There was resistance, of course, to this vast growth of West Saxon power, and not only from the Vikings. The Northumbrians had the proud and separate history recorded in Bede and were as reluctant as many of their descendants today to take orders from the south. And the same applied, even more strongly, to the Scots. The result was that the death of each West Saxon monarch was followed by a rebellion and a reassertion of northern independence. But each in turn was put down and the victories – Æthelstan’s at Brunanburgh in 937 and Edmund’s in the east Midlands in 942 – were celebrated by The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in sanguinary verse. Edmund was hailed, in language taken from the old sagas, as ‘lord of the English, guardian of kinsmen, loved doer of deeds’, while his elder brother Æthelstan was ‘lord of warriors and ring-giver to men’. But there was a political message too. The army at Brunanburgh was a joint force of Mercians and West Saxons; the achievement of each was celebrated, and the battle seen as the greatest victory since both peoples’ ancestors had conquered Britain:
Never was there more slaughter
on this island, never yet as many
people killed before this
with sword’s edge …
since from the east Angles and Saxons came up
over the broad sea. Britain they sought,
Proud war-smith who overcame the Welsh,
glorious warriors they took hold of the land.
The message was clear: united we stand in a new, consolidated Ængla Land.
Administrative unity, too, was soon imposed on all England south of the Humber. Like Alfred’s resistance, the reconquest from the Vikings had depended on the building of burhs – such as Hertford, Leicester, Nottingham and Huntingdon – to push the disputed frontier forward and to hold land taken. These burhs quickly followed the path of the southern burhs and became prosperous centres of population and trade. But they were made the administrative centres of new shires as well. These were modelled on the shires of Wessex and were likewise divided into hundreds. The difference was that they were largely artificial creations, imposed by a powerful and centralized administration and paying little or no regard to former regional and tribal boundaries which had existed before the Viking invasions.
I
This story of more or less unbroken success received a rude shock after the death of Eadred in 955. He was succeeded by his nephew, Eadwig, the elder son of Edmund I, who was crowned at Kingston a few months later. But, aged only about fifteen, Eadwig had his mind fixed on something other than ceremony and, at the feast which followed the day after the coronation service, the king suddenly withdrew. St Dunstan, the outspoken and reforming abbot of Glastonbury, who had had the ear of both Edmund and Eadred, was deputed to bring him back. Dunstan marched into the royal bedchamber, where he found the king in a threesome with his future wife and mother-in-law, while ‘the royal crown, which was bound with wondrous metal, gold and silver gems, and shone with many-coloured lustre, [lay] carelessly thrown on the floor’.
It was an inauspicious beginning. Within two years, Mercia and Northumbria had transferred their allegiance to Eadwig’s younger brother, Edgar, and Eadwig’s power was reduced to England south of the Thames. Two years later still, Eadwig died on 1 October 959 and was succeeded as king of all England by Edgar.
Edgar had won support by presenting himself as being as serious as his brother was irresponsible. And, once he had succeeded to his whole inheritance, he continued to win golden opinions. One of his first acts was to appoint Dunstan as archbishop of Canterbury. Edgar and Dunstan, who was a frequent attender at court, then went into partnership to enforce the programme of monastic reform which Dunstan had begun as abbot of Glastonbury. Each had his particular concern. Dunstan wanted to impose the order and discipline made possible by the rule of St Benedict. Edgar also saw the political possibilities of the reformed monasticism.
Most important, symbolically, was his purge of the two great adjacent minsters in his capital at Winchester, the Old, where Alfred was buried, and the New, founded by Edward the Elder. In 964, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes with some surprise, Edgar ‘drove’ the existing clergy out of the two minsters, and ‘replaced them with monks’. Two years later, in 966, he refounded the New Minster and his munificent gift was recorded in an unusually long and magnificent charter, written in book form. The frontispiece shows Edgar wearing the crown with four fleurons, which Eadwig had cast aside, and presenting the book-charter to Christ in Majesty.
By gifts such as these, Edgar was serving another god: he was promoting the idea of a united Ængla Land. Monasteries like Winchester were national institutions; they held land all over the country; they were centres of a self-consciously English culture and, above all, they were royal. Endowed by the king and reformed under his patronage, they were so many counterbalances to the overweening local power of ealdormen and other aristocrats. Naturally, some of the ealdormen were resentful. But, faced by the united front of king and archbishop, they had no choice but to submit to the reform programme, which carried all before it. At the beginning of his reign there was only one properly constituted Benedictine monastery, Dunstan’s at Glastonbury; by the end there were twenty-two.
Another illustration of the ordered, reforming power of Edgar’s government is the currency. Since Offa, as we have seen, the quality of the Anglo-Saxon coinage had tended to be high. But the Viking invasions had brought chaos here as everywhere else. In about 973 Edgar felt strong enough to issue a reforming ordinance. Thenceforward, every six years all the silver pennies in circulation were called in and melted down, and reminted with new designs. The reminting was done in local burh-mints. But the designs and dies were centrally supplied to the moneyers by the king. This arrangement not only ensured uniformity and maintained standards, it also allowed for a sophisticated management of exchange rates by increasing or decreasing the silver content. No other government in Europe would have been able to conceive or carry out such a programme, which continued to the end of Anglo-Saxon England and beyond. It gave England a currency that was unmatched in quality in Europe, and it laid the foundations for an enviable national prosperity.
But just as striking is the inscription on Edgar’s coins. It read: EADGAR REX ANGLO(RUM), ‘Edgar, king of the English’. And where there are English, there is an England, or Ængla Land, as the Anglo-Saxons called it. The unification of England, as we have seen, was the work of Edgar’s immediate predecessors, starting with his great-grandfather, Alfred the Great. Now, seventy years after Alfred’s death, his great-grandson Edgar came to Bath to be crowned on Whit Sunday 973. Almost certainly, he had already been crowned long before, perhaps as king of the Mercians. But now, in a vastly grander ceremony, he was to be anointed king of the English; honoured as emperor of Britain, and revered as a second Christ.
Hence the choice of Bath for the ceremony. For here there was a unique combination of a Christian abbey next to the largest, most impressive ruins of Roman Britain. It was an incomparable setting and the ceremony matched the occasion’s significance. St Dunstan himself, as archbishop of Canterbury, acted as ecclesiastical master of ceremonies and Edgar performed his part devoutly and decorously. First, he swore a threefold oath, administered by Dunstan: to keep the Church of God and the Christian people in true peace; to forbid rapacity and iniquity in all ranks; to do justice equitably and mercifully. Then he was acclaimed by the people as their king and anointed, as the choir sang the anthem ‘Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon King’. Next he was invested with the insignia of kingship: the ring, the sword, the crown, the sceptre and the rod. Finally, there came the coronation banquet, at which no one, we are told, drank more than he could hold. The king presided, wearing an imperial diadem of laurel interwoven with roses, while the queen had her own separate table.
Immediately after the coronation, Edgar sailed with his fleet to Chester, where, in an acknowledgement