History of the Anglo-Saxons, from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest / Second Edition

by Thomas Miller

The remainder of our journey through the kingdoms which anciently formed the Saxon Octarchy now lies in a more direct road, where there are fewer of those perplexing paths and winding ways, such as we have hitherto been compelled to thread, in our difficult course through this dimly-discovered country of the Past. We are now on the sun-bright borders of those dark old forest fastnesses, amid which we could scarcely see what flowers were at our feet, or catch a clear glimpse of the outstretched sky that hung above our heads; a few steps from this, and we leave this land of twilight and uncertain shadows behind. After the death of Ecgfrid, Alfred, who is already distinguished as having fought in the battle in which Penda fell, and afterwards, as having married his daughter, ascended the throne of Northumbria. We have before shown how, on account of his birth, his succession was disputed by the nobles; against their decision he offered neither defence nor resistance, but betaking himself to study, he so enriched his mind, under the instruction of the famous Bishop Wilfrid, that Bede classes him as first amongst the kings of Anglo-Saxons for his literary acquirements. He "waded not through slaughter to a throne," but calmly abided his time, and when it came, quitted his study to sway the sceptre. His court was the resort of literary men and enlightened travellers, and Aldhelm, the celebrated scholar of that day, stood high in his favour. There was a firmness about his character worthy of the name which afterwards becomes so endeared to us, for when he could not conscientiously agree in certain matters with his old tutor, Wilfrid, he allowed the bishop to quit his dominions, nor had a letter from the Pope influence enough to alter his resolution. Nothing of note appears to have occurred in Northumbria during his reign, for the expulsion of Eadwulf, and the ascension of Osred, were accomplished without difficulty. Ceolwulf came next, to whom Bede dedicated his Ecclesiastical History; but we must not step too suddenly into the familiar light which seems all at once about to break upon us.

Ceadwalla, a descendant of the renowned Cerdric's, after the death of Ecgfrid, made a stand against the nobles of Wessex, who had banished him from that kingdom. He first attacked the king of Sussex, slew him, and desolated his dominions. He then, accompanied by his brother Mollo, made an inroad into Kent, where they ravaged and destroyed the towns and villages for miles around. While Mollo, with several of his soldiers, were busied in plundering a house, they were surrounded by the enraged men of Kent, who, preventing the escape of the marauders, set fire to the building on every side, and burnt all within alive. The king of Wessex revenged his brother's death, and, far and wide, around the scene of this terrible sacrifice, he made "a land of mourning." After this he went on a pilgrimage to Rome, was baptized by the Pope, and died the week after.

Ina then ascended the throne of Wessex; his celebrated laws are still in existence, and as they throw considerable light upon the manners of this remote period, we will take a hasty glance at them before proceeding further. If a child was not baptized within thirty days after its birth, a penalty of thirty shillings was demanded; if that period elapsed and the ceremony was still neglected, the priest or the parents must forfeit all they possessed. If a slave or theow worked on Sunday by his master's commands, he became free; if a freeman worked on that day, by his own consent, he forfeited his freedom. If any one sold his servant, whether a slave or a freeman, he must pay his full value. If a poor man died, and left his wife with a child, six shillings a-year was to be paid for its maintenance, together with a cow in the summer, and an ox in winter—its kindred was to take charge of the house until the child became of age. If a man was killed, his life was valued according to what he was worth, and the slayer had to pay a fixed price for his death. Crude as these laws are, and barbarous as they prove the people to have been for which they were made, still they are the first landmarks, reared in a wild and uncivilized country, which point out to man the extent of his possessions and his power; the first attempt to draw an even line between might and right; for here the poor theow, the slave of the soil, he who was sold, like the cattle upon the estate, to the next purchaser, felt secure within his allotted mark. The day of holy rest was his own; if his lord compelled him to labour, the laws of Ina, next day, made him a free man. Ina, like his predecessors, was compelled to fight his way to peace, and amid his hostilities, he became involved in a war with Ceolred, king of Mercia. His queen appears to have been as courageous as himself, and is said to have besieged one of her husband's enemies at Taunton, and to have levelled the castle in which he was sheltered to the ground. Ina rebuilt the abbey of Glastonbury, and endowed it with rich gifts. It seems to have grown a custom amongst the Saxon kings at this period, to go on pilgrimage to Rome, resign their crowns, and become monks. Ina's queen had long tried, but in vain, to induce her husband to follow what she considered such worthy examples; but her entreaties had hitherto proved useless. She at last hit upon the following device. A feast had been held in one of Ina's castles; and the morning after the banquet they went out together to ride; when they returned, she conducted Ina into the banqueting hall, which was now covered with filth, and occupied by a herd of swine, a litter of which was resting upon the very couch he had before occupied. Well might so sudden a change astonish him, and we can readily imagine the dark spot that gathered upon his angry brow. Such a mode of conversion would have startled either Augustin or Paulinus, and made even cunning Coifi pause before he changed his opinion. The queen pleaded guilty to the fault, and reasoned upon the matter as follows: "My lord," said she, "this is very different from the noise and hilarity of yesterday; there are no brilliant hangings now; no table weighed down with silver vessels, no delicacies to delight the palate, neither flatterers nor parasites—all these have vanished like the smoke before the wind—have all passed away into nothingness. Ought we not, then, to feel alarmed, who covet them so much, yet are everyway as transient? Are not all such things so? and are we not ourselves like a river, that hurries headlong and heedlessly along to the dark and illimitable ocean of time? Unhappy must we ever be if we let such things occupy our minds. Think, I entreat you, how disgusting those things become of which we are so enamoured; and see what filthy objects we have become attached to; for in those filthy relics we may see what our pampered bodies will at last become. Oh! let us reflect, that the greater we have been, and the more powerful we now are, the more alarmed we ought to be, for the greater will be the punishment of our misconduct."

Ina listened, sighed, resigned his crown, and set off for Rome, where he founded a school, and imposed a tax of a penny upon every family in his kingdom, which was called Romescot, and which went to support the institution he had raised. As a proof of his sincerity, he wore a common dress, lived meanly, cut his hair, laboured hard, and dwelt in retirement with his queen, until he died "a good old man." His brother, Inigils, had died a few years before him, a name that falls silent as snow upon the pages of History; yet like the snow, doing its silent work, for he must have been a man of some note in his day and generation, to have been the father of Egbert and the grandfather of Alfred the Great, from whom descended a long line of kings.

The Mercian nobles rose up and put to death Ostrida, the wife of Ethelred their king, for what cause history is altogether silent; neither the why nor the wherefore is given—the sentence reads in the Saxon Chronicle like an epitaph upon a gravestone, yet she was the daughter of the once powerful Oswy of Northumbria, and when destroyed, queen of the Mercians. The very mystery which hangs around her fate interests us, and we want to know something about what she had done to draw down such dreadful punishment, but all our inquiries are vain; beyond the mere entry of her violent death, not even a doubt is registered, for us to pause over. The deed was done, and is recorded in one brief, terrible sentence, and we know no more. Her husband, Ethelred, abandoned the crown of Mercia to his nephew Cenred, and entered the monastery of Bardney, as a monk, going through all the routine of common duties, like a humble brother, until at last he rose to the rank of abbot in the monastery which he himself had founded.

Ethelbald is the next king of Mercia who commands our attention. He had been nursed in the stern school of privation; like Edwin of Northumbria, he had been persecuted in his youth, and owed his life to Guthlac, the hermit of Croyland. Picture the warrior monk and the young king in those wild marshes—where no monastery was as yet built up, and where, upon that swamp, which was afterwards crowned with a splendid abbey, only a humble hut, and a rude cross of wood, were then to be seen. The stormy old warrior, Guthlac, who had done battle in many a hard-fought field, was at last weary of a soldier's life, and hearing that there was an island surrounded by a lake in a corner of Mercia, he got one of the rude Lincolnshire fishermen to row him to the spot, where for some time he remained alone; here he was visited by Ethelbald, a man elegant in form, with a frame of iron, and a bold, undaunted spirit. There must have been some strange charm in the society of the soldier-monk, thus to have won over the young king to share with him such a solitude, for the marshes of Croyland must in those days have worn a most forbidding appearance, and even now, as they wave in summer, with their dark, coarse patches of goose-grass, and in some places, no stir of life is seen, excepting where the gosherd drives before him his noisy flock, an air of melancholy reigns over the scenery, and the mind unconsciously wanders back among the shadows of the dead. Nor did Ethelbald, when he ascended the throne of Mercia, forget his exile, or his companion Guthlac, but gave the island of Croyland to the monks who had accompanied his friend, and preserved their piety amid all the privations which surrounded that solitude, and over the monument which the Mercian king erected to the monk, was afterwards built the monastery of Croyland.

Ethelbald conquered Northumbria, and, aided by Cuthred, king of Wessex, obtained a victory over the Welsh; but although they had thus fought side by side, a spirit of jealousy lurked within each bosom, and the Wessex king only waited for the first favourable opportunity to throw off the mask, and free himself from the power of the Mercian monarch. Unforeseen circumstances, for some time, prevented Cuthred from openly taking the field against Ethelbald; his son rose up in rebellion, and no sooner was he put down, than one of his nobles, named Edelhun, took up arms, and would have conquered Cuthred, had he not been wounded at the very time when the battle had turned in his favour. These rebellions Ethelbald is accused of having fomented. The rival kings at last met near Burford in Oxfordshire; Ethelbald had under his command the combined forces of Essex, Kent, East Anglia, and Mercia; Cuthred, the soldiers of Wessex alone, and the powerful arm of the former rebel, Edeldun, who was now his friend. From Roger de Wendover, we, with a few slight alterations, copy the following description of the battle, as being one of the most picturesque accounts which we have met with in the pages of the early historians: "The attack on each side was headed by the standard-bearers of the opposing king; Edeldun bore the banner of Wessex, on which was emblazoned a golden dragon, and rushing forward with the ensign in his hand, he struck down the Mercian standard-bearer, a daring deed which called forth a loud shout from the army of Cuthred. A moment after, and the noise was drowned by the clashing of weapons, the mingled din, and roaring, and shouting, which swelled into the prolonged thunder of battle, amid which, if a brief pause intervened, it was filled up by the shrieks and groans of the wounded and the dying, or the falling of some dreaded instrument which terminated the agony of death. Havoc spread like the destroying flames, into the midst of which the maddened masses plunged. Death and danger were disregarded; they fought as if the fate of a kingdom rested upon the blows dealt by each single arm. For a moment the sunlight fell upon a mass of dazzling armour, gilding the plumed helmet, the pointed spear, the uplifted sword, and broad-edged battle-axe, and the rich banner, which, as it was borne onward amid the hurried charge, fluttered in gaudy colours, high over the heads of the eager combatants; a few moments more, and all this brave array was broken; another moving mass rushed onward in the thickest of the strife, the banner rocked and swayed, then went down; point after point the uplifted spears rose and sank, the helmets seemed as if crowded together; then the space which they occupied was filled up by others who passed onward, the moving waves heaved and fell, and passed along, while over all rolled that terrible sea of death which had swallowed up horse, rider, banner, sword, and battle-axe. Foremost in the ranks, stood Edeldun; wherever he moved, the spot was marked by the rapid circles which his ponderous battle-axe made around his head. At every stroke, death descended; wherever that terrible edge alighted, the hollow earth groaned, as it made room for another grave; no armour was proof against the blows which he dealt, for the fall of his arm was like that of a dreaded thunderbolt that rives asunder whatever it strikes. Like two consuming fires, each having set in from opposite quarters and destroyed all that lay in their path, so did Edeldun and Ethelbald at last meet, flame hurrying to flame, nothing left between to consume; behind each lay a dead, desolated, and blackened pathway." Here we are compelled to halt; the sternest image we could gather from the pages of Homer, would still leave the idea of their meeting imperfect. Ethelbald fled, having first exchanged a few blows with his dreaded adversary. Wessex shook off the Mercian yoke, and Ethelbald never again raised his head so high as it had before been, when he looked proudly above those of the surrounding kings. Cuthred died, and the king of Mercia was soon after slain in a civil war in his own dominions. After his death, our attention is riveted upon the events which took place between these rival kingdoms, for the rest of the Saxon states, with scarcely an exception, were soon swallowed up in that great vortex, which at last bore the immortal name of England.

After the death of Cuthred, the throne of Wessex was occupied by Sigebyhrt, whose reign was brief and unpopular; he paid no regard to the laws which had been established by Ina; he took no heed of the remonstrances of his subjects, but when Cumbra, one of the most renowned of their nobles, boldly proclaimed the grievances of the people, he was put to death. This was the signal for a revolt—the nobles assembled, the people were summoned to the council, and Sigebyhrt was deposed. Fearful of the vengeance of his subjects, the exiled king fled into the wild forest of Andredswold, where he concealed himself amid its gloomy thickets. Here it is probable that for a time the rude peasantry supplied him with food, and that the wild man of the wood was the whole talk and wonder of the neighbouring foresters. One day, however, he was met by a swineherd named Ansiam, who had doubtless seen him beforetime when he visited his murdered master Cumbra—the swineherd knew him at the first glance, and although he did not kill the king on the spot, yet he waited his time, and revenged his master's death by stabbing Sigebyhrt to the heart. He appears to have watched him to his hiding-place, and when the fallen king lay stretched upon his couch of leaves, under the shade of gloomy and overhanging boughs, the savage swineherd stole silently through the thicket, and with one blow sent the unhappy sovereign to sleep his last sleep. As in the death of queen Ostrida, we find but a brief entry of his terrible ending in the old chronicles; he suited them not, was slain, cast aside, and so made room for another, and Cynewulf, in whose veins the blood of Woden was believed to flow, reigned in his stead.

We will now hasten on and make a brief survey of the state of Northumbria. Ceolwulf, the patron of Bede, resigned his crown for the quietude of the cloister. Eadbert succeeded to the vacant throne. Whilst he was warring with the Picts, his dominions were invaded by the Mercians; he reigned for twenty-three years, then retired to a monastery, making the eighth Saxon king who had voluntarily laid aside the crown for the cowl. It is said that the fate of Sigebyrht and the fall of Ethelbald caused him to contrast their turbulent ending with the peaceful death-bed of Ceolwulf—a strange change was thus wrought in the minds of these old Saxon kings—the glory of Woden had departed; no eager guests now rushed to the banquetting-halls of Valhalla; they looked for other glories beyond the grave. Osulf succeeded his father to the throne of Northumbria, scarcely reigned a year, and was treacherously slain. Taking no warning by his fate, Edelwold was bold enough to accept the crown; as usual, the path from the throne to the tomb was but a brief step, and he perished. Another and another still succeeded. Alred, a descendant of Ida, stepped into the empty seat, just looked around, and was driven out of the kingdom. Then Ethelred came, put two of his generals to death on the evidence of two others, when, a few months after, the accusers turned round upon him, conquered him, and drove him from the throne. He fled like Alred. Alfwold was the next king that came to be killed; he just reigned long enough to leave his name behind before he bade the world "good night." Osred next mounted, made his bow, was asked to sit down, then driven out. Ethelred was beckoned back again; he came, stabbed Eardulf, who had aspired to the crown, and left him bleeding at the gate of a monastery; dragged the children of Alfwold from York, and slaughtered them; put to death Osred, who, like himself, had been deposed, and just when he thought he had cleared away every obstacle, and was about to sit down upon the throne which he had stuffed with the dead to make it more easy, his subjects rewarded him for what he had done by slaying him. He was followed by Osbald, who sat trembling with the crown upon his head for twenty-seven days, but not having reigned long enough to merit death, he was permitted to retire into a cloister. Eardulf, whom we left bleeding at the gates of the monastery, was taken in and cured by the monks, fled to Rome, was received by Charlemagne, and at last placed upon the throne of Northumbria, where he had not sat long before his subjects revolted. The crown and sceptre of Northumberland were then thrown aside—men shunned them as they would have done a plague; the curse of death was upon them, no man could take them up and live. "Death kept his court" within the one, and when he wielded the other, the gold had ever pointed either to the grave or the cloister. From such a murderous court numbers of the nobles and bishops fled—the throne stood vacant for several years; no man was found bold enough to occupy it. The sword which ever hung there had fallen too often—not another Damocles could be found to ascend and survey the surrounding splendour from such a perilous position.

In looking over this long list of natural deaths, murders, and escapes which took place in one kingdom after the abdication of Eadbert, we have but recorded the events which occurred within forty short years, from seven hundred and fifty-seven to about seven hundred and ninety. From the landing of Hengist and Horsa, about three centuries before, nearly one hundred and fifty kings had sat upon the different thrones of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The bulk of these are unknown to us excepting by name; we can with difficulty just make out the petty states they reigned over, and that is nearly all. Some died in the full belief of their heathen creed, with a firm faith that from a death-bed in the field of battle to the brutal immortality which their bloody deeds had merited was but a step, and that their happiness hereafter would consist in feasting and holiday murders in the halls of Woden. Others calmly breathed their last with their dying eyes fixed upon the cross of Christ, while the anchor of their faith sunk noiselessly into the deep sea of death, and their weary barques were safely moored in that tranquil harbour where neither waves beat nor tempest roared, and where, at last, the "storm-beat vessel safely rode." What a fearful history would those three centuries present if it could but be truly written—if we could but have the everyday life of those all but unknown kings! forgotten as their very graves are, and scattered their ashes into dust, which ages ago mingled imperceptibly with the breeze, and was blown onward, unseen and unfelt. Yet there was a time when even the meanest and the most unknown marched in pomp to the Pagan temple, or lowly Christian church, when before them the noisy heralds went, and the applauding mob swelled behind, and rude as the crown and sceptre might be, and all the barbaric pearl and gold, still the holy oil was poured forth, and solemn prayers offered up, and the whole witena-gemot, with the neighbouring nobles, were assembled together, and the little world around them for days after talked only of the coronation of the king. Thousands at their command had mustered in battle, high nobles had bowed their heads before them; on a word from their lips life or death frequently hung; valour and beauty were gathered around their thrones, and, when they rode forth in grand procession, the wondering crowd rushed out to gaze,—even as it does now. Edwin, with his banner borne before him, and Offa, with his trumpets sounding in the streets, were as much a marvel above a thousand years ago, as her present Majesty is in the provinces in our own time. Yet there are many in the present day who think it a waste of time to dwell for a few hours upon the fates of those ancient kings, who, forsooth! because they have been so long dead, are considered as undeserving of notice by those who seem to measure the events of the past by their own present insignificance, who, conscious that they themselves will be forgotten for ever as soon as the grave has closed over them, look begrudgingly upon almost every name that Time has not wholly obliterated.