Читать книгу Viking London - Thomas Williams - Страница 11

In 865, a micel hæðen here (a ‘great heathen horde’) arrived in East Anglia. It was a Viking warband larger than any seen before in Britain, and with extraordinary speed it set about tearing up the geopolitical order, shattering ancient kingdoms the length and breadth of the island: Northumbria (866), East Anglia (870), Alt Clud (870), Mercia (873) – all fell to the conquerors or were transformed out of all recognition. In England, only Wessex remained intact, preserved by good fortune and the fortitude of its rulers.

In 871, returning from Wessex after having been fought to a standstill by Alfred and his brother, King Æthelred, the great heathen horde had made camp at London and remained there over the winter. A hoard of silver found at Croydon can be dated to this period, and may well relate to the comings and goings of Viking warbands from their winter-setl at London. The Mercian King Burgred eventually ‘made peace’ with the Viking army (i.e. paid them off), and they returned to East Anglia. It was to be a short-lived reprieve – the Vikings invaded Mercia in 873, deposing Burgred and driving him into exile. In 878 a different Viking fleet, lately arrived from the continent, made camp at Fulham – then a site to the west of London. It too left after a single winter, travelling to Ghent (in modern Belgium) before rampaging onward into the Frankish kingdom.

There is no record that details activity at either of these camps, and no archaeology to pinpoint their locations or illuminate the day-to-day lives of their temporary inhabitants. ‘It is very difficult,’ as one historian has put it, ‘to gather from these random comings, goings and hibernations any coherent impression of what the occupation amounted to.’¹ The circumstances may have varied. The earlier camp might have been either within or without the walls of the city; either around the precincts of St Paul’s or thrown up west of the Fleet River amongst the derelict remains of Lundenwic. The camp at Fulham was perhaps more likely to have been newly built, a freshly laid out site with access to the Thames. Excavated Viking camps at Torksey (Lincolnshire), Repton (Derbyshire) and another site in North Yorkshire suggest that such camps covered extensive areas and hummed with activity. Trade, manufacture, engineering, gaming and family life – the site at Torksey has revealed all of this on a site of over sixty-five acres, more a small town than a temporary barracks.

Whatever conditions were like inside the perimeter of the camps at London and Fulham, relations with the locals were likely tense and probably violent. Raiders plundering the local countryside would have first secured the winter essentials – pigs, cattle, grain, ale – before coming for the horses, the silver, the women. It was a burden felt widely. The bishop of Worcester, Wærferth, was forced to sell off some of his land to cope with the ‘very pressing affliction and immense tribute of the barbarians, in that same year when the pagans stayed in London’.² Neither camp seems to have lasted more than a season, and the immediate threat of Viking occupation was in both cases transient. But in the fields and farms beyond the city, the world was changing fast, old certainties falling away sharply. In a little over a decade from the advent of the great horde in 865, two of the kingdoms that had traditionally exerted influence over London had been conquered (East Anglia) or dismantled (Mercia) by Viking armies. And although Alfred’s Wessex had endured, the resulting peace had left London on the front line of a volatile border. The story of how Alfred defeated an army led by the Viking leader Guthrum at Edington (Wiltshire) in 878, of how he had dwelt in the fen-fastness of Athelney (Somerset) before returning to smite his enemies like the avenging sword of the Almighty, has been told many times. Like all of the literary products of its time and place, it is replete with Alfredian myth-making.

In the peace that followed Edington (and the so-called Treaty of Wedmore), Alfred extracted from his erstwhile foe a number of key concessions, including his baptism and an agreement to change his name from Guthrum to Æthelstan. The key part of the whole ritualized encounter seems to have been – from Alfred’s perspective at least – the acceptance by Guthrum-Æthelstan of a symbolic filial subordination: he became, in the process of baptism, Alfred’s godson. It was a tacit acceptance of Alfred’s overlordship – an agreement to be his man. And though it might seem from a West Saxon perspective like total victory – a heathen warrior humbled, forced to his knees to kiss the cross and the ring of his conqueror – in reality it is hard to believe that Guthrum received nothing in return, that his defeat had been so total that it warranted nothing but humiliation.

Instead it seems likely that the negotiations included the recognition of Guthrum-Æthelstan as king of East Anglia – albeit a king who owed notional fealty to Alfred as his ‘father’ and overlord. Certainly, when the two men next met, it was perceived as a royal summit: the so-called Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum styles both men as ‘rex’. Amongst other provisions, that treaty – which is broadly datable to somewhere between 878 and Guthrum’s death in 890 – defined the respective spheres of influence of both kings. The dividing line was to be a boundary that ran ‘up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to Watling Street’. It was a treaty which conspicuously, and with obvious deliberation, scored a boundary around London, keeping it tucked just within the limits of Alfred’s authority.

Today the River Lea empties out into the Thames in Poplar, just east of the Isle of Dogs. To walk its course upriver is to pass through Stratford and past Hackney Marshes to Tottenham, Edmonton, Walthamstow, the river filling the Lea Valley reservoir chain, Epping Forest stretching away to the east. Its path carves through the Olympic Park, the ‘Olympicopolis’ so despised by Iain Sinclair: a ‘city of pop-ups, naming rights, committee-bodged artworks, cash-cow academies, post-truth blogs and charity runs’, an ‘emerging digital conceit on the Viking bank of the River Lea’.³ Sinclair seems at times unmoored by despair, enraged by the changes wrought by corporate money and empty technocracy on the cherished, untidy banks of the river. During construction of the Olympic Park he beat like an angry wasp against the notorious blue fence that enclosed the development, body and rhetoric levelled against the barrier. After Olympicopolis inevitably shimmered into three dimensions, he railed at this ‘theme park still to identify its theme’, still ‘waiting on input from a content provider’.⁴

Alfred, I am sure, would have approved of the Olympic Park; he emerges from the sources as a lover of order, a man didactic in his inclinations, managerial in style. He admired the Romans, planned grand building projects, enjoyed a good right-angle. I imagine he would have agreed that cleanliness is next to godliness. The world he and his scribes envisaged was a place of order and easy management, of binary choices and simple ethnicities: English, Danish; Christian, Heathen; Good, Bad. There were no shades of grey in Alfred’s little England, no room for conflicted loyalties, identities or beliefs: those things were chaos, and chaos lived beyond the pale in fifelcynnes eard – in ‘monster world’.⁵ In the ninth century, it was the slow drift of the Lea that became the limes, the tear in the fabric that separated Alfred’s ‘Anglo-Saxon’ realm from another place – a world of confused allegiances and sundered bonds, where the alien Guthrum reigned as king of East Anglia and a host of unnamed Viking warlords and embattled Anglo-Saxon thegns struggled to make sense of a disordered world.

In truth, it is hard to imagine how this boundary was ever inscribed in reality – there were no ramparts, no watchtowers. No wall. Even within the city, the lines of authority were blurred, a messy West Saxon/Mercian compromise involving Kentish and Mercian bishops and the shadow of the new Scandinavian regime in East Anglia.^fn1 As a notional approximation of the length of Alfred’s reach, the treaty placed London at the very tips of his outstretched fingers, barely within his grasp.

Perhaps it was this sense of insecurity that informed the tenor of what is perhaps the most famous of all mentions of London to emerge from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the record of a moment that has taken on an almost mythic status in the history of the city and of the nation, the moment in 886 when ‘King Alfred restored [gesette] fortress London [Lundenburh], and all the English [Angelcyn] turned to him, except for those in bondage [hæftniede] to Danish men [Deniscra manna], and he then bestowed [befæste] the stronghold on Ealdorman Æthelred to hold’.⁷ This, the Chronicle wishes us to know, is a moment for the ages, the apotheosis of English kingship, the reclaiming of London’s imperial destiny, the moment when Alfred transcended West Saxon parochialism to lay claim to a greater inheritance: a new realm, a realm of all the English, united against the common foe. Alfred had come to London as defender and liberator, to restore and to build, to fortify the mighty stronghold-city on the borders of his kingdom, to renew the legacy of Rome.

And yet, to turn a critical eye to the words and phrases the scribe employs in this one sentence is to find the half-truths, omissions and over-simplifications falling over themselves.

According to the mighty dictionary of Old English originally compiled by John Bosworth in 1838 and added to in 1898 and 1921 by Thomas Northcote Toller, the verb gesettan has numerous meanings – sixteen, in fact: ‘to set, put, fix, confirm, restore, appoint, decree, settle, possess, occupy, place together, compose, make, compare, expose, allay’.^fn2