Alex Woolf writes:
English history before the
Norman Conquest of 1066 has something of the flavour of a back-story. Like
those early parts of a Harry Potter novel that occur before Harry returns to
Hogwarts, it is necessary for understanding what follows but it is not really
part of the story. English kings are only numbered from the Conquest (though
this is a strange coincidence, the first king to be numbered thus was Edward
III) and the proverbial assertion of
ancestral antiquity is that one’s forebears ‘came over with the
conqueror’. Before this comes the Anglo-Saxon period which is a curious
in-between time, traditionally known as the Dark Ages, that separates the Roman
period from the Middle Ages proper. Over the last generation or so there has
been a concerted effort by scholars working in the field to bring it in from
the dark and terms such as Late Antiquity, covering the period up to about 650,
and the Early Middle Ages, more vaguely defined, have gained wider currency. Beyond
the core of specialists, however, even amongst other academic historians,
surprise is still sometimes expressed that we who work on the period before the
middle of the eleventh century regard ourselves as medievalists; the Middle
Ages, surely, was a world of knights in armour, castles, cathedrals and
crusades?
While the Norman Conquest
has always provided an easy hook upon which to hang the changes of the eleventh
century in England, these changes were not confined to one country alone but
affected all of western Europe to a greater or lesser degree. The Feudal
Revolution, which saw serfdom replace slavery and the rise of manorial estates,
provided the economic basis for a greater degree of professional specialisation
reflected in the rebirth of towns and the appearance of merchants and craftsmen
who had their own households quite distinct from the farming communities where
the bulk of the population still lived. Historians debate how rapid these
changes were. One school, led by French scholars such as Georges Duby, Pierre
Bonnassie and Guy Bois, speak of la
mutation de l’an mil, arguing that the change was rapid, occurring within a
generation in each part of Europe it reached. Perhaps this reflects the French
tradition of revolution? Others, including most Anglophone historians, imagine
a more gradual almost imperceptible transformation taking place over, perhaps,
as much as two hundred years. Again, this may reflect our recent experience of
constitutional change. The world before the Feudal Revolution was a world of
lords and peasants. Most land was held by free farmers who owned riding-horses
and weapons and who supplemented the labour of their families with that of
slaves. Serfdom existed but was largely confined to the greatest estates, in
most areas only those belonging to the King or the Church. Elsewhere in the
land lords wanted not rents and renders from their men, for there were as yet
no towns and few opportunities to spend surplus income, but their support in
legal and military activities. They had no need for craven and malnourished
subjects they could rackrent, but for men who would ride with them to court and
battle.
One of the by-products of
the Feudal Revolution, when it came, was an explosion in the production of
texts. Initially an education that included reading and writing was still
largely provided by the Church and most writers were in Holy Orders of some
sort but the increasingly complex economic world with which the clergy were now
engaged led to a much greater degree of integration with secular society. Secular
interests thus began to impact more on literary production. Complex theology
continued to attract much attention from some writers but others produced works
on history, administration and even texts written largely for entertainment. One
of the new genres which took off in the course of eleventh and twelfth century
was the secular biography. Prior to this the vast majority of lives were written as hagiographical
exercises to promote the cult of a man or woman considered to be a saint. In
the eleventh century several German kings and William the Conqueror were the
subjects of such secular biographies and in the early years of the twelfth
century we see lives appearing for Louis VI of France and Roderigo de Vivar, El
Cid, amongst others. In the same period the terse annalistic chronicles of the
earlier period which recount little more than the deaths of kings and prelates
and the occasional battle (sometimes without even giving the result) are
replaced by complex reflective histories in which the authors are not afraid to
voice their scepticism for some of their source material.
This transformation of the
textual record is, to a great extent, what separates the Dark Ages from the
later period. The paucity and terseness of the earlier source material makes it
very difficult to get a sense of distinct personalities or indeed the balance
of individual contribution as against Zeitgeist in historical process. The
decline of the ‘Dark Ages’ as a paradigm in modern scholarship largely reflects
the shift away from ascribing historical change to individual agents and
instead to focussing on underlying tensions in society and long term process. So
long as one eschews interest in the contribution of individuals in anything
other than theological debate then one can shed light on the Early Middle
Ages. Sarah Foot, the Regius Professor
of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford, has thus set herself a
Herculean task in attempting to write a 250 page biography of an Anglo-Saxon
king whose fifteen-year reign is recounted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, our best narrative source for the period, in
only 84 lines of the printed edition, 73 of which comprise a single poem
dealing with a battle which lasted a single day. At the outset Foot describes Æthelstan, the First King of England as
‘a biographical treatment’ ‘rather than an examination of Æthelstan’s life in
the context of his times’ (p.3). There
can be no doubt that Foot’s subject, Æethelstan, who reigned from 924 until 939,
is a worthy one. It is common now to identify him as ‘the grandson of Alfred
the Great’ but for much of the middle ages he was at least as well regarded,
perhaps even more highly, than his grandfather who attained his title of ‘the
Great’ only in the thirteenth century. Alfred has benefitted since the late
sixteenth century from the rediscovery and wide dissemination of a contemporary
life written at his court while he still lived, by Asser, the Welsh Bishop of
Sherborne. Asser’s Life of Alfred is
unique as a secular biography from England before the mid-eleventh century and
seems to have been inspired by, and to some extent modelled upon, one of its
few rivals from the whole of Europe, Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, written some seventy years earlier.
Anglo-Saxonists have long been aware that but for Asser’s book Æthelstan,
rather than his grandfather, might well have been the stand out pre-Conquest
king. While Alfred’s direct rule never penetrated far north of the Thames,
Æthelstan extended his realm as far as the Firth of Forth in 927, becoming the
first King to rule all the English.
