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June 2002

Parish History Episode 14

THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND

Last month’s article ended with mention of the survival of Alfred’s Kingdom of Wessex, in the far South of England. It was this kingdom, of all the Dark Age realms of Britain, which was to be ultimately successful, and to weld all of England, later all of the British Isles, into one United Kingdom. This Alfred, no Northumbrian king, is to be seen represented in the glass of the great window at the East end of our church.

It was through Alfred’s enterprise and courage that Wessex survived the Viking onslaught. But it was Alfred’s son, Edward “the Elder” (899-924), and his grandson, Athelstan (924-939), who were to conquer the Danish kingdoms in Eng-land, and to bring about the first United Kingdom of all the English. While Edward had established a kingdom of all the lands bounded by the Humber, the Mersey, Offa’s Dyke, and the Tamar, Athelstan styled himself, not King of Wessex, but King of All the English, and went on, to attempt the conquest of the whole island.

He first conquered Cornwall, and made it forever a part of England. He then invaded Wales, and defeated a coalition of the Welsh kings, who were forced to acknowledge him as Mechteyrn, which Athelstan thought meant Emperor of Britain, though the Welsh obviously saw it as meaning a great deal less. Athelstan then went on to conquer the Danish Kingdom of York, and, beyond the Tyne, the revived (English) Kingdom of Northumberland.

Athelstan then invaded Cumbria, thus coming close to uniting everything that is now England under his rule. However, the Kings of Strathclyde and of Scotland came to the aid of the King of the Cumbrians, and Athelstan decided to make peace with these three enemies. They agreed to recognise his conquests of Cornwall, York and Northumberland, and his overlordship of Wales.

The Northern kings, however, resented the pretensions of Athelstan and prepared to strike again. Athelstan marched North as far as the River Wear, and began to prepare for war. While camped somewhere along the Wear, he visited the new cathedral city of Chester-le-Street, where the Family of Saint Cuthbert had re-established themselves after many adventures. Athelstan entered the cathedral church (the site of which is unknown, but it’s foundations probably lie beneath the floor of the present parish church), and gave rich presents to the monks (some of these presents are still to be seen in the Treasury or the Monks’ Dormitory of Durham Cathedral), and his presentation of these gifts was recorded by an artist, and the painting is preserved to-day, bound up with manuscripts about the life of Saint Cuthbert, in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It is by far the earliest contemporary portrait we have of any English king.

Athelstan went on to invade Scotland, and won some victories there, before returning to Wessex, and being given a second coronation, at Cirencester Abbey, not as an English cyng, or a Welsh mechteyrn, but as Emperor of Britain (using the Greek word basileus, the title of the Byzantine emperors). All the Welsh kings and the kings of North Britain were invited to the Coronation, but they seem to have spent much of their time in Cirencester discussing how to get rid of Athelstan. They invited various Viking kings, from Ireland and elsewhere, to come to their assistance, and in 937 all these kings made their combined assault on England. Once again Athelstan defeated his enemies, and strengthened his position as Basileus.

It was not however, really a very united England that he ruled. It might have been thought that he would have been acclaimed a great liberator by the Northumbrians, the man who had freed them from Danish rule. But this was not the case. The Northumbrians seem to have seen the Saxons of Wessex as being even more alien than the Danes, and quickly came to resent Saxon rule, despite the gifts that Athelstan lavished on the Family of Saint Cuthbert at Chester-le-Street.

Horrible as the start of Danish rule had been, the Northumbrians do seem to have appreciated a certain rough and ready democracy which soon began to evolve wherever the Vikings settled down, a development which would lead to the House of Keys on the Isle of Man, and the Althing in Iceland. Viking society may have been marginally more bloody than English or Celtic society, but it was a lot less aristocratic, and some men had come to accept and even benefit from the rude equalities of Viking life.

At any rate, Athelstan was hardly in his coffin, but civil wars began to erupt in England, and the Welsh and the Scots broke away from English suzerainty, and only Cornwall seemed to remain of Athelstan’s conquests. Then the men of York (or more precisely the Archbishop of York, who seems to have resented the pretensions of the Archbishop of Canterbury to be Primate of All England) invited a bloodthirsty Viking pirate by the name of Eric Bloodaxe to be their King, and Eric willingly obliged. His reign at York was mercifully brief - 948 to 954 at the most, but it was frequently interrupted when other pirates seized York for short periods - but it was disastrous, and eventually the Northumbrians felt that even the Saxons were better, and Athelstan’s successor, King Edred, was invited to come North and eliminate Eric. This was achieved in 954, and once again all the English were united under the Dynasty of Wessex. Eric had been so incompetent and so evil that his death was not lamented by his subjects at the time.

But later some Northumbrians began to look back to the days of Eric Bloodaxe as a sort of golden age. Some two centuries after Eric’s death, Symeon of Durham wrote regretfully, “Thus perished the last King of Northumbria; and ever since then, the folk of the North have been lamenting their lost liberty !”

But a White Paper has just been published by Tony Blair’s government, which suggests that next year (2003), a referendum may be held in the North to see if the folk want their lost liberty back again. I hope we don’t vote for Eric Bloodaxe. That would discredit the experiment.