The Three Kingdoms and the First Civil War:

Though they are usually referred to as the English Civil Wars, the wars of the 1640s and early ’50s are more accurately described by the name used by generations of Irish historians – ‘the Wars of the Three Kingdoms’. The economically dominant gentry and merchants of south-east England, East Anglia and East Midlands, including most of the English ports, generally opposed the king, while the royalist support was strongest in the poorer and more peripheral west and north of England, as well as in Wales. After winning the ‘Bishops’ Wars’ of 1639-40 against the King, the Scots then remained neutral before the Presbyterian ‘Covenanters’ took to the field in support of the English Parliament in 1644. Charles I’s strategy of using both royalist Protestants and rebel Catholics, together with Montrose’s royalist Scots, linked the three kingdoms together in their struggles against the Stuarts, which turned against the king in 1644, culminating in his loss of York in July.

The Drudgery of it all – War Weariness:

By the winter of 1644-5, the first ‘English Civil War’ was already more than two years old, and it was clear by the end of the long and hard-fought campaigning season that if the parliament was to win in the field against the forces loyal to Charles I, it must concentrate its resources and reorganise its armies. But though this imperative was obvious, the obstacles to carrying it into effect were formidable. The overall commander of the armies, the Earl of Essex, although recently defeated, still had powerful friends and allies and remained popular with all who hoped, as he did, for a negotiated peace with the King. Sir William Waller, a seasoned campaigner in the Thirty Years’ War on the continent, had once seemed a plausible alternative commander since he had shown a far stronger fighting temperament. But the battle of Cropredy Bridge, fought near Banbury at the end of June 1944 (see the map below), and the second battle of Newbury, at the end of October, had exposed serious limitations in his generalship, and by his own admission, he had become so perfectly tired with the drudgery of the military command that he was ready to lay it down.

As for the Earl of Manchester, whose Eastern Association had once been the great hope of the war party, he had been so reluctant to engage in sorties against the royalists that a running quarrel had developed between him and Cromwell, his Lieutenant-General. Following the failures of the 1644 Campaign, there had been a concerted effort to remove Manchester from the command of the Eastern Association. The conflict between Cromwell and Manchester had begun in early 1644. Religion, as well as political views, played an important role in the dispute. In a Statement by an Opponent of Cromwell, it was claimed that, like Cromwell, …

… Colonels Montague, Russell, Pickering, and Rainsborough’s regiments (are) all of them professed Independents, entire.

Both Manchester and Major-General Crawford, his strongest supporter, were ardent Presbyterians, at least in a political sense. Cromwell had had a famous row with Crawford, the Scottish commander of the infantry in Manchester’s army in March 1644, when the latter arrested the lieutenant-colonel of his own regiment and sent him up to headquarters, apparently because he was unwilling, as a Baptist, to sign the ‘Covenant’, the agreement to impose the Scots’ system of church government on England. It was hardly the place of the lieutenant-general of Horse to rebuke the major-general of the infantry for disciplining a subordinate officer who was not complying with the law as laid down by parliament, but that was what Cromwell did, and in writing:

Sir, the state, in choosing men to serve them, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve them, that satisfies … Take heed of being sharp … against those to whom you can object little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning matters of religion.

Matters of Religion – High Churchmen, Puritans & ‘tub-thumpers’:

It is difficult to overstate the importance that matters of religion played as a backdrop to both the military campaigns and the debates in parliament. As Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Charles I and his bishops had angered the Puritans, or Calvinists, within it, by giving their support to a group of High Church clergy called Arminians, who supported the Stuart doctrine of the ‘Divine Right of Kings.’ Laud ‘s enforcement of High Church ceremonies and his persecution of Puritans had aroused the passionate anger of the Puritan middle class. Besides, the Stuarts’ pro-Catholic foreign policy aroused suspicions that they were ‘closet’ Catholics at a time when most Englishmen and lowland Scots had a fanatical hatred of ‘Papists’. The Church of England still remained the established national church requiring all the king’s English subjects to attend for communion every week. As the ‘Anglican’ Church, often referred to the ‘Episcopalian’ Church in Presbyterian-controlled Scotland, it retained bishops and archbishops and also continued to derive much of its iconography, liturgy and teaching from the traditional Catholic model. Its greatest defendant in this was Archbishop Laud, who by the beginning of 1645 had lain in the Tower of London for over three years before parliament, at the insistence of the Scots, had proceeded with his impeachment in March 1644.

As the proceedings dragged on into the autumn, it became doubtful whether the remnant of the House of Lords still in attendance at Westminster would convict Laud of treason, so the Commons switched to an ordinance of attainder, for which they no longer needed the King’s assent. They sent it up to the Lords on 22 November but despite pressure from the London mob the peers held out against passing it until 4 January. The seventy-one-year-old prelate was then beheaded on Tower Hill, although he had long ceased to be a threat to the parliament. The malignity with which it pursued him to death, largely as an act of revenge for the brutal persecution that they had suffered at his hands, in the 1620s and ’30s, is a mark of the power of the adversaries of Episcopalianism, who were often lumped together under the single nomenclature ‘puritan’, but, in reality, they were very diverse in their beliefs.

The most influential puritans in Parliament were the Presbyterians, who had been predominant in Scotland since the time of the return of the reformer, John Knox, from John Calvin’s Geneva. They also existed both inside and outside the Church of England and their aim was to replace its episcopalian structure with a system of presbyteries, something like local church committees, and regional ‘synods’. Their brand of Protestantism was very strong in the House of Commons and its adherents hoped to use Parliament to enforce its doctrine upon the Chuch of England and upon the whole population of England and Wales. The Independents were opposed to both the Episcopalians and to the Presbyterians. They did not believe that either the King or Parliament should dictate how they should worship. Among their numbers were Baptists, Congregationalists and Quakers, together with a large number of sects. The single point of agreement between them was that there should be a separation between the Church and the State, though many, like Cromwell himself, wanted there to continue to be a national church in both England and Scotland, though with the local congregations able to choose their own ministers.

But whilst Royalists tended to be Episcopalian, Parliament was solidly Presbyterian and the Army was largely Independent in religion and increasingly radical in its politics, some puritans supported the King and some Episcopalians who opposed him. Also, as the war dragged on, there were Independents, increasingly ‘pacifist’ in perspective, who wanted to reach an ‘agreement’ with the King. Much also depended on the social ‘orders’ to which people belonged. But war-weariness in the country at large and divisions at Westminster were further impediments to the forging of the means of victory. The previously strong ‘middle group’ in Parliament were finding it increasingly difficult to hold together a solid parliamentarian centre together in support of the war effort while fending off the defeatest ‘peace party’ on the one hand and a disruptively radical tendency on the other.

York to Westminster: Presbyterians v Independents:

During the winter of 1643-44, as both sides looked for military allies, John Pym, the puritan leader in the House of Commons negotiated the Solemn League and Covenant with the Scots, which was then enacted by parliament. Scotland’s leaders saw that a victory for Charles in England would doom their Presbyterian revolution, so they abandoned their neutrality in favour of an alliance with the English Parliament in January 1644. Meanwhile, Charles sought further reinforcements from Ireland, but their military value was not worth the damage that his willingness to accept Catholic support did to his cause in England and Scotland. This resulted in the military intervention of the Scots on the side of the English Parliament.

Reinforced by Scottish forces under Alexander Leslie, the Yorkshire Army of Lord Thomas Fairfax and the Eastern Association cavalry commanded by Oliver Cromwell decisively defeated the main royalist army under the King’s nephew Prince Rupert and the earl of Newcastle at Marston Moor on 2 July. Cromwell’s cavalry proved its worth and the ‘cavaliers’ lost the North of England. But in the West Midlands, the Welsh marches and the South-West, Charles was still on the offensive. An attempt by parliamentary forces under the Earl of Essex to capitalise on the success in the north by invading the West Country was heavily defeated at Lostwithiel in Cornwall in August. The picture below shows Restormel Castle, which was captured by Grenville.

Throughout 1644, parliament increasingly tended to polarise between two parties, which came to be commonly referred to as the ‘Presbyterians’ and the ‘Independents’. As the nomenclature implied, religious differences had much to do with this division, but religion was never the sole cause of it and labels were partly misleading. In Parliament, the old middle group and the original war party coalesced as Independents, covering a broad political spectrum, so that they were not homogeneous. The Presbyterians included the old peace party, though some who were Presbyterian in religion remained strongly committed to the war effort. The political differences between the ‘parties’ at this stage have often been exaggerated, for neither was contemplating a post-war settlement that would exclude the king. Cromwell, Saye and other leading Independents were still seeking for a means to reinstate the king on safe and honourable conditions more than three years later, before the Second Civil War.

Charles attempted to retrieve his fortunes in Scotland and to relieve the pressure in England, through a series of campaigns led by James Graham, the marquis of Montrose, a resourceful commander, but the royalist position in Scotland was a microcosm of that in England. Royalist support was strongest in the largely Catholic Highlands, but this was also the poorest part of the country; the richer and more populous Presbyterian Lowlands remained committed to the Covenanter alliance with the English parliament. Reinforcements from Ireland never arrived in sufficient numbers, the two thousand sent in June being the only significant contribution. Montrose was eventually crushed by Leslie’s Covenanters in September 1645, but not before he had unnerved them and distracted them from the siege of Chester earlier that year, as detailed below.

In 1644-45, the parties differed on the terms rather than the principle of a future settlement, and religion was a major point of contention in this. It came to the fore because all through 1644 the Westminster Assembly was debating the form of government which it would recommend for the Church of England. The Scottish Commissioners were pressing for a pure Presbyterian model, with a church session exerting its coercive jurisdiction in every parish, with parishes grouped in classical presbyteries, provincial synods elected by and from presbyteries, a national synod at the summit, and with lay participation by ruling elders at every tier of the pyramidal structure. Since episcopalians were unrepresented in the Assembly, most of the English divines were prepared to endorse such a system in its essentials, but they were persistently opposed by a small group of Independents who became known as ‘the Dissenting Brethren’. Unlike the ‘separatists’, however, they fully accepted the authority of the civil power in matters of religion, so long as it did not oppress the churches over essential matters of faith and conscience.

Doctrinal matters were not at issue, however, as in theology, the moderate Independents professed a common orthodox Calvinism with the Presbyterians. What many of them rejected was the concept, common to Anglicans and Presbyterians, of a church coterminous with the nation-state; they could never accept that church membership was conferred simply by being born and baptised in a particular parish. A true church for them could only consist of a congregation of committed believers, men and women who had given mature covenant to live in accordance with it. Every such ‘gathered church’, they argued, should have the right to choose its own pastor and the power to discipline its members, even in the last resort to cast them out; so the Presbyterians’ entrustment of ordination and ex-communication to presbyteries was unacceptable to them. But they did not claim the right to total autonomy for each congregation that most separatists demanded, but rather proposed a kind of federal association. They didn’t like being called ‘Independents’, because they believed …

… the truth to lie and consist in a middle way betwixt that which is falsely charged on us … and that which is the contention of these times, the authoritative Prebyterial government in all the subordinations and proceedings of it.

Although they were few in number in the Assembly, the Independents had powerful supporters in parliament, including Cromwell in the Commons and Viscount Saye and Sele in the Lords. These and most of the other lay Independents were strongly committed to a vigorous prosecution of the war, so, understandably, ‘Independent’ became a loose label for all who pursued total victory and ‘Presbyterian’ for those who preferred a negotiated settlement. It was also generally true that most Independents advocated some degree of liberty of conscience in religion, whereas most Presbyterians favoured the continuance of a single national church, conformity to which would be enforced by the state. Yet even here the labels could be misleading, and religious beliefs were not always matched by political practice and priorities regarding church governance. Thus, it is often necessary to distinguish between the political and religious senses of the terms ‘Independent’ and ‘Presbyterian, since the correlation between them was so imperfect. References to political groupings should, therefore, be made without capitalisation, and ‘parties’ suggests a greater degree of identity, coherence and organisation than actually existed in the 1640s. There was also a social dimension to the mutual opposition between Presbyterians and Independents. Politicians like Cromwell would have extended liberty of conscience not only to their fellow Independents but also to the more peaceable separatists – Baptists, Quakers, Seekers – which were proliferating in the unsettled climate of the mid-1640s. Conservative souls, however, distrusted the whole principle of electing ministers of religion and were horrified by the prospect of giving free rein to sectarian ‘tub-thumpers’ without academic training who were elected by their fellow plebeians.

The Westminster Assembly promised the continuance of a single national church in which the majority of the parish clergy would continue to be chosen by wealthy gentry patrons.  Such a church was likely to cement the existing structures of society, whereas sectarian preachers were seen as potential social dynamite. In December 1944, the Earl of Essex, in overall command of the parliamentary forces, was complaining that:

Posterity will say that to deliver them from the yoke of the King we have subjugated them to that of the common people, (whose) audacity (he would henceforth) devote his life to redressing.

 

Right: The title page of an anti-radical tract. Moderate ‘independents’, horrified by the growing extremism engendered by the war, struggled to make their voices heard.

How to Win the War? Parliament & The Army:

When Oliver Cromwell emerged as the leader of the ‘war party’, linking up with radicals in many locations, it was natural that there should be social overtones to this shift in national policy. These radicals were described by their enemies as a company of Brownists, Anabaptists, … factious inferior persons. He had built up a virtually impregnable position for himself before he struck at Manchester and all he stood for. Not only was he a person of great favour and interest with the House of Commons as one hostile fellow-MP put it. By sheer hard work and military efficiency, he had become the outstanding figure in the Eastern Association, which after London was the main centre of support for parliament, especially in Essex and Suffolk. In June 1644 his leadership had been decisive at the battle of Marston Moor, the first really crushing victory the Parliamentarians had won. Cromwell’s troopers, originally,  were picked men, well equipped, well horsed, well paid. All these factors enabled him to use the cavalry charge as a battering ram instead of as a mobile infantry lightly armed with pistols. Prince Rupert’s horse charged once, often with devastating effect, but then lost cohesion in destroying enemy stragglers or in the search for plunder; a rabble of gentility, as Monck (below left) called the Cavalier cavalry. As Claredon (below right) put it, …

… though the King’s troops prevailed in the charge and routed those they charged, they never rallied themselves again in order, nor could be brought to make a second charge again the same day … whereas Cromwell’s troops, if they prevailed, or thought they were beaten and presently routed, rallied again and stood in good order till they received new orders.

This, Clarendon added, was only under him, and had never been notorious under Essex or Waller. At Marston Moor, it had been the repeated charges of Cromwell’s horse that had turned apparent Parliamentary defeat into complete victory. Yet he had remained in the background when the London radicals had tried to build up Sir William Waller as a rival commander to the Earl of Essex, and so had not suffered their discomfiture when ‘William the Conqueror’ was routed by a royalist cavalry charge at Roundway Down in July 1643. On the question of winning the war the issues between Cromwell and Manchester and between the two ‘parties’ were clear-cut. Manchester is often quoted as saying:

If we beat the King ninety-nine times, yet he is King still. … but if the King beat us once, we shall all be hanged.

To which Cromwell is said to have retorted with irrefutable logic:

My Lord, if this be so … why did we take up arms at first? This is against fighting ever hereafter.

The dispute between the Independents and Presbyterians within the Army was part of the process that led, despite its military successes, to the eclipse of the Eastern Association army under Manchester’s generalship. The conflict, in political terms, was between those who believed the war could be won and those who did not want to defeat the king. It was the success of the Independents, like Pickering and Montague, which enabled the creation of an army committed to winning the war. Manchester, for his part, alleged that Cromwell had admitted to packing the Eastern Association Army with men of his own principles …

… so that in case there should be propositions for peace, or any conclusion of a peace, such as might not stand with those that honest men should aim at, this Army might prevent such a mischief.

Cromwell did not contest this charge, but soberly told the House of Commons that:

I had a great deal of reason to think that his Lordship’s miscarriage in these particulars was neither through accidents (which could not be helped) nor through his improvidence only, but through his backwardness to all action; and had some reason to conceive that that backwardness was not (merely) from dullness or indisposedness to engagement, but (withal) from some principle of unwillingness in his Lordship to have this war prosecuted unto full victory, (but rather end it) on some such terms to which it might be disadvantageous to bring the King too low.

Cromwell was not pursuing a personal vendetta against Manchester, nor did he relish the antagonisms within and between the two Houses that their quarrel was generating. He was waiting only for the Committee of the Army to endorse the evidence of Manchester’s persistent unwillingness to fight since the fall of York. It did so when it reported to the House on 9 December, and towards the end of a long debate, Cromwell rose to make the most important speech of his career to date. He was speaking to a report from a committee which had been set up to inquire into the quarrel between himself and Manchester, but he succeeded in elevating the dispute to one of principle. It was this speech, and what immediately followed it, which demonstrated his consummate skill as a Parliamentary tactician:

It is now a time to speak, or forever hold the tongue. The important occasion now is no less to save a nation out of  a bleeding, nay, almost dying condition, which the long continuance of this war hath already brought it into; so that without a more speedy, vigorous and effectual prosecution of the war – casting off all lingering proceedings like … soldiers of fortune beyond sea, to spin out a war – we shall make the kingdom weary of us, and hate the name of a Parliament.

For what do the enemy say? Nay, what do many say that were friends at the beginning of the parliament? Even this, that the members of both Houses have got great places and commands, and the sword, into their hands; and what by interest in the Parliament, what by power in the Army, will perpetually continue themselves in grandeur, and not permit the war speedily to end, lest their own power should determine with it. This I speak here to our own faces is but what others do utter abroad behind our backs.

… I know of the worth of those commanders, members of both Houses, who are yet in power; but if I may speak my conscience without reflection upon any, I do conceive if the army be not put to another method, and the war more vigorously prosecuted, the people can bear the war no longer, and will enforce you to a dishonourable peace.

So then, he concluded, let them cease pursuing particular complaints against any single commander, since none was infallible, but apply themselves instead to the necessary remedy; he hoped that no member of either House would take offence at his speech, or hesitate to sacrifice private interests for the public good. He had clearly prepared his ground well behind the scenes, colluding with the Presbyterian chairman of the Committee for the Army, Zouch Tate, a firm believer in fighting the King to a finish. Tate immediately moved that …

… during the time of this war no member of either House shall have or execute any office or command, military or civil, granted, or conferred by both or either of the Houses. 

Above: The House of Commons in 1640. It changed little over the following five years.

This was a master-stroke of parliamentary manoeuvring since, as a presbyterian, Tate could be seen as a political opponent of Cromwell. But it was Oliver’s close colleague, Sir Henry Vane, who seconded the motion, who offered to lay down his commission as co-Treasurer of the Navy, and Cromwell himself then offered to resign his own military command. This ‘Self-Denying Ordinance’, as it was more formally adopted by the Commons ten days later, was one half of the remedy; the other would be a thorough recasting of the parliament’s military forces, but that would be a thorough recasting of the parliament’s military forces, but that would be fruitless unless they were put under commanders with a wholehearted will to win. Removing Essex and Manchester was the first problem to be faced, though other peace party peers and MPs were holding less exalted commands, including Thomas Fairfax, Haselrig, Brereton, Cromwell himself, and half-a-dozen others who were equally committed to total victory. For Cromwell to have hung up his sword would have been a serious strategic loss to the army, but he told the House of Commons that the recall of their fellow-members to Westminster …

… will not break, or scatter our armies. I can speak this for my own soldiers, that they look not upon me, but upon you, and for you they will fight, and live and die in your cause.

The Radicals of the Eastern Association:

Cromwell’s enemies no doubt saw the Ordinance as a means of getting rid of him; he and his friends saw the broader problem of removing peers and all those who owed their military commands to social rank rather than to ability. It was a logical extension of the policy of promoting ‘russet-coated men’ within his own regiment according to merit.

The New Model Army, according to one of its chaplains, Richard Baxter, was partly the envy and partly the scorn of the nobility. Baxter was a Presbyterian both in religion and politics. He joined Colonel Whalley’s regiment of horse in the New Model because he thought that the King should often do what Parliament wanted and that people should not be forced to accept bishops or the Prayer Book. However, he was soon shocked to hear how the troopers spoke of the King:

We that lived quietly did keep our old principles and took the true happiness of King and people, Church and State, to be our end. But when I came among Cromwell’s soldiers I found a new face of things which I never dreamed of. I perceived that they took the King for a tyrant and an enemy and really intended to master him or ruin him.

Although there were not that many radicals in the army, they were already beginning to influence among the ordinary soldiers whose hatred for the King was becoming more extreme as the war continued. Baxter blamed himself and other nonconformist ministers for not persuading Cromwell and other commanders to be more peaceable in outlook earlier in the war. In assessing Cromwell’s statesmanship in parliament and the army, we suffer from hindsight. Baxter had been invited by him to become ‘pastor’ to his troops at the beginning of the war when his officers had purposed to make their troops a gathered church’, but he had believed, like many others, that the war would soon be over and there would soon be a peace settlement with the King. When by the end of 1644, this was obviously not the case, he decided he must support Parliament and go to minister to the ’roundheads’. From the start, Cromwell’s troops had enthusiastically carried out the Commons policy of destroying stained glass and images in the churches, for which he was wrongly blamed. In his home city of Ely (pictured below) in January 1644, he had warned Canon Hitch …

… lest the soldiers should in any tumultuary or disorderly way attempt the reformation of your cathedral church, I require you to forbear altogether your choir service, so unedifying and offensive, and this as you will answer it, if any disorder should arise therefrom. … leave off this fooling and come down.

When Hitch ignored the warning, Cromwell emphasised that he was a man under authority, … commanded to dismiss this assembly. Whether or not they were ‘under authority’ to carry out their acts of iconoclasm, there can be little doubt that Cromwell and his troopers were willing to do so, though not altogether as wantonly as many others in East Anglia. It was in the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds, in January 1645, that Cromwell summoned a conference to plan the formation of the New Model Army. The half-trained county levies had proved more than a match for the royalist forces, but they had been reluctant to fight far from home or to permit their military duties to interfere with the demands of their farms and businesses. This was certainly true of the Suffolk men who frequently had to march to distant parts of the realm. Six months later, Cromwell urgently called upon Suffolk’s cavalry to muster at Newmarket and for the infantry to muster at Bury. Each trooper, he promised, would receive fourteen shillings per week and each dragoon 10s. 6d. per week.

But the growing power of the army and the fanaticism of some of its leaders and troops also alarmed many Suffolk people. The use of churches as stables and their ancient windows and monuments for musket practice made the soldiers increasingly unpopular. Added to this disrespectful treatment, William Dowsing of Laxfield was appointed to the post of ‘Parliamentary Visitor’ by Manchester, as General of the Eastern Association. Between January and October 1644, he toured Suffolk with a troop os soldiers, smashing stained glass, defacing bench ends and carved fonts, breaking down crucifixes, tearing up brasses and obliterating inscriptions. In the course of his disastrous rampage, he visited 150 churches at random and carefully noted down his work of destruction in a journal. The entry for the parish church of Clare reads:

… we broke down one thousand pictures superstitious. I broke down two hundred; three of God the Father and three of Christ and the Holy Lamb, and three of the Holy Ghost like a dove with wings; and the twelve apostles were carved in wood, on the top of the roof, which we gave order to take down; and twenty cherubims to be taken down; and the sun and the moon in the east window, by the King’s arms to be taken down.

Some parishes welcomed Dowsing and co-operated with him, but others, such as Ufford, put up a show of resistance, locked the church and tried to keep the desecrators at bay. Even where there was support for his actions, many churchwardens resented having to pay the standard charge of 6s. 8d. for his visitation. Meanwhile, Cromwell’s protection of religious radicals under his command had won him respect from all those who feared a Scottish-imposed Presbyterian discipline. On one of his rare visits to the Commons during the campaigning season, in September 1644,  Cromwell had suggested to one of his independent allies, Oliver St John the wording of a successful motion that asked, failing substantial agreement in the ‘Assembly of Divines’, that the House should continue:

… to endeavour the finding out of some way, how far tender consciences, who cannot in all things submit to the common rule which shall be established, may be borne with according to the Word as may stand with the public peace.

The ‘Self-denying’ & ‘New Model’ Ordinances enacted:

We also know now that Cromwell and other MPs retained their commands, while the Self-denying Ordinance got rid of Essex, Manchester and other ‘peace party’ peers in the army. But it was by no means clear in advance that this would be the outcome. Tate’s original resolution had proposed that ‘no members of either House’ should hold a military command. Yet Cromwell ended up playing a leading role in the whole course of events which led from the Self-denying Ordinance to the formation of the New Model Army. He also ensured that Sir Thomas Fairfax was to be appointed Commander-in-Chief of the new force in January, although this was not finally confirmed until April.

Above: Sir Thomas Fairfax. General of the Parliamentary forces.

Both Fairfax and Cromwell were eventually exempted from the ordinance, though they could hardly have expected this when they first offered to resign. Despite reports of a mutiny in his regiment at the prospects of it being put under another colonel, Cromwell was actually at Windsor, paying his respects to Fairfax before laying down his commission, when he was ordered by the Committee of Both Kingdoms to prevent a rendezvous between the King’s forces and those of Prince Rupert before moving northwards. No doubt Cromwell’s supporters hoped from the start that he would survive the Self-Denying Ordinance, the issue remained in doubt for at least six months after it was first proposed. Cromwell’s political tactics at that first point were superb, but they included the risk that he might have to pay the price of political eclipse himself. The fact that he survived and went on to become Lord General and Lord Protector should not blind us to the chances he took, and to his clear belief in personal providence over ‘blind’ individual ambition.

These twin measures to transform the conduct of the war, the Self-Denying Ordinance and its follow-up the New Model Ordinance, were not solely the product of the war party within the Commons but were devised with the small group of like-minded peers who included Viscount Saye and Sele and the Earl of Northumberland. These formed a coherent group of with their allies in the Commons, a group that some historians have called the ‘royal independents’ because of their subsequent importance in the brief period between the first and second Civil Wars. Saye proposed the Self-Denying Ordinance in principle in the Lords the same day as it was proposed in the Commons, but the peers took ‘great offence’ and rejected it ‘out of hand’. When it came up to them having passed the Commons on 19 December, they laid it aside and resisted all pressure to take it into consideration until 13 January, when they threw it out formally following a ‘vote’ in which only four peers recorded their dissents in favour of it. What finally moved the Lords to action was the reading of the New Model Ordinance later that month, when the Committee of Both Kingdoms recommended the formation of a new army of twenty-two thousand men, to be supported by a levy of six thousand pounds per month on a number of the districts controlled by Parliament.

The establishment of this New Model Army was set at twelve regiments of foot each of twelve thousand men, eleven regiments of Horse of six hundred men each, and one regiment of a thousand dragoons, divided into ten companies, each of a hundred men. The senior officers of the army were selected on 21 January, and Sir Thomas Fairfax was appointed as Commander-in-Chief (on a salary of ten pounds a day) and Philip Skippon as Sergeant-Major General (two pounds per day). Cromwell was only nominated as Lieutenant-General of the Horse (two pounds per day) on the eve of the Battle of Naseby in June and was not appointed as Commander-in-Chief until after Fairfax’s retirement five years later in June 1650. The choice of Fairfax was far from simple because the Self-Denying Ordinance ruled out almost everyone who had commanded anything larger than a regiment. Philip Skippon was an exception and was nominated to the post which best suited him, that of major-general of the infantry. Sir Thomas Fairfax was only thirty-two and had had no pre-war military experience, his highest command having been that of the Horse in his father’s small army, and he had not distinguished himself, unlike Cromwell, at the Battle of Marston Moor. But wherever he had fought he had shown the flair of a born leader of cavalry and he communicated his calm nature in the heat of battle to his officers and men: Cromwell had seen him in action more than once. Although an MP for Yorkshire, he had no known political leanings beyond a steady devotion to the parliamentary cause, and in religion, he was a devout but undogmatic puritan.

The Commons passed the Ordinance without a division. The measure had three main objects, the first of which was to forge a genuinely national army out of the remnants of earlier ones, an army free of the regional ties which had made Waller’s London trained bands and Manchester’s East Anglian foot look over their shoulders when they had been away from home ground for any length of time. Three regiments of horse and foot were to come from Essex’s army and two from Waller’s. The remaining nine regiments of horse and four of infantry were to be from the Eastern Association. This comprised 3,578 men, consisting of four regiments of foot, Crawford’s, Rainsborough’s, Montague’s and Pickering’s. The second aim of the Ordinance was the creation of a fully professional army whose officers were wholly dedicated to the prosecution of the war, without political control. Thirdly, this army was to have an undisputed first call on parliament’s financial resources. The creation of so powerful a force aroused the deepest misgivings of the Lords, especially since peers were to be precluded from holding command in it. Its proposers sought to appease their potential opponents by writing the names of its generals and colonels into the ordinance itself.

The Lords delayed passing the New Model Ordinance until 15 February, despite constant pressure from the Commons, and they disputed the lists of officers submitted by Fairfax for more than a month after that. Although he proposed no-one for the service who did not already hold a commission, they tried to make no fewer than fifty-seven changes in his recommendations, most of them politically motivated; thirty-five of the fifty-two of the officers whom they tried to remove were independents or men of radical views. They tried to make every officer take the Covenant and undertake to conform to the church government to be settled by parliament and to cashier or disqualify any who refused. Under extreme pressure from the Commons and the City, and under the threat of both to withhold essential financial provisions until they gave way, an evenly divided House of Lords finally approved Fairfax’s nominees on 18 March. Even then, at the end of the month Essex, Manchester and Denbigh had still not resigned their commissions and the presbyterian peers were holding up Faifax’s appointment because it did not bind him to preserve the safety of the King’s person. Essex’s infantry was in a state of mutiny and some of his cavalries had refused to serve under Waller. The Lords were jeopardising the whole parliamentarian cause, and they still had not passed the Self-Denying Ordinance. The Commons then threatened to discharge all members of both Houses from their military commands or civil offices. The Lords then approved Fairfax’s commission by one vote, enabling him to gain control of all the troops. Essex, Manchester and Denbigh resigned their commands on 2 April, and the Self-Denying Ordinance was passed by the Lords the following day.

Beyond the obvious sense of injured pride felt by Essex and Manchester in particular, it is difficult to explain why the Lords obstructed the measures which were essential for the prosecution of the war by Parliament. There is some evidence to suggest that Essex’s aim was to revive the medieval office of ‘Lord High Constable’, which had carried supreme military authority, and to occupy this position as a possible step towards even more vice-regal powers. His repeated refusals to obey the Committee of Both Kingdoms’ directions may be attributable to an ambition become not just the master of the war but also the architect of the peace. If this was his plan, the New Model Army and its political sponsors in the Lords soon put paid to it. At the same time as parliament passed the New Model Ordinance, it appointed Northumberland, Saye’s ally and the most senior peer still attending the Lords, as Governor of the King’s children, and it was reported that if the King still refused reasonable terms for a settlement, his youngest son, the Duke of Gloucester, would be made king and Northumberland would become Lord Protector. The rapid elevation of Northumberland by the war party looks very much like an aristocratic move to block Essex’s pretensions and his potential path to power.

The Radical Regiments:

Thus, the New Model Army was finally established in April 1945 under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax, while Cromwell was only later appointed to the command of the cavalry. But it is surely to Cromwell that we must look to see why Pickering’s and Montague’s regiments were put forward for inclusion in the new army. Both had been regiments in the Eastern Association army, which had proved itself by the end of the 1644 Campaign to be the best organised and most successful parliamentarian forces. Besides, Pickering, Montague (who was distantly related to the Earl of Manchester) and their officers had demonstrated that they had all the right credentials to fulfil Cromwell’s objective of creating an effective national standing army committed to complete military victory. But when the list of officers for the New Model was debated in parliament, their names were struck out by the Lords, along with others. Although his elder brother, Sir Gilbert Pickering, was a well-respected MP, John Pickering was described as a fanatical Independent, and his regiment had earned a reputation as being the most radical of all the parliamentary forces. Therefore, the Lords voted to leave out the entire regiment at first on both political and religious grounds, undoubtedly reinforced by Manchester’s determination to purge his personal enemies from any new army that was created.

Pickering’s and Montague’s regiments had already been reported to the Committee for the Army for, on Cromwell’s instructions (as claimed), absolutely refusing orders from Major-General Crawford during 1644. Crawford himself refused to serve in the New Model Army after the failure of presbyterian MPs to control its formation and eventually transferred to Leslie’s presbyterian Scottish army. He was sent to command at the siege of Hereford where he was killed in August 1645. The religious controversies he sparked with Cromwell are revealed in the various disparaging remarks made about Pickering’s and Montague’s regiments by Sir Samuel Luke, governor of Newport Pagnell, another presbyterian. John Pickering was one of the officers who were questioned by parliament, in December 1644, about the events surrounding Manchester’s seeming unwillingness to prosecute the war against the King’s forces. He had reported on the Earl’s failure to capitalise on the successes of the early summer, 1944, and his wish to winter in East Anglia rather than advance into the west with Pickering’s infantry. It was in this acrimonious atmosphere that the ‘radical’ regiment was to be excluded by the Lords, but when the pressure from the Commons eventually led to the passing of Fairfax’s original list by just one vote, Pickering’s became the twelfth regiment of the New Model Army.

After the Battle of Marston Moor in the summer of 1644, fighting had tended to be concentrated around the royalist strongholds of Newark, Chester, Exeter and Oxford. Oxford was the king’s headquarters; its garrison dominated the main routes to the West Country. Large parliamentary forces were committed to besieging these centres, while the king prepared a new offensive. Colonel John Pickering’s Regiment of Foot had been quartered at Abingdon throughout the winter, and it was there on 4 January 1645 that the regiment was paid, and it was still there in April. The regiment was therefore probably involved in the defence of the town when Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the King’s nephew and commander of his cavalry, attacked with eighteen hundred troops on 10 January. New works had just been constructed around the garrison and these proved effective, the royalists being driven back with heavy losses. On 5 April, two days after the establishment of the New Model Army in Parliament, Sir Samuel Luke wrote that two of Pickering’s soldiers were among prisoners held by the royalists at Boarstall, one of the cavalier garrisons that ringed the king’s capital at Oxford.

Although the New Model was being formed from the existing units of the armies of Essex, Manchester and Waller, these had suffered so many losses in the campaign of 1644 that they could supply only seven thousand of the required fourteen thousand plus infantry. It was intended that the balance should be provided by impressment in London and the south-east, but when the New Model began its first campaign it was still short of four thousand men. Nevertheless, it was an instrument of war by which its professionalism, courage and discipline would bring victory for Parliament. Sheer military necessity forced the Committee of Both Kingdoms, with the Commons’ backing, to go ahead with the forming of the Army before it received parliament’s legislative backing. The general aim was to embody in it intact such units in the armies as had proved their military worth. Fairfax was entrusted with the nomination of all officers below the rank of colonel,  and he faithfully observed the principle of keeping together officers and men who had already forged a bond in war. Despite acute Scottish suspicions to the contrary, there was no deliberate design to create an army of a specific political or religious complexion. The overriding criterion for appointment and promotion was military effectiveness. The senior officers named in the ordinance covered a wide ideological spectrum, though the greater commitment of Independents, both religious and political, gave them greater preponderance.

There was no difficulty in filling the ranks of the cavalry in the New Model Army, with a large number of redundant officers enlisting as troopers. The service carried much more prestige and better pay and conditions than the infantry enjoyed. A trooper’s two shillings a day was about twice what he basically needed to feed man and horse, whereas a foot soldier’s eightpence was the wage of a common labourer, and his rations in the field usually consisted of cheese with bread or biscuit. Proven fighting quality ensured the embodiment of most of Cromwell’s Eastern Association cavalry, furnishing five of the New Model’s original regiments of horse. In his efforts to enlist men who knew what they were fighting for and loved what they knew, Cromwell had found them mainly among those who saw their cause as that of the people of God, and so many of them were puritan enthusiasts. He was accused unjustly of favouring sectaries at the expense of moderate, orthodox men, for he did not probe into their beliefs if he sensed that he had what he called ‘the root of the matter’ in them. For a while after the incident with Crawford related above, he did promote Independents and sectaries in preference to rigid Presbyterians, not because of the latter’s religious convictions but because of their intolerance towards comrades-in-arms who did not share them. But  this phase did not last long, and his true spirit spoke in his dispatch to Speaker Lenthall after the New Model Army’s heroic storming of Bristol in 1645:

Presbyterians, Independents, all had the same spirit of faith and prayer, the same presence and answer; they agree here, know no names of difference; pity it is it should be otherwise anywhere. All that believe have the real unity, which is most glorious because inward and spiritual. … As for being united in forms, commonly called uniformity, every Christian will for peace sake study and do as far as conscience will permit; and from brethren, in things of the mind, we look for no compulsion but that of light and reason. In other things God hath put the sword into the Parliament’s hand, but the terror of evildoers and the praise of them that do well.

Re-organisation, Recruitment & Religion:

Thomas Ayloffe was a presbyterian who had originally been included in the list of colonels for the New Model. During the winter of 1644-45, as the conflict between the independents and Presbyterians was fought out in parliament, Ayloffe’s were in the garrisons at Aylesbury and Newport Pagnell, under the command of Crawford and Luke. Ayloffe was not selected to serve in the New Model because of the failure of the Lords to purge it of radicals like Pickering. It was another ‘independent’ regiment, Rainsborough’s, which accompanied  Pickering’s and Montague’s from the Eastern Association into the New Model Army. However, because of the drastic collapse of the numbers in Pickering’s regiment during 1644-45, it was decided by the Commons, on 16 April, that Colonel Thomas Ayloffe’s regiment should be reduced into Pickering’s to help restore the regiment to strength. Ayloffe’s, which probably drew its men from Essex, had spent most of 1644 in the garrison at Aylesbury and Newport Pagnell and did not see action in any of the major battles of that year, although they were involved in the storming of Hillesden House. This process of consolidation was repeated throughout the parliamentarian army because most regiments were under strength. Ayloffe’s men had been with him throughout 1644, while Pickering’s had supported him throughout the winter of 1644-45. The soldiers from Ayloffe’s were successfully transferred to Pickering’s in early April, as Lieutenant-Colonel Hewson reported to the Army’s Treasurer:

… the officers of Collo. Aliffs Regiment did with all willingness and request deliver unto us ther men according to order… 

However, more recruits were still required and though recruitment was still carried on in East Anglia, Pickering’s likely acquired some men from other areas. Pickering took with him into the New Model seven of his company commanders, including Hewson. Not one Captain from Ayloffe’s regiment was included, indeed it would appear that no commissioned officers transferred, for Hewson’s letter clearly states that Ayloffe’s officers ‘delivered’ their men. This was not simply a matter of political or religious differences. One objective of combining regiments was to redress the balance of officers to men. Even when the number of common soldiers in Pickering’s reduced to below three hundred they retained a nearly full complement of officers. The infantry of the older armies was so depleted that just over half of the New Model foot had to be raised by conscription, and they were not raised easily. An impressment ordinance was quickly passed at the end of February, with most of the burden falling on London, which had to find 2,500, and on East Anglia and Kent, whose quota was a thousand each. Pressed men were so prone to mutiny or desert that they had to be guarded all the way to their regiments. They were drawn from the lowest orders, for those worth three pounds in property or five pounds in goods were exempt, as were a whole range of occupations. The penalty for desertion was death, but many were homeless men who could easily disappear without a trace. During the New Model’s first year, nearly twice as many men were pressed as actually served. Desertion rendered it chronically short of infantry, who were down to only eight thousand by September 1945. As Ian Gentles has written, conscripting infantry in 1645-6 was like ladling water into a leaky bucket.

The New Model was better armed and equipped than its predecessors, and it was the first English army to wear a uniform: red, or ‘russet’ coats faced with blue (Fairfax’s colour) with grey breeches. It was even paid fairly regularly, but that did not stop the looting large quantities of livestock, bacon, beer, grain, firewood and household goods wherever they marched. The Eastern Association regiments had always paid their way but in the ‘transition’ period before the Battle of Naseby. The figure below is of a warrant for payment for bullocks delivered for Pickering’s regiment, signed off by Manchester. But in its early months, many of the new infantry recruits behaved as one would expect of unwilling conscripts.  We have seen already how a silk-weaver captain in the garrison at Newport Pagnell incurred the wrath of Sir Samuel Luke by refusing to take the Covenant. But the ordinary soldiers commanded by such men of religious conscience were described by Luke as ‘an ungodly crew’ as they trained for what, for many, was to be their first battle:

 I think these New Modellers knead all their dough with ale, for I never see so many drunk in my life in so short a time.

As Underdown has pointed out, the effect of the establishment of military committees was to supplant the role of JPs, and as many of their members came from origins less elevated than those of the substantial gentry who made up the Commission of the Peace, they were often unpopular with the leading men of the county, even those of nominally Parliamentarian persuasion. The moderates, peace-party men or political ‘Presbyterians’ thus wished to curb the powers of the County Committees; the radicals, war-party men, pro-Army ‘Independents’, wished just as passionately to maintain them. The issue on which local quarrels often turned was finance. The original committee members were anxious to protect their friends and relations, to keep money and troops inside the county and not to be compelled to pay for military activities which did not directly affect their mainly parochial, interests. The radicals who gradually displaced them were less interested in ‘county’ society and property rights; and were more outward-looking. To begin with, it had been assumed that the war would be financed by voluntary subscriptions and loans: Cromwell himself had contributed a thousand pounds in this way, but as it became clear that these would prove inadequate, an excise was introduced and then a land tax. In addition to the sequestered property of loyalists were used for military purposes. This led to tensions between the local sequestration committees, dominated by men with purely local interests, and ‘London’, to which more and more radicals looked for national leadership as well as for finance.

Thus, winning the war became a matter of financial as well as a military re-organisation. The New Model Army was financed by a policy of ‘compounding’ with delinquents, i.e. allowing them to buy back their sequestered estates for a fine calculated according to the degree of their delinquency. This was a compromise, falling short of the confiscation the radicals wanted, but the military revolution necessitated a financial revolution. As Colonel John Pickering took up his new command at Abingdon, where his regiment had been in winter quarters, the Eastern Association ceased to be responsible for his regiment on 5 April. The total cost of maintaining it had been over four and a half thousand pounds, of which three hundred and fifty was for provisions and fifty was for the payment of staff officers. The administrative system of the Association had been unable to raise adequate resources to cover such large sums of money for so many regiments. This is why the pay to Pickering’s regiment had fallen into arrears and the situation regarding supplies and equipment for it and other Eastern Association regiments may however have been better than for some other Civil War armies due to its efficient organisation before the creation of the New Model Army.

However, the problems over pay did not improve after the transfer into the New Model. For forty-two days in April and May, the regiment went without pay. This may have been a factor leading to the mutiny later in April, but the catalyst was apparently a sermon preached by Colonel Pickering following the confirmation of his command of the regiment. This apparently antagonised the men who had transferred from Ayloffe’s regiment who were strongly influenced by the strong presbyterian views of their former commander. According to a royalist broadsheet, it was Pickering’s condemnation of the proposed imposition of the presbyterian church system to which the men particularly objected. It was not unusual that Pickering should have preached to his troops their commanding officer, in the absence of an ordained chaplain, and his strong Calvinist beliefs would have been appreciated by religious Presbyterians and Independents alike. Lay preaching was, after all, an evolving nonconformist practice at this time, but the Presbyterians were determined to impose new conformity in religion through their ‘Covenant’ with the Scots. Parliament, with its presbyterian majority, issued an order which instructed Fairfax …

… that no person be permitted to preach who is not ordained a minister …

But the bad feeling between the regiments of the New Model Army and the other parliamentarian regiments was only in part due to religious and political views. It reflected more the growing resentment at the apparent rise in the status of the New Model regiments, especially when this was exacerbated by the competition for resources. This can very clearly be seen as a primary ‘feeder’ of the conflict between the garrison of Newport Pagnell and Pickering’s regiment while it continued to be billeted in the south Midlands during May 1645. On the 19th, Sir Samuel Luke wrote:

There is such an antipathy here between my men and the New Model that you will every day hear of new encounters. My party which encountered Col. Pickering is returned with the loss of one man only, whom I intend to relieve so soon as I know where he is.

There is some evidence to suggest that, in keeping with Underdown’s thesis, that the general population in the town did not share the hostility of the county gentry and the garrison towards Pickering and his troops, as Luke himself later wrote:

Col. Pickering exercises … twice at North Crawley last Lord’s Day, as I hear, and our townsmen at Newport admire him beyond Mr. Birdett (the commander of Newport Pagnell garrison).

Hostile commentators, both royalist propagandists and Presbyterians like Samuel Luke, misrepresented the general character of the new army from the start. They sneered at the base birth of its officers, though of the thirty-seven who fought at the Battle of Naseby a few weeks later, with the rank of colonel or above, nine were nobles and only seven others were not gentry, while a high proportion of the more junior officers were also of gentry stock. On the other hand, the New Model was widely feared as the supposed military wing of the independent party, but in fact, it refrained from engaging in any kind of collective political activity before 1647. In its early years, it was not indifferent to political issues, for most of its officers and any of its ordinary soldiers, especially its troopers, cared passionately about what they were fighting for. But over these two years, under Fairfax’s leadership, it remained wholly and solely dedicated to beating the enemy in the field, as its creators had intended. At the outset, the high proportion of Independents and sectaries in regiments drawn from the Eastern Association retained much of their old character, especially in Cromwell’s cavalry. But in choosing officers for regiments that had to be reorganised or newly raised, the criteria were previous service and military fitness.

In practice, broad toleration prevailed in most of the army during its fighting years. Something can be gleaned from the names of its chaplains, whose appointment, outside army headquarters, lay with the regimental commanders. Over thirty have been traced who served with various regiments between 1645 and 1651, but few stayed with the colours for more than a few months. Of the nine appointed during 1645, five were Independents and four certainly or probably Presbyterian. Chaplains in the New Model Army preached to civilian congregations as well as to soldiers. Some, like Richard Baxter, were ordained ministers before the war (see above), but these were hard to find and reluctant to leave their ‘flocks’ at home. An increasing number of common soldiers took upon themselves preaching functions, having much in common with itinerant mechanic preachers. Army chaplains also included many radicals, including Henry Pinnell, who became chaplain to Pickering’s regiment, presumably following the complaint from Ayloffe’s men about the Colonel’s preaching and the prohibition on lay-preachers. Later, in 1647, it was Pinnell who defended the ‘Agitators’ to Oliver Cromwell’s face. He was a classical scholar, translator and pamphleteer, and therefore probably an ordained minister, like Baxter. Pinnell was an ‘Antinomian’, contrasting the way a man knows a thing by the reading of it with experimental certainty of it in himself. Although an Independent who championed the rights of ordinary soldiers and was radical in political views, Pinnell also wanted to see an agreement reached with the King. Both were critical of the ‘presbyterian’ parliament, as Baxter often heard men say:

It will never be a good world while knights and gentlemen make us laws, that are chosen for fear and do but oppress us, and do not know the people’s sores. It will never be well with us till we have Parliaments of countrymen like ourselves, that know our wants. 

The Campaign of 1645 – Long Marches & Sieges:

Even at full strength, the New Model accounted for less than half the men in arms in England. Although it absorbed most of what was left of the armies of Essex, Manchester and Waller, Massey’s Western Association Army, the Northern Association Army under Major-General Poyntz, and Brereton’s Cheshire brigade continued in force. There were also numerous local garrisons, as well as the London trained bands. But it was the New Model Army which was to seal Parliament’s victory in the first Civil War. But the delay in getting the New Model ready for action allowed the initiative to pass to the royalists in the early months of 1645. They took Weymouth in February, though it was soon recovered. Colonel Mytton then scored a rare success for parliament by capturing Shrewsbury on 22 February. Plymouth and Abingdon managed to survive determined royalist assaults, but Goring’s cavalry captured Farnham, only thirty-eight miles from London, though he was soon forced to draw them back. More threateningly, the king sent the Prince of Wales with a group of privy councillors to Bristol, to reanimate the war in the West Country and create a new field army there with the specific aim of besieging the much-contested town of Taunton. But the royalists had quarrels of their own in the west country. Charles’ indulgence of Goring led to him becoming commander-in-chief of all the western forces, but neither Grenville, besieging Plymouth, nor Berkeley, governor of Exeter, were willing to take orders from him.

In March 1645, Prince Rupert was sent to relieve Chester, which was threatened by Brereton. Leven had dispatched five thousand Scots under David Leslie to reinforce Brereton, and it looked as though a major battle was impending. However, Rupert was forced to fall back by a popular uprising in Herefordshire and Worcestershire which threatened his rear. Exasperated countrymen had formed themselves into an association to defend themselves against plundering soldiers from both sides. They were nick-named ‘Clubmen’ because most of them were armed only with cudgels and farm implements, though some of them had firearms. They were crushed by the combined forces of Rupert and Maurice and then punished by having the princes’ troopers quartered in the county. But though the cavaliers’ force of arms stamped out the movement in the Marches, for the time being, Clubmen risings followed in Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset in the late spring. The Clubmen were not just aggrieved with having the armies in their midst, but also by the New Model Ordinance and the increased power of the county committees which stemmed from it and the way it impinged on the local rights of property.

Rupert then wanted to march north, first to relieve Chester from Brereton’s besieging forces and then to attack Leven’s now much reduced Scottish army, which was besieging Pontefract Castle. But Cromwell was still in the field with a brigade of horse, making the most of the forty days that the Self-Denying Ordinance allowed him. When Fairfax took to the field at the end of April, his army still at barely half strength, his main impediment was the Committee of Both Kingdoms, which insisted on directing his operations from Westminster. It ordered him, against his own better judgement, to march to the relief of Taunton, so on 1 May, the bulk of Fairfax’s New Model Army marched into the west, leaving Cromwell and his party of horse and dragoons …

… and four regiments of foot besides, who were ordered, when their recruits were come up, to joyn with him to busie the Enemy about Oxford.

These were likely the four regiments of Foot from the Eastern Association, with which Cromwell had worked so well in 1644. Pickering’s regiment was already with Cromwell in late April. Moreover, the brigade of infantry accompanying him was under the command of Richard Browne, Major General of Oxfords, Berks and Bucks (left), under whose command Pickering’s had remained throughout the winter. Rainsborough’s, another of the former Eastern Association regiments, had also been placed under Browne’s overall command in April and May 1645.

Cromwell was already involved in an attempt to clear several small garrisons around Oxford.  On 25 April, following a cavalry skirmish, he had taken Bletchington House, an important garrison only seven miles from Oxford, and went on to harry the outer defences of the city itself, frustrating the northward movement of the king’s artillery by driving off most of the draught horses. From there he turned his attention to Faringdon Castle, then in Berkshire. This was a more difficult challenge, so he had to wait until 29 April, for a body of infantry to join him before he could attack. Five to six hundred infantry were sent by Browne from Abingdon where Pickering’s were quartered. Sprigge recorded that Captain Jenkins was killed at Faringdon, the first of Pickering’s officers to be lost, along with fourteen ordinary soldiers. The regiment may have numbered between five and six hundred by this time since their ranks had been swelled by the men from Ayloffe’s regiment, so they may have been the only regiment involved in the siege.

Above: The Campaign of 1645

This caused Charles to change his plans; he recalled Goring from the west and to summon all his army, including Maurice’s forces in the Marches from Worcestershire southward, to a general rendezvous at Stow-on-the-Wold on 8 May. The results of the siege of Faringdon were inconclusive and on 3 May Goring’s cavalry and dragoons, from the south-west, attempted to ‘beat up’ Cromwell’s quarters and to relieve Faringdon. They were engaged at Radcot Bridge by Cromwell’s horse, but although there were some losses, Goring did not press home his advantage. Having survived Cromwell’s attack, the garrison at Faringdon remained in the royalist’s hands for a further year. At Stow, Charles mustered at least five thousand foot and six thousand horse, as much as Fairfax had when he set out for the west, and the arrival of Langdale with his northern horse gave him an appreciable advantage in cavalry. Meanwhile, when the New Model Army reached Blandford on 14 May, Fairfax was recalled to besiege Oxford and directed to detach six regiments to reach Taunton. The Committee of Both Kingdoms was alarmed by the movements of the Charles’ forces and lured by a false report that the faithful governor of Oxford was ready to betray the city. Fairfax must have thought that there were better ways of raising the morale of raw and reluctant infantry than taking them on long marches for no apparent reason. The Committee of Both Kingdoms was determined to take Oxford before engaging the King’s army in the field. With five thousand men detached for the relief of Taunton, Fairfax was temporarily very vulnerable, yet the Committee ordered him to advance against Oxford.

At Stow, however, the king’s council of war was as usual divided, and it proceeded to throw away its advantage. Rupert and Langdale wanted to stick to their plan for a northern campaign, but most of the rest, including the civilians, pressed for the whole army to move westward and engage Fairfax while the New Model was still raw and under strength. That surely was what the parliament and its general had most to fear, but Rupert opposed it strenuously, and he broke what was becoming an impasse by proposing a division of forces: Goring and his men would be sent westward to check Fairfax, while the rest of the royal army proceeded northward. It was not a good solution, but it pleased Goring, whose authority was enhanced, and it was adopted. It did at least force Brereton to lift the siege of Chester. The strategically-placed city was also the port that Charles hoped to use to land further reinforcements from Ireland. The Committee of Both Kingdoms had tried to keep the siege going by requesting Leven to hasten to Brereton’s assistance and by ordering all available local forces, including Lord Fairfax’s Yorkshiremen, to do likewise. But Leven, though he did not refuse, was deflected by the news of the most brilliant of all Montrose’s victories at Auldearn. He feared that Montrose might advance through the lowlands to join up with the royal army moving northwards, so he made a long detour through Westmorland, so Brereton did not receive the help he needed in time.

The Committee of Both Kingdoms was still transfixed by the mirage of an easy siege of Oxford, and the independent politicians were looking for an ultimate victory which would owe as little as possible to the Scots, who had become a political liability at the same time as their military value had shrunk. As a result, a proposal to send the New Model north was lost by one vote in the special committee of both houses. As a compromise, Fairfax was ordered to send 2,500 of his cavalry and dragoons to assist Leven and to move his remaining troops against Oxford. His political masters had therefore succeeded in splitting his army into three parts before it was even up to strength. , with nearly half his cavalry moving northwards, four thousand men still in Taunton, where they were trapped by Goring after relieving the town, and maybe ten thousand men preparing to lay siege to Oxford. Cromwell’s and Browne’s forces were also instructed to rejoin the army, which they did at Marston on 22 May. Pickering was with the army at Southam in late May and Lieutenant-Colonel Hewson was active in carrying arms and surgeons’ equipment to the siege.

By the end of May, Fairfax had received at least four thousand infantry recruits since first taking to the field, but had also lost three thousand through desertion, disease or skirmishing in the course of his gruelling march into Dorset and back. Rupert also had to contend with politically-motivated civilians in the king’s council of war, but now at Market Drayton, he guided it towards wiser decisions than those he had urged at Stow. Though he had been keen on a northern campaign, he was aware that the major part of the divided New Model had returned as far as Newbury, and he was eager to engage it while he could still catch it at a disadvantage. He had already sent orders to Goring, who had become obsessed with retaking Taunton, to return with his whole force and rendezvous with the main army at Market Harborough in Leicestershire. He now successfully urged that by striking eastwards towards the parliamentarian heartland he would be sure to draw off Fairfax from Oxford, and hoped on the way to collect three thousand Welshmen that Charles Gerrard had been raising and the bulk of the cavalry from the Newark garrison. Since the royal army already numbered eleven thousand, he had a good prospect of giving Fairfax battle on equal or better terms. But Goring decided to ignore his orders to return to the Midlands and remained in Bath, besieging Taunton.

To draw Fairfax off, Charles and Rupert marched upon Leicester, launching what effectively amounted to an invasion of the parliamentary stronghold of the East Midlands, which took its inhabitants by complete surprise. Although it was a wealthy city, it was inadequately garrisoned, and its hastily built fortifications were compromised by suburban buildings which gave cover to an attacking force. Its plunder would fill the soldiers’ stomachs and still leave plenty of loot for the king’s coffers. Rupert invested it methodically and summoned it to surrender on 30 May. Without a response, the royalist guns opened fire in mid-afternoon, and by six they had breached its best-defended quarter, the Newark.  At midnight, they launched a general attack which was resisted by the defenders, a mere 480 foot and 400 horse, assisted by 900 townsmen in arms. They had to be driven back street-by-street until they were finally cornered in the market place and forced to surrender. They did not all receive quarter, and both men and women were killed during the night since Rupert had lost thirty officers and was exasperated by the city’s resistance. The ensuing plunder went on for days, at the end of which 140 cartloads of ‘booty’ were carried off to Newark. It was reported that no royalist taken prisoner between Leicester and Naseby had less than forty shillings on him, two months’ pay for a foot soldier.

Following the fall of Leicester to the royalist army on 31 May, Cromwell (right) was dispatched to secure Ely while Pickering’s regiment remained with Fairfax. Leicester’s agony had the expected effect of making the Committee of Safety abandon the folly of besieging Oxford. Parliament promptly accepted its recommendation that Fairfax should now take the field against the king forthwith, thus removing the New Model’s shackles, simply instructing its general to follow the royal army’s movements and leaving the rest to his own judgement.

(to be continued…)

Sources:

Oxford: OUP (2002).

The cover of the book shows a section of ‘England’s Miraculous Preservation’. The ark contains the two Houses of Parliament, and among those struggling in the flood are Archbishop Laud, Prince Rupert and the Earls of Hamilton and Newcastle, as well as Oliver Cromwell (centre).

Whitstable: Pryor Publications (1994). In the acknowledgements, Glenn refers to the work he and this author did on the history of the regiment:  ‘It had been intended that we write the book together, before his departure to Hungary.’

Harmondsworth: Pelican Books (1972).

Christopher Hill (1975). The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas  During the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

David Smurthwaite (1984), The Ordnance Survey complete guide to the Battlefields of Britain. Exeter: Webb & Bower (Publishers).

John Hayward et.al. (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

 

Individualism & Collectivism:

According to the eminent ‘man of letters’ of the twentieth century, Raymond Williams (1983), the term ‘Socialist’ emerged as a philosophical description in the early nineteenth century. In that century and beyond, it could be used in two ways, which have had profound effects on the use of the term by radically different political tendencies. Of course, social was the merely descriptive term for a society in its now predominant sense of the system of common life; a social reformer wished to reform this system. But ‘social’ was also …

… an emphatic and distinguishing term, explicitly contrasted with ‘individual’ and ‘individualist’ theories of society.

Naturally, there has always been a great deal of interaction and overlap between these two meanings, but their varying effect can be seen in the beginning in the formation of the term. In the first sense, it was viewed as an extension of ‘liberalism’ as it referred to radical political reform of the social order, to develop, extend and secure the main liberal values for all members of society; political freedom, the ending of privileges and formal inequalities, social justice (conceived as ‘equity’ between different individuals and groups). In the second sense, it was seen as the ‘enemy’ of competitive, individualist forms of society, specifically industrial capitalism with its system of wage-labour. Truly social forms depended on practical co-operation and mutuality, which in turn could not be achieved while there was still private (individual) ownership of the means of production. Real freedom could not be achieved, basic equalities could not be ended, social justice (conceived as a just social order rather than simply ‘equity’ between individuals) could not be established unless a society based on private property was replaced by one based on social ownership and control.

Yet, also in this period, movements describing themselves as ‘socialist’, for example, the English Fabians, powerfully revived what was really a variant sense in which ‘socialism’ was seen as necessary to complete liberalism, rather than as an alternative theory of society. To George Bernard Shaw and others in Britain and Ireland, socialism was the economic side of the democratic ideal (Fabian Essays, 33) and its achievement was an inevitable prolongation of the earlier tendencies which Liberalism had represented. Opposing this view, and emphasising the resistance of the capitalist economic system to such ‘inevitable’ development, William Morris used the word communism. Engels, in his Preface of 1888, looking back to the Communist Manifesto which he and Marx had written in 1848, observed:

We could not have called it a ‘Socialist’ manifesto. In 1847, Socialism was a middle-class movement. Socialism was, on the continent at least, respectable; Communism was the very opposite.

Marx & Engels at work at the time of publishing The Communist Manifesto.

For a time, the stresses between employers and employees led to the worldwide dissemination of the very harsh and elementary form of communism which is associated with Karl Marx in particular. However, we need to view Marx’s political economy in its proper context as an integral shift in thinking about how to interpret the new industrial world which had grown up ‘like Topsy’ around the common man. It was only as the nineteenth century developed, according to H. G. Wells, that:

… men began to realise that property was not one simple thing but  a great complex of ownerships of different values and consequences … that there is a very great range of things, railways, machinery of various sorts, homes, cultivated gardens, pleasure-boats, for example, which need each to be considered very particularly to determine how far and under what limitations it may come under private ownership, and how far it falls into the public domain and may be administered and let out by the state in the collective interest.   

Wells, writing his well-known book in 1922, A Short History of the World, expressed the dichotomy in the following terms:

On the one hand are the individualists, who would protect and enlarge our present freedoms with what we possess, and on the other hand the socialists, who would pool our ownerships and restrain our proprietary acts. In practice one will find every graduation between the extreme individualist, who will scarcely tolerate a tax of any sort to support a government, and the communist, who would deny any possessions at all.

The ordinary socialist of today is what is called a collectivist; he would allow a considerable amount of private property, but put such affairs as education, transport, mines, land-owning, most mass production of staple articles, and the like, into the hands of a highly organised state. Nowadays there does seem to be a gradual convergence of reasonable men towards a scientifically studied and planned socialism.

Without such a programme, Engels had realised, there could not be a united Socialist Party permanently, and every attempt to found one would fail. Indeed, the political independence of the nascent Labour Party from the Liberal Party was always in doubt until in 1918 it accepted a Socialist constitution.

Socialism as a Matter of ‘Faith’ – Methodist or Marxist?:

British Socialists possessed a ‘faith’ in the righteousness and ultimate victory of their cause which acted as a powerful driving force. This faith owed as much to Methodism as to Marxism, being based both on Christian principles and the analysis of contemporary society first presented by Marx and Engels. Much of this analysis was modified, however, by Hyndman and the Fabians, by Morris and Blatchford, though it still had a comprehensive reality for those who accepted it. To its working-class adherents, like my own grandparents who founded and campaigned for it in Coventry, it gave a sense of purpose and pride in class consciousness; to middle-class philanthropists, it afforded the consolation that they were working in solidarity with a range of tendencies of social change and progress. As Pelling concluded in his seminal work, the history of the world had often shown the dynamic qualities of a faith devoutly held, like that of the early Christians, the Calvinist reformers and the millenarian sects of the seventeenth century. Faith may feed on illusions, but it is capable of conquering reality.

The fact was that the British working class as a whole had no use for the conception of violent revolution. Any leader who failed to recognise this could not expect to win widespread support. Economic grievances could temporarily arouse bitter discontent as they had done in the early years of the industrial revolution. But dislocations of this type were for the most part transitory: a permanent political organization of the working class needed to disavow the use of violence. Only those who recognised this could effectively set in motion the movement to form a Labour Party. At the time Keir Hardie (right) retired from the chairmanship of the ILP in 1900, it had captured trade-union support, with the ultimate objective of tapping trade union funds for the attainment of political power.

But soon the ILP was deeply in debt and was only saved from bankruptcy by the generosity of wealthy supporters such as George Cadbury, who, as a Quaker, appreciated its stance against the Boer War. With Hardie’s re-election to Parliament, and the reaction against imperialism, the ILP’s position steadily improved, and it began to build itself up again and gained fresh recruits. By 1906 it was as strong as it had not yet the full force of the Socialist revival of that time. The Labour Representation Committee was a pressure group founded in 1900 as an alliance of socialist organisations and trade unions, aimed at increasing representation for labour interests in the Parliament. The Socialists were a minority force within it, and even after the formation of the Labour Party and its adoption of Socialism as its political creed in 1918, many within the party were hostile to it as an ideology.  There is little doubt that most of the non-Socialist trade-union leaders would have been happy to stay in the Liberal Party, which most of them had belonged to in the past if the Liberals had made arrangements for a larger representation of the working classes among their Parliamentary candidates.

All along, there was little doubt that most of the non-Socialist trade-union leaders would have been happy to stay in the Liberal Party if that party had made arrangements for a larger representation of the working class among their Parliamentary candidates. Again and again, it was the fault of the official Liberal Party constituency caucuses that this did not happen; and it was the behaviour of these that set many of the workers’ leaders thinking in terms of a separate party. Even Keir Hardie’s revolt at Mid-Lanark in 1888 had been directed, not against Gladstone’s policies, but against the system by which the local association chose its candidate. The subsequent success of the ILP was largely due to the failure of its rivals, the Labour Electoral Association, to make any satisfactory terms with the Liberal Party for the fuller representation of Labour. Its leader, Threlfall, had been forced to admit the complete failure of its policy in 1894:

It is a curious commentary upon this ‘ideal system’ that of the thirteen Labour members representing England and Wales in the present House, four ran in opposition to, or without recognising the existence of the caucus, five represent constituencies where the miners absolutely dominate the position … and only four either captured the caucus or out-generalled it. It is … a waste of time to advise the working classes to attend … they regard it as a middle-class machine; they have neither the time nor the inclination to compete with the wire-pullers who work it, and they have a decided objection to being made the puppets of anyone. It has served its purpose, and it has carried the people through one state of its development: but as it exists today it is too narrow and too much hampered with class prejudice to be a reflex of the expanding democratic and labour sentiment.

Herbert Gladstone, later to become the Liberal Chief Whip, also recognised that the constituencies, for social, financial and trade reasons are extremely slow to adopt Labour candidates. The Fabians also found that their attempts to ‘permeate’ the associations with potential candidates were met with the refusal of the moneyed men to finance the caucus. The principal reason why money was required was that there was no system for the payment of MPs. This was a reform that the Liberal leaders might have taken up much earlier than they did, thus removing a motivating factor in the support given by smaller unions to the idea of a separate Labour Party. As early as 1897, E. Cowey, a prominent Lib-Lab leader of the Yorkshire Miners moved a resolution at the 1897 TUC in favour of State payment of MPs, saying that:

… money was still the golden key that opened the door to a seat in the House of Commons. Only large and powerful societies could … afford to keep their representatives in such a responsible and expensive position. … The payment of members was absolutely necessary to the success of the Labour movement.

But it was not until 1911, after the Osborne Judgement, that the Liberal Party gave this priority and passed it into law; in the meantime, the smaller unions had already wedded themselves to the idea of a separate Labour Party. For these reasons, it is not difficult to see why the Liberal Party failed to retain the popularity that it had once enjoyed among the ‘responsible’ leaders of the trade unions. As Ramsay MacDonald observed to Herbert Samuel, We didn’t leave the Liberals: They kicked us out and slammed the door in our faces. As the LEA faded away after 1895-96, the ILP steadily asserted itself as the hope of the working-class for parliamentary representation. Thus, the early components of the Labour Party formed a curious mixture of political idealists and hard-headed trade unionists: of convinced Socialists and loyal, but disheartened Gladstonian Liberals.

The Establishment of the Parliamentary Labour Party:

The great difficulty the LRC had to face was the maintenance of an independent political line by all its members. Richard Bell, one of the only two MPs representing it in 1900 Parliament, saw no need to hold himself aloof from the Liberals, and in 1904-5, when he refused to sign the Labour Party constitution, he had to be expelled. There was similar trouble with the three Labour MPs elected at by-elections before 1906: two of them, Shackleton and Henderson were reprimanded in 1904 for appearing in support of a Liberal by-election candidate. It was only in 1906, with the election of a substantial group of thirty MPs who drew a regular salary from the LRC, that the Labour Party was established as a genuine parliamentary party. Part of the problem had been the financial weakness of the Socialist societies as compared with the trade unions. Even in 1901, before many of the big trade unions switched their allegiance, the societies made up less than one-sixteenth of the total affiliated party membership. They were further weakened by the secession of the SDF and by the Fabian Society losing respect over its support for jingoism; the ILP was also, once more, on the verge of bankruptcy. In 1906, it contributed to the LRC based on a nominal sixteen thousand members, and the Socialist societies’ proportion of the LRC’s contributing membership had sunk to one-fiftieth.

Above: A Liberal Party rally during the 1906 General Election. Though often rowdy, rallies were vital in mobilising voters. As the early twentieth century progressed, political parties made increasing use of the new forms of mass media: radio and newsreel, in addition to newspapers and journals.

Furthermore, many of the political difficulties of the Labour Party’s early years arose from the fact that the ILP, although committed to the line of independence, was nevertheless sympathetic to the Liberal Party in policy terms. It favoured Free Trade over Chamberlain’s policy of Protection and was fiercely opposed the Education Act of 1902, which established state-controlled elementary schools, as did most Nonconformist supporters of both Liberal and Labour causes. Sidney Webb had had a role in the design of this act, but the Manchester Guardian was able to say of the 1901 ILP Conference that: What must strike a Liberal … is … how much of the proceedings are devoted to the advocacy of traditional Liberal principles.

After Champion was finally discredited, the former Liberals had it all their own way in the ILP’s leadership. Ramsay MacDonald, whom Hardie described as the party’s greatest intellectual asset, sided with the Liberals against the Fabian Socialists on almost every immediate issue of the time; and Hardie, who had been much more friendly to the Radicals since the outbreak of the South African War, in October 1901, publicly advocated a frank, open and above-board agreement … for well-defined purposes with the anti-war Liberals. Eighteen months later Hardie was apparently prepared to connive at MacDonald’s secret electoral understanding with the Liberal whips. With both the leaders and the rank-and-file of the Socialist wing showing little enthusiasm for the pacifist stance of MacDonald and Hardie, the non-Socialist elements gravitated further towards an alliance with the anti-war Liberals. Between 1903 and 1906 the new party machine had been brought into existence, and whatever the political views of its officers, it soon began to build up among them a vested interest in its maintenance, which has continued through to the present day, despite immense strains at times.

The officials of the great trade unions had made up their minds in favour of having a distinct party of Labour, and so long as their industrial strength continued to grow, the strength of the political organisation would also increase. In the pre-war years which followed, however, there were doubts about the value of political action, and the new industrial unions absorbed ‘syndicalist’ ideas from across the continent and the USA. These were often born out of a traditional distrust of ‘leaders’ within the movement which was often stoked by personal feuds between them as well as disagreements on policy; there were also stresses and strains arising out of wars, rumours of war and revolutions in Europe. Some of the unions, especially the Miners’ Federation, ‘the Fed’, suffered from the peaks and troughs of the international trade cycle, resulting in further radicalisation. Others among the ‘new unions’ of 1889 became more moderate as they became more established. In the thirty years of its life, the new party increased its aggregate poll and share of the vote in every General Election it fought. Despite the persistence of its plurality of ideas and interests, or perhaps because of it, the essential unity of the party remained intact. As Pelling concluded:

The association of Socialist faith and trade-union interest, of hope for an ideal future and fear for an endangered present, seemed on the point of disruption at times: yet it survived, for a variety of reasons … because in the years before the party’s birth there had been men and women who believed that the unity of the working-class movement, both in industry and politics, was an object to be striven for, just as now most of their successors regard it as an achievement to be maintained.

In British politics as a whole, the electoral system underwent profound changes over the early twentieth century. In 1900, only seven out of ten adult men (and no women) were qualified to vote. Four million men were excluded from the franchise and there were nearly half a million plural voters, including around two thousand men with four or more votes. Despite the continued restrictions on the franchise,  the SDF continued to field independent socialist candidates. The picture above was taken during the Haggerston by-election of July 1908 and shows a suffragette, ‘Miss Maloney’ speaking from a Clarion Van in the cause of the SDF candidate, Herbert Burrows. During the five-day campaign in the safe Liberal seat, the van was parked outside the Liberal Party HQ. Burrows was a popular figure in East London, where he had helped Annie Besant organise the 1888 matchgirls’ strike at Bryant and May’s factory. The issue of female suffrage was a strong factor in the campaign, and the Liberal candidate, Warren, had the support of Mary MacArthur’s National Union of Women Workers. However, many notable suffragettes, including the Pankhursts, were opposed to his candidature, because he was a supporter of Asquith. The result brought a victory for the Tory, Rupert Guinness, the brewer, with Burrows finishing in third place with half the votes gained by Warren.

After the ‘Landslide’, Erosion & the Rise of Labour:

Above: The Bethnal Green by-election of 1914. Door-to-door canvassing was, at it still remains, an important aspect of electioneering. Though women did not get the vote until 1918, this candidate seeks support on the doorstep from a female shopkeeper. His attention is an early indication of the growing importance of women at election-time.

The Liberal governments of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith had initiated, between 1906 and 1914, a series of social and political reforms of a far-reaching character. But the emphasis here is placed upon the period 1914-22 in identifying the role of the Labour Party concerning Liberal decline. Whether Dangerfield’s idea of the ‘strange death of Liberal England’ between 1910 and 1914 is a valid thesis is still strongly debated among historians. Its significance lies in its identification of the basic strains upon Liberalism caused by the political and industrial crises. Liberalism was, and still is (at least to some extent), an ideology of individual and social conscience. It was the 1914-18 War which tested that conscience rather than the earlier threats. The War also brought about an independent Labour representation in Parliament, a result of the breakdown of the Gladstone-MacDonald Pact of 1903. The nature of ‘total war’ brought many basic Liberal principles into question. It led to the leadership of Asquith being challenged first with the creation of a more broadly based coalition in May 1915 and then being superseded following the split with Lloyd George in December 1916. For the Liberal Party, this meant a rift, never to be healed, between Asquithian and Coalition Liberals.

Universal male suffrage was achieved in 1918, when, after a long struggle, women over the age of thirty were also permitted to vote. In 1928, the age limit was lowered to twenty-one, equal with men. The principle of single-member, equal-sized constituencies was accepted in 1885, though it was not completely achieved until 1948. Voting behaviour also changed significantly. Most obviously, Labour replaced the Liberals as one of the two major political parties after 1918. The beginnings of this change, which took effect on a largely local and regional basis, can be seen in the map of the 1918 General Election, shown below. In 1918, British politics was based upon the relationship between the Liberal and Conservative parties. They were, in many ways, sides of the same coin. They accepted both the logic of consensus politics and the benefits of a capitalist society.

John Buchan, the Conservative politician and writer, described the 1918 General Election as a ‘blunder’.  He claimed that Statesmen, who had criticised soldiers harshly for their blindness, were now in their own province to be no less myopic. The instinct which led to the election was right, but its conduct was disastrous. For the sitting members, the test of patriotism was a solitary division in the House of Commons in the preceding May on a criticism of the Government by a distinguished staff-officer, one which was neither factious or unfair. Those who had remained ‘docile’ were given ‘coupons’ to fight the election on behalf of the Coalition Government, but the ‘malcontents’ were outlawed. The coupon candidates swept the board, giving the Government a huge working majority with 484 members; Labour returned fifty-nine members, and the non-coalition Liberals were reduced to little more than a score of seats. But although this was a landslide for Lloyd George, that victory for ‘the man who won the war’ should not blind us to the poor performance of the Asquithian Liberals, the vulnerability of many of the Coalition Liberals with their seats in industrial working-class areas to Labour advance and the 22.2 per cent of the total vote received by the Labour Party. ‘Fusion’ between Coalition Liberals and Conservatives seemed possible in 1919-20, the creation of a ‘centre’ party to counter the reactionary right and the revolutionary left, but Lloyd George did not grasp this opportunity and by 1921 it was too late.

The result of the ‘coupon election’ was one of the least representative parliaments in British history. A batch of leaderless trade unionists constituted the official Opposition; the rest was, in Lloyd George’s words, ‘a chamber of commerce’. It was an assembly of well-to-do mediocrities. The election created impatience in many classes, in returning soldiers, in munitions workers and in Labour circles in general. It gravely weakened the prestige of Parliament, which had been largely in abeyance during the war, and which could not afford any decline in its status at a time when many minds were turning away from constitutionalism. Above all, it weakened the authority of Britain in the coming peace councils. Lloyd George went to these councils bound by extravagant election pledges. Overall, the first three decades of the century witnessed the development of class-based voting, with the Labour support concentrated in areas of heavy industry in Wales, the Midlands and North of England and Central Scotland, while the Conservatives held a near-monopoly of seats in the rural South of England, and the Liberals held on to the more sparsely-populated constituencies in the ‘Celtic fringes’ of Wales and Scotland and, to begin with, the more rural areas of East Anglia, Yorkshire and the North-East of England. This set the voting patterns for the rest of the century. In her diary for 1918, Beatrice Webb made a ‘prophetic’ statement:

The Liberal Party which had for years governed the Empire has been reduced to an insignificant fraction with all its leaders without exception at the bottom of the poll. … Lloyd George with his conservative phalanx is apparently in complete command of the situation; as the only alternative Government there stands the Labour Party with its completely Socialist programme and its utopia of the equalitarian state.

Syndicalists & Socialist ‘Heroes’ of the Unemployed.

Outside Parliament, the Socialists kept up their agitation for ‘Work, not charity’ relentlessly during the first decade of the century, the SDF leading the unemployed on regular sorties into the heart of Mayfair. The photograph below of Westminster unemployed, printed from an SDF lantern slide, gives a vivid picture of the strength of the demonstrators as they ‘invaded’ Berkeley Square in November 1905. The Central Workers’ Committee had organised a vast demonstration of the unemployed. Assembling on the morning of 20 November on the Embankment, contingents marched from all parts of the capital. From Islington, Shoreditch, Hackney and Bethnal Green, unemployed men were led by Dick Greenwood of the SDF and Parson Brooks, the ‘socialist chaplain’. Two thousand walked from Hammersmith and Fulham, stopping on the way in Eaton Square to eat sandwiches provided by the SDF. The Woolwich men, two-hundred-strong, tramped to Greenwich, crossing the river by steamboat. Fifteen hundred arrived from Poplar, organised by the Labour Representation Committee and led by George Lansbury and two of his aldermen. The trade unions supporting the demonstration unfurled their magnificent silk banner with colours of crimson and gold, green and silver, bearing the names of the organised working class; the Gasworkers, Riggers, Coal Porters, French Polishers, Machine Rulers and many more.

As the march moved away from the Embankment, they were led by the banner of the Westminster Unemployed, as seen in the photograph, with the slogan by heavens our rights are worth fighting for. Curse your charity, we want work was the theme as the SDF with trade union support swept towards the homes of the wealthy. Twenty thousand roared approval at a Hyde Park rally after the ‘incursion’; as Jack Williams told them, you have starved too long. … come out and parade the West End every day. He read a telegram from Keir Hardie urging them not to hide in the slums, but to come out and back us in fighting to win the right to work. Like Hardie, Williams was born into poverty and escaped from the workhouse at the age of ten, climbing the walls of the Hornsey Union to freedom. The other speakers at the rally included the trade union leaders Margaret Bondfield and Harry Gosling, but it was the fiery passion of Jack Williams that had the crowd roaring support. He led the workless to the doors of the rich, marching them on one occasion down Bond Street as policemen stood purposefully with their backs to the jewellers’ windows. On another ‘invasion day’, they marched to Belgrave Square, and caused consternation as a red carpet laid across the pavement for a society wedding was torn to shreds by the boots of the unemployed.

Earlier in the year, London had seen the arrival of two marches from the Midlands. The first was from Raunds of Northampton, members of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, going in a body to the War Office to protest against cheap labour policy of the department in purchasing service boots at prices below an agreed tariff. Once again, the organiser of the march was a prominent member of the SDF, James Gribble, who had worked in the boot and shoe trade since he was twelve years old. He organised the march on military lines, selecting only the fittest men from hundreds of volunteers and appointing three ‘officers’ to take command of his men who were divided into six companies. With bicycle outriders and a horse-drawn ambulance, General Gribble, as he was dubbed, took no risks of his army falling by the wayside.

Another procession to London to be commemorated by a series of postcards was the march of four hundred unemployed from Leicester, representing two thousand men and their families. Negatives of the original cards, including the one above, were sent to Leicester Museum by an old socialist, Robert Barnes, who produced the photographs, including that shown above, from those in the possession of the organising secretary of the march, George White. Their journey was arduous and miserable, the men trampling through driving continuous rain, shoes leaking, with topcoats made from sacks and living on bread, cheese and cocoa. The march was supposed to be welcomed in London by the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour Party at a mass meeting in Hyde Park in support of the Unemployed Bill, which was opposed by many trade unions because it provided that the unemployed under local authority assistance should work at less than the union rate for the public works they undertook. Along the way, the marchers learned that the King had refused their request for an audience and it was a tired, ragged and soddened army that was given shelter and a meat tea by the Salvation Army at Edgware and asked by Ramsay MacDonald to sign the pledge! On Whit Monday the weather brightened and so did the men, marching cheerfully to Parliament Hill Fields (shown above), where MacDonald addressed a crowd on more than six thousand on behalf of the ILP. Keir Hardie also sent a telegram describing their march as ‘heroic’.

An unusual postcard was that shown above, depicting the SDF agitator Ernest Marklew dressed in broad-arrowed prison clothes, picking oakum, published in 1906. The card is one of a small of socialist commemorative cards that belonged to a pioneer member of the ILP. It is a reminder of the long years of struggle by early socialists to establish the right of free speech in public places. The SDF had long been harassed by police while holding open-air meetings and heavy fines and imprisonment with hard labour had been imposed by middle-class magistrates on socialists accused of obstruction and refusal to pay fines. At Nelson in Lancashire, as well as in other towns and cities including the capital, socialists persisted in speaking at regular ‘pitches’ despite repeated harassment. As one speaker was arrested, another one would take his place, and thousands would turn out every Sunday, some from curiosity, others to lend support, as police fought their way through crowds to drag away speaker after speaker. The secretary of the Nelson branch of the SDF, Bryan Chapman, was also imprisoned during the free speech fight there. Marklew was sent to prison for fourteen days and Chapman got seven days. Arrests and battles followed each Sunday for months and the usual attendance of hundreds for an SDF open-air meeting swelled to thousands. The photograph of Marklew (above) was posted in a studio and sold by the SDF to raise money for the socialist cause.

In 1908, the Manchester unemployed tried a new tactic to draw public attention to their plight. On Sunday, 14 September, following a meeting of about five hundred workless men, they were urged to march on Manchester Cathedral and the photograph above shows them pouring into the cathedral during worship, watched by the mostly middle-class communicants. The Dean, Bishop Weldon, appeared and agreed to speak on unemployment if they could come back during the afternoon. That afternoon nearly three thousand men assembled in Stevenson Square. About fifteen hundred then marched to the cathedral where the bishop welcomed them but said it wasn’t the province of the church to organise work but, if it was necessary to raise a special fund, many of us will willingly deprive ourselves to aid what is being done. The vicar of Rochdale preached a sermon in which he offered sympathy on behalf of the Church. When the men interrupted, the Dean had to declare the service over. After the service, the leader of the unemployed, a man named Freewood, read the prayer that he had intended to read in the cathedral, ending with…

O Lord we beseech thee to move thy servant Bishop Knox (Archbishop of Canterbury) to see that something more than sympathy is needed and that his influence brought to bear on our Parliament might bear some fruit.

The rising militancy of the trade unions and the determination of the government to meet the militancy with armed force if necessary was shown first during the Cambrian Combine strike in 1910 in the Rhondda Valleys which led to serious rioting in Tonypandy and clashes with police leading to the death of one miner. Winston Churchill, then Liberal Home Secretary, deployed both cavalry and infantry units, the latter drawing bayonets on picketing miners. I have written about in detail elsewhere on this site. The picture above (top) shows miners waiting to go into a mass ‘Federation’ meeting at the Empire Theatre, Tonypandy in November 1910. Below it, Trehafod miners are pictured picking coal from the slag-heaps during the dispute, which continued into 1911.

Above: A soup kitchen during the Cambrian Combine strike, 1910-11.

Tom Mann, one of the leaders of the great dock strike of 1889, founder of the militant Workers’ Union, first secretary of the ILP and first secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, arrived back in England in May 1910, after eight years of trade union activity in Australia. By that time, he was a labour leader of international renown with a capacity for appearing at the centre of a struggle, as a catalyst for action. He returned from his years abroad as an advocate for syndicalism, or ‘industrial unionism’, as a means of winning working-class power. Within eight weeks of arriving home, he had launched a small publication, The Industrial Syndicalist. He wrote,

… What is called for? What will have to be the essential conditions for the success of any such movement? That it should be avowedly and clearly revolutionary in aim and method. We therefore most certainly favour strikes and we will always do our best to help strikers.

He was not to have to wait long before leading one of the fiercest strikes of the decade. Following his ideas of industrial unionism, by November he had formed the thirty-six unions organising transport into the National Transport Federation. After winning the first stage of the battle against the International Shipping Federation for union recognition, the lesson of solidarity was clear in Liverpool on 28 June 1911, when four thousand dockers came out demanding recognition of the National Union of Dock Labourers. Churchill drafted troops into Liverpool and sent two gunboats up the Mersey with their guns trained on the port. Cavalry and infantry with fixed bayonets were deployed and hundreds of long, stout staves were ordered for the police. Mann answered this by telling the Liverpool strikers:

Let Churchill do his utmost, his best or his worst, let him order ten times more troops to Liverpool, not all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can take the vessels out of the docks to sea.

On 24 August, with all their demands conceded, the strike was called off. The success of the dockers and the railwaymen, during the first national railway stoppage, seemed to inspire a revolt of women workers in the area of London’s dockland during a heatwave in August. The photograph above showing the distribution of loaves of bread outside the Labour Institute in Bermondsey survives as a relic of an uprising of the unorganised. Women and girls walked out of jam, biscuit and pickle factories and marched around Bermondsey calling on other women in the food factories to join them in claiming an increase in their incredibly low wages. Out came the women and girls from the factories with household names; Spillers’, Pearce Duffs’, Hartley’s and Lipton’s, where they worked for as little as seven shillings a week. Laughing, singing, welcoming the escape from the stifling factories, they were joined by Labour leaders including Ben Tillett, the Dockers’ leader (pictured below), Mary MacArthur, Herbert Burrows and Dr Salter addressing fifteen thousand of their fellow strikers in Southwark Park. Within three weeks, increases had been won at eighteen of the twenty-one factories where the women had struck.

It is doubtful whether British society has ever been so beset with contradictions as it was in 1914. A Liberal Government was in power, though only just; it depended on the votes of Labour and Irish Nationalist MPs. A vast programme of social reform lay behind it, but a vast agenda of social unrest awaited it every day. There was widespread working-class unrest; beginning in 1910, there had been a wave of strikes, conducted with extreme bitterness on all sides, sweeping through the country, with every prospect of a final confrontation in the autumn of 1914. Ben Tillett, looking back on these years in 1931, called them:

A strange, hectic period of our economic history! It was a great upsurge of elemental forces. It seemed as if the dispossessed and disinherited class in various parts of the country were all simultaneously moved to assert their claims upon society.

‘Memories and Refections’, 1931.

The Disunited Kingdom at the Outbreak of War:

It was to a disunited kingdom, with a militant Suffragette movement ‘alongside’ militant trade unionism in Britain, the Army in Ireland in a state of mutiny and Ulster on the verge of civil war over ‘Home Rule’, that war came in August. At once another contradiction was exposed. The ruling Liberal Party was strongly tinged with pacifism, yet it was also the Party which had carried through, under Lord Haldane, the most effective military reforms in British history. The people as a whole were largely unaware of them; indeed it was almost completely unaware of its Army, except when war was actually in progress, or when disagreeable occurrences like the Curragh Mutiny reached the headlines and was the cause of ‘wild delight’ on the opposition Conservative benches in the House of Commons. A powerful counter-note to this was struck by a Labour MP, Colonel Ward, which would nevertheless have been considered dangerous had it been uttered outside the protection of privilege that the House provided. In ringing tones, he warned the Tories that, if they wanted a Civil War, they could have it: If there was to be a mutiny in the Army, it would a mutiny of the working class. Britain was a naval power, much admired around the world as the shield of British democracy, but the Army, characterised in Rudyard Kipling’s poem Tommy, was viewed with far less respect, particularly by the lower middle class and the ‘respectable working class’ and especially in the ‘chapel-going’ areas of Wales and the rural Midlands and ‘West Country’ of England, where ‘red-coats’ were seen as ‘scum’.

For socialists, although not all pacifists, the war was a negation of internationalism, splitting the movement as workers from one country hastened to shoot down the workers of another. On 2 August 1914, just two days before the declaration of war, a huge anti-war meeting was held in Trafalgar Square. Called by the British section of the International Socialist Bureau, a manifesto, whose signatories included Keir Hardie and Arthur Henderson, was read to the gathering, it ended with the words down with the class rule, down with the rule of brute force, down with war, up with the peaceful rule of the people. Speakers included Will Thorne, Mary MacArthur, Margaret Bondfield, Herbert Burrows and Keir Hardie. Three days later, the Labour Party supported the war. H. G. Wells proclaimed the sword had been drawn for peace. Labour and trade union leaders joined in recruiting campaigns and Will Thorne became a Lieutenant Colonel in the West Ham Volunteers. Workers enlisted in their hundreds of thousands and it was left to the pacifist section of the labour movement together with a handful of true internationalists to preserve the socialist conscience. The ILP published an anti-war manifesto that declared:

Out of the darkness and the depth we hail our working class comrades of every land. Across the roar of guns we send sympathy and greetings to the German socialists. …

This was truly a cry out of the darkness.  The slogans on the posters in the recruiting photograph on the right attest to the prevailing jingoism of the times.  In his own constituency of Aberdare, Keir Hardie, the apostle of British socialism was booed as he declared he was going to oppose this war in the interests of civilisation and the class to which he belonged.

These words were brave and sincere, but also soon lost in the vortex of hate which soon flowed from the outbreak of war, and a tired and saddened Hardie slowly died as the workers rushed in their hundreds of thousands to join the recruiting queues to enlist for the bloodiest slaughter in the history of mankind to date. The same British workers who had been hailing their German proletarian comrades just days before, now saw them as enemies and aggressors, crying out Down with Germany!

The dominant mood, in the early August days of 1914, was one of euphoria, as can be seen on the faces in the photograph above, taken outside the recruiting office.

The weather seemed to have a lot to do with it.  A mood of national unity was suddenly reborn, one which leading figures in the Labour movement found difficult to resist and remain in leadership. When Ramsay MacDonald (pictured below) resigned as Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party because of his own opposition to the war, Henderson was ready to take his place.

But resignation in these circumstances did not come cheaply either. One contemporary who had met him once before 1914 and had failed to be impressed,  except by his remarkable good looks. M. A. Hamilton had also heard him speak after this and had been considerably impressed. But what had ‘thrilled’ his observers in 1914 was his going out into the wilderness:

We accepted the legend of rejected office, and gloried in it, as in the courage of his assault on Edward Grey. Meeting him in those days at 44 Bedford Square, one could not but admire an aloof dignity in which there was no hint of self-conscious pomp. This admiration steadily mounted, as MacDonald was singled out for attack. He was assailed, incessantly, as a pro-German pacifist who cared nothing for his country. He got all the brick-bats; they were numerous and edgy, and he minded them, a lot.

Arthur Henderson was, according to E. A. Jenkins in his biography, From Foundry to Foreign Office (1944), a typical Northcountryman, who liked to talk about religious or political ‘topics of the hour’. Henderson became a Methodist in 1879 (having previously been a Congregationalist) and became a local lay-preacher. Henderson worked at Robert Stephenson and Sons’ General Foundry Works from the age of twelve. After finishing his apprenticeship there aged seventeen, he moved to Southampton for a year and then returned to work as an iron moulder (a type of foundryman) in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. After he lost his job in 1884, he concentrated on preaching. In 1892, Henderson entered the complex world of trade union politics when he was elected as a paid organiser for the Friendly Society of Iron Founders and its representative on the North East Conciliation Board. Henderson believed that strikes caused more harm than they were worth and tried to avoid them whenever he could. For this reason, he opposed the formation of the General Federation of Trade Unions, as he was convinced that it would lead to more strikes.

In 1900, Henderson (shown on the left in the photo from 1906, with other leading figures in the party), was one of the 129 trade union and socialist delegates who passed Keir Hardie’s motion to create the Labour Representation Committee (LRC). In 1903, he was elected Treasurer of the LRC and was also elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Barnard Castle at a by-election.

In 1906, the LRC changed its name to the Labour Party and won 29 seats at the general election. In 1908, when Hardie resigned as Leader of the Labour Party, Henderson was elected to replace him. He remained Leader until his own resignation two years later, in 1910. In 1915, following Prime Minister H. H. Asquith’s decision to create a coalition government, Henderson became the first member of the Labour Party to become a member of the Cabinet, as President of the Board of Education.

‘Total War’ – the Views of Working-class Men & Women:

Despite the vitriolic attacks on pacifist politicians like MacDonald at home, there was a more satirical tone expressed in the voice of the Army in its marching songs as it arrived in the fields of Flanders and northern France. This was the Regular Army, the sardonic, unemotional, matter-of-fact voice of the widely-despised ‘Tommy Atkins’ who, as usual, was being expected to do the dirty work, was quite prepared to do it and was not sentimental about it. It had few illusions and its attitudes, had they been aware of them, would have further shocked their fellow-countrymen. In contrast to the general public mood, it was not fuelled by hatred of Germany but, in true mercenary spirit, it would have been equally ready to fight the French. Its motto was, We’ll do it. What is it? Sixty per cent of the men in the ranks of the 1914 British Expeditionary Force were reservists, called back to the colours. For many of them, their return to Army life was a distressing uprooting from their homes and occupations. Yet theirs was also an odd satisfaction in obeying the call.

But the Regular Army, even with its reservists, was simply not large enough for the needs of continental war. There would need to be something else, and this need was quickly perceived by Lord Kitchener, the new Secretary of State for War. Out of this perception came the ‘Kitchener Armies’ or ‘New Army’, an extraordinary manifestation of patriotism which brought over 2.25 million volunteers into the colours in the first fourteen months of the war. As the Front-line war dragged on over the next three years, the endless casualty lists recorded the toll of human life; the physical destruction mounted day by day. It was not surprising that nerves frayed and revulsion mounted among those who had to endure all these sufferings. To make them endurable, the soldiers invented a class-conscious vocabulary and style of humour all of their own, closely modelled upon that of the ‘old Regulars’, as demonstrated in the following anonymous parody of the parable of the sower:

Some fell by the wayside, and the Sergeant-Majors sprang up and choked them. 

Making shells

The demand of the generals for more and more young men for the muddy walk to mutilation and death on the Western Front inevitably resulted in the depletion of labour available for industry and the increase in opportunities for women to replace them at home. Of course, there were problems and a degree of resistance especially from male workers in skilled industries such as engineering. The Amalgamated Society of Engineers, an all-male union with a long tradition of craft skill, saw the introduction of lower-paid unskilled labour as a threat to post-war job security and wage-rates. The answer was the ‘Shells and Fuses Agreement’ whereby the unions would accept ‘dilution of labour’ for the duration of the war. In effect, the trade unions were asked to accept the introduction of a twelve-hour working day, the unlimited subdivision of jobs, the scrapping of apprenticeship agreements and the introduction of unskilled labour to produce the hardware of war. Safeguards and rights painstakingly fought for by trades unionists over half a century or more were set aside until the end of the war. No similar sacrifice was to be asked of the employers who were enabled to make rich profits by speeding up production and introducing unrestricted unskilled labour at cheap wage-rates.

Above: Oxide breaking at Beckton Gas Works.

The doubts of trade unionists about the large-scale introduction of female labour into industries were expressed in a composite resolution at the 1915 Trades Union Congress from two craft unions asking for committees to be set up to ensure the replacement of women at the close of the war by more suitable male labour. The real threat, however, was the inequality of pay between men and women and, to their credit, many trade union leaders insisted on equal pay for women doing equal work, achieving some limited success. The government sided firmly with employers against the unions and in June 1915 the new coalition government dropped all pretence at negotiation on the question of existing industrial practices and introduced a Munitions of War Bill to force dilution of labour by unskilled men and women on the unions. The war opened many industries to women and there is no shortage of propaganda-style photographs like the one above, showing women in ‘unladylike’ work, cleaning railway engines, filling shells, and humping coal sacks. Although of an official nature, they do represent women at the kind of heavy industrial work that would not have been readily open to them before the outbreak of the war.

It was the mass participation of women in the War effort – in industry, in the Civil Service, and in the Forces – which produced the result so deeply desired and defiantly demanded by the pre-war Suffragette Movement. In March 1917, the House of Commons passed the Women’s Suffrage Bill by 341 votes to 62, setting out a scheme for electoral reform to come into operation at the end of the War. The motion was moved by Asquith, who, according to The Times’ Michael McDonagh, gave a fine speech recanted the stout opposition which he gave to votes for women before the War. Women, he said, had worked out their own salvation in the War. But, even in the latter stages of the war, women’s participation was not greeted with universal enthusiasm by their menfolk at the Front, nor did they admire how it was sometimes ‘forcibly’ obtained. One soldier’s letter to his wife which was censored from May 1918 was quite threatening on the subject, also perhaps revealing the social conservatism which existed in working-class homes:

Well, I am afraid there will be trouble if they try to take married women into the WAAC. We men can stand a lot, but they are nearing the danger zone when they wish to force our wives into service. Goodness, the damned infernal impudence of wanting our wives! Why, if anyone came for you while I was at home, I’d slit his throat open. I’m not bragging; I’m saying what I mean. How little they understand us, they are running up against trouble with a vengeance; they will find they have signed their death warrant.

Lloyd George’s Visit to Clydeside & Labour’s Socialist Programme:

While many trade union and Labour leaders who supported the war acquiesced in the increased exploitation of industrial workers, other sections began a wave of resistance, demanding payment of the proper rate for the job where new workers were introduced, controls on company profits and a guarantee that the men away at the front would have jobs waiting for them when they returned after the war. The strongest opposition was led by the Clyde Workers’ Committee, a group of shop stewards elected directly from the shop floor under the chairmanship of Willie Gallacher. The Clyde workers had already conducted a strike for higher pay in February 1915, and the newly formed committee was more than ready for Lloyd George (above) when he travelled to the Clyde at Christmas of that year as Minister of Munitions to plead the case for dilution as a patriotic duty. Against the advice of his officials, Lloyd George was obliged to meet with the shop stewards and hear out their case for workers’ control of the factories. At a meeting in St. Andrew’s Hall held on Christmas Day, he had the experience of having to stand on the platform while the entire audience got to their feet and sang The Red Flag.

The effect of the protests on the Clyde and the continuing agitation by women trade unionists did result in 1916 in an amendment to the Munitions Act which gave statutory force in ‘the rate for the job’ where women did the same skilled work as men. Unions recruited the new women workers and by 1918 the membership of those affiliated to the TUC had risen by well over two million since the outbreak of war, totalling two and a half million. Women and girls who had been unorganised domestic servants, and/ or working-class housewives had been introduced to a range of jobs never before open to them and most importantly, they had been brought into the organised trade union movement for the first time. Even before the end of the war, however, the growing divisions in British society, later to be signalled by the General Strike of 1926, were already widening. In January 1916, the government had arrested Gallacher, Johnny Muir and Walter Bell, the leaders of the Clyde Workers’ Committee, on charges of attempting to cause mutiny, sedition or disaffection among the civilian population. Ernest Bevin, speaking in the Leeds Coliseum on 3 June 1917, joined in the radical trade union war of words with the Coalition Government:

We all know that in the industrial world the capitalists would give us peace tomorrow if we would surrender. But I am not going to surrender. I am not going to be a pacifist in the industrial movement. I believe that even in our own country there will have to be the shedding of blood to attain the freedom we require …

In 1916, David Lloyd George forced Asquith to resign and replaced him as Prime Minister. Arthur Henderson became a member of the small War Cabinet with the post of Minister without Portfolio. (The other Labour representatives who joined Henderson in Lloyd George’s coalition government were John Hodge, who became Minister of Labour, and George Barnes, who became Minister of Pensions.) Henderson resigned in August 1917 after his proposal for an international conference on the war was rejected by the rest of the Cabinet. He then turned his attention to building a strong constituency-based support network for the Labour Party. Previously, it had little national organisation, based largely on branches of unions and socialist societies. Working with Ramsay MacDonald and Sidney Webb, Henderson in 1918 established a national network of constituency organisations. They operated separately from the trade unions and the National Executive Committee and were open to everyone sympathetic to the party’s policies. Henderson lost his seat in the ‘Coupon Election’ of 14 December 1918 but returned to Parliament in 1919 after winning a by-election in Widnes. He then secured the adoption of a comprehensive statement of party policies, as drafted by Sidney Webb. Entitled “Labour and the New Social Order,” it remained the basic Labour platform until 1950. It proclaimed a socialist party whose principles included a guaranteed minimum standard of living for everyone, nationalisation of industry, and heavy taxation of large incomes and of wealth.

Bevin’s ‘Docker’s Breakfast’, Poverty & ‘Poplarism’:

There were mutinies in the armed forces which continued during the period of demobilisation into 1919, reminding the upper classes rather uncomfortably of the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent revolutions on the continent. They were followed by a series of strikes which led The Times (27 September 1919) to proclaim that this war, like the war with Germany, must be a fight to the finish. The civil strife which had arisen towards the end of the war continued principally among the miners, shipbuilders, railwaymen and farm workers, that is, in the declining sections of the economy. Ernest Bevin, pictured below, the national organiser of the Dockers’ Union, used his own experience of poverty and his deep knowledge of and feeling for the dockworkers in presenting the case for higher wages to the Shaw inquiry of 1920. The potatoes are peeled into a chipped enamel bowl, while the little girl watching is wearing boots that must have come from her brother.

‘The Dockers’ KC’ was an appreciative title won by Ernest Bevin when he argued the case for a sixteen shillings a day minimum wage and de-casualisation of their labour at the Shaw Inquiry in 1920. Bevin, a thirty-nine-year-old national organiser of the Dockers’ Union was given the task of putting the case for the Transport Federation. His performance was brilliant. Though lacking in formal education, he spoke for eleven hours, vividly describing the history, work, poverty, danger of a docker’s life and scoring heavily in exchanges with the Chairman of the Port of London Authority, the wealthy Lord Devonport, an old enemy of dock workers. While the two sides were involved in academic arguments as to whether or not a docker and his family could live on the employers’ proposed wage of three pounds thirteen shillings and sixpence a week, Bevin went shopping in Camden Town. That evening he prepared a ‘docker’s breakfast’ (shown above) and took the plates into court.

When Professor Bowley, the employers’ expert witness, went into the witness box, calculating the precise number of calories on which a man could live and work, Bevin pushed scraps of bacon, bread and fish he had prepared before him and asked the Cambridge professor if that was sufficient for a man who had to carry heavy sacks of grain all day. The witness protested. You have never carried 2cwt bags on your back continuously for eight hours? Bevin fired. The professor answered that he hadn’t, and Bevin then produced a menu from the Savoy Hotel and asked him to calculate the calories in a shipowners’ lunch! The outcome of the Inquiry was a triumph for Bevin, and the court condemned the system of casual labour, awarding a national minimum wage of sixteen shillings a day for a forty-four hour week. Bevin went on, of course, to become a leading figure in the trade union and Labour movement over the next four decades.

Historians often date Britain’s ‘hungry years’ as beginning in 1929 with the ‘Great Depression’, but for many workers, they never had a beginning, since the depression, unemployment and hunger were a permanent condition of their lives and one from which they received only occasional relief. In March 1921, Poplar, a borough in London’s East End, blighted with mass unemployment, casual dock labour, rotten housing and slum landlords, reached a breaking point. It was hardly equitable that a rich borough such as a Westminster, where a penny rate raised more than thirty thousand pounds, maintained only eleven hundred on outdoor relief, while Poplar, where a penny rate raised only three thousand pounds had to maintain forty-four thousand. The East End of London as a whole, with only a quarter of the paying capacity of the West End, had seventeen times the liability. Faced with a massive increase in the rate, a burden the poor could not carry, the Council refused to cut the level of relief to the unemployed and decided not to pay the quarter of a million pounds due to the central authority, the London County Council, carrying a rate of four shillings and fourpence in the pound, to meet the needs of the Council and the Board of Guardians.

This was the essence of the conflict that was to lead to the imprisonment of the mayor and the majority of the socialist members of the Council and the introduction of a new word into the English language, ‘Poplarism’. Summoned to appear at the High Court on 29 July the Council marched in procession from Bow with the mace bearer at their head, the mayor wearing his chain of office and all beneath a banner saying ‘Poplar Borough Council marching to the High Court and possibly to prison’. Following the councillors, who included Edgar Lansbury and his father, the ‘uncrowned King of the East End’, the kindly George Lansbury, came the people of Poplar. The court ordered payment, the councillors refused and in September, nearly the whole of the Council was sent to prison for contempt. Fifteen thousand marched to Holloway, many of the women carrying babies (as shown in the photo above) where Minnie Lansbury and four other women were taken. While Herbert Morrison deplored their actions and J. H. Thomas called the councillors ‘wastrels’, the fight continued even inside the prison.

A council meeting was held in Brixton Prison, the women being brought from Holloway to attend. Outside, ten thousand enrolled in the Tenants’ Defence League and pledged to refuse to pay rent if the councillors asked. The High Court released the councillors in October so that they could attend a conference to discuss the whole matter. The result was a victory for Poplar. The Council had made their first charge the care of the sick, orphaned, aged, widowed, workless and homeless and forced the introduction of a Bill equalising rate burdens between the rich and poor. The two photographs of Poplar residents and councillors are taken from an album presented to one of the councillors at a Council meeting the following year. The caption to the picture of the Poplar women carrying the loaves given by the Guardians is entitled ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ while the photograph of the councillors features Alderman Hopwood with his pipe, ‘surrounded by his bodyguard’.

The photograph above shows the outing of Norland Ward Women’s Group of the North Kensington Labour Party. The woman on the left in the front row is carrying the Party’s red flag and most of the group are wearing red rosettes. The substantial-looking Labour Club proclaims ‘Socialism’ and ‘Recreation’ and the women in their prettiest dresses have no doubt earned their break from the shop, factory, housework and local canvassing for the party. Charabanc day trips were a popular working-class leisure activity during the 1920s and the elected representatives of the Labour and trade union movement enjoyed them as much as the membership. Charabanc pictures from the early twenties are common and include those of the annual outings of workers from scores of factories on jaunts to Dartmoor and Epping Forest. The charabancs chugged along at a maximum of twelve miles per hour.

(to be continued…)

 

The Wars of the Roses and the Tudor State of Wales:

By the time of the ensuing Wars of the Roses, the Crown territories had spread throughout Wales, leaving the Marcher lordships with less power. Yorkist and Lancastrian families in the March provided fighting men for the armies of the rival factions, and when Harlech fell to William Herbert, the first Welsh-speaking earl,  the poet Guto’r Glyn had no hesitation in calling upon him to unite Glamorgan and Gwynedd, pardon not a single burgess, and expel all Englishmen from office in Wales. Only the Anglo-Welsh Lancastrians should be spared. However, it was Edward of York, earl of the March and Lord Mortimer, who became Edward IV in 1461. As a result, many of the lordships changed hands or were forfeited. Many of these passed to the Crown, the twenty-two Mortimer lordships included. York controlled the March and Lancaster the Principality, and practically every family of substance was drawn into the conflict. William Herbert built himself up to become Earl of Pembroke, the effective ruler of south Wales. Griffith ap Nicolas rose from humble origins to make himself and his family ‘kings of south-west Wales’ and to establish the ‘House of Dinefwr’.

The Crown lordships and the Principality now dominated the political landscape of Wales, enabling the king to establish a Prince’s council of the Marches of Wales in 1471 which continued to function intermittently until the Tudor ‘invasion’ of Wales and ‘takeover’ of England in 1485. The Tudors of Anglesey were, like the bulk of their compatriots, survivors. The family fortunes had been established by Tudur ap Gronw, whose sons had fought alongside Owain Glyndwr as his cousins. One of them, Rhys was executed and another, Maredudd, was driven into exile. His son, Owen, was taken on as a page-boy by Henry V, later marrying his widow, Catherine de Valois. His stepson, Henry VI, made his Tudor half-brothers earls of Richmond and Pembroke. Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, married Margaret Beaufort, who brought a claim to the English throne. Edmund died and was buried in Carmarthen; his son, Henry, was born posthumously. His mother was now a fourteen-year-old widow, so the boy was taken in by his uncle Jasper at Pembroke Castle, where he learnt Welsh. Following the Lancastrian disaster of 1471, Jasper took the boy to Brittany, and when his small army landed at Dale in Pembrokeshire, he depended entirely on a Welsh rally to carry him through to his supporters in England. Many of the northern Welsh lords did rally to him at Shrewsbury, and at Bosworth Henry unfurled the Red Dragon of Cadwaladr. He called his eldest son Arthur, and the Venetian ambassador commented that,

The Welsh may now be said to have recovered their independence, for the most wise and fortunate Henry VII is a Welshman…

The old Yorkist order in the Marches tried to hang on and, in the boroughs, made a last stand against the incoming tide of Welshmen. Henry kept St David’s Day and packed his own minor offices with Welshmen. By the end of his reign almost every marcher lordship was in royal hands, ‘over-mighty subjects’ had been cut down and charters of emancipation issued to north Wales. Under Henry VII’s firm hand a reinvigorated Council in the Marches began in the king’s name to bring about some uniformity in the government of the various lordships, particularly in the field of administration of justice. The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries saw an increasingly centralised Tudor state in which the special political arrangements of the March were becoming untenable. In 1490, Henry VII agreed to a form of extradition treaty with the steward of the lordships of Clifford, Winforton and Glasbury which allowed ‘hot pursuit’ of criminals in certain circumstances.

However, as he himself had demonstrated by his successful invasion on the way to ‘picking up the crown’ at the Battle of Bosworth Field, there remained a problem of the defence of the extended kingdom. Wales was England’s weakly bolted backdoor. Some degree of unified defence of Wales was of major importance to England’s security. His second son was left to find a solution to this problem, which was further complicated by his decision, in 1529, to go into action against the papacy. As the commissioners moved on the monasteries and their property, with Welsh gentry eagerly joining in, there was cause for alarm. As the Marcher lordships collapsed into gangster fiefdoms, just across the water, Catholic Ireland was also restive. If Wales was its backdoor, Ireland beyond ‘the Pale’ remained its back gate. It was from there that the Plantagenets had sought to dethrone Henry VII at Stoke Field in 1487, and even in the 1540s, Henry VIII remained paranoid about the threat from that quarter. The March of Wales had become so disorderly as a separate part of the kingdom that the Duke of Buckingham asked for a royal licence from Thomas Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor, to allow him to have an armed guard when he travelled through his lordships, declaring that he did not dare enter his lands in the March without an escort of three to four hundred armed men. Under these circumstances, the King’s solution for the disorder in the March of Wales was not to tinker with the constitutional anachronism which had become, but to abolish it.

By 1536, Thomas Cromwell realised that a ham-fisted coercion would not suffice. The law and order of England would have to embrace Wales with the aid of Justices of the Peace drawn from its gentry. The ‘British’ nation-state in the making was faced with the difficulty that there were two nations within it, with a visible border between them. So both the border and the smaller nation would have to become invisible. Therefore, between 1536 and 1543, the English crown put through a number of measures which have gone down in British history as the Acts of Union. The Act for Laws and Justice to be Ministered in Wales in like Fourme as it is in this Realm united the Principality and the March of Wales as part of ‘the kingdom of England and Wales’. The Acts of Union in 1536 and 1542, bound the two countries into a single state of ‘England and Wales’. The Act of Union of 1536 completed the long process of the absorption of the Principality of Wales and the March of Wales into the English kingdom. It rendered superfluous the castles that until then had held these territories in subjugation.

The old Principality was wiped off the map, and the lordships in the March were abolished and, by combining them in groups, new shires were created to be added to the two established by Henry III in South Wales, and the four in Gwynedd and Dyfed, which had been created by the Statute of 1284. Wales became thirteen counties in all. The marchers were permitted to retain their lands and rights of lordship as practised in England, but they lost their previous prerogatives and privileges. The whole country was subsequently administered as a corporate element of the same realm. Shrewsbury remained in all but name the administrative capital of the whole of Wales, with the Council in the Marches, responsible for maintaining law and order in the English Marches and Wales, meeting there until its abolition in the 1640s. A consequence of these changes was that the language of the ruling gentry class became predominantly English. The key office of the Justice of the Peace passed to the gentry as ‘kings of the bro‘ (the ‘locality’). Welshmen became entitled to the same rights under the law as Englishmen, including the right to representation, for the first time, in the Westminster Parliament. However, because Wales was poor compared to most regions of England, the ‘burden’ of sending an MP was reduced to one MP per county, and the boroughs of each county were grouped together to supply a second MP. Wales was provided with a distinct system of higher administration and justice, in that twelve of its counties were grouped into four circuits of three for a Welsh Great Sessions, meeting for convenience in the borderlands, which also meant that Ludlow became an important centre for many years.

In the Tudor ‘nation-state’, English was supposed to be the only official language. Henry VIII proclaimed the necessity of extirpating all and singular the sinister usages of customs of Wales. No person or persons that use the Welsh speech shall have or enjoy any manner of office or fees within this realm. The threat of cultural genocide was not, in fact, fulfilled. In many ways, Wales remained a ‘peculiar’, if not a separate nation, with a unique administration and its own customs and language. Although the official, written language of local administration and the courts was to be English, the right of monolingual speakers of Welsh to be heard in courts throughout the country necessitated the appointment of Welsh-speaking judges and ensured the continued public use of the language. The dominance of the local gentry ensured that the justices of the peace and the men running the shires on behalf of the Crown were magistrates of their own nation, thereby guaranteeing that Wales would not come to be regarded simply as a part of England. This was the case even in Monmouthshire, which was fully incorporated into England by the Act of Union, and became part of Wales only in 1972.

At the same time as its administration was being remodelled, Wales also experienced the religious upheaval of the Protestant Reformation. At first, the Reformation simply substituted one barely intelligible tongue (Latin) with another (English). However, in contrast to Ireland, where little effort was made to make religious texts available in the native language, Welsh translations of the creed, the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer came out as early as 1547, and these were soon followed by translations of the Prayer Book and the Scriptures. Since the Welsh could not be made invisible in the Tudor state, they had to be made Protestant, which meant that the Crown was forced to accede to pressure and authorise Welsh translations of the Bible, whose 1588 version was to prove a sheet-anchor for the threatened language. The early translation of the scriptures into Welsh also helped Protestantism to be accepted in Wales. In fact, the Welsh people embraced it enthusiastically, and later Puritanism and Nonconformity.

Above: The frontispiece of the first full translation of the Bible into Welsh, published in 1588.

Nevertheless, although it could be used when necessary in the courts, Welsh ceased to be an official language and had to retreat into the Church and the kitchen. The long-term effects of this were very serious for the language. Since it was all but excluded from administration, the position of Welsh gained as the language of religion did much to ensure its survival. The survival of Welsh as a living tongue compensated for the collapse of the medieval bardic tradition with its characteristic prophetic elements. Another Celtic tradition that sank into disfavour was the use of patronymics, by which a person’s second name identified or her as the child of a known parent (e.g. ap Arthur). This was superseded by the use of surnames, in the English manner, handed down from one generation to another. Many traditional Welsh Christian names also fell out of fashion in this period.

At the time, however, the Union was celebrated among the self-confident Welsh burgesses, who saw themselves as being as free as Englishmen under the law of England and Wales. Most importantly, perhaps, the ‘ordinary’ Welshman was no longer at the mercy of his lord or prince in terms of justice, which could no longer be administered arbitrarily by a master who was ‘a law unto himself’. Henry VIII was as masterful a monarch as Edward I in cutting the Lords Marcher down to size, and the lords seem to have accepted that their time for full submission to kingly authority had finally come. Now fewer in number and with most of the lordships already in the hands of the Crown, they were largely absentee landlords; their interests in England were, vulnerable to royal retaliation, were more valuable to them than their Welsh ones, which were still recovering their economic value from the long-term effects of the Glyndwr Rebellion.

These political changes in Tudor times left the Border itself with less strategic importance. Wales after the Union was no cultural backwater. The Welsh adopted Jesus College in Oxford (founded in 1571) and the Inns of Court in London to complete their education. The Welsh gentry took enthusiastically to the Renaissance, building houses and art collections comparable with those anywhere else in Europe. Against these cosmopolitan tendencies should be set the work of Sir John Price in defending the Arthurian tradition in the face of general scepticism, and the work of Gruffydd Done, in the sixteenth century, and of Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt, in the seventeenth, who both collected and preserved Welsh medieval texts. By the time of the early Stuarts, ‘the Wales of the squires’ was entering a golden age in which Anglicanism and royalism were becoming rooted among the Welsh gentry. James I and VI was therefore favourably disposed to them and their loyalties were easily transferred to the Scottish dynasty with its own idea of Great Britain, not far removed from their own developing identity as Cambro-Britons. William Vaughan of Cardiganshire, who tried to launch a Welsh colony, Cambriol, in Newfoundland, was also keen to discard the ‘idea’ of the old frontier when he wrote:

I rejoice that the memorial of Offa’s Ditch is extinguished.

Above: Plas Teg, near Mold, Flintshire, the earliest Renaissance-style house in Wales, built c. 1610 for Sir John Trevor, a senior figure in naval administration.

Administration, Language, Trade and Religion:

Wales had acquired its historic frontier in the estate boundaries of an Anglo-Norman oligarchy. Ethnic minorities were left on both sides of the line. Old Ergyng (Archenfield) disappeared into Herefordshire but remained Welsh-speaking for three hundred years. The integration of Britain became visible in the large-scale migration of the Welsh to London, the growing centre of both trade and power. Dafydd Seisyllt, from Ergyng, was one of those who went up to London as a sergeant of Henry VII’s guard. He bought land and installed his son as a court page. His grandson was William Cecil, Elizabeth’s potent statesman. The Seisyllts, in a transliteration which became commonplace, became the Cecils. The family of Morgan Williams the brewer who had married a sister of Thomas Cromwell changed his name and Oliver arrived three generations later.

Monmouth became an anomaly; nearer to London and relatively wealthy, with an early tin-plating industry, it was saddled with the full parliamentary quota and subjected to the courts of the capital. Always reckoned to be a part of the ‘Welsh’ Church in diocesan terms, it was, however, excluded from the Great Sessions and the Welsh parliamentary system. This led to the curious hybrid title of ‘Wales and Monmouthshire’ as a standard secular description, which continued English settlement in the county reinforced. Among the landowners clustering thick in Glamorgan and Monmouth in the south were some of the richest squires in contemporary Europe.

The lordships had varied greatly in size and in physical character, which largely governed their capacity for profitable exploitation, their lords’ primary aim in winning, holding and administering their conquests:

Glamorgan (Morgannwg) was large, much of it agriculturally productive;

Maelienydd, a core lordship of the Mortimer family, was small, an upland and sparsely populated territory of little intrinsic value other than its strategic location;

Clifford, another Mortimer lordship, was very small, perhaps only twenty square miles in extent, but of strategic importance in the Wye valley, the ancient and medieval gateway into Wales.

Conquest was followed by settlement and the evolution of ‘Englishries’ and ‘Welshries’, an ethnic division of population. The Welsh were evicted from the more low-lying arable districts of the lordships which then became ‘the Englishries’, organised in the English manorial system. Here the lords established their ‘vassals’ and immigrant settlers to farm their ‘demesne’ as tenants, paying rent. Often the marcher lords would be absentee landlords, leaving their officials to administer the lands. In this respect, the Mortimers were atypical in that their power and prosperity lay in the March of Wales. By the end of the fourteenth century, they had connections all over Wales of long duration. A Mortimer had married Gwladus, daughter of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, in the previous century, and in the last half of the fourteenth century Roger Mortimer, fourth Earl of March, had probably as good a dynastic claim as any to the inheritance of Gwynedd. He became the focus of extravagant hopes among the Welsh gentry. The poet Iolo Goch, who was one of his tenants, wrote a fulsome ode of loyalty to him, presenting him as an Arthurian ‘Hero Returned’ who would rescue the Welsh from their degradation. What made this all the more significant was that Mortimer also had a good claim to the inheritance of Richard II. This shift in consciousness came just at the time when a  renaissance of the Welsh language and culture was beginning to provoke political responses and to meet with judicial resistance.

The dispossessed Welsh, were effectively ‘internal exiles’, resettled in ‘the Welshries’ which consisted of the upland and less productive districts of the lordships where raising cattle and sheep were the principle agricultural enterprises. These areas would be more or less self-governing, with courts conducted according to Welsh customs and practice, and in the Welsh language, with little if any interference from the lord provided its inhabitants gave no trouble and paid their tributes in kind. In the lordship of Hay, in the mid-fourteenth century, while the men of the Englishry paid for their land with rent and services, the Welshry as a whole gave the lord the traditional tribute of twenty-four cows every year, though this was later replaced by payment in money. In the later Middle Ages the gradual abandonment of Welsh laws, customs and systems of land tenure was welcomed in some quarters of Wales, particularly among peasant farmers; in the second half of the fourteenth century, Welshmen in Clwyd were eager to surrender their holdings and receive them back on ‘English’ terms, while others were willing to pay for the privilege of ‘English’ status. This was because they preferred the inheritance law of primogeniture to the Welsh system of gavelkind, the equal division of a man’s inheritance among his sons, involving restrictions on his disposal of land according to his family’s individual circumstances.

These moves towards greater integration in the March of Wales had various manifestations. The Welsh language had started to reconquer the Vale of Glamorgan; Welshmen began to appear in the lowland and valley towns, in Oswestry, Brecon and Monmouth; the Welsh began ‘harassing’ English merchants in the March. A chorus of complaint against them burst from boroughs not only in Wales but in the English border counties. Nearly every Parliament which sat between 1378 and 1400 demanded urgent action against these impertinent ‘scrubs’. Even as the gentry turned their hopes towards Richard II, the English administrations in Wales slammed their doors hard. This was a reassertion of colonialism in a régime that was breaking down under its own contradictions, and the Welsh-English tensions that it provoked provided an even greater incentive for the discontented Welsh to support Richard II and Roger (VI) Mortimer.

Although the distinctions between Englishries and Welshries were breaking down by the later Middle Ages, these can sometimes be identified on the landscape today from old place names, where these appear as either English or Welsh, or sometimes bilingually:

Gwerthrynion and Cwmwd Deuddwr (the latter identifiable on today’s map as one of the longest original Welsh place-names, Llansantffraed Cwmdeuddwr) were two Mortimer upland lordships, located north-west of Rhayader on the upper reaches of the Wye. Presumably, they were unattractive to English settlers as there is also a notable absence of English placenames in that area.

Newtown bears its English name, with a translation provided into Welsh (Y Dref Newydd), despite being surrounded by villages with Welsh nomenclature, because it was established as a borough by Mortimer. Other attempts by them to found boroughs were not so successful. Cefnllys remains the name of a long-ruined castle near Llandrindod Wells, because the Mortimers failed to take into account both its isolated position remote from major trade routes as well as the very limited potential for agricultural production within its close vicinity. When the once important castle had been abandoned as no longer of strategic value, its fate was sealed. Similarly, the prosperity of the borough of Wigmore, and the value of its castle languished after the Mortimers moved their seat of power to Ludlow. The military security of the marcher lordships depended on castles, boroughs and the lords’ private armies. Castles were pivotal in their survival and territorial ambitions as well as being status symbols; they served as ‘launching pads’ for aggression, defensive strongholds and bases in which they could reside when in their Lordships. They were also administrative centres from which their stewards could operate, collecting rents and dues and exercising justice.

The marcher lords inherited from the Welsh princes the obligation of all free men to fight for them, and Wales throughout the Middle Ages provided a pool of experienced fighting men on which the marcher lords, and by extension, the king, could draw. Most of the infantrymen in the king’s armies were Welsh, and the archers, in particular, distinguished themselves in the Hundred Years War, and for both Yorkist and Lancastrian armies in the Wars of the Roses. The bowmen of Monmouthshire and south Wales were celebrated in both English and Welsh writing; in the March this intensified a loyalty to their lords which became a political as well as a military force. Thousands of Welshmen in their proud livery – like Mortimer’s men, all clothed in green with their arms yellow – were a force to be reckoned with in the politics of England itself, whenever the marchers were heavily involved, as they nearly always were.

Some of the larger lordships, like Glamorgan and Pembroke were organised along the lines of English shires, long before they were formally recognised as such in Tudor times. Maelienydd, by contrast, did not even have knight service, and the Mortimer administration was far less English in form. Rhys ap Gruffydd was knighted by Edward III, one of a number of Welshmen who achieved rank, office and respect in the king’s service and in the March. He commanded the Welsh bowmen in France, as a discrete unit in the English army. Hywel ap Meurig’s family had long been associated with the Mortimer family. In 1260, he was appointed as the negotiator with Llywelyn ap Gruffydd on behalf of the Crown and then became constable of the Mortimer castle at Cefnllys. He served as the king’s bailiff in Builth and soon after the end of the Welsh War of Independence of 1276-77 was commissioned as a justice in Wales. He and his family prospered as important cogs in the administration of Wales. Roger Mortimer (IV) maintained a retinue, or private army of Welsh soldiers during his ascendancy in the late 1320s. Although the final resort in settling disputes among the marcher lords, and with their princely Welsh neighbours may have been to engage in warfare, a full-blown war was unusual and arrangements developed among them for settling quarrels which would usually have been of a minor nature over such matters as cattle rustling and boundaries. ‘Letters of the March’ were forms of passports for travellers and merchants passing from one lordship to another. If a traveller was arrested in a lordship other than his own, he could present his letter, which would have been issued by his lord stating that he was a tenant, and request to be returned to face justice in his own lordship.

The prosperity of the lordships depended largely on agricultural exports of cattle to England and across England to the continent. In 1349, four hundred cattle were driven from the Bohun lordship of Brecon to Essex for fattening. The first part of this journey was along long-established drovers’ roads through the hills, which still mark the landscape of Wales today. Twelve years earlier fourteen sacks of wool were dispatched to from the Mortimer lordship of Radnor en route to Dordrecht, and in 1340 another thirty were awaiting dispatch (each sack weighed 165 kilos). They were probably held up because of the chaotic conditions in trade as a result of the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War. Wool exports to Flanders had been a thriving business since the early twelfth-century. Welsh border wool may have been of an inferior quality to that of the prime sheep-rearing centres of the Yorkshire moors and dales, but it was certainly superior to the wool of East Anglia.

When Shropshire fleeces were fetching fourteen marks a sack, the Suffolk farmer could only get four marks for his. Yet Suffolk was richer than Shropshire and closer to their foreign customers. The sight of foreign buyers riding eastwards to Ipswich or Dunwich followed by long lines of pack horses laden with Welsh wool was a familiar one in medieval East Anglia. Suffolk farmers and merchants could do a brisker business with the continent because they were closer, but they could not compete in volume or the quality needed by the weavers of fine cloth in Flanders. Then Edward III decided to levy swingeing taxes on markets and customs duties on ports both in order to raise money for his wars with France and as an economic weapon in those wars. In the wool-producing areas the immediate effects were catastrophic, but after 1350 the introduction of weaving to East Anglia, accompanied by the migration of skilled weavers from the depressed textile industries of Flanders, led to a boom in demand for fleeces.

Throughout the early modern period, Wales remained predominantly agrarian, specialising in cattle production, rather than sheep-grazing; dairy products, and, until the Industrial Revolution, cloth-manufacture. The countryside underwent gradual enclosure and deforestation. Settlements remained small and scattered, with farmers maintaining upland summer homes and lowland winter houses. Towns, other than the boroughs already referred to, were not an important feature until the eighteenth century and even then were restricted largely to Glamorgan. There was some tin-plating in Monmouthshire, but neither coal-mining nor iron-casting was as important as they were to become.

Dislike of the Anglo-Norman hegemony in Wales was not confined to the civil sphere; it was also present in the Church. The great religious revival of the eleventh century in Normandy was carried to England by the Conquest, which the Roman Church and the Norman barons themselves regarded as a Crusade, predating the ones they began to the ‘Holy Land’ in 1096. They considered the Welsh Church, still with its independent Celtic roots, to be, like the English one, in need of reform and physical rebuilding. The early conquests in Wales were accompanied by expropriation of church property for the benefit of religious foundations in Normandy and appointed French bishops whose dioceses by the early twelfth century had been incorporated into the province of Canterbury. In the Anglo-Norman borderlands and the Anglo-Welsh March, the abbey at Much Wenlock was refounded circa 1080; the Mortimers founded an abbey circa 1140 at Shobdon, a predecessor of Wigmore Abbey, and were later benefactors of the abbey at Cwm Hir in Maelienydd. Llanthony Abbey (detailed below) was founded in 1107. The native religious houses of Wales were slowly superseded by Anglo-Norman foundations or reformed in the new tradition as religious and cultural control of the Church passed out of Welsh hands for the next eight hundred years. Hardly surprisingly, this meddling was a cause of great resentment, with that champion of the Welsh Church, Giraldus Cambrensis, indignantly asking the Pope, …

… Because I am a Welshman, am I to be debarred from all preferment in Wales?

A Pilgrimage to Llanthony Abbey & through Gospel Pass:

Above: The Landor Estate at Llanthony.

This is an appropriate point to engage with the path itself. The section from ‘Pandy to Hay-on-Wye’ officially begins where it crosses the A465 from Hereford to Abergavenny by “the Lancaster Arms.” However, by following the Afon Honddu northwards along the B4423 from Llanfihangel Crucorney, we can find our way to Llanthony Abbey. Given the remarks of Giraldus Cambrensis above, this is perhaps a better place to start a historical walk. The Priory is directly below in the deep Vale of the Ewyas which, as the twelfth-century itinerant Giraldus described it, is about an arrow shot broad. The priory he found, perhaps somewhat grudgingly, not unhandsomely constructed. It is, in fact, well worth the detour, either along the ‘B’ road or coming down from the Loxidge Tump from the Dyke Path (see maps below).

You come to the priory ruins in a beautiful setting of meadows and groves of chestnuts. It is said that St David settled at Llanthony during his travels through Wales in the sixth century, establishing the llan (church). It is unlikely that he stayed long, but Llanthony’s special claim to fame is that he supposedly ate the leeks here that were to become the Welsh badge during the campaigns of the Hundred Years’ Wars with France. The priory was founded in 1107 by the powerful marcher lord William de Lacy at the place where, while on a deer hunt, he is said to have forsaken ambition and decided to devote his life to the service of God. As a result of Welsh raids on the Augustinians whom they no doubt considered to be the Roman Church’s supporters of the Norman incursion, the monks sought refuge with the Bishop of Hereford, only a few of them returning to the priory. From 1300, with Edward I’s conquest, the priory flourished once more, and at some point housed the largest single body of medieval Welsh ecclesiastical manuscripts, but by 1376 it was in a poor state of repair. Owain Glyndwr burnt it down around 1400; by 1481 only four canons and a prior remained, and its end came with its Dissolution by Henry VIII.

In 1807 the estate was bought by the poet Walter Savage Landor (right) for twenty thousand pounds. From a wealthy Whig family, he held estates at Rugeley in Staffordshire and Bishop’s Tatchbrook in Warwickshire, but had been looking for a more secluded country property in which to write, and settled on Llanthony. The previous owner had erected some buildings in the ruins of the ancient abbey, but an Act of Parliament, passed in 1809, was needed to allow Landor to pull down these buildings and construct a house, (which he never finished). He wanted to become a model country gentleman, planting trees, importing sheep from Spain, and improving the roads. The Victorian diarist Kilvert wrote of his varied experiences of coming down the valley to the Abbey:

Under the cloudless blue and glorious sunshine the Abbey looked happy and peaceful. … How different from the first day that I pilgrimaged down the Vale of Ewyas under a gloomy sky, the heavy mist wreathing along the hillsides cowling the mountain tops. 

There is still an avenue of trees in the area known as “Landor’s Larches” and many old chestnuts have been dated back to his time. But though he had literally fallen in love with Welsh people as a young man in Tenby and Swansea, where he lived for a time, he quarrelled with local people and the Bishop of St David’s, also finding the Black Mountains to have an “ungenial clime”. He left the estate in the hands of trustees and moved to Italy with his wife, whom he had met and married in Bath while living at Llanthony. They had returned to live in Llanthony. The remains of Landor’s house lie at Siarpal in the ‘cwm’ above the priory formed by the Hatterall Ridge and the Loxidge Tump. Together with the tower of the priory, they form what is now the Llanthony Abbey Hotel. The main surviving buildings of the priory are in the care of Cadw, the Welsh ‘keeper’ of historic monuments. Entrance is free.

It’s a pretty steep climb up the cwm to the ridge and the tump where the path can be regained, so the four-mile trek up the valley road to Capel-y-ffin seems more inviting, particularly as it’s rewarded by another monastery, founded in 1870 by the Rev. J. L. Lyne (Father Ignatius) for the Benedictines, in an unsuccessful attempt to reintroduce monasticism into the Anglican Church.

Soon after his death in 1908 the community ceased to exist, and the church became ruined. In the 1920s, though, the artist Eric Gill lived at the monastery for four years, and the house remained in his family after he returned to London. Besides the Catholic church are an Anglican chapel and a Baptist chapel. Capel-y-ffin means ‘chapel on the border’.  Just over a mile further on towards the Gospel Pass is the Youth Hostel.

The road goes on through the pass between ‘Lord Hereford’s Knob’ and ‘Hay Bluff’, where it eventually joins the Dyke path for the descent into Hay-on-Wye, avoiding the steep section on the road. This is where you are likely to see the Welsh mountain ponies.  Following the path itself from Black Daren northwards brings you very gradually to towards the unmarked summit of the ridge, and of the path, at 2,306 feet, on a broad and bleak nameless plateau of peat.

The surrounding landscape becomes wild and remote, a place to avoid in mist and rain. The Welsh have a saying, mae’n bwrw hen wragedd a ffin, meaning “it’s raining old ladies and sticks” (“cats and dogs” in English, of course!) Although “ffin” could mean “boundary” as suggested above, it might also mean “sticks” and there is a legend tell of the Old Lady of the Black Mountains, who is said to appear at night or in mist with a pot and/or wooden cane in her hand and who, going before wayfarers, will cause them to lose their way.

A friendlier spectre, said to appear to travellers lost in the mountains between Llanthony and Longtown, is of a man who will guide them to the nearest road before disappearing. Best take the road in the first place, I say, with its beautiful views along the Ewyas Valley (above). At Pen y Beacon (or Hay Bluff), which is bypassed by the official path, we come to the to the steep north-west facing scarp of the Black Mountains, high above the middle Wye Valley. The way-marked alternative path to the beacon itself was described by the Victorian diarist Kilvert, and has apparently changed little over the last century and a half:

Soon we were at the top, which was covered with peat bog and black and yellow coarse rushy grass and reed. Here and there were pools and holes filled with black peat waters. … The mountains were very silent and desolate. No human being in sight, not a tree. 

On the high and windswept bluff, on the very cornice of the range, a wide-sweeping countryside stretches away almost to the limits of vision. Beyond the Wye, hidden from view, where the Dyke path continues its journey, the Silurian hills of Radnorshire rise to grassy tops or to open hill common. In the distance are the outlines of Mynydd Eppynt, and the Radnor Forest. Dropping down over the cornice of Brownstones you aim between two deep gullies to join the Gospel Pass road on its way from the Honddu Valley. The path leads past the prehistoric burial mound at Twyn y Beddau and along the side of Cusop Dingle, on a steady descent into Hay. In a triangle bounded on two sides by main roads, Hay forms a compact and sleepy town, except when the International Book Festival is in town, in May.

In the town, there are the remains of two castles, both Norman. The mound of the earlier motte and bailey, built around 1100 by William de Braose, is beyond the medieval core of the town, near St Mary’s Church. Legend has it that the castle was in fact built, not by William, but by his wife, Maud de St Valerie (‘Moll Walbee’). She is said to have built it in one night, carrying the stones in her apron. A pebble that dropped into her shoe is reputed to have been thrown into Llowes churchyard, three miles away. The ‘pebble’ measures nine feet in length and a foot in thickness! The later castle seems to have been destroyed by King John in 1215, the year that he signed the Magna Carta. It was rebuilt and then burnt by Llywelyn ap Iorwerth in 1231, though it was apparently still in use when Henry III rebuilt it about two years later. In 1236, the town walls were built, and by 1298 a compact town had grown within them. The castle was captured and changed hands several times in the succeeding decades so that John Leland in the sixteenth century found Hay to show…

… the token of a right strong Waulle having in it three Gates and a Posterne. Ther is also a Castel the which sumtime hath bene right stately.

The seventeenth-century Jacobean castle incorporated into it was owned in the 1980s by R. Booth, who ran a remarkable second-hand book business in the town. Apart from the castle itself, where rarer books were kept, many shops and other buildings have become bookshops. The collection is claimed to be the largest collection in the world, and it is well worth setting aside time to explore the bookshops. It is this recent remarkable piece of social history which has given rise to the book festival and Hay’s unofficial title as ‘the book capital of the world’. As a postgraduate student in Cardiff, I well remember organising a minibus trip to Hay and returning with a number of books which were out of publication, dating back to the early twentieth century, the period I was researching.

North of Hay, the Dyke crisscrosses the border into Herefordshire, before reaching the lowlands of Montgomeryshire. This is the ancient territory of the kingdom of Powys known as Rhwng Gwy a Hafren (‘between Wye and Severn’). Although Mercian influences were strong along this part of the Border, this is essentially a countryside of dispersed habitation in the Welsh tradition. Much of the walk is through some of the quietest and most beautiful, undulating country along the Border. Leaving Hay en route for Knighton you cross over the Wye into Kilvert country, where the wayfaring diarist we met at Lanthony Priory and atop the Black Mountains, Francis Kilvert, was curate of the parish of Clyro from 1865-72 and where, in 1870, he began his diary, describing vividly both the way of life in the area and much of the surrounding countryside. As it is only a mile along the road, but is not on the Dyke Path, it seems sensible to include the short walk to Newchurch as part of a sojourn in Hay. That is where I plan to end my journey this year.

For some of its course, the Dyke marks local government boundaries, or more locally the boundaries to farmsteads, like Pen Offa near Chirk, where I hope to get to next year. But while, for the most part, the political boundary between England and Wales no longer follows it, and there are many gaps in the great earthwork itself (mostly due to modern development), the Dyke retains its place in the imagination as the symbolic frontier. It represents a natural if man-made division between upland and lowland peoples, as the only visible and historic structure which corresponds both to the imagination of those peoples, and to the fundamental reality of that division.

Sources:

Charles Hopkinson & Martin Speight (2011), The Mortimers, Lords of the March. Hereford: Logaston Press.

Gwyn A Williams (1985), When Was Wales? A History of the Welsh. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Asa Briggs, John Morrill, et.al., (eds.) (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

Irene Richards & J. A. Morris (1946), A Sketch-Map History of Britain and Europe to 1485. London: Harrap.

George Taylor & J. A. Morris (1939), A Sketch-Map History of Britain and Europe, 1485-1783. London: Harrap.

John B. Jones (1976, ’80), Offa’s Dyke Path (Long-Distance Footpath Guide No 4). London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (Prepared for the Countryside Commission). 

 

 

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A Summer’s Sojourn in Brexit Britain

Here is my blog for ‘Labour Teachers’ from August 2016:

 

I wonder, I wonder,

If anyone knows,

Who lives at the heart,

Of the velvety rose?

Is it a goblin, or is it an elf?

Or is it the Queen of the fairies herself?

 

I took early retirement from the UK Education Industry in 2012, and have been teaching in Hungary ever since. My wife is Hungarian, and we have two boys, one, born here, teaching MFL in Suffolk and the other, born in Bristol, attending a Hungarian State Primary School run by the Reformed Church. Both are naturally bilingual, bicultural and binational. When we returned to Hungary after fifteen years, including a year teaching in France, we found it difficult to recognize the country as the same one we left in 1996. We had been back on extended visits during the summer, but nothing prepared us for the more nationalistic atmosphere which pervaded every walk of life and still does. Five years later, Viktor Orbán’s illiberal democracy is a project which seems to attract popular support with almost everyone who isn’t a gipsy, a migrant or a refugee, or at least two-thirds of them, enough to change the constitution.

Although the once-mighty MSZP, Hungarian Socialist Party, is still around, it has little prospect of returning to power, as it did three times in the twenty years of transition which followed the cutting of the iron curtain in 1989. The Left is like Humpty Dumpty, so fragmented and divided that it would take a whole regiment of Huszárok (Hussars) to put the pieces back together again. Here, referenda have become the preferred tool of the populist politician, except that, unlike Cameron, Orbán would never call one he thought he might lose. We’re just about to have one about the meneköltek, the asylum-seekers or bevándorlok, the ‘vagabonds’ or immigrants, as the government prefers to see them. Hungary is, of course, a strategic crossing point from the Balkan migrant group, and is third behind Germany and Sweden in the number it has played host to, but only for short transits on the way west. Few migrants or refugees want to settle in the country, and the revived Christian patriots of the Great Plain are not keen to receive people who they erroneously compare to the Muslim Ottomans of distant centuries. Here, national mythologizing is more important than a more interactive narrative between past and present.

This year, however, on returning to Hungary from our usual two-month sojourn in the UK (school summer holidays are longer in Hungary but are paid for throughout the year), I had decided not to give my usual answers referring to landscapes, seascapes and weather, to polite questions about ‘how I felt myself’ in England. I overlooked the obvious mistake, having spent a week in my beloved Wales, and replied that I didn’t recognize the country. It was true. For the first time in the ten years spent in Hungary, in the 1990s and more recently, I felt more alien as a returning native than I did in Viktor Orbán’s Ruritanian retreat. This was not to do with language, but rather with the bits of culture which don’t depend on language. I arrived with my younger son (aged 13) on the day before the Referendum vote, having promised to help with canvassing for the ‘Remain’ side in Bury St Edmunds, which voted 57% to 43% to ‘leave’ the EU.

My son enjoyed posting the reminder to vote leaflets, and we did find some encouragement on the poorer estates of the rich Cathedral city. But most people kept their heads down against the wind on an inclement early summer day. We could tell there was a sense of not wanting to engage about what they were about to do or had just done, a sense of guilty pleasure in expressing the traditional antipathy of Suffolk people for the ‘Establishment’. The results across East Anglia were generally even worse, with only Cambridge and Norwich defying the regional trend. While the people of those two cities may have been better informed on the finer points of the debate, this vote was not, fundamentally, a result of a lack of education. Neither was it, at least in central Suffolk, about excessive immigration. As the TV engineer who called at my teaching son’s house a week later told me, it was about a feeling of powerlessness in people’s lives, a lack of control, of which immigration was an obvious symptom, but one which the political élites refused to talk about or treat.

The day after the result was declared was one of the worst in my life, and there have been some pretty low troughs. It was the complete opposite of how I felt on 2 May 1997, as if twenty years of my personal and professional life had been completely wasted. My younger son, listening to the news with me, said he felt that he had been betrayed. I spent the rest of the morning writing to our local ‘pro-Remain’ Conservative MP about whether, in five years’ time, we will have to pay full-cost overseas student fees for my son if we don’t return to live in the UK before Brexit takes effect. I also asked about the Erasmus funding my elder son had received for teaching English in a special comprehensive school in Germany. Could my younger son expect to have such an experience after Brexit? I haven’t yet heard from him, except for a feature article in the local newspaper telling the people of Suffolk that Brexit would bring many opportunities for the county, things which he obviously hadn’t noticed when he wanted them to vote the other way the week before. He obviously doesn’t want to be deselected by the partisan Tory burgers of central Suffolk. Of course, Labour MPs would represent all of their constituents, not just the revolutionary cadres in the CLPs, and they wouldn’t change their views on the EU, and then change them again, just to keep their positions, unless they were party leaders. That wouldn’t be ‘authentic’!

Eventually, when we walked out together mid-morning, it was difficult to meet the eyes of elderly neighbours and other vaguely remembered faces in the small town where my elder son lives and teaches. The young waitress who served us in the en route café briefly expressed her disappointment, however. Yet no-one was celebrating. At my elder son’s school, there was a full-scale staffroom inquiry, since the teachers already knew that nobody had voted ‘Leave’. Even some tears began to flow, so bereaved did people feel. A fortnight later, in Pembrokeshire, I overheard the conversation of two elderly ladies sitting on a bench in a town square. One told the other that she had voted no because too much money was going to the EU, and we got nothing in return. The other pointed out that her friend was among the ‘misinformed’, because Wales gets far more out than it pays in. A month after the vote, my son’s well-networked colleagues reported that they had still not yet met one person in the whole of central Suffolk who admitted to having voted for Brexit, nor had the other people in their network. Ironically, the day following the vote, her son had arrived at our flat in Hungary, having walked across Europe for the charity of one of his friends whose sister had died from a rare form of leukaemia, into which research was going on in Cambridge, part-funded by the EU.

So, here we are at the beginning of a new school year, and I have to think about how to enthuse my students to get their EU-rated ‘B’ and ‘C’ level grades in English so that they can travel and study in the world, while the birthplace of English, my birthplace, my reason for being here, is pulling out of the whole inter-cultural project I am supposed to represent. As I teach ‘British Studies’, what is still called ‘Anglo-Saxon Civilization’, I will need to find reasons not to feel ashamed of my country for the first time since the early 1970s, and explanations for the events of the summer.

I think I might take ‘The Velvety Rose’ nursery rhyme as my starting point since most of my students are training to be teachers. The rose could be taken to symbolize both England. At present, it is the ‘Queen of the Fairies’, Theresa May, who seems to live at the heart of England, however, with her ‘Brexit means Brexit’ mantra repeated as often as the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland emerged to cry ‘off with their heads!’ at the men around her. Certainly, teachers will recognize the resentment felt towards senior managers who return from their long holidays ‘reflecting’ on a Mediterranean beach or in Alpine meadows to lead a ‘brainstorm’ on a ‘bombshell’ announcement made at the end of term. All the teachers want to do is get on with the planning and preparation of their own departments, focusing on their pupils. But no! The ‘Headmistress’ wants us to help her create ‘Fairyland’, an abstract, utopian place otherwise known by the much more concrete noun ‘Brexit’. For Brexit, read Fairyland. It’s much more true to real life!    

Grammarians and Reformers:

William Cobbett (1763-35), the self-educated farmer’s son from Farnham in Surrey, who had served in the army in Canada from 1785 to 1791, then returned to England to become a journalist. He began a weekly newspaper, The Political Register, in 1802 as a Tory, but soon became converted to the radical cause of social and Parliamentary reform. After the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832, he became an MP, continuing to write for and edit The Political Register until his death. In 1817, following the suspension of habeas corpus (freedom from imprisonment without trial), Cobbett was back in North America, from where he continued to write his newspaper. He wrote about how the use of the concept of vulgarity in language was used to deny the value and meaning of petitions to Parliament:

The present project… is to communicate to all uneducated Reformers, ‘a knowledge of Grammar’. The people, you know, were accused of presenting petitions ‘not grammatically correct’. And those petitions were ‘rejected’, the petitioners being ‘ignorant’: though some of them were afterwards put into prison for being ‘better informed’…

No doubt remains in my mind that there was more talent discovered, and more political knowledge, by the leaders among the Reformers, than have ever been shown, at any period of time, by the Members of the two houses of parliament.

There was only one thing in which any of you were deficient, and that was in the mere art of so arranging the words in your Resolutions and Petitions as to make these compositions what is called ‘grammatically correct’. Hence, men of a hundredth part of the ‘mind’ of some of the authors of the Petitions were enabled to cavil at them on this account, and to infer from this incorrectness, that the Petitioners were a set of ‘poor ignorant creatures’, who knew nothing of what they were talking; a set of the ‘Lower Classes’ who ought never to raise their reading above that of children’s books, Christmas Carols, and the like.

For my part, I have always held a mere knowledge of the rules of grammar very cheap. It is a study, which demands hardly any powers of mind. To possess a knowledge of those rules is a pitiful qualification…

Grammar is to literary composition what a linch-pin is to a waggon. It is a poor pitiful thing in itself; it bears no part of the weight; adds not in the least to the celerity; but, still the waggon cannot very well and safely go on without it…

Therefore, trifling, and even contemptible, as this branch of knowledge is ‘in itself’, it is of vast importance as to the means of giving to the great powers of the mind their proper effect… The grammarian from whom a man of genius learns his rules has little more claim to a share of such a man’s renown than has the goose, who yields the pens with which he writes: but, still the pens are ‘necessary’, and so is the grammar.

Cobbett therefore wrote A Grammar of the English Language in the same year, in order to satisfy that desire which every man, and especially every young man, should entertain to be able to assert with effect the rights and liberties of his country. At the same time, he cautioned his educated young readers against calling the Hampshire plough-boy… ignorant for his colloquialisms such as Poll Cherrycheek have giv’d I thick handkercher. It would be wrong to laugh at him, because he has no pretensions to a knowledge of grammar, but yet may be very skilful as a plough-boy. As Olivia Smith remarked, in her 1984 book, The Politics of Language 1791-1819 (OUP), Cobbett considered grammar, in short, as an integral part of the class structure of England, and the act of learning grammar by one of his readers as an act of class warfare.

It is clear that no significant differences in the grammar of Cobbett’s writing separate today’s language from the English of the early nineteenth century. What we now call Standard English has been established for over two hundred years, since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, at least. It is the only form of the language, together with its North American variant, which obtains universal acceptance. This seems to contradict the linguistic statement that all living languages are in a constant state of change. However, the grammatical innovations since Cobbett’s day are developments of established features, rather than of fundamental changes. Once a standard form of writing becomes the norm, then the rate of change in the grammar is slowed down considerably. At the same time, however, there have been significant lexical shifts and changes, plus modifications in pronunciation, especially in recent decades.

Vocabulary:

As there has been a constant change in the vocabulary of the language over the past two hundred years, it almost goes without saying that there have been many losses of gains of words since the eighteenth century. English is a language that has taken in and assimilated words from many foreign languages to add to the core vocabulary of Germanic, French and Latin words. I have more to write about this later, in connection with the late twentieth century.

Spelling:

The standard orthography was fixed in the eighteenth century by the agreed practice of printers. Dr Johnson set down accepted spellings in his Dictionary of 1755, and also recorded some of the arbitrary choices of ‘custom’:

… thus I write, in compliance with a numberless majority, ‘convey’ and ‘inveigh’, ‘deceit’ and ‘receipt’, fancy and phantom.

A few words found in the original versions of eighteenth century texts have changed in spelling, such as cloathing, terrour, phantasy and publick, but there are not many. More recently, it has become acceptable to change the ‘ae’ spelling in words like archaeology to ‘e’ – archeology. Some American spellings have also become acceptable in Britain, such as program, mainly as a result of its use in computer programming. With few exceptions, however, it is true to say that our spelling system was fixed over two centuries ago, and that every attempt to reform it, e.g. with a more phonetic system, has failed.

Grammar:

While the underlying rules of grammar have remained unchanged, their use in speech and writing has continued to develop into forms that distinguish the varieties of language use since the eighteenth century. This can be described in terms of ‘style’ and ‘register’. In present-day English we can observe, in some varieties of language use, a greater complexity in both the noun phrase and the verb phrase.

Modifiers of nouns normally precede the head of the noun phrase (NP) when they are words (normally adjectives or nouns) or short phrases, as in a/the red brick wall and follow it when they are phrases or clauses. The rule of pre-modification has developed so that much longer strings of words and phrases can now precede the head word, as in a never to be forgotten experience. This style is a particular feature of newspaper headlines and other media, where a noun phrase is used to shorten longer statements containing a number of post-modifying prepositional phrases. For example, the statement There has been a report on the treatment of suspects in police stations in Northern Ireland is turned into the headline Northern Ireland police station suspect treatment report…

The process of converting clauses with verbs into noun clauses is called nominalisation. The word is itself an example of that process. It has become a marked feature of some contemporary styles, including formal and academic writing. However, this does not signify a change in grammar, but rather reveals the way in which the flexibility of English grammar readily permits nominalisation. In Standard English, verb phrases can also be constructed in increasingly complex forms, such as she has been being treated, using auxiliary verbs to combine the grammatical features of tense (past or present), aspect (perfect or progressive), voice (active or passive) and mood (positive/ negative statement or interrogative). Question forms such as hasn’t she been being treated? and won’t she have been being treated? may not be common, but they are conceivable, and have developed since the eighteenth century. They are examples of how English has become a more analytic language in recent centuries, in that its structures now depend far more on strings of separate words, rather than on inflections of words.

Another development in the resources of verb phrases is the increased use of phrasal and prepositional verbs like to run across for to meet, put up with for tolerate and give in/ give up for surrender. They are a feature of spoken and informal usage, and although the structure can be found in earlier forms of English, they have increased considerably in modern Standard English, with new combinations being continually introduced, often as slang, as in get with it, afterwards being gradually accepted and assimilated.

The Queen’s English

We still tend to judge our fellow latter-day Britons by their speech as much as by other aspects of their behaviour, though some have been much more positive in their reactions than others. The relationship between social class and the language used in the eighteenth century was maintained through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, for example, is the dean of Canterbury Cathedral, Dr. Henry Alford, writing in a book called The Queen’s English: Stray Notes on Speaking and Spelling, in 1864:

And first and foremost, let me notice that worst of all faults, the leaving out of the aspirate where it ought to be, and putting it where it ought not to be. This is a vulgarism not confined to this or that province of England, nor especially prevalent in one county or another, but common throughout England to persons of low breeding and inferior education, principally to those among the inhabitants of towns. Nothing so surely stamps a man as below the mark of intelligence, self-respect, and energy, as this unfortunate habit…

As I write these lines, which I do while waiting in a refreshment-room at Reading, between a Great-Western and a South-Eastern train, I hear one of two commercial gentlemen, from a neighbouring table, telling his friend that “his ‘ed’ used to ‘hake’ ready to burst.”

Alford’s attitude here is no different from that of some eighteenth century grammarians in their references to ‘the depraved language of the Common People’. One common usage that is still taught as an error is what is called ‘the split infinitive’, as in the ‘infamous’ introit to the 1970s US television series, ‘Star Trek’, ‘…to boldly go…’, which has become almost as legendary in sociolinguistics as the series itself has become in popular culture. Here is Dean Alford on the subject:

A correspondent states as his own usage, and defends, the insertion of an adverb between the sign of the infinitive mood and the verb. He gives as an instance, ‘to scientifically illustrate.’ But surely this is a practice entirely unknown to English speakers and writers. It seems to me, that we ever regard the ‘to’ of the infinitive as inseparable from its verb.

The Dean was wrong in his assertion that the practice was ‘entirely unknown’. The idea that it is ungrammatical to put an adverb between to and the verb was an invention of prescriptive grammarians, but it has been handed down as a ’solecism’ (violation of the rules of grammar) from one generation of pedagogical pedants to another. It has become an easy marker of ’good English’.

Above: Details from The Village Choir by Thomas Webster (1800-1886), Victoria & Albert Museum.

Henry Alford was born in Bloomsbury, London, in 1810. His father, also Henry, was rector of Aston Sandford in Buckinghamshire. Henry junior was educated at Ilminster Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he subsequently became a Fellow. Ordained in 1833, he became curate of Ampton in Suffolk, and incumbent of Quebec Chapel, London, before becoming Dean of Canterbury Cathedral in 1857, where he remained until his death in 1871. He became a distinguished scholar and wrote numerous books, including a critical commentary on the Greek New Testament. A strong evangelical, he wrote a number of hymns, some of which remain well-known and are still used regularly today. Among these is the harvest hymn, Come ye thankful people, come, which he wrote in 1844 for use in services in his rural Suffolk parish. It uses the parable from Mark’s gospel (chapter 4. 26-29), about the seed springing up without the sower knowing about it, including the line: For the earth bringeth forth of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. As they sang this verse, the local farmers and labourers from Suffolk’s ‘grain belt’ would have had a very clear image to match the meaning of the parable. The hymn was first published in his own collection of Psalms and Hymns in 1844. He then revised it for his Poetical Works (1865) and his Year of Praise (1867). The writers of Hymns Ancient and Modern included it with their anthology first in 1861, but changed Alford’s simple, rustic words of the second verse, from:

… First the blade and then the ear,

Then the full corn shall appear:

Lord of harvest, grant that we

Wholesome grain and pure may be;

 To:

… Ripening with a wondrous power

Till the final harvest hour

Grant, O Lord of life, that we

Holy grain and pure may be.

Although these changes were firmly repudiated by the author, they have persisted to this day, reappearing in the New Standard version of the Anglican hymn book. This shows that, although Alford may have been a stickler for correct grammar, he was also in favour of the movement to bring the folk language and culture of the countryside into church worship, connecting it with the simplicity of the gospel texts.

His other famous hymn was, however, very different in both content and style. Ten thousand times ten thousand, a stirring hymn about the Church Triumphant, it is full of imagery drawn from the Book of Revelation, and the opening lines are suggested by the reference in chapter 5, verse 11 to St John the Divine’s vision of a mighty throng of angels around the throne of God, and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand. The rush of hallelujahs and the ringing of a thousand harps are also taken from the book (19. 1-6 and 14.2):

Ten thousand times ten thousand,

In sparkling labour bright,

The armies of the ransomed saints

Throng up the steeps of light;

’Tis finished, all is finished,

Their fight with death and sin;

Fling open wide the golden gates,

And let the victors in.

 

What rush of hallelujahs

Fills all the earth and sky!

What ringing of a thousand harps

Bespeaks the triumph nigh!

O day for which creation

And all its tribes were made!

O joy, for all its former woes

A thousandfold repaid.          

The first three verses of which first appeared in his Year of Praise in 1867. The fourth was added in 1870 in The Lord’s Prayer. The complete hymn was sung at Alford’s funeral in January of the following year. Hymns, unlike other forms of writing, were written to be sung by all classes of society together, in church, so that Alford was well aware of the need to keep their language simple and direct if they were to become popular with the masses in Victorian society who were the object of his evangelical ministry. At the time he was writing his hymns, the Chartists were also launching their equally ’evangelical’ campaign among the working classes, and they too wrote hymns to popularise their cause of Political Reform. A copy of The National Chartist Hymn Book of 1845 has recently been discovered in Todmorden Public Library, in fact what is believed to be the only surviving copy. Michael Sanders of Manchester University believes that it was almost certainly complied by the South Lancashire Delegate Meeting. It is interesting to see how the desire for social justice is expressed in biblical language, and in the form of a hymn like God of the Poor!:

God of the poor! Shall labour eat

Or drones alone find labour sweet?

Lo, they who call thy earth their own,

Take all we have – and give a stone.

God of the poor! Shall labour eat

Or drones alone find labour sweet?

 

Yet not in vain thy children call

On thee, if thou art Lord of all;

And by thy work, and by thy word,

Hark! Millions cry for justice, Lord.

Yet not in vain thy children call

On thee, if thou art Lord of all.

 

The last verses of Great God are equally rousing in their call to martyrdom in the cause of freedom and justice:

Tho’ freedom mourns her murdered son,

And weeping friends surround his bier,

Tho’ tears like mountain torrents run,

Our cause is watered by each tear.

 

O May his fate cement the bond,

That binds us to our glorious cause!

Raise! Raise the cry! Let all respond;

’Justice, and pure and equal laws.’

The hymn form was further popularised by the Methodist preachers who formed the early agricultural workers’ unions in the 1860s and ’70s. They came together in their thousands in pouring rain and muddy fields to sing folk anthems such as When Arch Beneath the Wellesbourne Tree, defying both squire and parson in its words. This poor man’s choral tradition passed into the Clarion Movement (see pictures below) which ‘evangelised’ for socialism in town and countryside in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.

The invention of sound recording, and especially of the portable recorders, has made it possible for us to study the spoken language in a way that students of English were unable to fifty years ago. Through such recordings, we are able to produce transcripts of modern Standard English, enabling us to compare it with surviving dialects. However, the only way of comparing contemporary Standard English with that which was in use 150 years ago or more, is to return to the texts of the King James Bible and compare the Revised Version made by teams from Oxford and Cambridge Universities between 1870 and 1880, with the New English Bible of 1961:

St Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 26 verses 69-75:

Revised Version:

Now Peter was sitting without in the Court: and a maid came unto him, saying, Thou also wast with Jesus the Galilean. But he denied before them all, saying, I know not what thou sayest. And when he was gone out into the porch, another maid saw him, and saith unto them that were there, This man also was with Jesus the Nazarene. And again he denied with an oath, I know not the man. And after a little while they that stood by came and said to Peter, Of a truth thou also art one of them; for thy speech betrayeth thee. Then began he to curse and to swear, I know not the man. And straightway the cock crew. And Peter remembered the word which Jesus had said, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly.

New English Bible:

Meanwhile Peter was sitting outside in the courtyard when a serving-maid accosted him and said, ‘You were there too with Jesus the Galilean.’ Peter denied it in the face of them all. ‘I do not know what you mean’, he said. He then went out to the gateway, where another girl, seeing him, said to the people there, ‘This fellow was with Jesus of Nazareth.’ Once again he denied it, saying with an oath, ‘I do not know the man.’ Shortly afterwards the bystanders came up and said to Peter, ‘Surely, you are another of them; your accent gives you away!’ At this he broke into curses and declared with an oath… ‘I do not know the man.’ At that moment a cock crew; and Peter remembered how Jesus had said, ‘Before the cock crows you will disown me three times.’ He went outside, and wept bitterly.

 Although the revisers of the King James Version were given a brief of making a more intelligible version than the 1611 original, they also kept as close to its wording as they could. In this way the Revised Version represents both the transitional elements of Early Modern English and the forms of dialogue in use in mid-Victorian England, just as the New English version reflects the contemporary speech of the early 1960s, whilst at the same time trying to remain true to the original meaning.

The Deterioration of English?

By the last quarter of the twentieth century, fears for the future of the language had once again become the staples of newspaper columns, and were also joined in discussion of these by the new media of television news items and chat shows. They were even, in the Britain of 1978, the subject of a special debate in the House of Lords. The record of the debate, The English Language: Deterioration in Usage, makes very interesting reading. All but one of the speakers accepted the proposition that the language was deteriorating, and together they made a series of complaints about, for example, the misapplication of words such as parameter and hopefully. The language was cluttered with monstrosities like ongoing, relevant and viable. In addition, ‘good’ old words were acquiring ‘bad’ new meanings, as far as their Lordships were concerned. It was, remarked one of them, virtually impossible… for a modern poet to write ‘the choir of gay companions’. The use of the word for propaganda purposes… had destroyed its useful meaning…

Pronunciation, another familiar bugbear, was also considered to be slipping in words like controversy and formidable. In this context, as in many, the BBC came in for a substantial amount of criticism for failing in its clear duty to uphold the standards of English. There were laments also about the latest revisions of the Bible translations and the Book of Common Prayer. In addition, there were the usual condemnations of the way in which American usages, such as location for place which were creeping into our language. Lord Somers expressed the view that if there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is!

Besides the BBC, the Anglican hierarchy and the Americans, the peers also blamed schools, the universities and the mass media for the state of the language. Children and students, it was claimed, were no longer educated in grammar and classics. Newspapers, radio and television were familiarising the public with a language that depends on generalisations which are usually imprecise and often deliberately ambiguous… a language that makes unblushing use of jargon whenever that can assist evasion… A major cause of deterioration, noted one peer, exhibiting more than a touch of xenophobia, was very simply the enormous increase in the number of people using it. Perhaps the most revealing comment came from Lord Davies of Leek:

Am I right in assuming that in an age of uncertainty with respect to religion, God, family, self, money and prosperity, there is a worldwide collapse of not only the values of the past but of our language which, more and more, tends to be vague, indecisive, careless and often callous?

In one sense, Lord Davies was probably right. The relativism of the twentieth century probably did encourage a more permissive approach to language. In a deeper sense though, it was the decline of respect for God, the family and property that really concerned Lord Davies and his fellow peers, and he used Language-change or deterioration as the means for complaining about society. When all is said and done, language is only the medium of discourse, not the matter itself; the messenger, rather than the message. Language is, as it always has been, the mirror to society, not to be confused with society itself. In Britain, where English developed, it has become standardised and centralised in the South, apparently cautious of change. In the British Commonwealth, the independent traditions of Australia, New Zealand and Canada have breathed new life into the English that was exported from Britain more than two hundred years ago. In the Caribbean, it is the focus of an emergent nationalism. In Africa, it is the continent-wide means of communication and in South Africa it is the medium of Black consciousness. In India and South-East Asia, it is associated with aspiration, development and growing self-confidence, taking on distinctive forms. Therefore it is not neutral: it is a vehicle of both change and continuity, rather than a victim of social degradation.

Sources:

Dennis Freeborn (1992), From Old English to Standard English. Basingstoke: MacMillan.

Ian Bradley (2005), The Daily Telegraph Book of Hymns. London: Continuum Books.

Robert McCrum, William Cran, Robert MacNeil (1987), The Story of English. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

We call the language of the Anglo-Saxon period up to about 1150, following the Norman Conquest, Old English (OE). Our knowledge of OE is based on a number of manuscripts that have survived from those times, from which the grammar and vocabulary have been reconstructed by scholars, working from the sixteenth century onwards, but especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They have provided us with the dictionaries and grammars of OE, and the editions of OE texts on which we can rely.

Above: The Heptarchy, or seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Northumberland, given here, was more often known as Northumbria before the Norman Conquest.

Boundaries and Dialects:

The English were not a particularly unified nation until late OE times, from about the time of Alfred the Great in the late ninth century. The Anglo-Saxons came from different parts of Western Europe and spoke different dialects of West Germanic. Different tribes settled in different parts of Britain, but were able to communicate with each other in an increasingly common tongue, though retaining differences in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. The ‘country’ which existed during the seventh and eighth centuries is sometimes referred to as the heptarchy, the seven kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex. There were frequent wars between these kingdoms, in which one tried to dominate the others, first Northumbria, then East Anglia, then Mercia and finally Wessex, until it was overthrown by the Danes under Cnut in 1016. The fact that there were seven kingdoms does not mean, however, that there were seven different dialects. The evidence from the manuscripts suggests that there were four: Northumbrian, Mercian and Anglian, in the North, East Anglia and Mercian, or Midland, from the West Germanic settlers, and a dialect which mixed Jutish with West Saxon across the south. It is usual to use the late West Saxon dialect of the tenth and eleventh centuries to describe OE in its written form, because Wessex was by then the dominant kingdom, and most of the legal manuscripts were written in it, although Mercian remained the most widely spoken dialect north of the Thames throughout the Middle Ages.

 Above: A chart of runic symbols with their equivalent phonemes in modern English.

The writing system of the earliest English was based on the use of signs called runes, which were devised for carving in wood or stone. One of the few examples to survive in Britain is the eighteen-foot cross in the church in Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire. On it are some runic inscriptions in the Northumbrian dialect, part of a famous OE poem called The Dream of the Rood (from the OE for ‘cross’, relating the events of the Crucifixion). The Ruthwell Cross probably dates from the eighth century. Written English as we know it had to wait for the establishment of the Church and the building of monasteries, at which time the monks wrote in Latin. This began to happen in the seventh century when much of Northumbria and East Anglia was converted to Christianity by monks from Ireland, while Augustine had been sent by the Pope to convert the southern English, beginning in Kent. The monks adapted the Latin alphabet to write in English, which means that OE gives us a good idea of its pronunciation. The variations in spelling provide evidence of the different dialects which existed in English.

For example, the earliest known poem in English is Caedmon’s hymn, found in the OE translation of Bede’s History of the English Church and People, written in Latin and finished in 731. Bede’s history was translated into English in the late ninth century as part of the great revival of learning under King Alfred the Great of Wessex. The poem, a hymn to God the Creator, is all that survives of the devotional poet, Caedmon, who lived in Bede’s time. Here are the first lines from it in, first, the West Saxon and then the Northumbrian dialects, followed by a word-for-word translation into modern English:

 

Nu we sculan herian heofonrices Weard

Metodes mihte and his modgethonk

weorc Wulfdorfaeder; swa he wundra gehwaes

ece Dryhten, ord onstealde.

 

Nu scylan hergan hefaenricaes Uard

Metudaes maecti end his mogdidanc

uerc uuldurfadur; sue he uundra gihuaes

eci Dryctin, or aestelidae.

 

(Now we must praise heaven-kingdom’s Guardian

Creator’s might and his mind-thought

work Glory-father’s; as he of-wonders each

evelasting Lord, beginning established.)

 

Runes and Early Writing:

 

In printing and writing Old English today, present day shapes of Roman letters are used, with three additional non-Roman letters, or phonic symbols, because there was no equivalent sound or letter in Latin. These are the short ‘ae’ vowel sound, known as ‘ash’ in runes, as in the modern word ‘cat’, and two symbols used interchangeably for the voiced and unvoiced ‘th’ sound in modern English. These runes are called ‘thorn’ and ‘eth’. A complete list of the vowels and consonants and their corresponding sounds in modern Received Pronunciation (RP) is given below:

A small book called a Testimonie of Antiquietie was printed in 1567. Its purpose was to provide evidence in a contemporary religious controversy about the Church sacraments. It reproduced, with a translation, a sermon ‘in the Saxon tongue’ by Aelfric, Archbishop of Canterbury in 995. He was not only a famous preacher in English, but also a grammarian. The book is of interest to linguists because the translation provides an example of Early Modern English (EME) both in style and spelling and printing as well as a copy of the OE manuscript forms. The beginning of Aelfric’s sermon is given below, together with its sixteenth century translation and the list of the Saxon characters or letters that be moste straunge. The word-for-word translation of the OE in the facsimile is:

Aelfric abbot greets Sigeferth

friendily; to me is said that

thou saidest about me that I other

taught in English writings,

than your anchorite*

at home with you teaches,

because he clearly says that is

permitted, that mass priests

well may wive, and my

writings against speak this.

 

* = religious hermit

 

The Incursions and Immigrations of the Norsemen:

 

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records an event in 787 which proved to be an ominous portent of things to come (in word-for-word translation):

Here took breohtric king offa’s daughter eadburh… in his days came first three ships of-northmen from hortha land… and then the reeve thereto rode… he wished drive to the king’s manor because he knew-not what they were… him one slew there. That were the first ships danish men’s that Angle-people’s land sought.

 

By the end of the eighth century the Angles, Saxons and Jutes had finally occupied almost the whole of what we know of England today, as well as modern-day Scotland as far as the Firth of Forth. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued to record battles for supremacy between the kings of the seven kingdoms, as in the following example of the annal dated 827:

In this year there was an eclipse of the moon on Christmas morning. And the same year Egbert conquered Mercia, and all that was south of the Humber, and he was the eighth king to be ‘Ruler of Britain’: the first to rule so great a kingdom was Aelle, king of Sussex; the second was Caewlin, king of Wessex; the third was Aethelbert, king of Kent; the fourth was Raedwald, king of East Anglia; the fifth was Edwin, king of Northumbria; the sixth was Oswald who reigned after him; the seventh was Oswy, Oswald’s brother; the eighth was Egbert, king of Wessex.

 

But by this time the three ships that the king’s reeve had ridden to meet forty years earlier had been followed by greater numbers of ships and Norsemen, making annual raids for plunder along the coasts and up the rivers of northern France and England. The Peterborough Chronicle annal for 793 records the first Norwegian Viking attack on the monasteries of Lindisfarne and Jarrow:

793, and a little after that in the same year on 8^th January* God’s church on the island of Lindisfarne was miserably plundered and destroyed by the heathen, with great slaughter.

 

(*794 in the Gregorian calendar)

 

The Norwegian Vikings soon began to raid around the northern and western coasts and islands of Scotland, the north-west coasts of Cumbria, Northumbria, Mercia, Wales and the north of Ireland, and the Isle of Man. Danes began raiding the eastern coasts of the Anglian and Saxon kingdoms in 835, and by the mid-ninth century larger raiding parties regularly ravaged the hinterlands and began to occupy and settle major tracts of these. The most famous of the Saxon kings, Alfred, King of Wessex, after years of continual defeat, negotiated treaties with the Danes. By the time of his death in 899, only Wessex remained intact and independent. The rest of Engaland, north and east of the old Roman road called Watling Street, from London to Chester, was in the hands of the Danish settlers and became known as the Danelaw. The Scandinavian attacks and incursions continued throughout the first half of the tenth century. One of them, dated 937 in the annal, is celebrated in poetry as the Battle of Brunanburh in modern-day Scotland (the exact site is unknown), where Aethelstan, King of Wessex, defeated the Norwegian Vikings attacking from Ireland.

 Above: The Battle of Brunanburh, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Parker) for AD 937.

(In OE manuscripts, poetry was set out like prose, not in separate lines. Lines and half-lines were often clearly marked with a dot like a full-stop.)

 

A period of twenty-five years of peace after 955 was once again broken when more attacks by Norsemen began in the 980’s. Some came from Normandy across the Channel, where they had also settled, as well as from Denmark and Norway. In 1017, the Danish king, Cnut, became ‘King of All England’; Danish rule was not ended until 1042, when the Edward the Confessor became the King of England.

The settlement of the Danelaw had important effects on the English Language. Old Norse (ON) is the name now given to the language spoken by the Danish and Norwegian Vikings. It was ‘cognate’ with Old English (OE); that is, they both came from the same antecedent West Germanic group of languages. It seems that the two languages were similar enough in vocabulary for OE-speakers to understand common ON words and phrases, and vice-versa, so that the English and the Norsemen could communicate. Many OE words therefore have a cognate ON word, and we cannot always be sure whether a Modern English reflex is derived from OE, ON or from both. An Icelandic saga says of the eleventh century that there was at that time the same tongue in England as in Norway and Denmark, but speakers of their own tongue simplified it when making transactions with the other, so that OE dialects in the Danelaw became modified in ways which were different from the west Mercian, East Anglian and Wessex dialects. These variations are detectable in present-day northern and East Anglian dialects, which reveal ON features, especially in vocabulary.

Main Published Source:

Dennis Freeborn (1992), From Old English to Standard English, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Above: pages from Spot the Style: A Mini Guide to architecture in Britain, by David Pearce. London: P Murray.

Below: Seckford Street in Woodbridge, Suffolk, named after the Tudor lawyer, parliamentarian and benefactor. In 1587 he decided to donate a large measure of his wealth to endowing ‘certain almshouses’ in the town. He died the same year, and his tomb can be seen in St.Mary’s Parish Church.

              

Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Languages of Anglicanism and Puritanism; East Anglia and New England

As Anglicanism became established, parish churches continued to hear the celebration of the eucharist (holy communion) in the form set out in Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and readings from the translations of the Bible later consolidated in the Authorised Version of 1612. The repetition of prayers and readings, noble in expression, brought linguistic unity to England. The adoption by the Scottish Kirk of English translations of the Bible may have thwarted the separate development of Lallans (lowland Scots) and a different cultural tradition, which made the transition to the unity of the kingdoms much easier. Those devising the new services had a long tradition of devotional literature to draw on. Tyndale and Cranmer had a language ready for expression and translation of the complex Judaeo-Christian tradition  in new forms. This was due to the creation of English as a language of intellect and the higher emotions by authors of vernacular works by poets and writers who drew their themes and inspirations from shrines, pilgrimages, visions and the telling of legends of saints and Arthurian heroes.

Some of those writers were women, such as the turbulent visionary Margery Kempe, who wrote the first autobiography in English, and the gentle, reclusive Julian of Norwich. The poets and writers included, most notably, Geoffrey Chaucer, who set his greatest poem in the framework of a pilgrimage to Canterbury. William Langland’s Piers Ploughman arose from a vision on the Malvern Hills. Thomas Malory gave new life to the common British tradition in his Morte D’Arthur. The holy place that most fully commemorates the English literary tradition is Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where the names of those buried among kings and knights make it a resting place of genius unrivalled in Europe. The only name missing is that of England’s national bard, William Shakespeare, but it is perhaps appropriate that he lies by the altar of his parish church, Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was also baptised and grew up listening to the language of Cranmer’s English Bible and Prayer Book.

 

Looking back on the achievements of Elizabeth’s reign, historians have referred to it as an age, one in which England survived national and international crises to be recognised as a centre of artistic splendour. During her reign and that of James I, a total period of seventy years, or one full lifespan, the English language achieved a richness and vitality of expression that even contemporaries marvelled at. However, contemporaries at the beginning of this period had recognised that their native tongue was barely ready, after centuries of Latin and French dominance, for serious literary and scholarly purposes. England, not even yet united with the Tudor homeland of Wales, was a small nation, just beginning to flex its international muscles. Its statesmen tended to indulge in hyperbole, like the poet, courtier and soldier, Sir Philip Sidney, who claimed that English hath it equally with any other tongue in the world. It was the confluence of three historical developments, at least two of which were common to much of Europe, and occurred earlier in many countries, the Renaissance and the Reformation, which really propelled England forward during these years. The third, most dynamic factor, was its emergence as the leading maritime power.

 

The Renaissance had different effects in each European country. In England it had coincided with a communications revolution following Caxton’s setting up of his printing press at Westminster. This revolution has only recently been surpassed by the present age of computer and internet technology. The printing press transformed society. Before 1500 there were only about thirty-five thousand printed books in Europe as a whole, mostly in Latin. Between 1500 and 1640, some twenty thousand items were printed in English alone, ranging from pamphlets and broadsheets to folios and Bibles. The result was to accelerate the education of the middling sort and even some of the lower orders of society, so that by 1600, it has been estimated, as much as half the population had some kind of minimal literacy, and a much higher proportion in the cities and towns. In a growing free market in the printed word, the demand for books in English outstripped the demand for the old classical media of the universities, and booksellers and printers were keen to meet this new market. Lexicographers were keen to introduce new words, like maturity, from Latin, as part of the necessary augmentation of our language.

English could not escape the influence of the classical languages in the age of the Renaissance, as the revival of learning produced a new group of scholar-writers from Thomas More to Francis Bacon who devoted themselves to the cultivation of style in Latin. Although they wrote their scholarly works in Latin, when they wrote their letters in English, they embellished their prose with Latinate words. They ransacked the classical past for words like agile, capsule, absurdity, contradictory, exaggerate, indifference (Latin) and monopoly, paradox, catastrophe, lexicon, thermometer (Greek). The scientific revolution of the time also prompted new borrowings, such as atmosphere, pneumonia, skeleton. An encyclopedia would now be required to explain the idea of gravity. Vesalius’ transformation of anatomy meant that English would need descriptions like excrement and strenuous. In physics, the work of scientists like William Gilbert were introducing words such as external and chronology. There were also further borrowings from French, like bigot and detail. Besides some specific architectural words from Italian, and some bellicose Spanish words, there were also important nautical words from the Low Countries like smuggler and reef. Sailors also brought Low Dutch into English at this time, words which are sometimes falsely attributed to the Anglo-Saxons, like fokkinge, kunte and bugger.  These words are not what we would normally associate with the Renaissance, but they form part of the same desire to make English a communicative, everyday language with a broad vocabulary. Altogether, the Renaissance added as many as twelve thousand words to the English lexicon.

These innovations and inventions were typical of the kind of adventurousness we associate with the Elizabethans, especially in their brave explorations of the New World. Francis Drake traveled well beyond the bounds of Christendom, circumnavigating the globe, plundering Spanish ships in the Caribbean and exploring the Americas. It was the guidance and inspiration of Drake’s fellow Devonian, Sir Walter Ralegh (pronounced Rawley), which led to the first English-speaking communities in North America. A lesser-known adventurer was Thomas Cavendish of Trimley St Martin in Suffolk. He was one of the many sea dogs who served Queen Bess and his own pocket by harassing Spanish shipping and settlements in the Americas. In 1586 he decided to emulate Drake’s great exploit of sailing around the globe. Setting out with three ships, he completed the incredible journey in a little over two years. In 1591 he set out to repeat the venture in order to open up commercial relations with the Orient, but was worn down by storms and disease, dying off the coast of Brazil, where he was buried at sea.

 

The story of what was to become the first North American settlement starts in the late 1570s when Sir Humphrey Gilbert, under charter from Elizabeth, claimed Newfoundland for England. (One of his fellow explorers was a Hungarian, about whom I have written elsewhere.) Heading South, Gilbert was then drowned in a storm with the famous last words, We are as neer to heaven by sea as by land. Sir Walter Ralegh then took up the cause of founding a new colony, temporarily establishing the Cittie of Ralegh in Virginea, on today’s coast of North Carolina. The story of The Lost Colony, as it became known, exemplifies the adventurous mariners of the Elizabethan era, but also shows how hazardous and difficult the settlement of the New World was. Ralegh, now out of favour with the Crown, continued to express his undying faith in an English empire overseas. With hindsight, the colonisation of the new huge land-mass of North America by English-speaking settlers seems inevitable and Ralegh’s boast to Sir Robert Cecil in 1602, that he would yet live to see it an English Nation might not seem so idle, had he been allowed to live on. However, at the time neither Ralegh nor the prospective settlers could envisage what they were taking on, let alone confront the harsh realities of the new frontier on the other side of the ocean. In the meantime, raiding and trading was continuing to prove far more lucrative. 

In contrast to the internationalism of scholarship and commerce,  Tudor politics – the Reformation and its creation of a distinctly English Church, emphasised the age-old desire of the English, and to a lesser extent the Welsh and the Scots, to establish their independence from French and other continental influences. The breach with Rome, followed by the almost continual wars with France and Spain, the superpowers of the age, culminating in the defeat of the Armada, with the small island nation beating off the huge invasion fleet of a transatlantic Empire, was matched by the declaration to Parliament of an independent-minded Queen:

 I thank God I am endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place in Christendom. 

In reality, the threat of 1588 failed to strike much of a patriotic fire in the coastal towns of Suffolk. The decayed coastal defenses had to be rapidly repaired and when the eastern ports were required to provide a quota of ships for the royal fleet they all pleaded poverty. The Spanish wars had already caused them severe loss of trade, they argued, and they could only afford a fraction of the ships needed. When the time came for the county levies to assemble before their Queen at Tilbury, the men of Suffolk had to be cajoled once more, for they were reluctant to leave their farms at harvest time and even more reluctant to leave their county. In the event, they were not really needed, as Drake’s fireships scattered the heavy Spanish galleons, laden down with heavy cannon and balls which disintegrated on impact, and God’s wind did the rest.

The long war with Spain disrupted the cloth trade with the Spanish Netherlands, an important cause of its decline, or rather of transition, with old draperies giving way to new ones. The old system had been badly hit not just by wars and market changes, but by the introduction of new techniques and the growth of monopolies. The planting of European colonies in Africa and the Americas provided new and often captive markets for the goods of the Old World, but the requirements of these new consumers were not the same as those of England’s old trading partners. The inhabitants of tropical and sub-tropical lands did not want to drape themselves in heavy Suffolk broadcloth. The county’s clothiers could probably have risen to this challenge as they had to previous market changes, but powerful mercantile groups saw regional specialisation as the solution to the problems.

Fulling could be carried out more efficiently and cheaply in counties like Yorkshire with its abundant supply of fast-flowing tributaries running off the Pennine moors into its great, navigable rivers, flowing into the North Sea. Within a few years, Suffolk’s small-scale yet integral fulling industry dwindled and many craftsmen had to take to the Great North Road to find work.

Growing control over the East Anglian industry was being exercised by London merchants, most of whom belonged to trading companies which had official or unofficial monopolies in large trading areas overseas. These merchants could therefore combine to outbid the local clothiers for yarn and to pay more for unfinished cloth than the exporters of Ipswich and Colchester. Suffolk clothiers who tried to break these monopolies were frequently prosecuted through a growing volume of legislation. The erosion of free trade by sharp mercantile practices led to prohibitions and restraints of trade which, in 1588, left the merchants of Ipswich unable to transport Suffolk cloths even to the continent, and especially to Spain. By the second decade of the seventeenth century, this stranglehold on trade had left the cloth industry in Suffolk extremely exposed to the sharp practices of some unscrupulous London merchants. In 1619, one Gerrard Reade refused settle payment with eighty Suffolk clothiers for the cloths he had already sold for twenty thousand pounds. The Suffolk magistrates complained that the work of at least five thousand weavers was at stake. The clothiers did not have the funds to pay them, having not been paid themselves for the cloth, and were they to be thrown on the parish for relief, there would not be enough funds to relieve them.

The Elizabethan Poor Law, which reached its final form in 1601, made the parishes responsible for all their inhabitants unable to care for themselves. Throughout the country the number of those in need of relief rose and the poor rate with it. The magistrates heard frequent pleas for leniency from overseers and churchwardens who simply could not collect the necessary money. Three years later the same justices reported to the Privy Council that bankruptcies were continuing among the Suffolk clothiers, unable to sell the 4,453 broadcloths they had left on their hands, distributed across twenty different towns, worth more than thirty-nine thousand pounds. Poor houses and alms houses were built in many places, including inside the castle walls in Framlingham (pictured left)

The clothiers reacted to these pressures by banding together themselves into local organisations capable of resisting them. A company of cloth-workers was formed at Ipswich in 1590, with the avowed intention that the said mysteries and sciences may be better ordered, the town better maintained, and the country near about it more preferred… A similar trade organisation was formed at Bury in 1607. However, they failed in protecting local trade from the tycoons in London. What they did achieve was to help the clothiers to restrict the wages and impose strict conditions upon the craftsmen who worked for them and who were already experiencing severe hardship. They also tried to restrict to check the import of new, lightweight cloths from the Low Countries, but the Flemish weavers were producing a fabric which, while warm, was easier to work and lighter to wear, and whose popularity was therefore irresistible. Many Suffolk craftsmen, especially the persecuted puritans among them, decided to practice both their trade and their religion in the Netherlands, before some later emigrated with the Pilgrim Fathers to New England. At the same time, some cloth-makers had been copying the skills of earlier Flemish immigrants, turning their attention to spinning yarn and weaving new draperies. These new cloths included fustian, bay, say and stuff. The Suffolk centre for these was Sudbury, but the kembing (spinning) of yarn was more widespread. At first the spinners were independent and made their own arrangements for selling the yarn in London or Norwich, but before long merecantile capitalists took over the organisation of the industry.

In Tudor times, fishing, shipbuilding and coastal trade continued to be thriving activities along the coasts and estuaries. Two hundred or more ships out of ports of Lowestoft, Southwold, Walberswick, Dunwich, Aldeborough and Orford plied the North Sea herring grounds and Icelandic cod fields throughout most of the sixteenth century. In 1572 these ports, together with Ipswich and Woodbridge owned 146 coastal trade vessels, carrying cloth, oil, flax, hemp and wine across the Narrow Seas and plied along the coast with timber, fuller’s earth, hides and Newcastle coal. The growth of maritime enterprise in these times brought prosperity to the shipyards of Ipswich and Woodbridge. Ipswich was the principal supplier of large merchant ships to London, and thousands of Suffolk oaks went into a succession of fine vessels.

Woodbridge was always a close rival to its neighbouring port but Ipswich added to its prosperity by producing the cordage and sail canvas. By the turn of the century business was booming and a succession of fine ships were laid down, including the 320-ton Matthew in 1598.

However, coastal erosion posed a continual threat to the east coast ports, in particular, Dunwich. In 1573, The Queen’s majesty’s town was by the rages and surges of the sea, daily washed and devoured. The haven was so badly silted that no ships or boats could get either in or out, to the utter decay of the said town. Year after year more houses, churches and sometimes whole streets simply vanished. The inhabitants lacked the technical skill and resources necessary to construct sea defenses and, despite desperate pleas for help, there was none forthcoming from the government. Southwold was also fast silting up by 1620 and fishermen could no longer rely on access to the harbour at Walberswick. These ports were also plagued by piracy, which had become particularly virulent in the North Sea from the late sixteenth century. Operating out of Dunkirk, Ostend, Sluys and Nieuport, the privateers caused havoc to coastal and international shipping. In 1596 a small fleet of Dunkirkers blockaded Harwich and in 1602 east coast merchants were forced to adopt a convoy system. In 1619 a national subscription was raised to relieve the people of Dunwich, Southwold and Walberswick whose misfortunes were, in part, blamed on pirates. In 1626 a Dunkirk privateer sailed into Sole Bay at Southwold with guns blazing. While the townsfolk fled from the harbour the pirates cut out a merchant ship and made off with her. Between 1625 and 1627 no less than thirteen Aldeburgh ships of a total value of 6,800 pounds were lost to pirates.

Despite these problems, many Suffolkers were as proud of their mother-tongue, in all its vernacular plainness, as they were of defying the pope and denying the might of Spain access to their island’s shores.  Some writers such as Ben Johnson and even Shakespeare himself wanted to defend the language against the incursions of Latinate terms, calling them inkhorn terms and showing a preference for plainnesse. When Berowne finally declares his love for Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost, he announces that he will shun taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, and instead express his wooing mind … in russet yeas and honest kersey noes.

The combination of these twin traditions, homespun and continental, led to the emergence of a language, to quote Logan Pearsall Smith of unsurpassed richness and beauty, which, however, defies all the rules. Almost any word could be used in any pat of speech, adverbs could be used for verbs, nouns for adjectives, and nouns and adjectives could take the place of verbs and adverbs. In Elizabethan English, you could happy your friend, malice or foot your enemy, or fall an axe on his neck. Shakespeare himself wrote of how he could out-Herod Herod, ask that ye … uncle me no uncle and describe how she might tongue me.

When Shakespeare moved to London, he would have encountered the speech of the court, which was sufficently different from the standard speech of a market town like Stratford for a sharp-eared contemporary to note what he called a true kynde of pronunciation (what, today, we would call received pronunciation). We find some clues as to how this might have sounded in Shakespeare’s own plays, where he puns with minimal pairs like raising and reason, which would then have sounded much more like its French original, raison. Similarly, in All’s Well that Ends Well, a lot of the humour is conveyed in language rather than action, based on exchanges of puns as with the words grace and grass, much more similar among the courtiers then than they are now. Shakespeare would also rhyme tea with tay, and sea with say. Elizabethan English would have sounded much more like the English of Banburyshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire to twentieth-century ears than that of East Anglia, London and the South-East.

However, it was the English of London and East Anglia which was first to take hold in Massachussets, the language of the rigorous Puritan mind. The text owed much to earlier translations, especially that of Tyndale, but also to the scholarship of John Bois in ensuring the faithfulness of the overall text to the original Hebrew and Greek. He was born in 1560 and grew up East Anglia, reading the Hebrew Bible at the age of six, and becoming a classics scholar at St John’s College at fourteen. He passed through the examinations at record speed, and soon became a Fellow of the College. When this expired he was given a rectorship at Boxworth, an isolated hamlet a few miles north of Cambridge, on condition that he married the deceased rector’s daughter. This he did, moving into the Fens, but still rising at four o’clock to ride into Cambridge to teach, reading a book on horseback. Bois continued  to live quietly in Boxworth, a man with a brilliant scholarly reputation. At the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, called by James I to discuss matters of religion, Dr John Reynolds of Oxford proposed a definitive translation of the Bible to ameliorate the developing friction between Anglicans and Puritans. The rex pacificus gladly assented to the idea of one uniforme translation, though he doubted whether he would see a Bible well translated in English.

By June 1604 it was settled that there would be six groups of translators, two in Westminster, two in Oxford and two in Cambridge, each made up of eight scholars. John Bois was recruited for one of the Cambridge committees, and he was put in charge of translating the Apocrypha from the Greek, but his level of scholarship soon made him indispensable to other committees. The six committees were instructed to base their Version upon the previous English versions, translating afresh, but also comparing their work with that of the previous translators, from Tyndale to Parker. At the end of six years, the six committees delivered their texts to Westminster for a final review by two scholars from each centre. John Bois went from Cambridge, together with his old tutor, Dr Anthony Downes. For the next nine months in 1610, the six scholars worked together on the final draft of the AV, refining and revising the texts. Their brief was to re-work the text not just in order to make it read well, but also sound better when read out loud. In their Preface to the finished text, the translators commented interestingly on this process, addressing their remarks to The Reader.

During these nine months, Bois kept a diary containing notes on the revisions which still survive, and through which we can see how the six translators honed the text to near perfection. In the First Epistle of Peter, chapter two, verse three, the key word is pleasant. Bois had several choices from previos versions; pleasaunt  (Tyndale), gracious (Great Bible), bountifull (Geneva), gracious (Bishop’s), sweete (Rheims), …if so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious… (KJV), …how gracious the Lord is… (Bois’ revision). Not only does he make the right choice with the word gracious (pleasant would sound like nice in today’s English, and have roughly the same far too general and everyday meaning), but by inserting the adjective before the proper noun, Lord, he also makes the sentence sing (compare it with the great hymn, How great Thou art.) If we also compare the King James’ Version with Henry VIII’s Great Bible in the translation from the Hebrew, we can also detect the work of a brilliant linguistic and literary scholar. In chapter twelve of Ecclesiastes, the preacher says:

Or ever the silver lace be taken away, or the gold band be broke, or the pot broke at the well and the wheel upon the cistern, then shall the dust be turned again unto earth from whence it came, and the spirit shall return to God which gave it. All is but vanity saith the preacher, all is but plain vanity. (Great Bible).

Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern: Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity. (KJV).

The King James Version at once reads more clearly and sounds more poetic. It is an irony of the process by which the final text was created that only the king himself is credited with its creation. The version he only had to authorise came from the hard work of a scholarly committee, rather than a single writer. Compared with Tyndale and Cranmer, Bois is now almost forgotten. He returned to the Fens, where in 1628 the Bishop of Ely offered him a canonry at the cathedral, in which position he remained for the rest of his life, being buried in the cathedral in 1643.

The King James Bible was published in the same year as Shakespeare produced his last play, The Tempest, in 1611. Both the play and the Bible are masterpieces, but there is one crucial difference between them. While the playwright used more words than ever, inventing new ones as he wrote, the King James Version employed a mere eight thousand words, God’s English for Everyman. The people for whom the new, simplified yet poetic text became a weapon saw themselves as God’s Englishmen and Englishwomen. They became known to others as Puritans. Their heartland was East Anglia, birthplace of John Bunyan and Oliver Cromwell. Besides these very English revolutionaries, about two-thirds of the early settlers of Massachusetts Bay came from the eastern counties, from Lincolnshire in the north to Essex in the south, from Suffolk and Norfolk in the east to Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in the west.

Throughout the seventeenth century, the villages and towns of these counties supplied the New World with a ready and steady stream of immigrants, country people with country skills who were already well adapted for the hard life of the pioneer. The speech-features of East Anglia that were transplanted to the place the Pilgrim Fathers named New England are still to be heard in the rural parts of Norfolk and Suffolk. People there still say noo instead of new and don’t sound the r in words like bar, storm and yard, very different from the burr of western English counties from rural Oxfordshire and Worcestershire down to Dorset and Devon.

Many, perhaps most, were Puritan dissenters, or separatists, who would not conform with the liturgy and practices of the Church of England, and their story became the story of American English. Their motives were a tangle of idealistic, colonising, self-interested and religious ambitions. The Pilgrim Fathers went to escape, in the words of Andrew Marvell, the Prelate’s Rage. They were also escaping from a monarch of Great Britain who hated both Scottish Presbyterians and English Independents among his subjects, vowing to harry them out of the land. Their impulse to migrate was both profoundly conservative and revolutionary in religious terms. They hoped to find an austere wilderness where they could establish an authentically English Christian community. They were not abandoning their East Anglian identity, but rather purifying and transplanting it. They did not see themselves as creating a new country, America, but recreating the old country, free from what they felt were the papist poisons prevalent in the national church. When the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth on 16 September 1620, the largest group on board came from East Anglia, but they represented thirty different communities from all over England. These can still be seen in the place-names of New England… Boston, Bedford, Braintree, Cambridge, Lincoln and Yarmouth. By the middle of the seventeenth century, there were some already a quarter of a million colonists on the North-Eastern seaboard of North America, mainly from London and the eastern counties.      

Today, it is claimed that over 360 million people speak English as their mother-tongue, many of these with a recent history in North America. However, their heritage as English-speaking peoples goes back for a millenium and a half. The role of churches and holy places in the creation of the language and literature, and therefore in its creation as a worldwide language, whether first, second, or as a foreign tongue, means that they form part of a much greater heritage. From the religious strife that followed the breach with Rome there remain many holy places, but they are sectarian in nature, such as the sites of the burning of the Protestant martyrs at Smithfield, Oxford, Canterbury and Hadleigh, or the hanging, drawing and quartering of the Catholic martyrs at Tyburn and the site of the beheading of Sir Thomas More in the Tower of London. There was, however, a wider spirit at work to reconcile these differences. The spirit in which the King James Version of the Bible was consolidated from earlier translations, mostly based on Tyndale, in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey, in a conscious effort to appeal to as wide a cross-section of beliefs as possible. The spirit of toleration in forgiveness and reconciliation which informs the last plays of Shakespeare, before he went back to rest in his parish church in Stratford. Perhaps Prospero’s speech from The Tempest (c 1611), often thought to be Shakespeare’s own valedictory speech, can be seen as the supreme antidote to the speech of the dying John of Gaunt in one of his earlier plays, Richard II (c 1595):

 

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,… 

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,

 Like to a tenement or pelting farm: (2.1.3) 

 Prospero, in The Tempest:

 And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. (IV.i. 148–158)

 

By the time The Tempest was written, England had been given a renewed identity by the first Elizabethan age, and, though the Essex Rebellion, late in 1601 and the Midland Rebellion of the Catholic gentry of 1605 threatened to disrupt this new vision, it became a vision of Great Britain. Under the dual monarchy of the Stuart kings, this was to become more than simply a geographical entity, Grande Bretagne as opposed to little Brittany, but a vision of an island and an independent people chosen by God for great deeds and heroic achievements. The expression of this is found not only in Shakespeare, but also in Spenser’s mythical history of Britain in The Fairie Queen and in the great antiquarian work, Camden’s Britannia. History, or rather national mythology, was to become a potent political force in the seventeenth century, with the myth of the Norman Yoke and the legends of Robin Hood finding their usage among counter-cultural nonconformists.

Legacy of the Tudors: The Island Myth in Word and Image

A later visionary portrayal of the unity of Britain appears in Blake’s prophetic poems, in which he sees the dawning of a new form of consciousness when sleeping Albion, the spiritual essence of Britain, will awake with the light of the Divine imagination and be joined to his female emanation, Jerusalem, a holy shrine re-built in England’s green and pleasant land. In one of the versions of the Glastonbury legends preserved among Cornish and Somerset miners, on which Blake based his poem, Jerusalem, now England’s alternative national anthem, Joseph of Arimathea had visited Avalon, Ynys yr Afal (Apple Island in the Cymric), bringing with him the young Jesus of Nazareth who, as a trained carpenter, built a shrine made of wattle and daub, dedicating it to his mother.  Even the coronation oath of both Elizabeth I and II refers back to the mythology of a Christianity dating back to the time of Joseph’s second visit, sent by the Apostle Philip in 63 A.D. with a band of missionaries, to establish the Christian faith in Britain. As the last Welsh-speaking monarch, Elizabeth, like the first,  her grandfather, was not averse to using popular British legends as propaganda, to point out to a Papacy about to excommunicate her that she owed her title as Defender of the Faith not to the Bishop of Rome, nor even to St Augustine, but to the ancient British saints and rulers who went into battle with pagans, like Arthur, carrying crosses and pictures of the Virgin Mary, as well as their dragon emblems. After Blake, the legends were again reinterpreted in the Gothic and Celtic revivals of the Victorian period, inspiring both Anglo-Catholics and Pre-Raphaelites, especially Edward Burne-Jones, who created so much of the stained glass for churches built in this period.

 Any traces which may have remained of this most ancient shrine to Mary were destroyed by a great fire in 1181. All that survives to claim credence for the legend is The Glastonbury Thorn, marking the place called Wearyall, a hill on which Joseph thrust his hawthorn staff into the ground and it immediately burst into blossom, though it was winter. It still blooms around Christmas-time. The branch is on one of the several trees descending from the one, thought to be the original, which was cut down at the Dissolution. Originally surrounded by marsh and water, the four-hundred-foot Tor (which means rocky outcrop in the Cymric), with its fifteenth-century tower of the ruined St Michael’s Church, the site of the abbey and the town to its west, all formed an island until the Somerset levels were drained in Stuart times. The association of this island with Arthur’s resting place received a great boost when, a decade after the great fire, a monk apparently discovered the coffin of Arthur and Guenevere.

 The resulting flood of pilgrims must have helped to fund the abbey’s rebuilding, by the thirteenth century, but this early tourist industry was also what led to its ultimate destruction. Nevertheless, few of the ruins of the Dissolution bring about such a pang in the visitor as those of Glastonbury, whether because of the destruction of a great architectural work of an abbey rebuilt in the Transitional and Early English styles, or because of the psychological damage done to both England and to the British Isles as a whole by the sudden and violent denial of a contemplative tradition in the expulsion of the monks.

Excavations have shown traces of the original British monastic settlement, first recorded as existing in 658, and there are strong traditions that St Patrick, St Brigid and St David all visited the monastery. Re-founded by King Ine of Wessex in the eighth century, ravaged by Danes in the ninth, the abbey began its great period in 940 under Abbot Dunstan, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. We know, from the chroniclers, that some of the Kings of Wessex were buried there, including Edmund Ironside, in 1016, but there no Anglo-Saxon remains have yet been discovered.

Ascending to the summit of the Tor, the modern-day pilgrim stands on the place where in 1539 Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury, was executed as a traitor on Henry VIII’s command. After the death of the previous abbot in February 1525, the community elected his successor per formam compromissi, which elevates the selection to a higher ranking personage, in this case Cardinal Wolsey, who obtained King Henry’s permission to act and chose Richard Whiting. The first ten years of Whiting’s rule were prosperous and peaceful. He was a sober and caring spiritual leader and a good manager of the abbey’s day-to-day life. Contemporary accounts show that Whiting was held in very high esteem.The abbey over which Whiting presided was one of the richest and most influential in England. Glastonbury Abbey was reviewed as having significant amounts of silver and gold as well as its attached lands. About one hundred monks lived in the enclosed monastery, where the sons of the nobility and gentry were educated before going on to university.

Whiting had signed his assent to the Act of Supremacy when it was first presented to him and his monks in 1534. Henry sent Richard Layton to examine Whiting and the other inhabitants of the abbey. He found all in good order, but suspended the abbot’s jurisdiction over the town. Small injunctions were given to him about the management of the abbey property.  Whiting was told a number of times over the years which followed that the abbey was safe from dissolution.

However, by January 1539, Glastonbury was the only monastery left in Somerset. Abbot Whiting refused to surrender the abbey, which did not fall under the Act for the suppression of the lesser houses. On 19 September of that year the royal commissioners, Layton, Richard Pollard and Thomas Moyle, arrived there without warning on the orders of Thomas Cromwell, presumably to find faults and thus facilitate the abbey’s closure. Whiting, by now feeble and advanced in years, was sent to the Tower of London so that Cromwell might examine him himself. The precise charge on which he was arrested, and subsequently executed, remains uncertain, though his case is usually referred to as one of treason. Cromwell’s manuscript Remembrances contains the following  entries:

Item, Certayn persons to be sent to the Tower for the further examenacyon of the Abbot, of Glaston… Item. The Abbot, of Glaston to (be) tryed at Glaston and also executyd there with his complycys… Item. Councillors to give evidence against the Abbot of Glaston, Rich. Pollard, Lewis Forstew (Forstell), Thos. Moyle.

 Marillac, the French Ambassador, wrote on 25 October that;

“The Abbot of Glastonbury. . . has lately, been put in the Tower, because, in taking the Abbey treasures, valued at 200,000 crowns, they found a written book of arguments in behalf of queen Katherine.” 

As a member of the House of Lords, Whiting should have been condemned of treason by an Act of Attainder, and beheaded, but his execution was an accomplished fact before Parliament met. Whiting was sent back to Glastonbury with Pollard and reached Wells on 14 November. There some sort of trial apparently took place, and he was convicted of robbing Glastonbury Church. The next day, Saturday, 15 November, he was taken to Glastonbury with two of his monks, John Thorn and Roger James, where all three were fastened upon hurdles and dragged by horses to the top of the Tor, overlooking the town. Here they were hung, drawn and quartered, with Whiting’s head being fastened over the west gate of the now deserted abbey and his limbs exposed at Wells, Bath, Ilchester and Bridgwater. His gruesome death at so peaceful a place was symbolic of how 1539-40, the year of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the dissolution of the great monasteries and the official publication of the Bible in English, marked the key point of transition to the development of a distinctively English form of Christianity, based on the word, rather than on the image.

 

Printed Sources:

See Part One 

 

Introduction: Pirates or Merchant Adventurers?

Out of the North they came, more warriors from the fringes of the Baltic. Norsemen, Vikings, Danes, many names, but one overriding characteristic – they came first to raid and plunder in tall-prowed sailing ships that had carried these sea-rovers to the Mediterranean and the coasts of a new world across the northern ocean. For fifty years their sporadic visits devastated small coastal areas as they probed the strengths and weaknesses of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. In 793, they attacked the monastery on Lindisfarne, burial-place of St Cuthbert (634-686).  Alcuin of York heard of the catastrophe in France, and wrote anguished letters home. never before has such terror arrived in Britain… the church of St Cuthbert splattered with the blood of the priests of God. He was clear that the reason for the visitation was the wickedness of the English, the explanation Gildas had given three centuries earlier, except that then it was the Englische who had been the instrument of God’s wrath upon the British, and now, according to Bede’s prediction, it was the peaceful, Christian English who had, within one generation, laid aside their weapons, preferring… to take monastic vows rather than study the arts of war and whose pacifism, or lack of preparedness, was to be rewarded by northern sea pirates assailing them in the next generation. With the benefit of hindsight, later chroniclers expressed a similar view, as the raids spread all around the coasts of Britain, Ireland and France. This was the beginning of what has been called the Viking Age, which lasted from the end of the eighth century until well into the eleventh century.

The popular image of the Vikings has followed that of the Christian chroniclers in painting them as wholly savage pagan marauders and murderers, whose only aims were slaughter and pillage, and whose path could be tracked and traced by the burning churches and the blood of martyred saints. These warriors fought without fear, since death in battle was their desired end, rewarded by eternal feasting in Valhalla. The familiar picture (above right) used to be of a giant axe-wielding Scandinavian, complete with winged helmet, blood dripping from his fulsome blonde moustache, with captive women slung over his shoulder, appearing suddenly out of the sea mist, then disappearing with equal speed to his wild northern homeland. The bias of the monastic commentators were even more biased than they had been about previous incursions and invasions, since they were naturally especially appalled by the pagan raiders’ totally indiscriminate violence at holy places. Of course, in this respect, and in their own terms, they were very discriminating, since these places were full of wonderfully undefended heaps of loot for the taking. Accounts of numbers of ships and men were often also exaggerated by the chroniclers, especially when recounting defeats of the defenders, which they made seem less ignominious by laying stress on the overwhelming odds against their faithful few. In Anglo-Saxon law, the definition of an army was more than thirty men, so the Danish armies which later began to invade eastern England and France probably numbered only hundreds, not thousands or tens of thousands, such as those mustered by the French-Norsemen, or Normans, at the end of the eleventh century. There is also the question as to how many warriors could fit into a ship, particularly relevant to the period of invasion and settlement, rather than that of the early raids. A ship bearing wives and property, bags and baggage, would not have had room for many warriors and their weaponry. Excavations of various Scandinavian towns and settlements have focused attention on domestic life, and the achievements of craftsmen and artists, while their travels have been redefined in terms of merchant adventure rather than piracy.

Chronicles, Legends and Other Narratives

In 865, they came to stay in East Anglia. Ivan the Boneless and his brother Halfdene landed on the Suffolk coast at the head of the great heathen army. The terrified Anglo-Saxons fell back before the invaders. King Edmund sought peace and by the terms of the treaty the Danes were allowed to winter in Suffolk and given horses to carry their baggage. Edmund’s speedy capitulation may have lacked valour, but it saved his people much suffering. For several months the Norsemen consolidated their position and prepared for the next campaigning season. In the Spring, Edmund and his subjects watched as their unwanted guests went westwards to attack Northumbria and Mercia. However, in 869 they returned laden with spoil, flushed with triumph and heedless of their former treaty with the East Anglians. They wintered at Thetford and used it as a base from which to ravage the monasteries and countryside of the region. Now Edmund could not honourably allow this rampage to go unchecked. He came forth to do battle and thus an insignificant king became a martyr, saint and a legend, achieving greater fame in death than life. According to Roger of Wendover, a great battle was fought near Thetford, lasting from dawn till dusk, till the stricken field was red with blood of the countless number who perished. Edmund, seemingly, won the day, but not long afterwards he and his bodyguard found themselves besieged in the Saxon fort at Framlingham, on top of the mound where the Norman stone-built castle now stands. He escaped northwards, and the rest is the stuff of legend, much of it confused. Some accounts portray him as a deliberate martyr, surrendering himself to save his people further suffering. Others recount how he escaped his enemies by cunning, but before long was caught, tortured and executed. Historians seem to agree that the site of his martyrdom was Hellesdon near Norwich. However, the people of Hoxne claim that their village was the scene of the sainted king’s last days. Apparently, he was hiding beneath a bridge when a bridal party happened to cross it, and the bride noticed a golden gleam in the water below, the king’s spurs. She exclaimed, and the king was taken by the Danish warriors guarding the bridge.

The details of Edmund’s death are clearer. The King’s standard-bearer was with him to the end and related the events to Bishop Dunstan, so that they were then incorporated into the tenth-century Passion of St Edmund, according to which, Edmund was brought to a tree in the neighbourhood, tied to it, and for a long while tortured with terrible lashes. Despite this brutal treatment, the Bishop relates that his constancy was unbroken, while without ceasing he called on Christ with a broken voice. This offended the pagan sensitivities of the Danes still further, apparently, and they began shooting arrows at various parts of his body, demanding that he renounce his faith. Know you not that I have the power to kill you?, demanded the Danish warlord, to which Edmund replied, know you not that I know how to die? At last they silenced him by cutting off his head, at which point legend takes over again. When the body was moved to Beodericsworth, or Bury St Edmund’s, in the tenth century, it was claimed that the head and body had somehow perfectly reunited themselves, neither showing any signs of decomposition. By then, Edmund had become a folk hero for all the ‘oppressed’ Anglo-Saxons. Churches were dedicated to him and King Alfred issued memorial coins bearing his image. These stories surrounding Edmund reveal the apparent barbarism and ferocity which accompanied the Danish invasion, a savagery made worse by the clash of religious cultures. Certainly, the two decades after 865 were truly terrible for the Christian English of eastern Britain. Churches and monasteries were razed to the ground all along the east coast; holy books were burned and torn (the recently discovered Lindisfarne gospel of John survived in Cuthbert’s grave); wayside altars were broken; monks, nuns and priests became fugitives; the Anglo-Saxons either abandoned their Christian faith or met in secret to celebrate the holy mysteries in what could still be made to look like pagan shrines from their pre-Christian period.

However, there is another side to the Viking story. Quite naturally, modern Scandinavians have preferred to stress the more constructive aspect of their ancestors’ lives, and many British scholars have followed suit, especially the archaeologists who excavated the Viking settlement of Jorvik in York’s Coppergate in the 1970s. The excavations produced a sequence of buildings dating from the time when York was under Viking rule, from 866 to 954 (with a gap from 927 to 939). After the excavation, the York Archaeological Trust managed to persuade the developers to incorporate the imaginative Jorvik Museum in the basement of their new buildings. Visitors can experience a literal journey back in time into a recreation of part of the tenth century city, with its authentic houses, shops, pots and pans, people and clothes, animals and even part of a ship. There are even attempts to replicate sounds, speech in Old Norse, and smells of all kinds of rubbish, even human excreta. In the 1980s this kind of museum was an entirely new experience, and a remarkable one too.

It certainly changed our view of the Vikings. It also demystified the work of archaeologists for the general public, showing the exact processes of excavation and scientific analysis of finds.

It was followed by Viking exhibitions in the British Museum and elsewhere which have pursued the same theme of the domestic Viking life with accounts of Scandinavian towns and trade, craft, industry and art. Excavations in Scandinavia itself, like those in Britain, have begun to show a much clearer picture of what life was like in the ninth and tenth centuries. The small populations of Sweden and Norway mostly lived in farmsteads scattered along the shores of lakes or fjords, communicating by boat rather than overland. In Denmark there were larger villages, neatly laid out along streets. There were also some more extensive settlements, which might even be described as towns. It is possible, therefore, to write books about the Vikings which concentrate on such things as their hoses, art, and skill in woodcarving, with foreign travel thrown in as mostly peaceful trade or exploration. However, we know that whole families migrated and settled in Britain and Ireland and that armies of various size, marauded across Britain and Europe for generations. Why did this happen and what was their impact on the countries they invaded and settled in?

There is no clear, agreed answer to the first question. Medieval Norse sagas tell of oppression by kings which drove men from their homes, and centralisation of authority under stronger royal dynasties might well have led to conflicts as a result of which the unsuccessful contestants could well have decided to make their fortunes elsewhere. There may also have been pressure on land, caused either by rising populations or fluctuations in climate. The realisation that there were richer and more fertile lands of the British Isles and France which could not just be raided for wealth, but taken over altogether, would have been a powerful motivating factor for the younger sons of farmers scratching for a living on a narrow strip of land on a fjord.

This would have been less true of Denmark, where the pressure might be better seen in terms of political or population pressure. In many cases, as with later great migrations, there was probably a complex of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors at work. Eventually, the invasion of eastern Britain became part of an expansionist, imperial exercise on the part of the Danish kings.

In 878 the Danish host, led by Guthrum, came face to face with the armies of Alfred of Wessex, and the Anglo-Saxons realised for the first time that the Danes were not an irresistible force when matched with an immovable obstacle. They had overrun  the kingdoms of Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia and were only prevented from engulfing the whole of England  by the heroics  of the west Saxon king.  Slowly the tide of battle turned. Alfred forced them into a truce in 880 by which the greater part of eastern and northern England was recognised as Viking land, the Danelaw. with an agreed frontier with Anglo-Saxon England along the Watling Street (see sources below). Then, a steady offensive under Alfred and his son, Edward, brought all England under one internal ruler for the first time, by 920.  Linguistic and place-name evidence suggests, nevertheless, that there was considerable Scandinavian settlement both in the north-east and, to a lesser extent, in the east Midlands/ East Anglia. However, this evidence is unclear, since even where Scandinavian place names survive, the numbers of settlers have been disputed and archaeological evidence is also inconclusive. During this period, those Danes who remained became settlers rather than raiders. Guthrum rewarded his followers with land, instead of booty, and the newcomers settled down beside the Anglo-Saxons to form common communities. Guthrum ruled from Hadleigh and kept for himself a territory which included most of Suffolk. Throughout the Danelaw the two cultures merged, with the Danish contribution to the English way of life stronger in some areas than in others. Place names like ‘Monks Kirkby’, just over the other side of the Danelaw in North Warwickshire suggest such a fusion in equal measure. In Suffolk, the Danish part seems to have been far less significant, despite Guthrum’s rule.

The Danes settled almost exclusively in areas bordering the coast and river estuaries. Throughout the whole county there are only about fifty place names which derive from Old Norse, many in the north-east corner of the county, whereas Norfolk has four times this number, such as Lowestoft. As part of the treaty of 880 Guthrum had agreed to receive Christian baptism, so that even in those Anglians who found themselves under new Danish landlords were able to practice their faith freely.

Elsewhere in Britain, settlers of Norwegian origin colonised the northern islands, the Shetlands, Orkneys and Hebrides and also the Isle of Man. They founded towns in Ireland, including Dublin, and settled in parts of northwestern Britain, including Cumbria, and round the Welsh coast to Swansea (Swain’s Isle). In the Orkneys, the archaeological evidence shows that the Norwegians integrated with the native Picts, although on the Hebridean island of Uist, however, the evidence shows that the natives were displaced or suppressed. In the north of England there is surprisingly little direct evidence of Viking violence in the later Saxon period. There are signs of burning on the Bishop’s Chair from North Elmham, and an ingot mould from Whitby might have been used in melting down loot. There is a stone from Lindisfarne which seems to commemorate a raid, and the monasteries at Jarrow and Monkwearmouth seem to have been burnt down at some stage. At Repton in Derbyshire, archaeologists  found evidence of a fortified gatehouse and fort with a great bank and ditch, possibly dug by the Danes who wintered there in 879, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, taking over the royal burial-place of the Mercian kings, including Wiglaf and Wystan. A Viking axe was also found in the churchyard, probably according to pagan burial-rite, and coins and other metal-work turned up nearby confirms the late-ninth century date for Danish occupation.

There was little fighting on Suffolk soil for another century, though 884 witnessed the first major English naval victory, fought in the Stour estuary, when Alfred’s new fleet pursued homeward a party of Danish raiders. He caught up with them at the point where the Stour and the Orwell meet together to pour into the North Sea and captured sixteen long-ships. He slaughtered their crews while Guthrum’s men watched helplessly from the headland still known as Bloody Point. In 918, when the final confrontation between the two kingdoms began, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex surrendered to Edward without a battle. With peace came renewed prosperity and the chance to develop the economic potential of the county. Now that Suffolk was part of a unified kingdom it was no longer ruled by hereditary East Anglian kings but by viceroys or earldormen, who collected taxes and raised the local militia, the fyrd, when the king needed it. The shire was divided into hundreds, each with its own court. Each hundred was composed of approximately a hundred ‘carucates’, the equivalent to the unit of land called a ‘hide’ in other parts of the country, defined as the amount of land which could be cultivated with one plough in the course of the year. It was approximately 100-120 acres, enough land to keep a self-sufficient family, the number of which increased rapidly in the late Anglo-Saxon period.

All this was achieved at great cost in terms of population and prosperity, and it took a century until, in 973, Alfred’s grandson, Edgar, was crowned King of all England in Bath and received the submission of even the Welsh and Scottish kings. And even then, it was less than another forty years before his grandson, Edmund II (Ironside), was defeated in another battle, the final one, with the Danes, in 1016.  The Kingdom was then divided between Cnut and Edmund, but when he died the following winter, Cnut took over Wessex as well, sending Edmund’s two young sons into exile to the King of Sweden, to whom he sent a secret message asking for them to be killed. The King refused, and instead they were taken to Kiev, then a Viking settlement. From there they made they were taken to Hungary, where Edgar died (of natural causes), but Edward the Exile prospered, married Agatha, the daughter of the first Hungarian King, István and his Queen, Gizella. There he had a son and two daughters, Edgar, Margaret and Cristina. Returning to England following Edward the Confessor’s decision to receive him as heir in 1056 (The Confessor himself was childless and feared for the future of the Wessex dynasty), he was (probably) murdered almost as soon as he arrived. His son, Edgar Aetheling should have been proclaimed King after the Confessor’s death, but was too young to resist the power of Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex. He was proclaimed after Harold’s death at Senlac Hill, near Hastings, but was then forced into exile in Normandy by Duke William, to whom he was forced to do homage, not returning to England until 1086.

Edward the Exile’s daughter, (Saint) Margaret (of Scotland) married the Scottish King Malcolm III (Canmore), and their daughter, Matilda, married Henry I of England, becoming Queen in 1100, and ensuring the continuity of the Saxon (Wessex) line in the English monarchy (I have written in detail about this elsewhere on this website*)

The church in Suffolk was a persecuted church for much of the ninth century, the ravages of which left it leaderless and put a permanent end to the Bishopric of Dunwich. Even after the treaty with Guthrum, the Christian faithful cannot have felt truly secure until they came under the control of the Christian kings of Wessex and the East Anglian diocese was recreated in 956. Even then, their troubles were far from over, as in 981 fresh Viking raids began. A decade later, ninety-three boat-loads of them landed in Suffolk, burned Ipswich to the ground and then marched to Maldon in Essex, where they metthe English forces in the most momentous battle  of the Anglo-Saxon period. In 1004 the invaders were back again and this time it was the turn of Thetford to be ruthlessly destroyed. However, before they could ravage further they were confronted by the Earldorman Ulfcytel and the East Anglian fyrd. After a bloody battle the Danes withdrew. Six years later they returned for a final encounter. Thorkell the Tall landed at Ipswich and marched across Suffolk to meet Ulfcytel’s force at Ringmere Heath near Thetford. The East Anglians stood little chance against Thorkell’s highly disciplined army. Both sides suffered heavy casualties in the battle, but during the following months Suffolk and the surrounding lands were totally devastated. Crops, herds and flocks were so ravaged that even the invaders couldn’t find food. They moved into Essex pursued by Ulfcytel. The last battle was fought at Ashingdown, at which the English were defeated and Ulfcytel was slain. East Anglia was then once more under Danish domination and was mercilessly harried by  the followers of King Swein Forkbeard. In 1016 the whole of England fell under the sway of his successor, Cnut, and was annexed to the Danish Kingdom. For a second time in a century and a half the Christian culture in East Anglia came under a determined Danish control, but this time not wholly pagan, as the following example shows.

Suffolk had England’s most important Christian shrine at this time, at Beodricsworth, or Bury St Edmunds. The remains of the saintly king were moved to the Abbey about 902 and remained there in a specially built shrine for many years. Thousands of pilgrims came to pray and make offerings at the tomb of the national martyr-hero. The community prospered and soon owned a great deal of land around the town. The cult of the saint had taken such a firm hold in the hearts of the English, that when Swein Forkbeard died suddenly, they believed that Edmund had struck him down. Cnut, who succeeded him and became the first Danish king of England, realised that he had to respect the feelings of his English subjects, and so lavished generosity he bestowed upon St. Edmund’s shrine. He contributed liberally to the construction of a new church and founded a new community of Benedictine monks to guard the shrine. He made reparation for the sins of his father at the altar when the new church was consecrated in 1032. Edward the Confessor also felt a great reverence for the Abbey. He exempted it from royal taxes and gave it eight hundreds of land, virtually the whole of western Suffolk.

The one straightforward sign of Scandinavian settlers in the north of England is rather surprising. This is stone sculpture, usually in the form of crosses belonging to a Christian tradition dating back to Celtic times in Britain and Ireland. The form is Christian and derives from native traditions, but the crosses are decorated with Scandinavian animal figures from pagan mythology as well as Christian iconography. The armed warriors painted on some crosses, like the ones from Middleton in Teesdale, North Yorkshire, might be seen as a substitute for the deposition of weapons in a grave. Norse sagas of Odin and Thor may have been reinterpreted in terms of Christian beliefs. If the mythology of one culture could be explained as a symbolic representation of the religion of the other, this is a powerful indication of the integration of the two. In particular, the most characteristic monument of the Viking Age is perhaps the runic stone, a great stone boulder with a snake-like inscription running around it, written in the runic script Germanic peoples had devised for cutting messages in wood, all in straight lines. Some record the taking of Danegeld, the tribute paid to the Vikings. Ethelred the Unready is infamous for paying Danegeld, though he may have had little option but to pay up. The ornament, letters and language of the rune stones are Scandinavian, but some of their sentiments show Christian influence, and include references to the Christian God. The crosses of northern England lie firmly within the native traditions of both Denmark and the British Isles, but they also show signs of a relationship between the pagan Vikings and the Christian Saxons, a dynamic relationship which was able to breathe new life into old forms, and which must have been far more complicated than the simple overrunning of one people by another.

Interpreting the Evidence: Raiders into Traders?

In order to understand this more symbiotic relationship between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings, we need to take a step back into the gap we left in the history of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy which had emerged by the time Bede was writing at the beginning of the eighth century. The seven main kingdoms were Kent, Sussex, Wessex, Essex, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. Under the rule of King Offa, from 757 to 796, Mercia became very large, taking over the whole of East Anglia and Kent, and even threatening Wessex. According to Bishop Asser, writing his biography of Alfred a century later, Offa built a great dyke along the frontier between Mercia and Wales, from the Severn estuary to that of the Dee in the north.Offa was also important for the English economy. He issued coinage on a larger scale than his predecessors. The silver penny which he minted was to remain the standard unit of English currency for many centuries, until long after the Norman Conquest. Many of these coins have been found abroad, evidence of the increasing volume of trade with the continent.

The political and economic power exercised by Offa was so great that the Emperor Charlemagne, who ruled a territory in Europe larger than that seen since the days of the Roman Empire, wrote to Offa about such matters as the length of cloaks exported from the Mercian overlordship, and the protection of traders from both countries.

British historians have usually seen London and York as the important trading ports in the eighth century, but archaeological evidence has recently challenged this view. The Roman walled circuits which later became the nuclei for the medieval cities of London and York were not where the merchants that Bede records were carrying out their trade. Most of the middle Saxon objects found in London have come from the district of Aldwich, ‘wich’ meaning a port, and excavations in 1985 confirmed its importance in the Kingdom of the East Saxons (Essex). In the days of King Offa, who had gained the overlordship of Essex together with East Anglia, ships were tying up along the Strand, outside the walled city of London. Similarly, excavations conducted in the same year outside the walled city, near the confluence of the Ouse and Foss, turned up more eighth-century material in a few weeks than has been found in the whole city during two centuries of excavation (below right).

Archaeologically, until quite recently, we knew more about both Southampton and Ipswich as ports than about London. At Southampton the large eighth-century trading settlement again lay to the east of the later medieval city centre, around the church of St. Mary. Extensive excavations of Saxon pits there revealed a great deal of datable pottery, much of it imported from northern France, and some of it high quality table-ware, suggesting that foreign merchants had lived in the settlement. Hamwith, as it was named by the archaeologists, was shown, by 700, to have covered at least a hundred acres, or forty hectares, populated by thousands of inhabitants. The people living there were carrying on the usual food-producing and manufacturing activities, working bronze and iron, making bone combs and leather objects, as well as making glass, which was previously thought to have been all imported from the continent during this period. The presence of traders, both local and foreign, at Hamwith, is shown not only by pottery but also by finds of hundreds of early Saxon coins; sceattas. 

At Ipswich, it has also been shown that a large area was occupied in the eighth century. Fewer wooden houses and streets have been found than in Southampton, though recently some later Saxon houses have been excavated. Many sites have produced finds of the local pottery, known as Ipswich ware, and kilns have been found where this was made. Although not elegant, Ipswich ware does mark a transition from earlier hand-made, idiosyncratic pots, many of which had been made, on a small-scale, for use in burial, to something closer to specialised industrial production for everyday use.  This pottery has been found all over Suffolk and Norfolk, but only very occasionally elsewhere, suggesting that production and distribution was limited to the Kingdom of East Anglia, perhaps by the kings of Mercia who were overlords of the East Anglians, but keen to protect their immediate sources of revenue within their own kingdoms. At the same time, foreign goods were coming into Ipswich from the Rhineland, rather than from France, as were barrels of wine. The cloaks Offa was asked to ship to Charlemagne were probably made from English wool. Evidence of spinning and weaving comes from every Anglo-Saxon site. Spindle-whorls must have hung from every woman’s belt or girdle, and when not doing anything else with her hands, she was probably twisting  yarn.  Wool is known as the basis of English wealth in later medieval centuries, but this was probably already the case in the second half of the eighth century.

The story of the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England to Christianity has continued to be dominated by its skillful and diplomatic telling by Bede in 731. It may be that the coherence and persuasiveness of Bede’s account have led us to believe we have a complete picture of what happened than is in fact the case. Even though Cedd of Northumbria, whose biography he also wrote, baptised the King of the East Saxons at the Royal House of the East Anglian king, his sponsor, and went on to become Bishop of London, before returning to northern England, there are large gaps in our knowledge of a the continuity of Christianity in the east at a time when the Gregorian mission withdrew from London and Canterbury. Apart from the missions of the Celtic Northumbrian saints, neither was he interested in chronicling the survival of Christianity among the descendants of the Romano-British in other parts of England where the Anglo-Saxons came to predominate, such as Wessex. Perhaps he did not wish to admit that the Britons had any influence on the Anglo-Saxons before the mission of Augustine, since the relationship with Rome and Catholic Christendom seemed far more crucial to the survival of eighth-century Christianity in north-eastern England than it had in the middle of the previous century he was writing about. The detail of the conversion of ordinary people, as opposed to that of the ruling élite, is also not easy to establish from Bede. Either people followed their leaders with perfect docility into the new religion, or they remained very far from true believers, whatever their nominal faith. Or, as may well have been the case in large parts of Wessex, as well as Northumbria, the majority British population remained Christian in sympathy, if not in open worship and practice.

It is clear that by the end of the seventh century all of English Kingdoms had become officially and, as far as their kings could foresee, permanently Christian.  Odd pagan practices might have survived locally among ordinary people, as they still do in many rural parishes today, and in those places in the west where British culture remained strong, practices of the Celtic Rite may have survived, despite Bede’s representation of the Synod of Whitby as a complete capitulation by the British monks, or, in his terms, a victory for the Roman Church. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity was marked by changes in burial ritual, new styles of art, fusing with the revival of old Celtic ones, the appearance of types of object not seen before, and the reappearance of stone architecture. The jewellery which survives from the eighth century shows how continental styles, deriving from Byzantium, replaced many of the older Germanic brooch types.

There are also specifically Christian artefacts, including cross-shaped pendants. In addition, there are the illuminated manuscripts produced in Britain and Ireland during the late seventh and eighth centuries. All the skills which had gone into creating a piece of convoluted animal ornament on something like the golden buckle from Sutton Hoo were redeployed in the creation of these iluminations.  Gold and enamel-working techniques were used for making the fittings for the covers of books, and the leather was probably also ornamented. Looking at a carpet page from one of the Lindisfarne Gospels, it can be seen that the overall pattern is made up from many tiny, intertwined animals. The manuscripts represent a fusion of Celtic, Germanic and classical styles, with ornaments of beasts and spirals. Similarly, the sculptured stone crosses carry ornament of vine-scrolls, clearly Mediterranean, with Germanic beasts sitting in their branches. Churches of this period may have been built of timber, much like ordinary houses: traces of post-holes under later stone-built churches are all that remain of these. A handful of stone buildings remain from the period, mostly in Canterbury or Northumbria, though it’s difficult to be sure which parts of these can really be eighth-century.

By the end of that century, England had become a united, prosperous country, with towns and major ports, literature and liturgy, churches and abbeys, kings and bishops. If we ‘fast-forward’ to the tenth century, following the Viking raids, invasions and settlements, given that it is not possible to date with certainty much of the archaeological evidence precisely, it is clear that the ninth century was a period in which much was destroyed and lost.  What had emerged by the tenth century, however, was a whole network of defensible towns, across the south of England, into the Midlands and extending northwards. In many cases, Roman city walls were rebuilt, as in York, Winchester and Canterbury, and new hill-top fortified towns were built, known as ‘burghs’, by King Alfred and his successors, such as Shaftesbury (Dorset).  Tenth-century towns were forts, first and foremost, whereas larger eighth-century settlements had been largely undefended ports and market-places.

The conversion Alfred forced on the Danish leader Guthrum and his followers must have been reasonably effective for burial practices to have changed so completely . We have two changes of burial rite which seem to suggest different things: on the one hand, in the seventh century the pagan Anglo-Saxons became Christian and ceased to bury grave-goods. On the other, we have newcomers taking over the native burial-rite and becoming archaeologically indistinguishable from the local people. In addition, there are tenth-century wooden houses which have been found in excavations in towns conventionally described as ‘Viking’: York and Dublin, so the temptation is to describe everything found in these sites as ‘Viking’, including the houses. In fact, these towns are not very similar.

In Dublin, the type of house construction shows strong signs of native Irish carpentry, while the sunken houses of York might owe something to Anglo-Saxon sunken buildings. It is possible that the tenth-century houses of York owed something to indigenous traditions. The houses and the population were probably of more mixed origin than the Norse speech of the Jorvik Museum sound-track might suggest. Perhaps they should have been speaking Old (Northumbrian) English as well as Old Norse.

If Offa had had an equally vigorous son and grandson, Mercia might have swallowed up the whole of England earlier than Wessex actually did. In fact, the idea of fortifying towns may have begun in Mercia, with towns like Hereford and Tamworth predating Alfred’s burghs. Taken alone, the Anglo-Saxon evidence might be interpreted simply as a demonstration of the strong and weak points of the Wessex dynasty over its century and a half fighting for hegemony over All England with the Danes. However, put in the context of the North Sea Empire which the Danes eventually created, the Viking threat becomes much clearer. It is interesting that a stronger political unit should have appeared in Denmark as well as England. It is worth speculating as to whether the English and Danish states would have developed anyway, without the stimulus of the need to organise, whether for attack or defence. Taken altogether, however, the nature of the archaeological evidence for the North Sea region from the eighth to the tenth centuries does show that it was a time of great insecurity, and that that threat came from Scandinavia and was directed against the relatively peaceful and wealthy lands of Britain and the Carolingian empire. However, the lack of direct evidence for settlement reflects the fact that there was not very much, although the historical and linguistic evidence does point to a notable influx in certain localities.

We also know, from both written and archaeological evidence, that under the latter Kings of Wessex and England, the whole country used the same coinage for the first time. It was of a standard quality, regularly recalled and re-minted, despite the fact that there were mints in almost every burgh. However, it had been under Offa that the coinage was reorganised. At the turn of the tenth-eleventh centuries, many more churches were built, some in stone, and there was a renewal of the eighth-century art associated with the Church.

Cnut, already nominally Christian before his takeover, made peace with the British Church by having all the churches destroyed or damaged in the Vikings’ ravages, rebuilt  or repaired.  Again, it can be seen that the arrival of Christianity in Scandinavia and the appearance of Christian burials and churches were both the result and cause of a combination of foreign contacts and peaceful missions, like those which had converted other Germanic peoples, including some of the Anglo-Saxons. Perhaps, in becoming increasingly Christianised and controlled, the Vikings left less of a distinctive imprint upon the English landscape, at least until the next generation of Norsemen, or Normans, launched their successful invasion fifty years after that of Cnut.

Sources:

Derek Wilson (1977), A Short History of Suffolk. London: Batsford

Catherine Hills (1986), Blood of the British. London: Guild Publishing.

Jorvik Viking Centre (1992), Guide Book. York Archaeological Trust.

I recently watched a video online which shows that, according to DNA testing, the English are only 5% English – genetically, that is. And they are far more similar to the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish than to people on the continent of Europe. So why, we might ask, don’t more of the people of the British Isles speak a Celtic language, Basque or Welsh, and how is it that it is a form of Mercian Saxon or ‘Midland English’ (not ‘East Anglian’, by the way), which dominates international communication?

These questions were very much on my mind this summer, not because of the Scottish referendum debate, but because, at last, I had the chance to visit the supposed burial grounds of one of the first great English kings. I had taught about the Sutton Hoo ship burial in much of my early career as a history teacher in Britain, but had never made the long journey up or across into East Anglia to see it at close quarters, in Suffolk. Of course, lots of the original finds are on display in the National Museum anyway, but there’s something about visiting the original site of the discovery, made 75 years ago this July, which evokes all the atmosphere of Dark Age mythology and the sense of communing with a unique heritage. There was also something very poignant about looking across those mounds, almost on the exact anniversary of the discovery of their treasures which revealed the mixture of pagan and Christian, Anglian and Celtic cultures, which was made on the eve of a war fought against an idea of racial and cultural purity, which plunged the world into a modern dark age far more terrorising than the comparatively minor conflicts of fourteen centuries ago.

I also visited the nearby so-called ‘royal’ church of the Wuffing kings, in the old village of Rendelsham, thought to be the site of the first Anglo-Saxon Christian shrine, dating back to the first decade of the seventh century.

As a young historian interacting with the various (mainly Welsh) nationalist mythologies of the early 1980s, which still seem remarkably resilient more than three decades later, I was much influenced by a ground-breaking television series, The Blood of the British, in which the Cambridge historian Catherine Hills traced the cultural changes in the British Isles from ten thousand years ago to the Norman Conquest, challenging and overturning accepted views of waves of successive invaders, from the prehistoric Beaker peoples to the Romans, Vikings and Saxons, fracturing the cultures of indigenous peoples and driving them from their settlements. She showed how, although much enriched by the newcomers of recent centuries, there was, and still is, a great underlying thread of continuity between the present-day British people and their ancient ancestry.

The end of Roman Britain, for instance, has often been seen as a drama involving the irruption of barbarian hordes into a country left undefended and partly empty by the withdrawal of the Roman military and trading network. The traditional story, which we learnt and taught in schools throughout Britain, was that the British king Vortigern, left to face the Pictish threat from the North unaided, invited in Germanic mercenaries to help him defend the rump of Britannia. These arrived in three ships, led by Hengest and Horsa, but soon turned on the Britons themselves, overrunning the country with fire and sword until flames licked the land from sea to sea and the cities ran with blood. Despite the heroic efforts of Ambrosius Aerelianus (often equated with the legendary Arthur), the Britons were pushed into the mountainous western lands, where they became the ‘Welsh’, a Saxon word for ‘alien’, ‘Cymry’ or ‘compatriots’ among themselves. The Anglo-Saxons then took over most of lowland England and Scotland, giving it a more-or-less common language and much of its present agricultural landscape and people.

This was a version of events given by most writers since monks like Gildas, writing in seventh century Britain, at least a century after the first Anglo-Saxon migrations, and Bede, who wrote in the eighth century, from his Celtic Christian refuge in Saxon Northumbria.  Neither was writing history, nor even straightforward chronicle, with clear dates and events accurately described. They were more like Old Testament prophets, calling the British to repentance and a holy war to defend the Christian order which was being tentatively re-established by saints from the Atlantic coasts and later from Rome itself. There are few other contemporary written sources on which to draw. So we have to turn to archaeology, which has told a very different story since the discoveries at Sutton Hoo. Even here, at first sight, the evidence seemed to confirm a pattern of invasion and migration from the other side of the North Sea, at least into Eastern Britain.

The best known archaeological find is at Sutton Hoo, overlooking the River Deben’s tidal estuary in Suffolk. Here, in the summer of 1939, thanks to the visionary inspiration of the local landowner, a great ship burial was discovered by local archaeologist Basil Brown. It was hidden under the largest of a group of burial mounds, and contained a treasure which most people thought must have belonged to a king. The great gold buckle and the remnants of the helmet found there have become symbols of Anglo-Saxon England, adorning, in their reconstructed form, the covers of dozens of school history textbooks. The whole collection represents a concentration of skills and resources which put its owner far away from the miserable pit-dwelling Saxons of some earlier accounts.  For example, the great gold buckle (see pictures) is covered with complex decoration in the form of intertwined animals. Also, the artefact is hollow, and it is therefore thought that it might have been used as a reliquary.  The purse-lid with gold plaques inset with garnets and millefiori glass, was probably grounded in bone or ivory. The hanging bowl is decorated with Celtic motifs in enamel and millefiori glass, showing that Celtic-style jewelry was either traded or adopted by Anglian craftsmen, giving the lie to the previously held myths of incessant violent conflict between the newcomers and the indigenous Romano-Britons.

So, ‘The Dark Ages’ is a term rightly frowned upon by historians. The implication that when the light of Roman civilisation was extinguished Europe was plunged into four centuries of barbaric, heathen gloom can no longer be accepted. The exact nature of the transition from Romano-British to Anglo-Saxon England is not as clear as one might think. At first sight, the traditional picture of a violent replacement of one people by another seems to carry some credence, but closer examination raises a number of questions, much of which is now being resolved through the genetic testing referred to earlier. A lot more of Roman Britain could have survived, even in the east, than used to be suspected. Perhaps there were different patterns of settlement in different areas along the east coast. In Norfolk, it seems that there were large numbers of newcomers who largely replaced the previous population, but elsewhere they may have been a subordinate minority, there on sufferance. Or they may have come to agreements with the natives: in Sussex it seems that Romano-British settlements remained on one side of a river, while the Saxons were allowed to settle on the other side. In Northumbria there was a new ruling élite, but the priesthood and the population remained predominantly British.

When, in later centuries, the peoples of southern and eastern England began to call themselves by the generic word ‘Engelisch’, they did not intend to apply it as a meaningful ethnic label, living in distinct ‘lands’, any more than were the labels ‘Irish’ or ‘Welsh’ supposed to refer to pure ethnic identities. Our chief chronicler for this period, Bede, for example, was unenthusiastic about being identified as a Briton, though he was writing at Jarrow in Northumbria, at an abbey founded by Celtic saints. The ruling dynasties and nobilities may well have been predominantly Angles or Saxons, or a mixture of both but the rest of the population must have been of British or Irish in descent, as there is little evidence of mass Germanic or Scandinavian immigration north of York. The Britons were probably prudent in identifying with the rulers and lords of their own particular area, and this identification increased as time went by. So Kent, Dover and Canterbury kept their (mainly) British names, rather than acquiring Jutish ones, whereas Sussex and Essex gained Saxon ones. Further west, many areas we now think of as ‘English’ were not even nominally Anglo-Saxon until long after the first migrations: both west Mercia (the west Midlands) and Wessex, or the West Country retain many of their Celtic and Roman place names, like combe (cwm in Welsh; small valley), as in Winscombe (Wine or Wini’s Valley) in Somerset, or Winchester in Hampshire, or avon (afon in Welsh; river), as in the two River Avons, one flowing south from the Midlands – Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire – and the other north from Wiltshire (Wessex) – Bradford-on-Avon. 

The newcomers to these lands, like the Celts before them, had viable systems of commerce and agriculture. Like the Britons, or ‘Welsch’, as they called them, they had a vivid culture, expressed through the mouths of bards and the hands of craftsmen in wood, bronze, iron, gold and stone. The fifth to the eighth centuries were a ‘dark’ age in one sense only, in that the first settlers left no written records of themselves, so that our knowledge of them comes from British bards and monks, writing in Brythonic or Latin. In addition, Suffolk in particular is very rich in archaeological sites of this period from which there is now a large corpus of established fact.

The Roman shore forts were abandoned in 407. At that time the inhabited parts of Suffolk were occupied by British smallholders and larger landowners. With the collapse of centralised Roman authority, there was no chance of holding the old Province of Britannia together as a single unit. Initially, the mercenaries from across ‘the German Sea’ were granted land along the Thames estuary and into East Anglia by the local chieftain, Vortigern, but they were soon joined by fishermen and farmers in seventy-foot-long, oar-propelled, shallow-draught boats, probing the coasts, rivers and inlets in search of vacant land and navigable waterways. These people were from as far away as modern-day Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein and the northern coast of Germany, as well as from the north Frisian islands. Pottery finds suggest that there were a large number of distinct communities who arrived  over a long period, settling in piecemeal fashion similar to the settlement of the Celtic tribes which had taken place over the millenia before the arrival of the Romans as conquerors. This was no concerted invasion, like that of the imperial troops or the Norman Knights of the late eleventh century, neither was it part of a wider guerrilla action or trading network, like that of their Scandinavian forebears of the late eighth century onwards. The Germanic settlers rowed far up the rivers, first from the Wash and then along the Rivers Deben, Gipping and Orwell, establishing settlements on the Sandlings.

The new culture established itself rapidly. The larger British landowners either moved westwards or established a ‘modus vivendi’ with the fishermen-farmers. The smallholders gradually accepted the new language of trade, whilst retaining their own within their own villages. New place names appeared – Ipswich (the settlement by the estuary), Wudebridge (Woodbridge), Sudbyrig (the southern fort, Sudbury), Ixworth (Gisca’s homestead). Wic, Tun, weorde –  they are all words indicating small settlements, fortified homesteads, where single families lived with their servants. To begin with, the Anglo-Saxon immigrants had no word for town, since the concept of urban life with its complex social relationships was alien to them. They lived in small self-sufficient units in round houses of timber and thatch within stockades to protect them from wild animals and raiders. Each homestead had its communal fire, while the chiefs lived in more imposing timber halls, where warriors could be mustered, justice could be administered and assemblies could be held. Early in the sixth century a group of settlers arrived in the Sandlings who were different in origins and customs. They were from Sweden and their leader’s name was Wehha. They took on the role of conquerors, perhaps because they were more warlike, and the Wuffings, as they became known, established the first Kingdom of East Anglia. From their fort at Rendelsham they ranged along the coasts and rivers, imposing their will on each settlement, demanding allegiance and payment of tribute. Within fifty years they had brought most of East Anglia under their control, and the Kingdom reached its zenith during the reign of Raedwald (c. 599-625).

Was it Raedwald (d. 624/5) or a later seventh-century king (e.g. Aethelwald, d. 664) who was buried with such incredible splendour at Sutton Hoo? When they opened up the long barrow near Woodbridge in 1939, exposing Anglo-Saxon treasures of enormous historical significance, the archaeologists also opened up a whole new set of issues about seventh century East Anglia. Sometime in the early seventh century (between c. 625 and c.670) a Wuffinga king died. His people took an old longboat, eighty-six feet long, dragged it on rollers to the royal burial ground overlooking the River Deben, and lowered it into a specially dug trench. Then they carried all his possessions – his axe, jeweled sword, knife and spears, his magnificent helmet of iron and bronze, shield, stone sceptre tipped with a fine bronze stag, leather and linen parade dress with gold buckles and other accouterments, a purse decorated with panels of gold and enamel, a six-stringed harp, drinking horns mounted in gilt, dishes and bowls of silver, a large hoard of coins, etc., which, according to pagan custom, should have been piled on his body in the central cabin. However, no body was found in the cabin, perhaps because he was given a Christian burial elsewhere. The existence of two silver Christening spoons suggest that the King had received a Christian baptism. If so, the missionaries would have taught him that the soul had no need of earthly treasures after death. However, his people may not have been ready to accept this new belief, and might well have equipped the long ship with what they still believed were the necessities for his journey into the unknown.

They might have accepted the King’s new religion, while as yet seeing no need to turn their backs on the old gods.

Raedwald was the first of the Wuffing kings of the Eastern Angles who is recognisable from the historical record, although our understanding of him is almost entirely dependant on St Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Angolorum, completed more than a century after the King’s death. Christianity entered Suffolk during the reign of Raedwald from two directions, first from Kent but then, and perhaps more significantly, from Northumbria. The main historical source for the history of his reign is that of the Northumbrian monk, Bede: The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. From this we know that Raedwald was King of the East Angles and overlord of Britain during the first quarter of the seventh century. As such, and by referring to other evdence, we can understand that he played an even more significant role in advancing the Christian cause than Bede acknowledges. In 597, the Roman missionary Augustine and his monks began their evangelisation of southern England, achieving an early success in the baptism of King Aethelbert of Kent. By this time there were seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms with Aethelbert as the senior ruler, or Bretwalda of south-eastern Britain.. He was therefore Raedwald’s overlord and when he ordered the East Anglian King to be baptised, Raedwald complied, the ceremony taking place in Kent in about 604, apparently travelling to Kent by sea. However, the conversion did not go very deep. On his return home, Raedwald raised an altar to his new god alongside the one to his old gods, perhaps at the home of the Wuffing kings in Rendelsham. There was probably some debate in the East Anglian kingdom  on the question of adopting Christianity, since the abandonment of the old gods was, undoubtedly, a very serious matter. In particular, the Queen’s devotion to the old religion ensured that her husband would only regard the Christian God as a recruit to the company of Woden, Thunor and Frig. Bede condemned him for allowing himself to be seduced by his wife and certain evil teachers and perverted from the sincerity of his faith, so that his last state was worse than his first. 

However, viewed from distance in time, we can perhaps have more sympathy for this attempt to resolve the growing cultural conflict by a symbolic fusion of the old and new faiths. In particular, we need to understand that there was a close connection between the agricultural year and religious belief in early Anglian society, not least from the information Bede himself provided about the pre-Christian calendar in one of his other books. The Old English calendar provides an elaborate system for reconciling the solar and lunar years. Its months follow the agricultural year, both pastoral and arable, as is implicit in the names of several of them. For example, August was known as Weed-month, a time when unwanted weeds were still a problem. It is also from this book of St Bede that we know that ‘Easter’ was named after ‘Éostre’, goddess of the radiant dawn, whose festival of the quickening of the season of growth was in April. This and other pagan festivals dedicated to mothers and goddesses points to the importance of the feminine in pre-Christian beliefs about life and farming. It is therefore legitimate to infer that these fundamental questions concerning the agrarian economy were a major obstacle to the acceptance of the new faith among the East Anglians, as they were in contemporary accounts from elsewhere in Britain and Northern Europe.

What Bede does state is that Raedwald’s Queen and other elders were involved in the discussion, and that they advised him against the total abandonment of the old faith. It may be that the queen had some authority in religious matters, since she represented the feminine characteristic of the fertility of the land. Evidently, there was also a tradition whereby a succeeding king, not in blood relation to his predecessor’s widow, would marry her, in order to maintain this fertility. At the same time, Raedwald was evidently not prepared to forsake his new-found faith in Christ, the new god of his overlord. To do so would have been seriously undiplomatic, but it may also have been that, as a Wuffing king, he felt some attraction to the foundation legend of Romulus and Remus and their totemic she-wolf, since there was an affinity between this story and those of wolves in his own family and its dynastic name Wuffingas. Apparently, later kings in the dynasty used the title Caser or ‘Caeser’/ ‘Kaiser’. Either Raedwald, or the attendant Augustinian delegate, may have made convenient use of this symbolism to convince the elders to agree to a diplomatic synthesis of the two religions. The setting up of two altars in parallel may not have satisfied Bede writing a century later, perhaps given the length of time that the compromise arrangement was in place (according to Ealdwulf (664-713) the pagan altar was still standing in about 650) but in Raedwald’s time and for generations after it secured the presence of Christianity in southern England, at a time when the Augustinian mission had been forced out of Kent and Essex.

Moreover, this was not simply a ‘marriage’ of convenience for Raedwald, who, although loyal to his old gods in economic matters at least, was also ideologically committed to the new one, considering himself to be a practising Christian for the rest of his life.

After Aethelbert of Kent’s death in about 616 and the consequent crisis in Christianity, Raedwald’s altar seems to have been the only Christian one in England until the re-establishment of the archbishopric of Canterbury some decades later. Raedwald was the only English king still in power who had been baptised into the Roman Church so that, for a time at least, it seemed that the last hope for the Gregorian mission in England rested with Raedwald alone. He became the most powerful king south of the Humber, overlord of the south and, following a war with the overlord of the north, Aethelfrith, he gained the overlordship of all England. Aethelfrith had become the most powerful ruler in northern Britain, extending his power over the whole region, including the English kingdom of Deira, south of the River Tees, in what is eastern Yorkshire today. He secured authority there by marrying its princess, Acha, at the same time driving her brother Edwin into exile. He remained unchallenged following his victory in 603, following his victory over Aedan, king of the Irish kingdom of Dalriada in present-day south-west Scotland. He went on to defeat the Britons near Chester in about 616, which meant that his dynastic enemy, Edwin of Deira, an exile in Mercia, where he had married the daughter of the Mercian King Cearl, was forced to seek refuge further away from Aethelfrith’s growing power. Edwin therefore found himself at the homestead of the Wuffing king. An account of his visit appears in a document, The Life of St Gregory the Great,  written twenty years before Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica. Bede’s account reports how Raedwald initially received Edwin with great honour, but was then put under great pressure (a combination of bribes and threats) to have Edwin put to death. Raedwald refused three times, hesitating only when Aethelfrith threatened to invade East Anglia. For his part, Edwin refused to flee, placing his trust in Raedwald’s judgement, whether he lived or died. The Old English version of the story goes on to explain how the Queen persuaded her husband that his friendship for Edwin, together with his wisdom and honour, should outweigh Aethelfrith’s bribes and threats. The consequence was war with honour, in defence of the laws of hospitality and friendship.  Yet although the fate of the exiled Prince Edwin may well have been one of the chief causes of the war between Raedwald and Aethelfrith, there must have been other factors as well. This was a war between the two most powerful kings on the island of Britain at the time, between the overlord of the north and the overlord of the south.

Bede reports how in 617 Raedwald assembled a great army and marched north to meet Aethelfrith before he had chance to summon his full strength. Aethelfrith’s forces had no doubt been depleted by the recent Battle of Chester. The great battle between them took place on the east bank of the River Idle, a tributary of the Trent, which formed part of the border between Nothumbria and Mercia, near the point where it is crossed by the main Roman road, Ermine Street, just to the north of Lincoln, a route still (roughly) followed by the A1 to this day. That Raedwald was able to organise and lead such a long-distance campaign suggests that he was an experienced commander. In his twelfth-century Historia Anglorum, Henry of Huntingdon draws both on Bede’s account and that of an unknown vernacular account, to describe how Raedwald’s troops

made a brilliant and formidable display, marching in three bodies, with fluttering standards and bristling spears and helmets, while their numbers greatly exceeded their enemies.

Fording the river and attacking with it behind him, Aethelfrith,

at once fell upon the close columns of Raedwald, and put to the sword Raegenhere, the King’s son, with the division he commanded… Meanwhile Raedwald, enraged but not appalled by his severe loss, stood invincibly firm with his two remaining columns. The Northumbrians made vain attempts to penetrate them, and Aethelfrith, charging among the enemy’s squadrons, became separated from his own troops and was struck down on a heap of bodies he himself had slain. The death of their king was the signal for universal flight.

There is also a background source in early Welsh poetry, Trioeth Ynys Prydein, (‘Triads of the Island of Britain’) which survives in manuscripts dating from the thirteenth century, using bardic material from centuries before and referring indirectly to the Battle of the River Idle. This poetic sources claim that Aethelfrith was killed by a British warrior, the son of Dissynyndawd, suggesting that Britons fought with the East Anglians and Derians against the Northumbrians to avenge their losses at Chester. In any event, the outcome of the battle was clear. Raedwald’s protectee Edwin became the new king of the Northern Angles, and during his reign the Roman Christian faith became established in Northumbria. For the rest of his life, Edwin remained indebted to Raedwald, who had not only helped him survive in exile, but had made him the new king in the north. As Henry of Huntingdon’s statement that the River Idle ran red with English blood implies, the battle probably ranks as one of the great river battles of British history. Above all it was a victory for King Raedwald, despite the loss of his heir, since not only was his overlordship of the south assured, but he became overlord of the north as well. If he had also gained power over British lands in the north and west conquered by Aethelfrith, he would have been the first overlord of northern and southern Britain. Bede describes him, at least, as King of the Angles. Since this victory for Raedwald was the first successful battle-trial for a Christian King, it may have been seen as a demonstration of the powers of the new god and a significant factor in the re-establishment of Christianity in the East, including, within a few decades, at the sees of Canterbury and London. Despite Bede’s scepticism, there may be a case for recognising Raedwald not just as a great king, whose political and military leadership helped to advance the Christian cause in England, but also as a good king, who demonstrated honour and friendship to be his virtues.

Bede tells us little of the latter years of his reign, but we might suppose that, if all the peoples of Britannia had been reunited under one great king, this period may have been regarded as something of a golden age, and that he would have received tribute from further afield than any king before him, some of which would have been buried in the ship. Bede at least tells of the peace in the time of Edwin, the first decade of which matched the last decade of Raedwald’s reign. This was so great, he says, that a woman with her newborn child could travel unescorted from sea to sea all over the island of Britain. There is no surviving source referring either to Raedwald’s burial or the burial-place. However, like other Wuffing kings, he seems to have regarded south-eastern Suffolk, the Deben Valley, as his homeland. The approximately datable death of Raedwald appears to more or less coincide with the scientifically datable treasure found on board the ‘ghost’ of the great ship revealed beneath Mound One at Sutton Hoo in 1939. In addition, although the funeral-rite which led up to the burial must have been mainly pagan in character, there were some strong signs of Christian practice among the grave-goods. There was a nest of silver bowls decorated with cruciform designs, a pair of silver spoons inscribed ‘Paulos’ and ‘Saulos’, which were most probably baptismal gifts for a king who had undergone conversion as an adult. Found above the likely position of the right shoulder of the body, they suggest royal contacts, political allegiances and religious uncertainty, together with the royal vision of Christian power which characterised Raedwald’s reign. There were also cruciform patterns on other important, though small items, found on site, showing close affinities with other examples of early Christian jewelry.

The ship itself is also an important symbol and metaphor in early Christian imagery, as it remains today, especially around the shores of Britain. The word ‘nave’ describing the length of the churches has the same root as the word ‘navy’ because their roofs were constructed in exactly the same way as long-ships and may even have been ‘recycled’ from disused boats, turned over and thatched. So potent is the metaphor of the ship as the soul’s ferry that it was used in more explicitly Christian poetry as well as in the albeit later-recorded legends of Artorius. The idea of Avalon, associated with the early British legends which grew up about Glastonbury, an island sanctuary known as Ynys Afallon (‘the isle of the Apple Orchard’) in early Welsh, was of a place just beyond the horizon of mortal knowledge, even of the wisest and bravest. Therefore, it might be more accurate to describe the ship-funeral as a transitional burial-rite. Hence the mixture of pagan and Christian symbolism found on the artefacts which also suggest that the body that was lain in state, albeit temporarily, in the great ship found in Mound One at Sutton Hoo, was indeed that of King Raedwald.

Following Raedwald’s death in about 625, however, the uneasy fusion of the two religions broke down, as Eorpwald embraced Christianity more fully, having been persuaded by Edwin of the Northern Angles (ruling c. 617-33) to accept baptism, only to be murdered by a pagan usurper, Ricbert. Within three years the rightful heir, Sigeberht, had returned home from exile and regained the throne. He was an impressive and much-loved figure, possessing the warrior skills of the Wuffingas allied with the religious devotion and love of books which earned him the name of Sigeberht the Learned. The Christian teachers and the schools he had encountered among the Franks had made a profound impression on him and when he returned from exile he set Christian missionaries to work converting and educating his people. St Felix and St Fursey played a significant role in the evangelisation of East Anglia. Though united by a common purpose, they were very unlike. Felix, who like Sigeberht, had been educated in Frankish schools, was appointed Bishop of East Anglia by the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Honorius, in about 631.  He established his base at Dummoc (Dunwich), building a cathedral and a school, from where he set out to convert the East Angles, continuing this missionary work for seventeen years. Fursey, by contrast,  was an Irish monk, aflame with Celtic zeal and mysticism. He left Ireland in 630 and became the first Irish missionary to the Anglo-Saxons, arriving in the kingdoms the year before Aidan established his monastery on Lindisfarne. Sigeberht heard of his ascetic life and eloquent preaching and gave him the ruins of Burgh Castle (Norfolk) on which to build a monastery. With a small group of monks, following a strict discipline, for ten years Fursey preached his way around East Anglia, winning hundreds of converts. He died in Frankish lands, but not before he had had a huge influence on King Sigeberht. Impressed by his preaching, the King abdicated his pomp and majesty and took up the cowl, leaving his nephew Ecgric on the throne.

However, these were difficult times for an ordained king to hide away in a monastery. Conflict between the kingdoms of the Heptarchy had developed into a struggle for hegemony between Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria, with the other kingdoms becoming pawns in their game. Britain had no secure state structures even at a regional level. Seventh century rulers tried to build larger and more unified realms within defensible boundaries and to legitimise their power, under the prevailing culture. The most important conflict was between Northumbria and Mercia. Penda, the pagan king of Mercia, continually campaigned against Northumbrian rulers, usually with the support of the Christian Welsh princes. Any defeat in this struggle tended to endanger the fragile unity of the defeated kingdom. When Sigebehrt vacated his throne, Penda of Mercia was in the ascendant, and in the early 630s his army was pressing hard on the East Anglian border. The combined North Folk and South Folk built a dyke and bank , with three lines of defence behind it traversing the limestone ridge, filling in the gaps between the natural obstacles; the fens, forests and hills. These earthworks can still be seen on the road from Royston to Newmarket. The first major crisis came in 636, when the Mercians invaded in force and the East Anglians mustered to meet them. But they had little confidence in their new king, Ecgric, and some went to Bury St Edmunds Abbey to plead with Sigeberht to lead them in battle. But he refused to forsake his devotions and his desperate countrymen eventually abducted him, still in his habit, hoping that simply his presence on the battlefield would inspire the East Anglians to heroic deeds of warfare. However, he refused to put on armour or take up the sword and went into battle armed only with his staff. The battle was soon over, and both Sigebehrt and Ecgric were slain.

Penda now put Anna on the throne, a nephew of Raedwald, to rule East Anglia as a vassal kingdom of Mercia. Anna, like Sigebehrt, was very religious, and had four daughters, each of whom took up the religious life, founding nunneries and monasteries. He spent much of his time at his manor at Exning, near Newmarket, near the centre of the Devil’s Dyke defence line, a good rallying point to which to muster both the North and South Folk. It was also not far from the important religious centre established by St Felix at Soham. In 641, Penda inflicted a crushing defeat on the Northumbrians, killing King Oswald. Northumbria broke into its component parts of Bernicia (north) and Deira, and its rival factions were easily manipulated by Penda. Northumbria was not fully reunited by Oswald’s successor, Oswiu, until 651. The new East Anglian strategic centre of Exning was next to be tested in 654 when Anna fell out with his overlord. Penda’s Mercian hordes once more marched along the Icknield Way and laid siege to the Dyke, eventually breaching it and slaughtering many of the defenders. The Angles were then chased back into their lands for more than fifty miles, through field and forest, over heathland and moorland, until Anna and his remnant made their stand at Blythborough. There Penda fell upon the East Anglians, as the ancient chronicler, Henry of Huntingdon records, like a wolf on timorous sheep, so that Anna and his host were devoured by his sword in a moment, and scarcely a man of them survived. After this disaster little is recorded about East Anglia in the chronicles, a silence which we can interpret either favourably or otherwise. It would appear that the last generations of the Wuffing dynasty, as happens to all families who have a long tenure of power, produced no men of stature to compare with the founders of the house. The last Wuffing king died almost a hundred years after Anna and that century produced few political events worthy of record. However, the people of East Anglia seem to have been left in peace. The balance of power shifted again when the King of a reunited Northumbria, Oswiu, defeated and killed Penda in 655, causing Mercia to descend into disunity for a more than a decade, and allowing the Northumbrian rulers to intervene in Mercian affairs throughout that period. Though owing allegiance to the kings of Mercia, the East Anglians were far enough away from the main area of political and military conflict to be left much to their own devices, certainly in economic and religious life.

Sources:

Derek Wilson (1977), A Short History of Suffolk. London: Batsford.

Sam Newton (2003), The Reckoning of King Raedwald. Colchester: Red Bird Press.

Catherine Hills (1986), The Blood of the British. London: Guild Publishing.