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May 2002

Parish History Episode 13

DANELAW

Halfdane had been and gone. He had devastated much of the North of England, carried off the population as slaves, killed those who were not worth enslaving, burnt the farmsteads and the towns, driven off the livestock, destroyed the crops in the field, left much of the land a wilderness as if it had never been inhabited. Houghton had the misfortune to have lain in the path of his march, and it had paid the price.

He had eventually settled down at York, the city which he made his capital, and he now sat enthroned within its ruins, while the slaves whom he had gathered up in the course of his long march now toiled on the fertile plains of the Vale of York, growing the food to feed themselves and their masters, and perhaps a bit more, enough to victual the Viking long-boats on their voyages all round the margins of the North Atlantic.

York was once again a pagan city, and its churches lay in ruins. Wulfhere, Archbishop of York, had saved his life by flight, and was dwelling, along with English and Celtic monks, in the abbeys of Otley and Ilkley and Addingham, in Upper Wharfedale. The only other surviving Northumbrian bishop was Eardwulf, the nominal Bishop of Lindisfarne, who had been tramping all over the dales of what are now Southern Scotland and Northern England, along with the “Family of Saint Cuthbert”, the monks who were carrying the coffin of Cuthbert and other relics from one hiding-place to another, in an effort to escape the Vikings.

As mentioned last month, these monks seem to have been accompanied by women, and living in a state indistinguishable from matrimony, and were therefore unlike most other monks before or since. But everywhere in England it seemed much the same. Most of the great monasteries and nunneries lay in ruins, their occupants either fled or slain or carried off as slaves. Cathedrals and parish churches were also, in many areas, completely destroyed. The English priests were, like their lords the thanes, mostly wiped out by the invaders, slaughtered sometimes in flight, sometimes at their posts, the altars of their churches, sometimes when assisting their lords in battle, whether by prayer or by arms - a fate which had often befallen their predecessors, the British priests slaughtered, three or four centuries before, by the invading pagan English. Indeed, it must have looked as if history were repeating itself, and the Island Church was being destroyed a second time.

But before Halfdane had died, in York, about 882, developments were occurring which seemed to suggest that the Church did indeed have a future. For instance, as mentioned in last month’s “Signpost”, the Family of Saint Cuthbert had arrived at Crayke, a village about ten miles from York, and settled down there. But if the monks were fleeing from Halfdane’s power, why on Earth would they wish to approach his power-base so closely ? And again, Halfdane must surely have been aware that Wulfhere, the man who claimed to be the archbishop of the city that he had seized, was still hanging out in the villages of Upper Wharfedale (by no means an impenetrable area), some fifteen or twenty miles away. Was the old murderer mellowing in his old age?

It may be that Halfdane himself never mellowed. But he and his men were settled now on English land, and they needed the labour of English peasants to cultivate that land, and the peasants insisted that, in order to secure bountiful harvests, it was necessary to undertake certain rituals.

It is an old, old story : just as the ancient Hebrews were, after the conquest of the Promised Land, corrupted by the superstitious idolatry of the Canaanites, so, once they had settled down on their fertile farmlands, the simple Vikings began to forget their Lord Woden, and to turn to the acceptance of the Lord Christ, Whom they had previously scorned. (“For the sake of the crops, you know… …and the local yokels insist on these procedures, you know…”).

Halfdane’s successor, Guthred, was, though he personally remained a pagan, to prove himself a great benefactor of the Church. He led an army up into Wharfedale, not to root out the last remnants of organised Christianity up there, but in order to invite Wulfhere to return to York, and to resume his office as Archbishop, under the close scrutiny of the land’s new Danish masters. He had even more ambitious plans for Eardwulf, the last Bishop of Lindisfarne, who had turned up at Crayke in the company of the Family of Saint Cuthbert and various relics associated with that saint. He invited Eardwulf and his monks to return North, and he offered them the ruins of the old Roman city of Congidunum (Chester-le-Street), together with ownership of all the lands between the Tyne and the Wear, between Dere Street and the sea (Dere Street might have meant the present A167, the old Great North Road; or possibly the A68, from Auckland to Corbridge).

This was the origin of what later, in Norman times, was to become the Prince-Bishopric of Durham. Eardwulf was not only to own the land within this immense but thinly-inhabited area, but was also to be responsible for law and order, and for defence against Guthred’s enemies, and was to become in effect the secular ruler of what became known as the Patrimony of Saint Cuthbert.

This region was, after devastation by hordes of heathen Vikings, to be allowed to recover under the patronage of a saint and the leadership of the Church. It was modelled somewhat on the similar Patrimony of Saint Peter, established a century earlier in Central Italy, whereby the Frankish king, Pepin the Short, donated secular authority over that area to the Bishop (Pope) of Rome, thereby establishing a march-land between his own kingdom and the Lombards, Greeks and Saracens who between them had overrun most of Southern Italy.

As the Southern border of the Patrimony of Saint Cuthbert originally ran along the River Wear, the site of Houghton-le-Spring must originally have been excluded from Guthred’s donation. But the Patrimony must have been extended later for, in the early Tenth Century, we read of charters whereby the Bishops of Chester-le-Street make grants of manors in such places as Lumley, Offerton, Silksworth, Ryhope, Burdon, Seaham, Seaton, Dalton, Dawdon, Cold and Monk Hesledon, Easington, Thorpe, Horden, Castle Eden, Shotton, Hutton Henry, Billingham and Sheraton to various thanes.

There seems to be an ominous gap around Houghton - an “H”-shaped gap, we might call it, with such places as Herrington, Houghton, Hetton and Haswell omitted from the charters : these were presumably the districts completely devastated by Halfdane on his terrible march from Tynemouth to York. They were presumably laid completely waste, and of no use to any man.

We might still wish to ask why a heathen king should wish to be so generous as to grant any land to a Christian bishop. Pepin was after all a Christian when he made his donation to the Pope of Rome, and, in addition to possible Heavenly rewards which he might have obtained through his generosity, Pope Stephen II also granted some Papal titles to Pepin, and thereby increased the King’s prestige amongst his own subjects. King Guthred however remained a pagan to his death.

Guthred probably however calculated that, through being generous to the religion which was espoused by the vast majority of his subjects, he would be able to rule better with the consent of his people. He also probably wanted the Bishops of Chester-le-Street to protect his Northern border, along the River Tyne. To the North of the Tyne, in what is now Northumberland, a revived English kingdom had appeared, based on the old capital city of Bamburgh, and led by a warrior called Egbert, and this kingdom was obviously a potential threat to Guthred’s pretensions, and it might be assumed that Egbert would be chary of attacking directly a territory which seemed to be sanctified by close association with Northumbria’s great saint, Cuthbert.

Also, far to the South, another English kingdom had appeared, much stronger than Egbert’s revived Northumbria. This was the Kingdom of Wessex, as re-established by King Alfred, who had, after burning some cakes, emerged from the marshes of Athelney to defeat the Danes at Edington. He had then gone on to make peace with the Danes, granting them Essex, East Anglia, the East Midlands and Yorkshire, which were to form “the Danelaw”, and keeping the Southern counties and the West Midlands for Wessex. This revived Wessex was soon to describe itself as the Kingdom of England, and it would soon expand at the expense of the Danelaw until it stretched to the Scottish border. The future of Houghton would lie within this new England.