After the partial unification of England by Edward there followed a line of powerful kings whose names have faded from the collective consciousness of the English; yet the memory of one of them, Athelstan, was revered for many centuries. His name means noble stone, like the throne in Kingston upon which in 924 he was crowned and anointed with holy oil. In the fourteenth century he was still invoked when land was granted:
This land and twig I give to thee,
As free as Athelstan gave it to me,
And I hope a loving brother you will be.
He was the son of Edward the Elder, and became heir to a great dynasty; he was intent, however, upon augmenting the kingdom that he had inherited. He defeated in battle the king of York and his ally, the king of Dublin; Dublin and York were the twin engines of a Norse trading empire that was now coming to an end. Athelstan seized York, and subdued Scotland. The forces of the north then launched a counter-attack, but in 937 were decisively beaten at a place known only as Brunanburgh. ‘From this period,’ a chronicler wrote, ‘there was peace and abundance of all things.’ Many years later the period of Athelstan’s struggle was still known as ‘the great war’, just as the First World War is now remembered.
Alfred had been generally characterized as king of the Angles and of the Saxons, but Athelstan was hailed as king of England. His family became linked by marriage with the kingdom of France and the province of Aquitaine as well as the empire of Germany. Poets and scholars flocked to his court; he established one coinage for the entire realm; he refurbished many of the towns. He called truly national assemblies of bishops and lords. He imposed strict controls over buying and selling; he set out a code of laws. ‘I have learned that our peace is worse kept than I should like it,’ he wrote, ‘and my councillors say I have borne it for too long.’
There is a painting of him in the company of St Cuthbert, the holy man known as ‘the wonder-worker of England’. It is the first English royal portrait, and shows Athelstan wearing an imperial crown. Towards the end of his reign he styled himself monarchus totius Britanniae, and the Annals of Ulster declared him to be ‘the roof-tree of the dignity of the western world’. The tomb of this now forgotten king is to be found in Malmesbury Abbey. In life he wore his hair in ringlets entwined with threads of gold.
By the tenth century the polity of the Anglo-Saxon realm had taken an enduring shape. If the monarch was to guarantee order and stability, it was necessary for him to act in a formal and deliberate manner. He assembled a council of religious men and of wise men. He created structures of authority to supervise the exploitation of royal land and the dispensing of royal justice. A bureaucracy already existed, issuing what became an unbroken succession of charters and writs. (The charters can still be used in unravelling the English landscape.) They came in the first place from the king’s scriptorium, staffed by a handful of priests, but the emergence of a centralized monarchy prompted the growth of new institutions and procedures. So from this foundation there would spring a civil service, a judiciary and a parliament. The nation was becoming conscious of its own identity. That is part of the story of this volume.
It was taken for granted that every man must have a lord. Lordship was no longer dependent upon tribal relations, but on the possession of land. Mastery was assumed by those who owned the most territory. No other test of secular leadership was necessary. Land was everything. It was in a literal sense the ground of being. Land granted you power and wealth; it allowed you to dispense gifts and to bend others to your will. It was inevitable that, under the reign of a strong king, the hierarchy of the country would also be strengthened; the divisions would be sharper, the evidence of status more pronounced. When in 1086, according to the chronicles, ‘all men of property in England’ swore an oath of allegiance to William the Conqueror they were following an established procedure.
The landless man was either a slave or a pauper. He was not to be trusted. This represents the crucial difference between medieval and early modern England. The names of slaves are given for the first time within a document of 880; ‘Almund, Tidulf, Tidheh, Lull, Lull and Gadwulf’ are being transferred to land belonging to the bishop of Winchester. Slavery was in fact a legal punishment inflicted on those, for example, who could not pay their fines. A penniless farmer might sell his children. It has been estimated that 12 per cent of the English population were slaves. So land created economic subjection. Slaves, like oxen and sheep, were known as ‘live money’.
By the time of Athelstan the country was divided into shires, hundreds and vills or townships, precisely in order to expedite taxation. The shires of England were unique, their boundaries lasting for more than a thousand years until the administrative reorganization of 1974. The earliest of them date from the late seventh and early eighth centuries, but many of their borders lie further back in the shape of the Iron Age tribal kingdoms. So the essential continuity of England was assured. Hampshire is older than France. Other shires, like those in the midlands, were constructed later; but they are still very ancient.
The shire was originally a military district, but it also served royal purposes as a centre of taxation and a source of justice. Each shire had a court, and a burgh or major town; it could muster its own army, and was ruled on behalf of the king by a shire-reeve whose name became sheriff. The shire was then divided into ‘hundreds’; each hundred was supposed in theory to support one hundred households or to supply one hundred fighting men in times of war. The hundreds were further subdivided into ‘tithings’ made up of ten households. The administration of the entire country could be devolved upon small groups of individuals who led the ‘hue and cry’ against thieves and who were responsible for each other’s conduct. It was the essential basis of local government in England for at least the next thousand years.
The men of the hundred met in the open air at ancient places of assembly, and some of the hundreds are named after a prehistoric tumulus or barrow in the immediate neighbourhood. Hundredsbarrow and Loosebarrow, for example, are to be found in Dorset. The hundred of Doddingtree in Wiltshire is ‘Dudda’s tree’. The hundred of Brixton is derived from ‘Brihtsige’s stone’. This suggests that the roots of the hundreds go very deep, and that they reflect the primeval organization of the country. Since they still survive unaltered, although now rarely used for administrative purposes, they are another indication that we live in a prehistoric landscape. The rural district council is very old indeed.
In the tenth century the lie of the land was being changed. The country had been generally divided into very large estates governed by king, noble, or bishop; these estates of many thousands of acres are likely to have been the original territories of a tribe, their boundaries preserved by the burial mounds of ancient leaders. Yet in the reign of Athelstan they were being fragmented. Parcels of land were being granted to the clients of the king, or noble, in reward for service; an approximate size of the grant was 600 acres (243 hectares), upon which the new proprietor built his residence and organized his agricultural workforce. In the tenth century the new lords were known as thegns; they became the lords of the manor in the fourteenth century, the squires of the eighteenth century, and the country gentlemen of the nineteenth century.
The thegns had a much more direct relation to their land than had the great absentee landlords of the previous epoch. They created villages on their estates, taking the place of scattered farms and hamlets, so that their workers could be more easily housed and controlled. Villages were in existence in the period of Roman dominance, and similar settlements could be found in the Iron Age. Continuity is once more the key. But the village became the defining feature of a large part of the English countryside only in the ninth and tenth centuries. There is no village still in existence (except for those formed during the Industrial Revolution) that was not established by the twelfth century. If you dig deep into the village soil, you will find its ancient roots. Some of them, not the majority, have been in existence for thousands of years. But they are absent from certain territories. Down the middle of England, from Northumberland to Wiltshire, numerous villages are to be found; beyond that great expanse, in the north and in the west, the Iron Age landscape of scattered farms and hamlets survived.