The British Isles in the year 1000
Bound in with the Triumphant Sea“Middle Earth’s doom is at hand.”28 This conviction, which gnawed at many in the lands of what had once been the Frankish Empire, was no less a cause of anxiety on the opposite side of the Channel. That the seas would dry up; that the earth would be consumed by fire; that the heavens themselves would be folded up like a book: here were the staples of many an English sermon. Naturally, those who delivered them tended to hedge their prophecies with anxious qualifications: for they were the heirs to Alcuin and numerous other learned scholars, and knew perfectly well that it was forbidden for even an angel to calculate the timing of the end of the world. Nevertheless, like a child with a scab, they found it hard to let alone. Typical was a sermon which can be dated with great precision to the year 971.29 Scrupulously, despite having taken the Day of Judgement as his theme, its author forbore to make any mention of the looming Millennium. “For so veiled by secrecy is the end of days,” he warned his flock sternly, “that no one in the entire world, no matter how holy, nor even anyone in heaven, except the Lord alone, has ever known when it will come.” So far, so orthodox; but the preacher’s self-restraint was not to last for long. Indeed, with his very next breath, he was off, soaring away into giddy speculation. “The end cannot be long delayed,” he proclaimed all of a sudden. “Only the coming of the accursed stranger, Antichrist, who is yet to appear on the face of the earth, is still awaited. Otherwise, all the signs and forewarnings that our Lord told us would herald Doomsday have come to pass.”
30Except that, to the preacher’s audience, it would not have been at all clear that they had. England, in 971, was in a notably well-ordered state. Symptoms of the end of the world appeared safely confined to overseas. The Channel stretched wide indeed. Even as the empire of the Franks was fragmenting amid all the various convulsions of war and social upheaval, the English had found themselves being melded into a single nation; even as the line of Charlemagne was withering away into spectral impotence, a monarchy of unprecedented wealth and power was being entrenched in England. The dynasty called itself “Cerdicingas,” “the house of Cerdic”: a title gilded with all the prestige that only a really stupefying antiquity could provide. For Cerdic, back in the far-off days when the ancestors of the English had first arrived in Britain, had been at their head, a Saxon adventurer with a mere five ships at his back, but who had nevertheless succeeded in winning himself a kingdom.To be sure, there were many other warlords who had done the same; but it was Wessex, the land of the West Saxons, a realm ruled without break by Cerdic’s heirs over all the long succeeding centuries, that had ended up paramount.31 As the first millennium drew to a close, it dominated not only southern England, where its own heartlands lay, but all the lands where the English had settled, so that even the Northumbrians, who back in the time of Charlemagne had been a proud and independent people, “were in mourning for their lost liberty.”