[411 - 1066] The Forging of England

The year is 411. The last Roman legions have departed Britannia, their eagle standards vanishing over the horizon, never to return. They leave behind a land of fading grandeur: weed-choked roads, silent villas, and fortified towns inhabited by a Romano-British people who have forgotten how to fight for themselves. Into this vacuum, this ghost of a province, new forces are stirring across the grey waters of the North Sea. From the marshlands and forests of northern Germany and Denmark come the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. They are not conquerors in the Roman style, with organized legions and grand strategies. They arrive in long, open boats, perhaps only a few dozen warriors at a time, their thirst for land and plunder insatiable. The British chieftain Vortigern, the story goes, hired some of these Saxon warriors, led by the brothers Hengist and Horsa, as mercenaries to defend against northern raiders. It was a fatal miscalculation. The mercenaries saw a land rich for the taking and turned on their employers, opening the floodgates for a migration that would last for generations. For two centuries, the island bled. This was not a single, decisive war but a chaotic, creeping conquest. Kingdoms rose and fell in a heartbeat. The native Britons were slaughtered, enslaved, or driven west into the rugged mountains of Wales and the distant peninsula of Cornwall. In their place, a patchwork of new, brutal, and vibrant Germanic kingdoms emerged, a period later known as the Heptarchy. To the north, Northumbria, a kingdom of windswept coasts and scholarly monasteries. In the heartland, Mercia, powerful and aggressive, its kings often holding sway over their neighbours. In the south-east, Kent, Essex, and Sussex, and in the south-west, the kingdom that would ultimately endure: Wessex, the land of the West Saxons. Life in this Anglo-Saxon world was harsh, short, and governed by the sword. Society was a rigid pyramid. At the top was the *cyning*, the king, a warlord whose right to rule depended on his ability to win battles and reward his followers. Below him were the *thegns*, a warrior aristocracy bound to the king by oaths of loyalty. They were his war-band, his companions in the great mead-hall. This hall, a long, smoky timber building, was the heart of the kingdom. Here, warmed by a central fire, the king would dispense treasure—rings, arm-bands, and weapons taken in battle—while a poet, a *scop*, chanted tales of heroes and monsters, of courage and doom. Below the thegns were the *ceorls*, the free peasants who worked the land, and at the very bottom were the *thralls*, slaves who were little more than property. Justice was a raw, personal affair. If a man was killed, his family was entitled to a *wergild*, or ‘man-price’, a sum of money paid by the killer to prevent a blood-feud. The price varied by rank; a thegn’s life was worth 1,200 shillings, a ceorl’s just 200. Then, on a summer’s day in 793, a new terror appeared from the sea. Long, shallow-drafted ships, their prows carved into the snarling heads of dragons, slid onto the beach of the holy island of Lindisfarne. From them poured Norsemen—Vikings. They were not seeking land, not at first. They sought portable wealth. They ransacked the monastery, butchering the unarmed monks and sailing away with its golden chalices and jeweled gospels. This was just the beginning. For decades, these raids terrorized the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. But in 865, the nature of the threat changed. A ‘Great Heathen Army’, a force numbering in the thousands, landed in East Anglia. This was an army of conquest. One by one, the old kingdoms fell. Northumbria was conquered. East Anglia’s king, Edmund, was tied to a tree and shot full of arrows. Mercia was partitioned. By 878, only one kingdom remained: Wessex, led by a young king who was now a fugitive in his own land. His name was Alfred. Driven from his throne, he hid in the marshy wetlands of Somerset, a king with no kingdom. Legend tells of him taking refuge in a peasant woman’s hut, where he was scolded for letting her cakes burn, his mind preoccupied with the ruin of his people. But Alfred was a man of extraordinary resilience and vision. From the marshes, he gathered his scattered forces. He emerged to confront the Viking army at the Battle of Edington and won a decisive, shattering victory. Alfred did not, and could not, drive the Vikings from England entirely. Instead, he forced a treaty that divided the country. The north and east became the ‘Danelaw’, where Norse law and customs prevailed. The south and west remained under Alfred’s control. But Alfred did more than just survive. He knew the Vikings would return, so he began a radical program of reform. He created a network of fortified towns, or *burhs*, no more than 20 miles apart, ensuring that no farm was more than a day’s march from safety. He built a navy of larger, faster ships to meet the raiders at sea. And, believing their defeat was a punishment from God for their ignorance, he began a revival of learning, translating great works from Latin into Old English so his people could read them. Alfred saved Wessex, but his dream was larger. He was the first to see himself not just as King of the West Saxons, but as a king of all the English-speaking people. It was a vision his children and grandchildren would realize. His son, Edward the Elder, and his formidable daughter, Æthelflæd, the ‘Lady of the Mercians’, fought back against the Danelaw, recapturing land and building new burhs. It was Alfred’s grandson, Æthelstan, who would finish the job. In 937, at a lost location called Brunanburh, Æthelstan led a combined army of West Saxons and Mercians against a grand alliance of Vikings, Scots, and Britons. The battle was a bloodbath that raged all day, a ‘slaughter-field’ celebrated in poetry. Æthelstan’s victory was absolute. For the first time, the entire territory we now call England was united under a single king. He was no longer a king of Wessex; he was Rex Anglorum—King of the English. The century that followed saw this new kingdom of England flourish, but it was never truly secure. The Viking threat had not vanished, it had merely changed. Under the disastrous reign of Æthelred the Unready, new waves of attacks forced the English to pay a humiliating tax, the *Danegeld*, to buy off the invaders. It was a short-term solution that only encouraged them to return for more. The crisis culminated in the conquest of England by the Danish king Cnut the Great in 1016, who forged a vast North Sea Empire of England, Denmark, and Norway. Yet Cnut ruled as an English king, respecting the laws and customs established by Alfred’s dynasty. After Cnut’s empire fell apart, the old line of Wessex was restored in 1042 with Edward the Confessor. Pious and scholarly, Edward lacked a clear heir. His long, peaceful reign was overshadowed by the question of who would succeed him. Three men believed they had a claim. In England, there was Harold Godwinson, the powerful Earl of Wessex, the richest man in the kingdom and Edward’s right-hand man. Across the North Sea, there was Harald Hardrada, the ferocious King of Norway, a battle-hardened warrior who believed his claim was linked to Cnut’s old empire. And across the Channel, there was William, the ambitious and ruthless Duke of Normandy, who claimed King Edward had once promised him the throne. In the cold January of 1066, the old king died. The council of wise men, the Witan, immediately proclaimed Harold Godwinson as king. But in Norway and Normandy, two invaders began to gather their armies. The long, bloody forging of England was not over. A new, decisive fire was coming.