Great Tales From English History (7 page)

W
E KNOW ABOUT CAEDMON THE COWHERD
, Hilda the abbess, the Angles and the angels, and the insults that the Irish and English monks hurled at each other as they argued about hairstyles and the timing of Easter, thanks to the writings of the very first English historian, the Venerable Bede. To modern ears, it is a weird and even pompous-sounding name - ‘venerable’ meaning ancient and worthy, ‘Bede’ being an old word for prayer. But Bede the man was anything but pompous. He was a down-to-earth and rather humorous character - as you might expect of a Geordie lad, born in Northumbria near Monkwearmouth, now part of modern Sunderland. Bede spent most of his life in Jarrow on the banks of the River Tyne, where the modern Geordie accent, according to linguists, can be traced back to the Old English dialect spoken by Bede and his fellow-Northumbrians in Anglo-Saxon times.

The boy was just seven, and quite possibly an orphan, when he was handed into the care of the local monastery. In Anglo-Saxon England monks operated the only schools, and they trained their pupils in harsh conditions. In winter it was so cold in the Jarrow cloisters that pens slipped from the fingers of the priestly hands - while summer brought flies and infection. When plague struck the monastery in 685, the only survivors who could scratch up a choir were the twelve-year-old Bede and the old abbot, who managed to keep the services going between them, chanting and responding to each other across the chapel.

Today there is a Bede Station on the Newcastle to South Shields line of the Tyne and Wear Metro. If you get off the train and walk past the oil tanks and electricity power lines of modern Jarrow you soon come to the very chapel where Bede and the abbot kept the singing alive thirteen hundred years ago. Sometimes there is only a thin curtain between the past and ourselves. In those days the Jarrow monastery was surrounded by green fields, and from its ruins you can get an idea of how Bede lived his life, studying and writing by candlelight for more than fifty years in his small stone cell.

He wrote with a sharpened goose quill that he dipped in acid. ‘
Encaustum
’ was the monks’ word for ink, from the same Latin word that gives us ‘caustic’, meaning ‘biting’ or ‘burning’. Darkened with iron salts, Bede’s ink literally bit into his writing surface, which was not paper but parchment - scraped animal skin. The parchment would have been stretched out initially on a wooden frame that prevented the skin from shrinking back into the shape of the lamb, calf or kid from which it came. It could take as many as five hundred calfskins to make one Bible.

On this primitive but very effective and durable surface, Bede worked magic. He wrote no less than sixty-eight books - commentaries on the Bible, a guide to spelling, works on science, the art of poetry, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, grammar, the lives of Christian martyrs and a book of hymns. From his bright and simple Latin prose we get to know a man who was also interested in carpentry, music and the movement of the tides, which he studied and measured on long walks along the sands and rockpools of the blowy Northumbrian coast. Bede took a particular interest in cooking. He kept his own store of peppercorns, precious spices transported by traders from the other side of the world, to pound and sprinkle on the bland monastery food. He could be frank about the drawbacks of the monkish life. Writing of King Saul’s two wives, he ruefully admitted: ‘How can I comment on this who have not even been married to one?’

It is largely thanks to Bede that today we date our history from the birth of Christ - the ad method of dating that gets its name from the Latin
anno domini
(‘in the year of our Lord’). The Romans had based their dating system on the accession dates of their emperors, but in his work
On the Reckoning of Time
, written in 725 ad, Bede took up the idea that the Church should not rely on this pagan system, particularly since it was the Romans who persecuted Christ. How much better to date the Christian era from the birth of Our Saviour himself! Six years later Bede put the system into practice when he wrote the book for which he is principally remembered -
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
.

To this day, Bede’s vivid narrative brings alive the texture of a turbulent time. He was a storytelling monk with a human touch, describing the terrible effects of famine in the land of the South Saxons where whole families, starving, would hold hands and jump off the white Sussex cliffs in tragic suicide pacts. In a credulous age he had a sceptical wit, poking fun, for example, at the legend that St Patrick had rid Ireland of snakes. This must mean, he wrote, that if any snakes happened to come over in a boat from Britain, they only had to inhale the scented Irish air to breathe their last.

This gentle dig at the Irish Christians reflected Bede’s prejudices. He was English and proud of it. For him, the Angles and Saxons were God’s chosen people, and his history tells us little about the Scots, and still less about the Welsh, of whom he disapproved heartily as troublesome heretics. He believed that life had a purpose, that men and women can shape their own destiny through hard work and faith - and for him that destiny was Christian and English.

But Bede’s proudly local story contains scenes and ideas with which anyone could identify today. Imagine yourself among a group of Anglo-Saxon nobles discussing the pros and cons of the new Christian faith, when one of them comes up with this interpretation of life:

It seems to me that the life of man on earth is like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your captains and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall. Outside, the storms of winter rain and snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one window of the hall and out through another. While he is inside, the bird is safe from the winter storms, but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. So, man appears on earth for a little while - but of what went before this life, or of what follows, we know nothing.

Bede’s own sparrow flight across the hall of life was lengthy by Anglo-Saxon standards. He died when he was sixty-two, surrounded by his pupils, who were helping him finish his last work, a translation of the Gospel of St John into ‘our language’, that is, from Latin into
englisc
.

‘Learn quickly now,’ he told them, ‘for I do not know how much longer I will live.’

He dictated the final chapter, then turned to one of his pupils. ‘I have a few treasures in my little box,’ he said. ‘Run quickly and fetch the priests of our monastery, so I can distribute to them these little gifts which God has given me.’

And so, before he died, the Venerable Bede handed out to the monks his store of worldly treasures - some handkerchiefs, some incense and the remains of his beloved peppercorns.

AD
878

A
NGLO-SAXON ENGLAND SOUNDS QUITE A
cheery place, as described by the gentle and generous Bede from the security of his monastic cell. But we read of quite another country in the blood-drenched pagan sagas of the age. Winter howls. Ravens wheel over trees that are bent and blasted by the sea winds. Storms crash against rocky slopes. Darkness draws on. It was a perilous and threatening world that lay outside the torchlit circles of Anglo-Saxon settlements. No wonder their inhabitants declaimed courage-stirring poems of defiance of which the epic tale of Beowulf is an early example. Shepherds guarded their flocks against the wolf - ‘grey ganger of the heath’ - and long-tusked boar ran wild in the forests. Vast areas of the country were trackless watery wastelands.

These inaccessible brackish expanses were the main difference between the English countryside then and now. In East Anglia the Wash flowed into Middle England, a fenland of more than a thousand square miles where cattle had to be rounded up by boat. Half of Staffordshire consisted of peat and moss swamps, and much of the Thames Valley was a marsh. To the west lay the Somerset Levels, acre after misty acre of bullrush and sedge extending from Glastonbury to Bridgwater Bay. Pelicans, herons and the huge European crane took refuge in its wastes, along with fugitives and runaways - and, on one famous occasion, a king.

He was Alfred, King of the West Saxons, driven into the Somerset no man’s land by the Vikings, the seaborne raiders who had started their attacks on England at the end of the previous century. They came from Denmark, Norway and the Baltic in their sleek and deadly longboats, crossing the North Sea as the Angles and Saxons had crossed it before them, pushed by the same pressures of population and attracted by easy pickings. One day around the year 800, the royal tax collector at Dorchester rode down to Portland to meet a fleet of Norse trading ships that had landed. But when he explained to the visitors how to pay their customs duties, they split his head open with a battle-axe. In the north the invaders captured and burgled the defenceless Abbey of Lindisfarne, drowning the old monks and taking away the young ones to sell as slaves.

The raids continued, decade after decade - and not just in England. In the course of the ninth century, Viking armies sacked Paris, Hamburg, Antwerp, Bordeaux and Seville. Moving fast in packs of five hundred or more, sometimes shouldering their lean-planked ships overland from river to river, the raiders even reached Russia - whose name comes from the Rus, the community of Vikings who set up their own kingdom in Novgorod, just south of the Gulf of Finland, in 852.

It was around this time that the Vikings in England adopted a worrying change of tactic: instead of returning home in the autumn, their armies started to settle. They took over the north of England, making York their own Danish-speaking, Danish-run capital, then extended their ‘Danelaw’, as the land they occupied came to be known, south into East Anglia, where in 870 they defeated Edmund, King of the East Angles. Refusing to renounce his Christian faith, King Edmund was tied to a tree and shot to death with arrows, according to one tradition. According to another, he was subjected to the inhuman Norse rite of ‘carving the blood eagle’, whereby the victim’s ribs were cut away from his spine while alive. His lungs were then pulled out, to be spread like wings across his back. In the following century the martyred king’s remains were moved to the Suffolk town of Bedricsworth, which in due course became a centre of worship and pilgrimage under the name of Bury St Edmunds.

Down in the south-west in Wessex, the last remaining centre of Anglo-Saxon resistance, King Alfred could certainly have expected a grisly end to match Edmund’s. He was a devout Christian - he had travelled to Rome as a boy. When he succeeded his brother in 871, at the age of twenty-three, Alfred was more noted for his learning and piety than for warfare. His name meant ‘elf wisdom’, and while he did enjoy some success in battle his most successful tactic was to buy off the enemy. In return for payments later known as ‘Danegeld’, the Vikings would agree to go home for the winter.

But the next year they would reappear, and early in 878 an army led by the Danish king Guthrum drove Alfred westwards into the marshes of Somerset. It was Easter time and the King retreated with a small band of followers, dodging from islet to islet through the splashy bogs. They had nothing to live on except what they could forage from the local population - and from Alfred’s desperate plight came one of the most famous tales of English history.

Taking shelter in the poor home of a swineherd whose wife was baking some bread, went the story, the refugee king was sitting by the fire, so preoccupied by his problems that he did not notice that the loaves were burning.

‘Look here, man,’ exclaimed the woman, who did not know that her bedraggled guest was the king, ‘you hesitate to turn the loaves which you see to be burning, yet you’re quite happy to eat them when they come warm from the oven!’

The endearing story ends with the apologetic king meekly submitting to the woman’s scolding and setting to work to turn the bread; but the account does not, unfortunately, come down to us from Alfred’s lifetime. The earliest manuscript that recounts the burning of the loaves (which turned into ‘cakes’ in the course of many subsequent retellings) was written about a hundred years after his death.

It is most likely a folk tale, handed on by word of mouth. Much was written about the heroic Alfred in the course of his life, and it seems surprising that such a very good story did not find its way on to parchment at the time. By the strictest laws of historical evidence, the story of Alfred and the cakes must be rated a myth.