Читать книгу The Spirit of London - Boris Johnson - Страница 10
ОглавлениеHe restored London and suffers from being a dead white male
It was only a hundred years ago that Britain could claim to be the greatest power on Earth. Royal Navy Dreadnoughts roamed the seas. Statues were raised in honour of the founder of the Navy, an axe-wielding, cross-gartered fellow with a flowing beard and deep-set eyes beneath a kind of Santa Claus hat.
Every child in England knew his name, and at one festival in his honour Lord Rosebery made a speech in which, among other superlative compliments, he hailed Alfred as ‘the ideal Englishman, the perfect sovereign, the pioneer of England’s greatness.’ E A Freeman, the Whig historian, later called him ‘the most perfect character in history.’
Alfred has not only a claim to be the father of the navy, and therefore of Empire and the entire supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon world – still just about alive at the beginning of the twenty-first century – but he also revived learning in a benighted land, he beat off a sadistic pagan enemy, he united his country and will go down as a man who saved London from oblivion.
And yet today Alfred is almost ludicrously unfashionable. His images are being lost or covered up; his statue in Wantage is regularly vandalised. Children are taught nothing about him: it is as if we are determined to send him back to the Dark Ages from which he rescued us.
In so far as we have relics of Saxon London before Alfred, they are dispiriting stuff. There are broken-toothed combs carved from the shoulder bones of sheep. There are pewter baubles you might expect to find at Camden Lock Market, except not so good.
There is the splotchy-glazed primary school pottery, and when you sit in one of the conjectural wooden dwellings in the Museum of London you have the impression of hippy squalor. There is no brick, no stone, no frescoes, no mosaic and certainly no public sanitation of a kind the Romans had used.
Perhaps some Anglo-Saxon historians will insist that we are talking of a golden age – but you have only to squat in that reconstructed hut to smell the smoke in your matted hair and the aromas of the pigs, and soon you feel a Dark Age dankness seeping up your ankles, to be followed by the chilblains and the pustules and an overall life expectancy of thirty-two.
The population had fallen cataclysmically since the days of Hadrian – to perhaps a few thousand. Londoners owed a distant allegiance to Essex or to Offa, the brutish and illiterate king of Mercia. They had moved out of the old Roman city, apparently because of some superstitious dread of the ruins.
Still, it seems there was something to be said for Lundenwic, the area they settled around the Strand and Aldwych. We have found pots that show there was busy trade with Merovingian Europe. In the 1980s, excavations around Covent Garden found a street with about sixty houses in it.
In the words of the Venerable Bede, London was still ‘a mart of many nations resorting to it by land and sea’. In spite of its decline, London at the beginning of the ninth century was still probably the richest and most important place in the country – in a not very hotly contested field. Things were about to get a good deal worse.
There is a sense in which you could say that the Anglo-Saxons had it coming. They were, after all, predators themselves. They were Germans, blond-haired toughs from the plain between the Elbe and the Weser, and they had behaved so aggressively towards the existing population – killing them and kicking them out wherever they could – that the Byzantine historian Procopius got the impression that Britain was actually two countries: a place called Brettania, opposite Spain, and Brettia, a more Germanic place opposite the mouth of the Rhine.
Even during the reign of Alfred the Saxons continued to persecute the Romano–Celtic Britons, driving them west to Wales and Cornwall. Alfred’s maternal grandfather was a royal butler called Oslac, and it was one of Oslac’s boasts that his family had killed all the British they could find in the Isle of Wight.
The Saxons had been merchants of genocide, and in the years before Alfred was born they got their comeuppance. Some say the raiders were driven by a population boom in Denmark, where the habit of polygamy had produced many younger sons of second wives, all casting envious eyes on the sheepfolds of England. Whatever the reasons, the Vikings came to Britain, sailing up the rivers in their sneaky, flat-bottomed craft and disembarking with hideous ululations.
Captured Saxon kings suffered the rite of the ‘blood eagle’, which in its milder version meant carving an eagle on the back; but which properly involved hacking the back ribs from the vertebrae of the still living victim, reaching into the thorax and pulling out the lungs, draping them artistically over the spread ribs so as to form ‘the wings of an eagle’.
They conducted other forms of human sacrifice. They sacked churches because a church, to them, was just another building, if one more likely to contain gold. The desperate kings of Wessex and Mercia tried to bribe them to go away. The Vikings took the gold and swore dreadful oaths that they would go – and ratted on the deal. In 842 it seems from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that there was a raid on London, ‘with a great slaughter’; but the real disaster took place in 851.
A fleet of 350 ships under Rorik sailed up the mouth of the Thames. First they stormed Canterbury. Then they sailed further on, landed on the north bank of the Thames – and Lundenwic was sacked. The women were raped. The men were killed. The blood flowed in rivulets into the Thames.
The man who would one day avenge this disaster was then only three or four. He was growing up in a huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ and prayin’ environment on the estates of royal Wessex. He was the son of Aethelwulf, the son of Egbert, the son of Eahlmund, the son of Eafa, the son of Eoppa, the son of Ingild – in other words, he was a proper Saxon toff.
The only trouble was that his parents had already had four sons – Aethelstan, Aethelbald, Aethelbehrt, Aethelred – and a daughter, called, you guessed it, Aethelswith. Alfred began with the advantage of the snappier name (it seems to mean something like elf-wisdom).
His biographer – a sycophantic monk called Asser – tells us that the young child beat his elder siblings in a poetry-memorising contest. One can imagine the disgust of all the older Aethelkiddies at the sight of this golden-haired Little Lord Fauntleroy, prattling away in front of his beaming mother.
Even more important in his development, Alfred was singled out by father Aethelwulf for a treat. Aethelwulf was in theory a descendant of Woden, lord of the pagan gods, but he was a devout Christian, so God-fearing that shortly after the Battle of Ockley (or Aclea) in 852, he did a most peculiar thing. The Vikings were still circling England – the threat had not gone away – and yet he decided to take the five-year-old child across the sea and over the mountains on a pilgrimage to Rome.
Pope Leo IV welcomed the bearded Saxon in St Peter’s basilica, and while flunkeys discreetly relieved the King of Wessex of his tribute – a four-pound gold crown, an ornamental sword and a purple-dyed tunic embossed with golden keys – the Pope came up with a fitting compliment for his visitor. Aethelwulf was created a consul. The highest office of the Roman republic, which poor old Cicero had flogged his guts out to achieve, was handed out like buttons to this obscure Germanic chieftain; and little Alfred was made the Pope’s godson.
With treatment like that, it is no surprise that the Rome experience seems slightly to have gone to Aethelwulf’s head. Father and son stayed for a whole year, living in the Schola Saxonum – a huddle of Saxon-style huts up against St Peter’s, designed for the use of religious tourists from England – and spending yet more of his country’s cash on doing up Roman churches. Two years later, when Alfred was seven, they came again, on a second pilgrimage.
Not so long ago I took my daughter to Rome, and we walked around the Colosseum, which now appears pretty much as it must have done in Alfred’s time. I looked up at the rain coming down like silver darts past its sooty arches, and thought how much vaster and madder it is than it appears in the photos. Imagine the impact of those buildings on his young mind – the scale of the Roman architecture. The whole of Saxon Southampton – the biggest commercial centre outside London – could have fitted comfortably into the baths of Caracalla.
Of course, much of Rome was as ruined as Roman London. But the impressive thing about little Alfie’s godfather, Pope Leo, was that he was determined to erect Christian structures to rival the pagan relics. He built massive walls around the Vatican and what had once been the Mausoleum of Hadrian, now the Castel’ Sant’Angelo. At the age when a child is most impressionable, Alfred the Great saw the remaking of a city, and understood something that had been all but forgotten in England – the idea of the city itself.
It was an idea the Vikings rejected with violence. They weren’t interested in cities; they were interested in burning them.
In 860 they sacked Winchester, the capital of Wessex, and Alfred came to manhood engaged in an almost continuous struggle with the heathen. His father had died in 858, and one by one his older brothers now proceeded to die, none of them reaching the age of thirty. In 871 a twenty-three-year-old Alfred took the crown in wretched circumstances. The Vikings were out of control, and in 872 part of the Great Heathen Army decided to reoccupy the desolation of London, raping and pillaging anyone who happened still to be knocking around. It looks as if the Viking chief Halfdene even had a coin minted in London, just to show who was boss.
Alfred was driven to paying the Danegeld (not in itself a disgraceful strategy; it is still used, with mixed results, against the Taleban), and found himself eventually harried into the wilds of the Somerset marshes, a fugitive in his own country. There it was that he burned the cakes in the peasant woman’s hearth, and in the words of 1066 And All That, became Alfred the Grate. There too, legend has it, he and a servant disguised themselves in order to spy on the Danish camp.
To a degree that is almost embarrassing to modern taste, he had a Victorian public school spirit, a muscular Christianity, a fervent belief not just in God but that the mind can be trained to overcome the infirmities of the body. As he came of age he was perturbed by his sexual urges, and actually prayed for a disease that would distract him. The Almighty rewarded him with piles so sizeable that after a particularly agonising hunting trip in Cornwall he stopped at a monastery and prayed for another disease.
He then fell victim to a mysterious abdominal pain that afflicted him for the rest of his life, and which has been identified with Crohn’s disease. Later on, when Alfred thought of himself as a G20-style world leader, he wrote to Patriarch Elias of Jerusalem inviting that learned authority to advise him on his intestinal grief. Elias sent back a disgusting series of remedies, including scammony for constipation, gutamon for stitch, spikenard for diarrhoea, tragacanth for corrupt phlegms, petroleum to drink alone for inward tenderness and the ‘white stone’ for all unknown afflictions.
It is not clear if or when Alfred really started to drink petroleum to cure his aching stomach, but most modern doctors agree that if he could survive the Patriarch’s medicine, he could probably survive anything. Overmastering his innards, and perhaps with the fumes of four-star already shooting from his rear end, Alfred came roaring out of those marshes. He forged the Saxons into a ‘fyrd’, or standing army, organising a rota system so that each man would have time to go back to his fields. He changed the whole defensive approach, converting about thirty towns into fortified double-ringed ‘burhs’. In 878 the Saxons clashed decisively with the Danes at Edington.
The armies closed like hoplites, first throwing their spears – between 1.8 and 2.4 metres long. Then it was a grunting, heaving affair of shield-boss against shield-boss; and if you look at the surviving Saxon stabbing swords – slender, evil-looking seaxes and scaramaxes – you can see why the Vikings did not like being at the sharp end. Gudrum the Viking was vanquished, and agreed, rather half-heartedly, to be baptised, with Alfred standing as his proud godfather.
Edington was the turning-point, the moment the Viking threat began to wane. But still the brutes would not entirely go away. In 882 it seems they raided London again, though who or what they were raiding is not clear. Perhaps the sad truth is that the settlement was so beaten up that there was no government to speak of – and yet London remained strategically crucial. It was still at the centre of the web of Roman roads, and if Alfred was to stop the Vikings moving around east and south east England, the simplest thing was to gain control of the crossroads.
In 886 he ‘gesette’ London, says The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He besieged it, or he occupied it, and at any rate there was another conflagration (of whatever dwellings the Vikings had constructed) and a considerable loss of Danish life. A famous hoard of coins, found at Croydon, seems to indicate that now it was the turn of the Vikings to bury their goods and scram. Once he was in possession of the ancient Roman capital, Alfred was able to do as his godfather Leo had done in Rome. All those ideas he had absorbed, as a child-pilgrim, came pouring forth, and in the words of Asser, ‘he restored the city splendidly and made it habitable again.’
He wanted a city with history, and like so many rulers before and since he was filled with the Dream of Rome, the Charlemagne-style desire to assert his own credentials as the heir to the great Roman Christian culture that had once ruled Europe; and so he decreed that the Saxons would overcome their Romano-phobia and move back inside the vast, mouldering pink-and-white walls.
From Cheapside down to the river he took a chunk of the old city, about 300 metres wide and 1000 metres long. He created a grid pattern of streets, still visible at Garlick Hill, Bread Street, Bow Lane and other places. Lundenwic was over, and Lundenburg was born. The old city became the new city, and the new city became the old city – as the name Aldwych (old market) reminds us.
New old London had two ports, at Billingsgate and Queenhithe, and trade began to flourish in the reconstructed wharves. We have turned up Norwegian ragstone hones and querns from Niedermendig in Germany. We have coins from Belgium, Normandy and Scotland, showing that London was recovering its identity as a multinational, multilingual kind of place.
Alfred created the framework for 150 years of stability and growth. Even more important than the physical reconstruction, Alfred’s London embodied a huge new political fact. He put the city in the charge of a Mercian, Ealdorman Aethelred (whose name is supposed to survive in Aldermanbury), and London became the fulcrum and symbol of a new unity between Wessex and Mercia; and Alfred, himself married to a Mercian princess Eahlswith, was no longer just king of Wessex.
He came up with a new title. He was rex Anglosaxonum – king of the Anglo-Saxons, and he referred to his language as Englisc. When he died in 899, full of wealth and honour, he was described as ‘cyng ofer eall Ongelcynn’ – King over all the English – and you can see the modern world’s master-language struggling to emerge from that phrase, like the semi-human features of an Australopithecus.
Alfred left 2,000 pounds of silver in his will, an astonishing sum for the age, and perhaps a sign that the Anglo-Saxons had learned to profit from the defeat of the Vikings and the clearing of the seaways. He also goes down as one of the greatest educators this country has ever had, who used the spread of literacy and Christianity as a weapon against the illiterate Danes.
Alfred was a scholar, who personally translated Augustine, Boethius and the psalms into his own language. He was a law-giver and theorist of government, with his own Domboc of dooms. His Churchillian energy and self-confidence inspired him to redesign the very boats his sailors were using.
There may be some cynical modern historians who will tell you that Alfred’s boats were not much cop, turning out to be rather heavy and sluggish. But he can claim to be the direct creator of an Anglo-Saxon naval supremacy that still exists, somewhat to the irritation of Beijing, in the furthest reaches of the Pacific Ocean.
He invented his own special Alfred clock – so that he could give up precisely half his hours to worshipping the Lord and half to earthly matters. After a great deal of experiment, he ordered his chaplains to gather together blobs of wax equivalent to the weight of seventy-two pennies. This block of wax was then to be divided into six very thin candles, each of them twelve inches long. Alfred had somehow worked out that each candle would burn for exactly four hours, and his plan was to have a permanent supply and burn them continuously, day and night, so that he could mark the exact passage of time.
Alas, the various tents and churches he occupied were so breezy that he found it very hard to keep his Alfred-o-meter going. Hmm, said Alfred, stroking his beard. We need something that lets the light through and keeps the wind off …
So he ordered his carpenters to make a wood-framed box, with side panels of horn so thin as to be translucent – and lo! The King had invented the lantern!
As it happens, modern scholars have struggled to replicate his candle-powered clock. They claim a thin twelve-inch candle burns out much sooner than four hours. That feels like pedantry. This was a man who not only beat back the Vikings and united his country; ships, clocks, lanterns – he had a string of major patents to his name.
So what has happened to us all, that we forget this soldier-scholar-polymath and saviour of his country? There is one statue in the Strand, near the Law Courts, which rightly commemorates his legal contributions – but absolutely nothing to remind Londoners of what he did for the city.
There used to be a plaque at his port of Queenhithe, until it got ‘lost’ by developers, and was only restored at the insistence of the excellent John Clark, lately of the Museum of London. ‘One almost suspects damnatio memoriae,’ says Mr Clark, ‘or collective amnesia.’
Part of the answer may be that Alfred left no obvious physical legacy, no London touchstone. Those Saxon palaces, those churches – not a brick or post of them survives. But we must also face the sad fact that he is in many ways so deeply uncool. There is something about his exhausting Christian virtue, his colossal energy and self-denial, that was probably more appealing to the Victorians than it is to us.
We modern sensualists are puzzled that a man should pray for piles to cure his sexual feelings. ‘Even as the bee must die when she stings in her anger, so must every soul perish after unlawful lust,’ wrote Alfred lugubriously, in an embellishment of his Boethius translation.
Novelists and Hollywood have struggled in vain to inject some sexual zing into his character. We must also accept that for much of the past century he was slightly too Teutonic to be a completely successful national hero. It was perfectly fine, in Queen Victoria’s time, to note the strong connexions between the early English and the Germans. She was married to a German herself. After two world wars, the association had become less popular.
These days, I am afraid, he suffers not so much from being Germanic, but from being history’s ultimate Anglo-Saxon. At the University of Alfred in Alfred, New York, the faculty decided in the 1990s that they would commission a statue of their eponymous figurehead. Alas, the move was instantly controversial, with Dr Linda Mitchell protesting that ‘if the university is claiming a dedication to diversity, it would be foolish to choose a symbol so exclusive and effective in emphasising the dead white male power structure in history.’
Even in Winchester, the capital of Wessex, they have betrayed the memory of the old boy. Between 1928 and 2004 there was a seat of learning called King Alfred’s College. It is now the ‘University of Winchester.’
One Saturday morning in December, I decided to go in search of Queenhithe, the port Alfred commissioned in what had been the old Roman city. Surely, I said to myself, you can’t get rid of a whole port. There must be something to see. I had just reached Upper Thames Street when the Almighty unleashed the biggest snowstorm the capital had seen for a hundred years, and I am afraid Queenhithe and all traces of Alfredian infrastructure were lost, along with everything else, in a white hell.
It was only a couple of weeks later, when the snow had cleared, that I finally found it. I was very pleased to have made the effort. There it is – an amazing square inlet in the shoreline of the Thames, surrounded now by red-brick modern flats and office blocks. Nobody was watching me, and in an instant I had hopped over the wall and was standing on Alfred’s very shore. I looked beneath my feet, and my jaw dropped.
Queenhithe is where things wash up, and beneath my feet were thousands – hundreds of thousands of bones: white bones, brown bones – the jaws of sheep, the ribs of pigs, the femurs of cows, and jumbled among them were innumerable broken stems of white clay pipes and bits of coal and tile and pot. As I looked across I could see the snazzy restaurants on the South Bank, the Globe theatre complex. But I was standing on a midden of London history, stretching back to heaven knows when.
I understood how perfectly Queenhithe is protected from the current of the river, how ideal it must have been for loading and unloading, and I could see how Alfred’s port had played its part in the recovery of mediaeval London; and I thought indignantly of those who have allowed the memory of Alfred to die, and the apathy of our age.
If it hadn’t been for Alfred, London might have gone the way of Silchester and other abandoned Roman towns.
If it hadn’t been for Alfred, there wouldn’t have been an English nation, and this book would probably be written in Danish.
***
After a century of peace, the Danes were back, and it is a tribute to Alfred’s legacy that London was the prize. The port was open, and trade with the continent had resumed, in bacon or wool (depending on whether a crucial manuscript refers to ‘lardam’ or ‘lanam’).
Alfred had put back the bridge, and though the Londoners who trudged across it were generally runtier and fewer than in Roman times, they had a healthy rustic menu: peas and roots for broth, eggs for scrambling, the odd blubberfish for blubberfish stew.
They had lost the luxurious wines and spices of the Roman Empire; they had lost the fine Syrian tableware. But London was the seat of the first democratic institution – the Saxon folkmoot, that met by St Paul’s – and Londoners were making enough money to be well worth attacking.
In 994 the Danes arrived, and met stout resistance. For the next fifty years mastery of the city went one way and then the other. In 1014 the Saxons lost to Danish Sweyn Forkbeard; but later that year they came back and actually attacked their own bridge, so that their ships could get at the Danish-held town.
With the help of some Norwegian allies led by King Olaf, they tied ropes to the wooden posts and pulled it down – which is why a billion children have sung a rhyme to the effect that London Bridge is Falling Down. The following year Sweyn’s son Cnut was on the scene, and by 1016 he had taken control.
In addition to being history’s most evocative misprint, the half-Danish half-Polish Cnut has a fine regal record. The Danes no longer burned churches. They were Christians, so they built them. They didn’t abolish the folkmoot. They had a Danish version, called the hustings (house-things).
In the most far-sighted of all his deeds, Cnut took his officials to a marshy place to the west of the Roman city, where the river bends and runs north–south. Here, on a flat called Thorney Island, he found a place to build a residence, and it was here – at least according to the guides of the House of Commons – that he put his chair on the shore and used the incoming tide to show his courtiers the limits of governmental power.
The spot is now occupied by the Palace of Westminster, where the point of his parable is so often forgotten.
Cnut was followed by Edward the Confessor in using Thorney/Westminster as the centre of royal and political authority, and the Normans were to go further still in the development of the rival site. Ever since the story of London has involved that basic tension, between the politicians and the moneymen, between the cities of London and of Westminster.
It was during this see-saw period that Londoners got the idea that they had the right to ‘elect’ the King of England. They liked to think they had chosen Edward the Confessor, in 1042, by popular acclaim.
They even liked to think they had ‘offered’ the crown to William the Conqueror – a touching belief, under the circumstances, in their own democratic prerogatives.
