takes notice of, they added this: that they never preached the faith to the Saxons, or English, who dwelt amongst them.’ Nor did any of the Anglo-Saxons’ other Christian neighbours, whether from Ireland or Gaul, make any moves towards their conversion either, and there is no reason to suppose they would have found them receptive if they had.

Then, in the last decade of the sixth century, there were signs of movement on the Christian and pagan sides alike. The first steps were probably taken by Æthelbert, king of Kent. Periodically, by guile or military prowess, one of the petty Anglo-Saxon kings would make himself first among equals, or even overlord (bretwalda) of most of England. Æthelbert was one of the most successful. His prestige seems to have derived from his access to the material and cultural riches across the Channel. There, in contrast to the former Britannia, where everything that was Roman had been wiped out, Roman institutions had survived the political collapse of the Empire. They did so because of the very different behaviour of the barbarian conquerors of Gaul, the Franks.

The Franks, another Germanic people, were the Saxons’ neighbours to the west, with their lands lying along the lower Rhine. They spoke a similar language to the Saxons, and, to begin with, were equally feared as pirates. But their history was transformed by their king Clovis, or Chlodwig (Louis in modern French). Born in c. 466, he married a Christian princess, Clotilda, and was himself baptized into Roman Christianity at Reims in 496. Thereafter, the Gallo-Romans, led by their bishops, hastened to submit themselves to him, and by the age of forty he was master of all Gaul. The Franks long retained their own laws, language and identity, and even gave a new name, Francia (France), ‘the land of the Franks’, to Gaul. But equally, under their rule, most aspects of sub-Roman society – the architecture, language, literature, manners and, above all, Roman Christianity – continued to flourish in the most successful regime since the fall of the Western Empire.

A connection with Francia was thus a glittering prospect for an ambitious Anglo-Saxon king like Æthelbert. So, probably in the 580s, he married Clovis’s great-granddaughter, Bertha. In the marriage, two contrasting worlds – Anglo-Saxon paganism and Roman Christianity – were to meet and, in so doing, to transform the face of English kingship.

As was usual with royal inter-faith marriages, arrangements were made for Bertha to retain the practice of her own religion. She brought clergy, including a Frankish bishop, Luidhard; while her husband, a conscientious, believing pagan, gave her the little Romano-British church of St Martin’s outside the walls of his ‘metropolis’ or capital at Canterbury to worship in. Perhaps Bertha’s family had made it a condition, spoken or unspoken, of the marriage that Æthelbert would convert. Perhaps Æthelbert, for his part, saw himself as another Clovis who would complete his domination of Britain through his own baptism. At any rate, after a few years, word reached Pope Gregory in Rome that the people of England wished to be converted to the Christian faith.

Gregory was a great man in a great office. For the popes were already claiming to be heirs, not only of St Peter, but of the Roman emperors as well. Gregory’s power was different, of course. It consisted not of legions of soldiers but of regiments of priests and monks. But they were organized with all the old Roman respect for discipline, hierarchy, efficiency and law. According to the famous story in Bede, Pope Gregory the Great first encountered the English when a party of merchants offered a group of boys for sale as slaves in the Forum: ‘their bodies [were] white, their countenances beautiful and their hair very fine’. He was told they came from Britain, were pagans and were known as Angles. ‘Not Angles but angels’, he is supposed to have replied.

The tale has the air of being a little too well polished in the telling. Nevertheless, there is no reason to doubt its essential truth. This is shown by Gregory’s own letters which make plain his interest in young Anglo-Saxon slave-boys. ‘Procure with the money thou mayest receive,’ he instructed the papal agent in Gaul, ‘English boys of about seventeen or eighteen years of age, who may profit by being given to God in monasteries.’

Now Bertha’s marriage to Æthelbert presented Gregory with the opportunity to go further and launch a new Roman conquest of England for Christianity. His chosen general in the campaign was an Italian monk of good family, named Augustine.

Augustine and his party of monks and priests set out from Rome in 595. They planned to travel by the usual route – by sea to Provence and thereafter across Gaul by land – and they carried letters of introduction to Gallo-Roman and Frankish notables, including the heads of Bertha’s own family. But, hearing tales of the Anglo-Saxons’ savagery, Augustine soon returned to Rome to beg for their recall. Instead, Gregory sternly ordered him to proceed, redoubling, at the same time, his own diplomatic efforts. The mixture of stick and carrot worked, and Augustine and his followers, complete now with Frankish interpreters, arrived in Kent in 597. They landed at Richborough, like those previous invaders Hengist and Horsa in 449 or the Emperor Claudius in AD 43.

Æthelbert, as soon as he was informed of Augustine’s arrival, ordered him to remain in quarantine on the Isle of Thanet, which was then cut off from the mainland by the Wantsum Channel. After a few days, the king decided on a meeting. So he crossed into Thanet and held his court there in the open air. This was to protect him from Augustine’s magical powers, which, the king and his advisers feared, might prove irresistible indoors. But, when he was summoned to the presence, Augustine employed instead the weapons of liturgical ceremony, which the Church had already polished to a fine art. Augustine entered the assembly robed and in procession, accompanied by his monks ‘bearing a silver cross for their banner, and an icon of Jesus (“the image of Our Lord painted on a board”) and singing the litany [in Latin]’.

Bede describes this entry as embodying ‘divine, not magical, virtue’. But the strangeness of it all – the dress, the symbols, the language and the music – must have been as potent as any spell to the Anglo-Saxons. It was a new way of doing things. And, as we shall see, it was to prove profoundly attractive.

Augustine then preached ‘the Word of Life’ to the king and his courtiers and his ‘interpreters of the nation of the Franks’ translated. Æthelbert heard them out courteously before making his reply. ‘Your words and promises are very fair’, the king said to his visitors, ‘but, as they are new to us, and of uncertain import, I cannot approve of them so far as to forsake that which I have so long followed with the whole English nation.’ But, he continued, he would welcome the missionaries. He would also allow them to ‘preach and gain as many as you can to your religion’.

Æthelbert was playing a subtle political game. He was well aware of the advantages which had accrued to the Franks after their conversion to Roman Christianity. But he needed to be convinced that it would work for him, for the political risks of conversion were enormous. So, in effect, he was inviting Augustine to market-test Christianity: there would be no Constantinian heroics of conversion; instead, Æthelbert would convert only when the people had shown it safe to do so.

Augustine got to work right away. The mission, with its formal preaching, teaching and services, was based in Bertha’s little church of St Martin’s, Canterbury. But equally effective in attracting converts, according to Bede, was the missionaries’ exemplary monastic life. The result was a mass baptism of 10,000 Kentish people at Christmas 597. Some historians take this to mean that Æthelbert himself must have converted already. But Gregory makes no mention of this fact in his report of the incident. Instead, it seems clear that Æthelbert held out for some years more. Finally in 600–1, Gregory vented his feelings at the continuing delay in a letter to Queen Bertha. She had done much, he had heard. But she could – and should – have done more: ‘you ought before now, as being truly a Christian, to have inclined the heart of our glorious son, your husband, by the good influence of your prudence, to follow, for the weal of his kingdom and of his own soul, the faith which you profess’.

Gregory’s is the earliest surviving letter to an English queen consort and the first picture of her role. It is a remarkably familiar one. She is pious and literate and her husband is expected – rather optimistically in Æthelbert’s case – to be putty in her hands. Gregory’s letter also gives a sense of Bertha’s place in the world, and, by extension, of England’s too. Naturally, the ‘world’, as Gregory saw it, was – despite all the vicissitudes of the city – resolutely Roman. ‘Your good deeds’, he assured Bertha, ‘are known, not only among the Romans … but also through divers places, and have even come to the ears of the most serene prince [the emperor] at Constantinople.’

Within a few months of Gregory’s letter to Bertha, Æthelbert was baptized, almost certainly at the hands of Augustine himself.

What had carried the day? True, the psychology of Augustine and Gregory in dealing with Æthelbert had been subtle. They had presented the Christian God as a great king, who would reward Æthelbert’s service in this world and the next, just as he, the bretwalda of England, rewarded his own faithful servants. But, finally, the key was probably political. For Christianity would enhance Æthelbert’s kingship with two things that were very attractive to a Dark Age ruler: Roman ideas about power and Roman ways of doing things. Like Rome, the Church used Latin. It had an elaborate system of law and administration, and it built in stone. Above all, the Roman Church was ruled by a monarch, the pope, who, like the emperors, claimed absolute and divinely ordained authority. The pope even used one of the imperial titles: supreme pontiff.

All this the Church made available to Æthelbert, now that he had converted to Christianity. The advantages for the king were obvious. One of the first things Æthelbert did after his conversion was to issue a Law Code, like Justinian and other Christian Roman emperors. But, though the form is Roman, the content of the Code is wholly Anglo-Saxon and merely sets down in writing the existing law of the folk in their own language, with the necessary adaptations to their new Christian status. Indeed, the Code may be the first document written in English and the story goes that Augustine himself had to devise additional new letters of the alphabet in order to write Anglo-Saxon down. And it is revered: at the top of the document, written in red, it reads: ‘These are the dooms [judgements] that King Æthelbert fixed in Augustine’s days.’

But could the Anglo-Saxon ideal of elective kingship survive these new trappings of divine and imperial authority and the power that went with them?

Over the next few years, the structure of the English Church was worked out in an exchange of letters between Gregory and Augustine. The English Church was to be self-governing under the pope. There were to be two provinces, each under a metropolitan or (as he was later known) archbishop: the northern based at York and the southern at London. Augustine himself was to be the first archbishop of the southern province with final authority over the whole English Church and (which became a point of bitter contention) over the surviving British bishops as well. The scheme was based partly on memories of the administration of later Roman Britain and partly on the current reality of the geopolitics of the Anglo-Saxons, who divided themselves into South- and Northumbrians (those living south and north of the River Humber). In the event, Augustine and his successors continued to be based at Canterbury. Otherwise, the lineaments of the scheme have survived and continue to the present.

Augustine died in c. 605 and Æthelbert a decade later in about 616. Both were buried in the splendid abbey, later known as St Augustine’s, which Augustine had founded after his mission outgrew St Martin’s. Augustine’s fellow missionaries and successors as archbishops were buried on one side of the church, and Æthelbert and Bertha and their successors as kings and queens of Kent on the other.

It was a symbolism of death to equal and outdo Sutton Hoo itself. It also spoke eloquently of the alliance of Church and king that, for a thousand years, would be one of the principal driving forces of English political life and practice.

III

The reigns of Æthelbert and Redwald marked the end of the domination of the south-east. Thereafter, the Anglo-Saxon balance of power swung away from the area of earlier settlement towards the north and west. Here, larger, newer kingdoms were being forged at the margins of Anglo-Saxon power: Northumbria in the north; Mercia in the Midlands and Wessex in the south-west. Each in turn was to dominate until finally, partly by accident and partly by design, a unified kingdom of Ængla Land (England) was created.

The outstanding contemporary of Redwald was Æthelfrith, king of Northumbria. Æthelfrith was a great warrior, and, thanks to his victories over the Scots under Aedan in 603 and the Britons of Powys in 613, he was the real founder of Northumbrian power. He was also a pagan. But this did not stop Bede from seeing him as the instrument of God’s vengeance against the Celts, who were not only (Bede thought) of the wrong race but had also espoused the wrong sort of Christianity. Æthelfrith was another Benjamin, Bede enthused, and, like the Old Testament hero, ‘[he] shall ravin as a wolf; in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil’.

It was a verse that might have been the motto of any successful Anglo-Saxon king.

But in this dog-eats-dog world, even Æthelfrith got his comeuppance. It was administered by Redwald, who had given refuge to Edwin, a rival claimant to the Northumbrian throne. Æthelfrith demanded Edwin’s surrender. But Redwald, deciding that attack was the best form of defence, launched a surprise campaign and defeated and killed Æthelfrith in battle in 616. Edwin succeeded to Northumbria while Redwald became unchallenged bretwalda. A decade later, Redwald died in c. 627 and Edwin emerged as bretwalda in turn. One of Edwin’s first steps was to seek the hand of Æthelbert’s daughter, Æthelberg, who arrived in Northumbria with Augustine’s disciple, Paulinus, as her spiritual adviser. After the marriage, Edwin converted and Paulinus became archbishop of York. But when Edwin went the same way as most early Anglo-Saxon kings and was overcome in battle and killed in 633, Paulinus fled south, to become successively bishop of Rochester and archbishop of Canterbury.

The new king of Northumbria, Oswald, was also a Christian. But he drew his inspiration from the very different tradition of the Celtic Christianity of the Scotto-Irish world, where he had spent many years of exile. This is seen in the case of the Lindisfarne Gospels. Lindisfarne monastery on Holy Island, off the Northumbrian coast, had been founded by St Aidan, an Irish monk from Iona, as a base for his missionary activity under Oswald. The splendid decoration of the Gospels, produced in the late seventh century, testifies to the rich mixture of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Roman elements in Northumbrian Christianity.

Under Oswald’s younger brother and successor, Oswy, the tensions between the two strands of Christianity, the Celtic and the Roman, became acute: it even divided the king and the queen, who took different sides on the matter. To settle the dispute, Oswy summoned a Council at Whitby in 664. Both sides argued their case with passion, particularly over the vexed issue of the dating of Easter. But the king declared that the Catholics had been victorious. He did so on simple grounds of authority. If he had to decide, the king said, between St Columba, the apostle of the Scots, and St Peter, the disciple to whom Jesus had given the Key of Heaven, he would choose St Peter.