1035-1100: The Anglo-Norman Church

We have already seen the pattern by which English Kings, including Danes who became English Kings, consolidated their rule. Once they had established power by brute force and the support of the aristocracy they would make an accommodation with the English Church, the provincial branch office of Rome. Certainly since Charlemagne, English Church and, better, Roman Church approval of a succession added significant lustre to the Crown and made it very much more difficult for a challenger to make an alternative claim although we should be in no doubt that it was the sword that counted in the end. The question of whether the English Church was always to take orders from Rome was another matter, one which became very relevant in the power struggles before and after the Norman Ascendency that emerged after the abortive English revolts of 1069.

The Church may have had no role to play in establishing power but it had a considerable role in maintaining power securely. Its role was to ensure order (since disorder was generally crueller even than a cruel autocracy for most people most of the time) on behalf of its charge, the mass of the population, and on behalf of itself given the financial and landed patronage necessary to maintain its mission. The general population had, of course, little or no say in this authoritarian structure. It wanted the order of Kingship but not necessarily the consequent taxation. Sections of the wider population also needed the limited welfare, celibate employment and protection that the Church could provide.

The people's own resources were, as often in history, redistributed to its own poor through a bureaucratic mechanism for the sake of peace with a 'take' for the clerics that grew larger with time. The similarities with twntieth century bureaucratic European socialism are clear for those with a mind to see them. The clerisy and its economic claims would grow larger with time until this thing that was 'too big to fail' got gutted by Henry VIII who saw that a bit of redistribution back to the English middle classes might secure his own base more effectively than relying on the Church to do so.

The Church never, of course, offered the threat of potential rebellion - this is not what it does, at least not while kings remained within the faith - but it did legitimise royal rule through explicit divine sanction in the coronation. Its preaching of quietitude and submission sat alongside its delivery of alms and its creation of meaning for existence and death as guarantors of a conditional order. "You give us the people", implied the Church, "and we will give you their submission and, incidentally, also save them from your brute plundering". It is the perhaps unhappy and unsatisfactory compromise required for a society that remained poor in resources and education and within which there are still few constraints on the exercise of force by those with weaponry on their side. The history of the liberation of the people from the whims of aristocratic brutes is one story. It takes a lot longer to effect liberation from the hollow ideologies of the Church. This scarcely starts for another half a millennium.

The creation of national saints is an essential part of this process. Our period starts with the canonisation of Archbishop John of York (died in 721) in 1037, known for his kindly concern for the poor. This sent its own signal in the middle of the brutal infighting that took place between the reigns of Cnut I and II that the ruling elite cannot and should not sink to its habitual and instinctive 'pagan' barbarism. Similarly, within a year of the burning down of Worcester Monastery by Cnut II after a tax rebellion (with the rebels inside it), Bishop Wulfstan had started to rebuild it on a larger scale in defiance of the royal sacrilege. The relationship of the English Church to the English people, manifest in the war of defence against the Danes, seems to have created a problem for the Normans in 1069-1070 and to have resulted in the latter's call on the Papacy to help bring the Church to heel.

Westminster Abbey in the Eleventh Century

The Church is never not part of the struggles for power at the very heart of the dynastic State. As we have seen, its leadership could be decisive just as it was in the power struggle that started in 1051 between the Anglo-Danish interest of the Godwin family and the pro-Norman position of Edward the Confessor. The shift in that year (temporarily) to the Norman interest was expressed at the highest level with the appointment of the Norman Robert Champert of Jumieges to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. There is something going on here in terms of Edward the Confessor's own sense of what sort of cleric will support him and his vision of a 'civilised' (perhapsd Charlemagnic) European monarchy. Edward is very active in his patronage of the Church. He founds Westminster Abbey (completed in 1065), which will be the future centre of the royal cult in England, in 1052. Waltham Abbey is completed and consecrated in 1060.

Battle Abbey - ruins of the East Range.

The political significance of the Archbishopric is demonstrated when the return of the Godwin interest under Godwin's son Harold Godwinson, after a brief Norman ascendency at court, results in the expulsion of Robert of Jumieges and his replacement as Archbishop of Canterbury with Stigand who is also Bishop of Winchester, still the primary see of the Wessex interest. We have covered this elsewhere. When William of Normandy became King, he quickly used the Church to seal his position by commissioning the Abbey at Battle on the site of his victory over Harold but he initially lets the Church continue as it had done under Edward until the rebellions of 1069-1070 break out.

His response is to invite three Papal Legates to Winchester in 1070. These legates gave him virtual carte blanche over the English Church after a ceremonial crowning. He promptly called a number of Church Councils and undertook a purge of Anglo-Saxon churchmen, deposing Stigand as Archbishop of Canterbury and replacing him with Lanfranc, a celebrated Italian jurist. What is going on here is also perhaps a Papal-driven frustration with the independence of the English Church, represented by the 'Anglican' Stigand (who was to be imprisoned). The reasonable suspicion here is that Rome saw the Norman Ascendency as an agent for imposing its control on a Provincial Church that had shown too many signs of independence in the recent past. The war crimes 'up north' would not have figured in the Church's moral reasoning at this point.

Church-State politics continued to calibrate in the years after the Norman coup. A controversy over the primacy of Canterbury over York, initiated by Lanfranc, was settled in 1072 at the Council of Winchester although not finally (the dispute would continue until the Fourteenth Century) but it is clear that both King and Papacy found this tiresome. In 1080, Pope Gregory VII tried to push his luck with William I by demanding that the King do him homage as his vassal in an attempt to make feudalism work for the Papacy. William simply refused. Such homage had not been offered by his predecessors. This in itself is interesting. William remembers that his Conquest was based on a right of succession to a line of English kings. He does not allow the Papacy to make the mistake that his power was owed in any way to the Pope. This tension, similar to that emerging from medieval interpretations of Charlemagne's coronation, between the inherent right of kings to rule by dynastic succession and the right of the Papacy to give God's blessing on kings would be a constant theme in European history as the balance of power between Church and State shifted and changed. However both sides agree that thrones can no longer be seized by warlords claiming right by mere conquest.Or at least if a warlord does this, he would soon want the Church to sanctify his seizure as legitimate.

Canterbury Cathedral - Norman Arcade

Much as we have come to expect, when kings cut
deals with the Church the subsequent years see a massive redirection of funds to building major churches. Following a fire that destroyed the old Anglo-Saxon Cathedral in 1067, Canterbury Cathedral was rebuilt and 'Normanised' from 1070. Recompense is also made for the plundering of monasteries that took place in 1069 as the Normans put down a Saxon rebellion that may have had some succour from parts of the English Church. New cathedrals are started at St. Albans (1077), Old Sarum (1078), Winchester (rebuilding - 1079), Hereford (1079), York Minster (1080), Rochester (1082) and Ely (1083). The commitment continued under William I's successor, William II: Worcester (1089), Chichester (1093), Lincoln, Chester & Tewkesbury (1092), Durham (1093) and the completion of Norwich and the start of the Crypt at Canterbury in 1096. This commitment of investment is massive and it indicates the equally massive political comitment to partnership with the Roman Church that helped transform England into a catholic feudal dynastic State although much of these funds are not onlybased on land grants from kings but also from powerful aristocrats in a feudal state that was never entirely an autocracy.

It should not be assumed that the relationship between Church and State was ever an easy one. The tension over their respective rights between King and Papacy under William the Conqueror became something more serious in the four years after Lanfranc died and before Anselm finally agreed to be Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. Relations between King and Archbishop worsened further. William II attempted to bring Anselm to heel in 1095 by convening a Council at Rockingham but Anselm defied him by appealing over his head to Rome, stating that he could not be tried in a secular court. In 1097, Anselm finally quit Canterbury, leaving the Church's estates in the hands of the King, in order to confer directly with the Pope. He chose exile rather than total submission and so left the problem of the relationship of Church and State to the next King Henry I. For Anselm, the Church was universal with the absolute right to maintain its own internal authority whereas for William II the issue was one of ultimate royal control of both Church and State. What we have here is a culturally strong Church but one not as materially strong as any warrior King, albeit that many warriors, worried by the immortality of their souls, would continue to bequeath estates and property to the King's main rival for power. This ideological tension will be one of the grand themes of English history until the Reformation.

The Norman Cathedrals

(Note that the original Norman (or Romanesque) element in these Cathedrals has sometimes to be extracted visually from beneath later Gothic accretions and in one or two cases has been largely overwhelmed. Nowever, Norman architecture can generally be recognised by its simpler 'blocky' and less ornamented style with more rounded arches.)

St Albans' Cathedral started in 1077

Ruins of Old Sarum started in 1078

Norman Transept of Winchester Cathedral started in 1079

Norman Nave of Hereford Cathedral started in 1079

Nave of York Minster started in 1080

Nave of Rochester Cathedral started in 1082

Norman Nave of Ely Cathedral started in 1083

Norman Arch of Worcester Cathedral started in 1089

Chichester Cathedral started in 1091

Norman West Front of Lincoln Cathedral started in 1092

Norman Arch at Chester Cathedral started in 1092

Norman West Front at Twekesbury Cathedral started in 1092

Durham Cathedral started in 1093

Norwich Cathedral completed as a Norman Cathedral in 1096

Norman Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral started in 1096

Saint Margaret of Scotland

There is an additional footnote of interest in the career of Margaret of Wessex, sister of Edgar Atheling, in exile in Scotland. Canonised in 1250, it was she who ordered the rebuilding of Iona Abbey in 1072 and was credited with civilising her husband Malcolm III and with bringing Scotland closer to Rome under the influence of Lanfranc. This alone suggests that it would be foolish to position Lanfranc as anything other than servant of the Papacy. Her story also reminds us that the Church was a solace to aristocratic women married to near-barbarian warlords and that the aristocracy of the day bore no ethnic petit-bourgeois grudges once it was clear how the power game had played itself out. We cannot read ethnicity back too easily into contemporary power relations where being part of a universal Church and of an aristocratic and kingly caste was of far greater importance than one's racial origin.

940-1035: The Church and Kingship from Edgar to Cnut

The last time we gave detailed consideration to the Church was back in the middle of the Eighth Century. Since Theodore's determination to ensure that the British Church was orthodox and operated well within the Catholic sphere of influence, its position as provider of administrative skills to a succession of warlords and petty kings vying for supremacy over England had borne fruit during the era of the Heathen Danish threat in a close identification between Catholicism and the fate of the English Kings. The identification of the Church, the Kingship and the Nation to this day provides the basis for classical British Country Toryism. The seeds of the modern Conservative Party were sown in the bloody battles of the Ninth Century.

As in the period of Theodore, the age is defined by a man, Dunstan (909-988), successively Abbot of Glastonbury, Bishop of Worcester, Bishop of London (957) and Archbishop of Canterbury (960). He refounded Glastonbury as a monastic house in 940 in his early thirties but his importance lies in the theatre of Edgar of Wessex's coronation as 'Emperor of Britain' in Bath on May 11th, 973. Zadok the Priest was sung for the first time (an institution that lasts to this day in Royal Coronation ceremonies). The coronation was followed by a second act in which eight sub-kings of Britain and Wales pledged fealty to Edgar at Chester and then symbolically rowed him on the River Dee while Edgar held the rudder.

Edgar, in fact, died the next year but the point was made - English overlordship is pre-sanctified by the Church in a complex set of ceremonies in which religious and political power are merged along Roman lines. The problem for the English Kings is that the Kingship that the Church sanctified need not necessarily be English if an alien King guaranteed Catholic cultural hegemony. The exploitation of this self interest or cynicism or realism (depending on your point of view) by Danes and Normans is part of the story of the next century.

This is also an era of foundations and so of royal patronage (the Church really does not seem to care who the patron is so long as the patronage follows through) - not only Glastonbury but Westminster Abbey (965), Crowland Abbey (c. 966), Oxford Cathedral (begun 1004) under English Kings and Gloucester Abbey (1017), Buckfast Abbey (1020), and Bury St. Edmund's (1032) under Cnut, the Dane. The original binding of Christianity and Kingship was closely linked to the external threat to the English presented by the invading Heathen Danes but the English Kings, in creating a Kingship detached from the people, also created a transferrable property.

In the first half of this period this would not have been an obvious problem. As far as English Kings, People and Church were concerned, there was one common enemy, the Heathen Dane, and the next round of raids played very much to type. From 980 the Danes return to Britain in force. They repeat the savage attacks on Northern Christianity that they perpetrated in the 790s: Iona is raided in 986, with the murder of the Abbot and six monks on the White Sands and, in 993, the Lindisfarne community is forced south to settle in 'a little church of wands and branches' in Durham.

The Danish wars of this period are for a later posting but Canterbury Cathedral was one casualty in 1012 with the then-Archbishop, Alphege captured and held at Greenwich where he was to be murdered by Danes at a drunken feast, apparently because he refused to sanction an attempt to redeem him with gold because (it is said) he did not want the English people burdened with the cost. To be charitable to the Church in its flip-flopping between ethnic Kings, there might have been merit in its intercessionary and protective role although this would have little effect on the Norman pogroms of the English North in the 1060s.

By the end of the Tenth Century, the Danes had become a complex melange of Heathens and Christians. The Danish Kings accepted Christianity, albeit at first superficially, even if their warlords were just as likely to be Pagan as not - at least until they had all smelt the way the wind was blowing. Harald Bluetooth was the first Danish King to be baptised some time in the 960s but it is clear that the raiders of the 980s had not followed his example. Naturally any Catholic acceptance of a Danish King in England would be contingent on the proven acceptance of Catholicism and the Church. By the 1010s the Church is perfectly happy to switch allegiance and give support to a Danish kingship on that basis.

Catholic approval of Cnut's overlordship of England, a valued province, is important enough that, by 1027, Cnut is making a pilgrimage to Rome to demonstrate his allegiance to the Pope in preference to his Heathen roots and those of his homeland. It is interesting in this context that not only are the later monastic foundations under Danish Kings (see above) but the new stone Bury St. Edmund's sponsored by Cnut exists to honour an East Anglian King murdered by the Great Heathen Army. Cnut also arranged in 1033 the transfer of the bones of Alphege (now a Saint) from St. Paul's Cathedral to Canterbury.

This succession of acts of homage to Catholicism must be seen in the context of the legitimacy that Cnut wished to have conferred on him by the Church in order to help rule a Kingdom that extended across a huge area of Scandinavian Europe and in which his homeland Heathens were now outnumbered by Christians. The Empire's pacification (and it is interesting to see how quickly it all fell apart after his death) required considerations not unlike those of Constantine so many centuries before. A lesson for all Early Medieval Kings has to be that the Church is only a very contingent ally: it will go where the power lies so long as power endorses the catholic vision, a strategy that would be followed with more conscious deliberation six centuries later by the Society of Jesus and may be being followed today by Pope Francis in his shift to populism. For Catholicism, the survival of the institution, the Church, is everything because it means the survival of the 'faith'.

Canterbury Cathedral in the Late Saxon Period (c. 1025) - Reconstruction by Canterbury Archaeological Trust [1]

 [1] Imaginative reconstruction of Canterbury Cathedral in the late Anglo-Saxon period (c.1025), based on archaeological and documentary evidence. Drawn by Ivan Lapper. © Canterbury Archaeological Trust Ltd.

835-848: The Arrival of the Danes

After the initial raids on Northumbria and Iona in the 790s, there were a further set of raids (three in all) on Iona in 800, with 68 monks killed on one occasion alone. This severely undermined its position as a Northern cultural centre. The Vikings appeared again in 825 at Iona, killing the Bishop and several monks and setting the settlement alight. By 850, the important treasures of Iona are being brought inland to Dunkeld by the Picts - other items were transferred to Ireland. Scotland may be on the edge of English and European affairs but is equally plagued by the Viking threat. The Pictish King is, for example, killed by the Danes in 839. In Ireland, the Danes found Dublin as their premier trading station and power base in 841. All this intense pressure may have had something to do with the increased unity of Scotland: in 844, Kenneth MacAlpin, a Pictish King, began the process of creating the Kingdom of Alba, merging the Picts and the Scots into one proto-nation.

The Southern British may have been horrified as Christian men by events in Northumbria and Iona but they may also have been complacent. That complacency ended in 835 when the Danes began to raid the Kentish coast. The Danish threat to England crystallised in the following year when Egbert of Wessex was defeated by an army made up of the men of 25 Danish ships at the Battle of Carhampton in Somerset, in the very heart of Wessex. The Danes appeared again in 838, this time in alliance with the Cymri of Cornwall, but Egbert (who died in the following year after a long 37 year reign) defeated both at Hingston Down so that the Danes and Cornish were forced to withdraw. Egbert was succeeded by Athelstan, a son, as sub-King of the small Kingdoms (Kent, Sussex, Essex and Middlesex) and by another son, Ethelwulf, as King of Wessex, indicating once again a tendency of the Anglo-Saxons to divide before they unify.

The Danes reappeared in 840, not merely to raid and to leave but to survive through the winter on English soil. The armies are increasing in size as well. In that year, Ealdorman Wulfheard has to beat off 37 shiploads of raiders at Southampton. Another Ealdorman, Aethelhun, has to fight them off at  Portland but is defeated and killed while there is a slaughter of Saxons in the Romney Marshes with the killing of Ealdorman Herebryht in the following year. This force then undertook a programme of murder, rape and plunder along the Kentish, Essex and Lincolnsire coasts throughout 841 and down the Thames estuary in 842, killing many in Rochester and London.  The outcome of this particular set of raids was only resolved (temporarily) with a Saxon defeat (led by Ealdorman Earnulf of Somerset and Ealdorman Osric of Dorset) of a Danish army at the River Parrett in 845. There will be more raids to come but Wessex appeared to have had sufficient resilience to mount a military challenge to the raiders when necessary. Whether it could sustain this costly resistance as the Danish armies grew in size, tactical ability and sheer greed would be the issue that would dominate the ninth century.

757-796: The Age of Offa: What Else Was Happening Before the Vikings

In the previous post we referred to a first abortive attempt to create an English Empire within at least Southern Britain by Offa King of Mercia and suggested that, at the end, he was not the man for the job. As we will see, further 'progress' would be delayed by the eruption of the Viking raiders, bad luck and lack of strong leadership. It may be argued that this delay in creating a viable English State was at the root of one of the salient events of British history - the ease with which the brutal post-Viking Normans were able to occupy and destroy the native English aristocracy without even bothering to absorb them as the Romans had done. But we run ahead of ourselves ... what else was happening around Offa in these years?

Northumbria had turned in on itself as it ceded moral secular authority to Offa. Its great age was well and truly over. King Edbriht became a monk in 758 (we noted earlier in our postings how the Church had created a means of retirement to effect a peaceful transition of power). He is succeeded by his son Osulf but there is no peaceful transition - he is killed within his own household and Aethelwold Moll becomes King in 761. Throughout the next half century, every King of Northumbria (and there are six of them in our period including Aethelwold Moll) is deposed, murdered or exiled with only one returning to the throne only to be murdered in his turn. I suggest we pass over the unedifying details, fascinating though these may be to students of dark deeds and courtly intrigue in a generation being raised on Game of Thrones. One can reasonably assume that the Mercians were dabbling in these murky waters as well as in every other court in England.

Northumbria is not going to be the core of a central English state. Its political weakness may even have been the first encouragement to Viking raids - a back door to the rape of Southern England. There is a certain logic to this loss of impetus for Northumbria. Southern Britain is where the wealth is. That wealth would increase with the development of relatively ordered pre-feudal societies which could trade with Europe and accumulate the capital to invest in further order (we have already seen the economic and political effects of a deterioriation in the relationship between Offa and Charlemagne). The deliberate creation of the Frankish Empire as Roman substitute would have helped shift Britain back to its 'normal' Roman pattern of wealthy province in times of relative peace.

Power would flow from the North to the South. Perhaps even Mercia was not South enough to be the pivot of a viable English nationalism. Perhaps that destiny was always going to be that of Wessex which would underpin a half-viable English State, albeit one ready to be plucked like a ripe apple by European opportunists because of its delayed political development. Whoever was going to create a unified English Nation State, it was not by the end of the Eighth Century going to be Northumbria and the odds were already lengthening on Mercia. The tragedy would be that a European invasion would exploit England's delayed development and impose an alien regime that was neither the fish of native organic State nor the fowl of wealthy Province of a Universal Empire. Perhaps our current post-Imperial Atlantic system, neither organic native State nor centralised European Empire reproduces that weakness today - neither fish nor fowl.

We run ahead of ourselves to note that, in three hundred years, a series of events would impose a bunch of military adventurers and brutal gangsters as an occupying force that was neither native nor universal. Those gangsters, no different other than their superior efficiency than the gangsters who seized Britannia after the departure of the Romans a further three hundred years before Offa, are the lineal ancestors of our current elite albeit thoroughly watered down and democratised over our last 350 years! That same elite, in a rare moment of polemic here, that has given up on the independent nation and yet cannot go for integration into a more logical empire and sits, like the weak English aristocracy of the Eleventh Century on the historical fence waiting for events to happen to it, ducking and diving and crossing its fingers in the hope that the worst will not happen.

Meanwhile, it is a case of business as usual for the petty kingdoms that accepted or were to accept Offa's overlordship or, in the case of Northumbria, were just outside his remit as rex totius Anglorum Patriae. The natural Southern rival of Mercia remained Wessex where Sigebehrt is succeeded by Cynewulf as King in 757. We have noted in the previous posting that Offa was at war with Wessex in 779 and came to some kind of dynastic alliance through the marriage of his daughter to Brihtric in 789. Wessex too, like Northumbria, was subject to internal dissension. Cynewulf is killed in 783 by Cyneheard but is then killed in turn to be succeeded by Brihtric in that same year.

In the minor Kingdoms, Ethelbert of Kent dies in 762 to be succeeded by his son Eardwulf. Kent was may have been particularly problematic for Mercia (the Battle of Otford is noted in 776). We can put this down to Kent's pivotal role in the cross-channel European trade. The wealth of Kent would be vital to any claim to overlordship. The pacification of Europe under the Carolingian Frankish Empire would have increased trade substantially. Kent, a wealthy but essentially small and so weak polity, would have been target for any aggrandising English nation builder. Offa should have offered no exception. Offa was, as we have seen, quite capable of beheading a King of East Anglia (792) for what amounts to temerity although he clearly had to back-track soon enough to keep his alliance with the Church and no doubt internal peace but the power was there in the Mercian State as we shall see. Kent survives Offa only to fall to a successor - a matter for the next posting. Eadbert King of Kent, who will be the target of Mercian ire, comes to the throne only at the very end of our period in 796.

Archbishops also come and go. Cuthbert of Canterbury dies in 760 and is succeeded by Bregowine in 761. Ethelbert of York dies in 780 and is succeeded by Eanbald.  In the same year, there are changes in the Northumbrian Bishoprics - Ealhmund of Hexham dies to be succeeded by Rilberht and Cynewulf of Lindisfarne resigns to be succeeded by Higbald. From now on, we will take these copmings and goings as read, referring only to those Churchmen who make some greater mark on history. By the end of the Eighth Century, the proper relationship between Church and State, of which we have a modern pale reflection in the Established Anglican Church today, had been established and, until the Reformation, would not be disrupted except by pagan raiding and the occasional schism in the Church or irruption of popular protest as heresy.

We should note as a marker event the politically but not theologically contentius Synod at Chelsea in 787 and signs that Offa's position owes not a little to Papal support, the Papacy always tending to encourage centralised secular authority that respects its own claim to a higher spiritual authority.  Offa promoted at his Synod the supply of funds from the English Church to Rome through what later was to become St. Peter's Pence, an institution that survived until the Henrician Reformation but which here signifies (in essence) an annual payment to the Papacy for its endorsement of Offa's divine right to rule so long as he continued to toe the spiritual line.

The Catholic Church was, by now, an effective operation for establishing its own totalitarian position within Early Medieval society - soft power endorsement and a universal network of social control and intelligence operations (albeit with social welfare aspects) offered in return for the elimination of all rival religious structures and a flow of funds to maintain an extensive parallel government, a proto-civil service that buttressed secular power (and could survive the chaos of secular politics much as the British Civil Service does today), moderated its tendencies towards ruthlessness and brutality and (at least in part) protected the general population fromn extremes of exploitation. As a system, it was finely tuned to grow with pacification, centralisation and economic recovery although the seeds of its own eventual destruction lay in the internal contradictions of it supporting ambitious secular kings who, with increased wealth and authority, would chafe at the restraints put on them by a Church that was to become fully secularised as a power in its own right over the subsequent 750 years.

But then everything is in danger of being turned upside down by the Pagan Vikings who are going to dominate our next set of postings. The first raids on the Anglo-Saxon world are recorded in 787 and they are back again in 793 during a period of famine. In this latter raid, the Vikings sack and destroy the Church at Lindisfarne. This first major raid is reported across the nation. The raiders go on in the same year to sack the monastery at Jarrow but suffer a reverse when their fleet breaks up in bad weather and many are drowned, any survivors who struggle ashore being killed by the Northumbrians at Tynemouth. There is another raid on Iona in 795 so we see a pattern of targeting the easy money to be found in church treasures in a smash-and-grab raid within a polity past its prime and unable to organise itself to defend or effect a punishing defeat on what amount to an organised crime operation that strengthens as it accumulates capital from its raids. Northumbrian weakness is the first stage in the creation of a loose gangland empire of initially pagan plunder. We might today wonder whether Western weakness is not enabling a similar accumulation of capital amongst organised criminals leading to similar effects. After all, ISIS has emerged out of smuggling gangs much as the Normans arose out of the raiding Northmen. We shall see.