Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [8]
A new wave of invasion was heralded by a piratical Danish raid in 793. In the following century the Danes came to stay. The contemporary Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded the landing in East Anglia in 865 of a “great heathen army” which the following year advanced north and west, to Nottingham and York. In 876, Viking leader Healdene “shared out the land of the Northumbrians, and [the Danes] proceeded to plow land to support themselves.” In 877, “the Danish army went away into Mercia, and shared out some of it, and gave some to Ceowulf,” a native thegn, or lord.8 The territory the Danes occupied included the future Huntingdonshire. At first few in numbers, the Danish warriors were supplemented by relatives from Denmark and also by contingents from Norway and Frisia.
Late in the tenth century Alfred the Great of Wessex (849-899)
Saxon church of St. Laurence, Bradford-on-Avon (Wiltshire), founded by St. Aldhelm (d. A.D. 709).
organized a successful resistance to the Danes but was forced to conclude a peace which left them in possession of most of eastern England.
The Danes having converted to Christianity, a number of monasteries were founded in Danish England. In about 970, St. Oswald, archbishop of York, and Aethelwin, ealdorman (royal official) of East Anglia, donated the land on which Ramsey Abbey was built, a wooded island in Ramsey Mere on which Aethelwin had a hunting lodge.
Between the founding and their deaths in 992, Oswald and Aethelwin donated their own hereditary holdings to the abbey, added land obtained by purchase and exchange, and solicited donations from others, until the abbey held a large block of territory fanning out from the island of Ramsey through Huntingdonshire and three adjacent counties.9
A property that was given to the abbey a few years after the death of the founders was the manor and village of Elton. The origin of the name of the settlement that had grown up near the site of vanished Durobrivae is conjectural. The suffix tun or ton (fence or enclosure in Anglo-Saxon) had broadened its meaning to become “homestead” and finally “collection of homesteads,” or “village”; the suffix inga, combined with a personal name, indicated the followers or kinsmen of a leader. Originally spelled “Aethelington” or “Ailington,” Elton’s name has been explained as either “Ella’s village,” or “the village of the Aethelings,” or “the village of Aethelheah’s people.”10
The benefactor who donated Elton to the abbey was a prelate named Aetheric, who was among the first students educated at Ramsey. During his school days, Aetheric and three other boys as a prank tried to ring the great bell in the west tower and broke its rim. The monks angrily urged punishment, but the abbot declared that since the boys were well-born, they would probably repay the abbey a hundred times when they “arrived at the age of maturity.”11
The Ramsey Abbey chronicler then relates Aetheric’s fulfillment of the prophecy. Elton was by now (early eleventh century) a flourishing village with an Anglo-Saxon lord; when he died,
his widow married a Danish noble named Dacus. In 1017 Aetheric, now bishop of Dorchester, joined an escort traveling with King Cnut “to the ends of the kingdom.” When the party stopped to spend the night in Nassington, a few miles northwest of Elton, Aetheric and four of the king’s secretaries were lodged at Elton in Dacus’s manor house.
In the course of a festive evening, Dacus talked expansively of the cattle and sheep that grazed his meadows, the plows that cultivated his fields, and the rents the village paid him. Aetheric remarked that he would like to buy such a manor. Dacus