Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy

In the wake of his decision, the Celtic leaders of the Northumbrian church withdrew and returned to Scotland. But much of their influence lingered on to contribute its share to the astonishing efflorescence of Northumbrian culture in the century and a half from c. 650–c. 800. Monasteries were richly endowed with lands and books and relics and became outposts of sophisticated Mediterranean civilization in the north. They copied and illuminated magnificent manuscripts; sent out missionaries to convert their former homeland in Germany, and in Bede produced the greatest European polymath of the day. The intellectual centre of the world, it seemed, had moved from the banks of the Tiber to the Tyne.

But it was not to last.

Very different was the rival kingdom of Mercia. Here King Penda (c. 626–55) held out as an unrepentant pagan. Moreover, in an alliance of convenience with the Britons, he enjoyed a series of crushing victories over the Christian Northumbrians, defeating and killing King Edwin in 633 and King Oswald in 642. The struggle was crucial to the future of England, and the largest, richest and most important Anglo-Saxon archaeological discovery of the last fifty years may be a product of it.

The Staffordshire Hoard was discovered in 2009 in a field near Lichfield, then in the heart of Mercia. It consists of over 1,500 objects made of gold and silver and decorated with precious stones. The silver weighs about 1.3 kilograms and the gold an astonishing 5 kilograms. Only the Sutton Hoo treasure can compare with it. But the two are very different. The Sutton Hoo burial is a careful ritual deposit; the Staffordshire Hoard seems to have been quickly thrown together and hastily buried. Moreover, it consists of fragments: 86 pommel caps from swords; 135 hilt plates from swords and the decorative pieces of at least one Sutton Hoo-style helmet. All are items of male adornment; there is no female jewellery. There are also the crumpled remains of four or five Christian crosses, including one inscribed with the warlike verses from Psalm 68: Surge domine, ‘Rise up, O Lord, and may Thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate Thee be driven from Thy face’.

Was this a processional cross, carried by the losing side in one of Penda’s victories over the Christians of 633 or 642? And were the fragments of male adornment – the warrior bling of the day – torn from the bodies and weapons of the fallen Northumbrian warriors?

It seems very possible. But, alas, we are most unlikely ever to know for certain.

But, finally, Penda succumbed in turn, being defeated and killed by the Christian Oswy of Northumbria in 655. The previous year, in a temporary lull in the hostilities, Penda’s son had married Oswy’s daughter, who, as usual, arrived with Christian missionaries. This gave Christianity a toehold in Mercia even before Penda’s death and it made rapid strides afterwards. One of the old pagan’s sons even retired to an English monastery, while a grandson abdicated to become a monk in Rome. Soon after, Penda’s direct line died out and the succession passed to his great-great-nephew, Æthelbald, who at last proved equal to his formidable ancestor.

The kingdom Æthelbald acquired was already extensive. Its base lay in the Tame valley north of Birmingham, with Tamworth and Lichfield as its main centres. Thence, the power of the kings of Mercia reached out in every direction along the two great Roman roads, Watling Street and the Fosse Way, which intersected in its heartland: north-east towards Lincoln; north-west into the borders of Wales, south-west to Bath and, above all, south-east to London, which, then as now, was the commercial heart of Britain.

Accurately, but prosaically, the Mercian kings have been called Lords of the A5.

Æthelbald was a man shrewd enough, and ruthless enough, to exploit this inheritance to the utmost. He also enjoyed, as all successful politicians must, good luck in the shape of the relative weakness of his most obvious rivals, the kings of Northumbria and Wessex. The result was that he quickly became dominant in the whole of southern Britain. Moreover, he maintained his sway throughout an unprecedentedly long reign of forty years (716–57).

But did that make him a true king of England, rather than a mere overlord? Many, then and now, have thought so. Indeed, a charter of 736 heaps titles on him: he is ‘king not only of the Mercians, but also of all the provinciae which are called by the general name “South English”’; rex Suutanglorum (‘king of the South English’) or even rex Britanniae (‘king of Britain’). But this was courtly hyperbole. Long-established kingdoms, such as Wessex and East Anglia, kept their separate identities and at least some freedom of action. Moreover, Æthelbald’s dominance came at a price. His private life was denounced as wicked by St Boniface; he was also reviled as a ‘tyrant’ once he was safely dead.

Indeed, it is the manner of his death which reveals the real fragility of his kingship. For, after reigning forty-one years, he was murdered at the height of his power and in the heart of his kingdom by his own men. The deed was done at Seckington, near Tamworth, where Æthelbald was ‘treacherously killed by his bodyguard at night … in shocking fashion’. The king’s remains were brought to Repton Church and buried in the mausoleum of the Mercian kings in its crypt. The crypt survives, though its alcoves and shelves are long stripped of the jewels and reliquaries they once contained. But then it would have been the setting for another spectacular royal funeral like those at Sutton Hoo and St Augustine’s, Canterbury.

Perhaps, however, there’s a wicked twist to the story. Was Æthelbald’s murder really the work of nobodies with a grudge? Or was the man who seems to have been responsible for Æthelbald’s splendid funeral also the man behind his murder? Certainly he was the one who profited from it, since, after a brief power struggle in which his rival too was murdered, he succeeded Æthelbald as king. He is one of the forgotten heroes of English history; a man who operated on a European scale and dominated the England of his day. His name was Offa, king of Mercia.

IV

Despite the sensational circumstances of his accession, Offa’s reign (757– 96) seems in many ways a rerun of his predecessor’s: he even reigned for a similarly long period. In fact, there were important differences of scale and method.

Like Æthelbald, Offa had generally good relations with the two large rival kingdoms of Northumbria and Wessex, which were cemented in the usual way by marriage alliances. But elsewhere, in the south and east, he increasingly imposed direct rule. And by often brutal means. He took control of Kent in the 760s; lost it for nine years after his rare defeat at the battle of Otford in 776, and then moved decisively to recover it. Sussex, whose fortunes were closely linked with Kent’s, followed a similar pattern, as a result of which Offa demoted its ancient kings to ealdormen or nobles. But most sensational was the case of Redwald’s former realm of East Anglia, where, in 794, Offa ordered King Æthelbert to be beheaded. It was an assertion of pure, untrammelled power.

Offa was equally assertive with the Church. The archbishop of Canterbury was head of the English Church. But he was also a great Kentish magnate and, as such, appears to have played a part in local resistance to Offa’s encroaching power. Offa’s response was stunning: he would have an archbishop of his own. The scheme was negotiated with two papal legates at a Council of the English Church in 787. The Council was close fought. But, as usual, Offa got his way and Lichfield, in the Mercian heartland, was elevated into an archbishopric, with its incumbent safely in Offa’s pocket.

The creation of the archbishopric of Lichfield opened the way to another project that was even closer to Offa’s heart: to ensure the succession of his son, Ecgfrith. He proclaimed him king of Mercia in his own lifetime; he also decided that he should be anointed. The ceremony also took place in 787. We do not know where or who performed it. Perhaps it was the new archbishop of Lichfield. Or perhaps the papal legates. Or perhaps, since Offa never did things by halves, it was both together.

At any rate, Ecgfrith’s is the first recorded consecration in English history, and it deployed the whole panoply of the Church to declare that the boy was inviolably royal and his father’s unchallengeable successor. The ceremony was a Christian adaptation of the inauguration rites of Old Testament kings. But, as so often in Anglo-Saxon England, it was a hybrid, since it combined Judaeo-Christian anointing with older Anglo-Saxon traditions that went back to Sutton Hoo and beyond. For the boy was invested, not with a crown, but with a cynehelm, a royal helmet.

Offa’s handling of the coinage was almost as novel. He issued a new-style coinage, in which the coins were bigger and thinner, had a better bullion content, were stamped with his image and prominently displayed his name and title of Rex M[erciorum] (‘king of the Mercians’) in bold capital letters. Offa was not quite the first English king to mint such a coinage. But his is incomparably the most important, in terms of both quality and quantity. Millions of coins seem to have been struck and they show an exuberant variety of ‘portrait’ types: some use Roman models; others appear to be based on the representations of the kings of Israel in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. Obviously, Offa cared about the image-making power of the coinage. But it was its economic and fiscal functions that mattered more. The numbers struck reflected Offa’s takeover of the wealth of the south-east; they helped that wealth to grow, especially by trade with Francia, and, in turn, they allowed Offa to tap the burgeoning economy for his own purposes.

A similar balance between image-making and practicality is to be found in the greatest achievement of his reign and the work for which he is still popularly remembered: Offa’s Dyke. It originally stretched from sea to sea along the Welsh frontier. This is a distance of 135 miles or double the length of Hadrian’s Wall. It consists of a ditch, originally six feet deep, backed by an earth rampart that was about twenty-five feet high. The rampart was probably reinforced with timber, and its siting displays great tactical ingenuity, commanding, as it does, long views into Wales.

But what was it for? Did it mark an agreed frontier, as an act of peace? Or was it a warlike gesture: to defend Mercia against Welsh attacks and to provide Offa with a forward base from which to launch his own campaigns against the Welsh? The latter now seems much more likely. In which case the Dyke was ‘a work of almost studied contempt for the Welsh’. For, by a strange reversal of roles, its building would suggest that it is the former Anglo-Saxon invaders who now see themselves as rich and civilized while the Welsh have become wild, untrustworthy raiders. In short, it is the Welsh, the Dyke says, who are the barbarians now.

But does that mean that Offa had gone the whole hog and imagined himself in turn as an imperial Roman? There is some evidence to support this view. And certainly, it is what happened to the Anglo-Saxons’ Frankish cousins across the Channel. For these are the years of the Carolingian revolution. It took place in two stages: the first royal, the second imperial. In 751, Pepin the Short, who had usurped the Frankish throne, was made king by the new royal inauguration ceremony of anointing. Forty-nine years later, his son Charlemagne, who had succeeded his father in 768 and had expanded the frontiers of Francia to run from the banks of the River Ebro to those of the Elbe, was crowned emperor in Rome by the pope on Christmas morning 800. The renewed empire was intended to be both Roman and Christian and Charlemagne took himself seriously in both capacities: he was soldier of the Faith and reformer of the Church, on the one hand, and, on the other, restorer of the Roman Empire, whose inheritance of law, language, literature, architecture and forms of government he was determined to revive.

Pepin and Charlemagne were thus Offa’s contemporaries and the latter at least was well known to him. They had diplomatic relations; unsuccessfully negotiated a marriage alliance and corresponded. The only surviving letter from a European ruler to an Anglo-Saxon king is from Charlemagne to Offa in 796. In it he recognized Offa ‘to be not only a most strong protector of your earthly country, but also a most devout defender of the holy faith’. He also addressed Offa as ‘brother’ and acknowledged him as an equal. Offa, for his part, was influenced by Charlemagne’s revival of the apparatus of Roman power. But there is no sign that Offa understood or imitated its cultural dimension.

On the other hand, Englishmen played an important role in the Carolingian achievement and one, Alcuin, who was born in Northumbria and educated at York, was a central figure in the regime as a sort of minister for culture and education. Finally, Offa’s takeover of the southeast of England brought him into close and direct commercial contact with Francia. This is why he modelled his changes in the currency on Pepin’s monetary reforms. Pepin also provided the ultimate model for Ecgfrith’s anointing. But there was a more immediate input since Alcuin, acting as envoy from Charlemagne, had accompanied the papal legates on their mission to England in 786. He played a major part in the ensuing Church Council; probably attended Ecgfrith’s coronation and returned to England on another diplomatic errand a few years later. Alcuin’s correspondence thus provides a sort of commentary on the apogee of Offa’s power and on the nemesis which followed soon after.

At first, all seemed well. Offa was, Alcuin wrote in one letter, ‘the glory of Britain’; in another, he saw him as having ‘the kingdom … of all the English’ within his grasp. And in Ecgfrith he had provided a worthy heir. Alcuin called the boy ‘my son’; enjoined him to learn ‘authority’ from his father and ‘compassion’ from his mother and saw him as ‘the hope of many’. It is not hard to see why. For, irrespective of Ecgfrith’s personal qualities, Alcuin interpreted his anointing, which he may have helped to devise, as the promise of a new, better monarchy: more ordered, more Christian and better attuned to its responsibilities to the people of God. In short, Alcuin seems to have hoped that the ceremony of 787 would lead to a renewed kingdom of the English, just as the Carolingian revolution had restored the kingdom of the Franks and would, in the fullness of time, revive the Roman Empire itself.

But it was not to be. Offa died on 29 July 796. Ecgfrith duly succeeded. But he died less than six months later, on 17 December. The hopes had been cheated and ‘the divinity that doth hedge a king’ had failed at its first English test. Alcuin was forced to ask why. His answer was that the sins of the father had been visited on the son. ‘For you know very well’, he wrote to a leading Mercian noble, ‘how much blood his father shed to secure the kingdom on his son.’

There were sins of omission on Offa’s part as well. Though Alcuin had expressed his delight that Offa was ‘so intent on education’, there is no evidence that it came to very much. Certainly, there is nothing to compare with the Carolingian or the Northumbrian achievement: there is no Mercian renaissance or chronicle, no Life of Offa, no writings by the king himself. In short, if Offa were attracted to ideas of empire, it was to imperium in its simplest, crudest sense as the mere absoluteness of power. His conquest of the south-east, his construction of Offa’s Dyke, his bloodlettings and regicides can all be read as embodying that. But it was not enough. Indeed, in the Anglo-Saxon political tradition, it may have been worse than useless. Or, in Alcuin’s own words: ‘this was not a strengthening of the kingdom but its ruin’.

But we must not anticipate. The man who emerged victorious from the power struggle which followed the royal deaths of 796 was Cenwulf. He, at best, was only a distant member of the royal kindred. But his style was pure Offa, as his treatment of Kent shows. The Kentishmen took advantage of the succession crisis and the consequent temporary eclipse of Mercian power to rebel and erect a certain Eadbert as their own king once more. But Cenwulf exacted a terrible revenge. The revolt was suppressed and Eadbert taken to Mercia. There he was ritually mutilated to disable him from kingship: his eyes were put out and his hands cut off. Not surprisingly, Kent subsequently remained quiet, though Cenwulf in turn made some concession to local pride by setting up his brother Cuthred as puppet-king of Kent.

Cenwulf himself died in 821. His death was followed by another, even more drawn-out struggle for the succession, which once more gave Mercia’s enemies, internal and external alike, their opportunity. And this time the whole edifice of Mercian imperial power was brought crashing down. Fittingly, the man who struck the decisive blow was another victim of Offa’s, Egbert.

Egbert was a scion of the royal house of Wessex. Somehow he had fallen foul of Offa, and, like many others, had fled ‘in fear of death’ to take refuge in Francia at the court of Charlemagne. But in 802, after the death of Offa’s son-in-law King Beorhtric, Egbert the exile returned to succeed effortlessly to the throne of Wessex. Now, twenty years later, Cenwulf ’s death offered him the opportunity to avenge the slights he had suffered at Mercian hands. The year 825 was his annus mirabilis: Egbert himself defeated the new Mercian king Beornwulf at Ellendun; the East Anglians then rose against Mercian domination and killed Beornwulf as he tried to suppress the revolt; meanwhile, Egbert’s son, Æthelwulf, occupied the remaining provinces of the former Mercian empire in Sussex, Kent and Essex, and, by some at least, was greeted as liberator. Four years later, Egbert scaled fresh heights: he conquered Mercia and marched against the Northumbrians, defeating them in battle and receiving submission and tribute.

A new great power had arisen in England: Wessex. But it would have to confront a new and even greater threat: the Vikings.

Chapter 3

Wessex

Æthelwulf, Æthelbald, Æthelberht, Æthelred, Alfred the Great

ONCE, IN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH CENTURIES, the Saxons had been Europe’s most feared pirates, plundering the coasts of Britain and Gaul at will. Then they grew bolder and became settlers and conquerors.

Now the process was about to repeat itself with another Germanic people on the move: the Vikings. They came from further north, from Denmark and even Norway. They were intrepid seafarers, as the Anglo-Saxons had once been; they were also pagan and they were (despite the whitewash of some recent historians) even more savage. The Viking raids on England began in the late eighth century, when Offa still held sway. An isolated raiding party landed at Portland and killed the king’s reeve, the leading royal official, at Dorchester. Then, in 793, they struck at the other end of the country and destroyed the monastic church on Lindisfarne.

Little more is heard of them for forty years. But from 835 the raids became regular. For Anglo-Saxon England was now rich – as rich, probably, as late Roman Britain and as vulnerable. Particularly attractive to the raiders were the forms of portable wealth which have appealed to thieves and robbers throughout the ages: the golden crosses and altar plate, the jewels surrounding the relics and studding the bindings of lavishly illuminated Bibles, the vast quantities of silver coin struck by Offa and his successors, the silver-mounted drinking horns and gold rings and brooches of the rich. Much of this portable wealth was concentrated in the minster-churches and monasteries, which thus became favourite Viking targets. Probably all that mattered was that these churches were rich. But the fact that they were centres of a rival faith may have made their destruction a duty to the pagan Vikings as well as a pleasure. Towns, which were also rich and lightly defended, were other victims of choice. As were captives, who could be ransomed, sold or enslaved.

All this was bad enough. But in the 860s there came a change in the raids that was both qualitative and quantitative: in 865 a ‘great army’ invaded England, and it was reinforced in 871 by ‘a great summer army’. Thousands of men were involved; they had royal leadership and their aim was conquest. Within a decade, everything north and east of Watling Street had fallen: Northumbria in 867, East Anglia in 869 and most of Mercia in 874–7. The kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia were obliterated, never to revive, and their kings were offered as sacrifices to Odin (the Nordic Woden), perhaps in the gruesome ritual of the ‘blood-eagle’, in which the victim’s ribcage was cut open and his lungs torn out and draped round his shoulders like an eagle’s folded wings. The succession to five bishoprics was disrupted for long periods and three of them were never re-formed. Everywhere, libraries and archives were destroyed; learning itself perished and the whole achievement of Anglo-Saxon England seemed on the point of obliteration.

I

In the rout, only one Anglo-Saxon kingdom survived, Wessex, and even that hung by a thread. It had certain advantages, however, which might give it hope. These included a secure succession, an unusually effective structure of government and, above all, it was to prove, the personal qualities of its king, Alfred. Like all Anglo-Saxon kings, Alfred was a man of action and a warrior. But he was also, uniquely for his own age and for long after, a true philosopher-king. Moreover, unlike many philosophers and almost all kings, he wrote and published widely. The result is that his very words have come down to us and, for the first time in our history, we can hear the genuine voice of an English king.

It is a very attractive voice too: reasonable, practical and persuasive. So much so, indeed, that it is easy to forget that it is also the voice of a master politician, who had an agenda and wants us to see things from his point of view. Actually, it is very difficult not to, since almost everything that survives from the period is written by Alfred or influenced by him. To a remarkable extent therefore our image of Alfred as ‘The Great’ is – still, and after over a thousand years – a product of Alfred’s own self-invention. It goes without saying that such a view is not impartial. But it has survived only because Alfred’s achievements matched the grandiosity of his vision.

Alfred was a grandson of the great King Egbert. His own father, Æthelwulf, succeeded in 839 after having acted for many years as sub-king or viceroy in the eastern provinces of Wessex, which he had conquered in 825. His marriage, to his first wife Osburh, was unusually fruitful, with five sons who reached maturity. This could be a mixed blessing, as the results of Edward III’s numerous progeny would show. But Æthelwulf was able to get his sons to agree to a sort of succession in survivorship, in which each brother would succeed his elder, saving all the time certain property rights to the children of the deceased. Rather surprisingly, the agreement held. Even more surprisingly, all four sons who survived Æthelwulf succeeded in turn to the throne.

Alfred, born in about 849, was the youngest of this band of brothers, being junior by at least twenty-five years to Æthelstan, the eldest. As the youngest of the family, he seems to have been a favourite child, indulged and even a little spoiled. He was also bright, curious, with an excellent memory and, like many younger sons, an unusually adventurous intelligence. But events were just as important in forming the man. His mother died when he was very young. Even more importantly, his father, taking advantage perhaps of his wife’s death, decided that thirty years as viceroy and king was enough. Instead, in 855, when Alfred was about six, he embarked on a pilgrimage to Rome. Æthelbald, his eldest surviving son, was left as king in his place, but Alfred, as the youngest, seems to have accompanied his father. They travelled in style and stayed in the city for about a year. It was far fallen from its ancient splendour. But more than enough remained to fire the imagination of a sensitive and impressionable child like Alfred. Probably his interest in history dates from this experience. As does his ambition, his lust for fame and his determination, as it were, to build a new Rome in England’s green and pleasant land.

But there was more to come. On the way back from Rome, Æthelwulf visited the Frankish court, and, on 1 October 856 at Verberie-sur-Oise near Paris, was married to Princess Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald, king of West Francia, and great-granddaughter of Charlemagne. At the same time, Judith was anointed and crowned queen by Archbishop Hincmar of Reims, the master-liturgist and inventor of tradition, in an ordo or form of service which he had devised. It was the first recorded coronation of an English queen and perhaps the first time as well that a crown had been used, rather than the royal helmet (which was, in any case, unsuitable for a woman). ‘May the Lord crown you with glory and honour,’ Hincmar intoned as he placed the crown on the queen’s head, ‘that … the brightness of the gold and the… gleam of the gems may always shine forth in your conduct and your acts.’

Was Alfred present? If so, we can only guess at the impact of the words. But their import would not have been unfamiliar. For, according to the official narrative of the House of Wessex, Alfred himself had already undergone some form of consecration, whether as king or consul, at the hands of Pope Leo IV himself in Rome.

Æthelwulf did not long survive his return home and was succeeded by Æthelbald. Æthelbald also stepped into his father’s bed and married his stepmother Judith. But Judith, who, after Æthelbald’s own premature death, would elope with Count Baldwin of Flanders, was cultivated as well as brazen. She also seems to have taken a shine to Alfred. So far, according to Alfred’s biographer, Asser, Alfred’s education had been oral and had consisted of learning by heart long passages of Anglo-Saxon verse. But Judith, literate herself, stimulated Alfred to learn to read by playing on his competitive instincts. She showed him a book with a richly illuminated initial and promised to give it to whichever of the two brothers, Alfred and Æthelred, who was only a couple of years older, would first memorize its contents. Alfred won.

But a harsher contest was imminent. In 865 the third brother, Æthelberht, succeeded but died after another brief reign. Æthelred, the loser in the book competition, now became king and Alfred stepped up to take his place as royal deputy and heir presumptive. Æthelred had need of all the help Alfred could give for his accession coincided with the arrival in England of the Viking great army.

Alfred’s life task had begun.

At first, Wessex got off lightly, as the brunt of the Viking attack fell on, successively, East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia. But in the early winter of 870–71 ‘the great army’ turned south-west from East Anglia and occupied a fortified camp to the east of Reading as its new forward base. The choice was perfect strategically. The camp, situated at the confluence of the Rivers Thames and Kennet, could be reinforced up the then still navigable Thames; it lay on the disputed frontier between Mercia and Wessex; while to the south and west, and within easy ride, lay the rich lands of Wessex.

The witan, the advisory council or ‘parliament’ of the leading men, lay and ecclesiastical, of Wessex, met in emergency session at Swinbeorg (almost certainly Swanborough Tump, a prehistoric burial mound in the Vale of Pewsey, in Wiltshire). First, King Æthelred and his younger brother Alfred, facing the imminent prospect of death in battle, solemnly confirmed their father’s arrangements for the succession; then they rode off, up the chalk road on to the Marlborough Downs and across the River Kennet to Reading, to try to dislodge the enemy. The results were mixed. A direct assault on the camp failed. But the West Saxons were victorious in a battle fought in the open field on the chalk ridge known as Ashdown. Alfred distinguished himself in the battle. But it failed to swing the campaign and two more Saxon defeats followed.

At this point disaster struck twice. The Vikings were reinforced by the arrival of ‘the great summer army’. And in mid-April 871 King Æthelred, still only in his twenties, died. The body was taken to Wimborne Minster in Dorset for burial and the great men of the witan, gathered for the funeral, met once more and confirmed Alfred as king. He was just twenty-two or -three. There is no suggestion of a coronation. Perhaps in view of the crisis there was neither the time nor the inclination.

The crisis soon got worse. Only a month after his accession Alfred, seemingly caught off guard and with only a small force, was defeated at Wilton. The victorious Vikings were within twenty miles of Wimborne and Alfred had to sue for peace.

It was not a good start to a reign.

But, once more, events elsewhere in England gave Wessex respite. Faced with more pressing concerns, ‘the great army’ withdrew from Reading, first for London and then for the north, to deal with the Northumbrian revolt against their Viking overlords. Its suppression, and the ensuing partition of Mercia, occupied ‘the great army’ till 874–5. Then it split into three divisions. The leader of one was ‘King’ Guthrum. And he had decided to carve out a real kingdom for himself – in Wessex.