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.

924-955: Athelstan, Edmund I and Edred

The next quarter century sees three Kings of Wessex - Athelstan (924-939), son of Edward the Elder, Edmund I (939-946), half-brother to Athelstan and Edred (946-955), his brother. The Welsh, Scottish and Danish sub-kings' oaths of allegiance to Edward the Elder were renewed in 926, indicating that England was now well established as the overlord of Great Britain. It is already getting close to the imperial multicultural model that is central to the later United Kingdom.

In the following year, England's northern frontier is established at the River Tees with direct rule by the English King over the Danes of York. Clearly the sub-kings are not entirely happy with the overlordship arrangements. Two subordinated kingdoms (the Scots and Strathclyde), directly invaded by the English, combined with the Danes who had founded Dublin to challenge Athelstan only to be defeated at the important battle of Brunanburh in 937.

Overlordship is converting steadily into effective control of the island by the English. There is a Danish rebellion in Mercia and Northumbria in 945 when Edmund works with rather than against the Scots. Edmund, however, is murdered by an outlaw, Leofa, in own hall (Pucklechurch, Gloucerstershire) indicating that this remains a rough and ready and, in some respects, barely civilised society.

Edred continues to be troubled by the Danes. York fell to Eric Bloodaxe in 947. Bloodaxe makes himself King of York before being driven out in 848. Bloodaxe's successor, Anlaf Sihtricson, is then ousted by Bloodaxe in 952. Edred's response is to invade York and Northumbria, driving Bloodaxe out in 954 towards the Solway Forth. Bloodaxe is ambushed and killed in the Stainmore Pass in the Pennines. It is probably from this date that we can start to say that England is unified within the frontiers that we broadly know today.

900-924: Edward the Elder & the Creation of England

Alfred the Great is succeeded by Edward (only called the Elder to distinguish him from a later King Edward) in 900, reigning until 924.  The first quarter of the tenth century is defined by the roll back of the Danes, the creation of a viable idea of England as island-wide and by what amounts to the progressive sanctification and 'orientalisation' by the Church of the Monarchy, seated in a national capital at Winchester.

The first test of the treaties made under Alfred was an attempt by the men of Kent in 902 to oust the Danes from East Anglia which failed, although the Danish ruler of the East Anglians, Eric, was killed at the Battle of the Holme. However, the Anglo-Saxons are now stronger and better organised than the Danes. The reconquest of the Danelaw starts in earnest from 910. The warrior princess Aethelflaed, Edward's sister and wife of the Ealdorman of Mercia, Aethelred, was no shrinking violet but took on the role of 'Lady of the Mercians' when her husband was killed in 911. She not only ruled her husband's domains but expanded them, seizing Derby in 917 and ruling until 920. Thanks to her and the Mercians' efforts, the Northern frontier of England was extended to the Dee-Wash line.

Meanwhile, Edward reconquered East Anglia and the rest of Southen England under Danish independent control in 918 and accepted the submission of the Welsh Kings of Dyfed and Gwynedd. By 919 the Viking Kingdom of Jorvik (York) under its new ruler Ragnald had also acknowledged the overlordship of Edward. By 920 Edward ruled as overlord all Southern Britain as far as the Forth-Clyde line, uniting the area (at least notionally) for the first time since the Romans. In 923 Edward even received the submission of the King of the Scots.  Alfred the Great is rightly regarded as 'Great' for having saved England existentially but the making of England as a sovereign entity that was more than just a large Wessex may be put down to his now less well known successor.

As for the sanctification process which helped to link the fortunes of the Anglo-Saxons as a people to their Kings as divinely sanctioned, this is exemplified  by the transfer of the claimed body of King Edmund of East Anglia (murdered in 870 by the Danes) to be buried with full rites at Beodricsworth (later Bury St. Edmunds).