Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [200]
THE TWO RIVERS
A.D. 877
The year of Our Lord 877.
In King Alfred’s kingdom of Wessex, it seemed that winter that there would be peace.
The small, half walled town of Wilton, a noted royal centre, lay at the joining of two of the five rivers: the Nadder and the Wylye. To the east, just three miles away, stood the ancient hill fort of Sarum, which acted as a defensive outpost for the town. To the west, the broad valley stretched under the edge of the chalk ridges until both encountered, some fifteen miles away, the great forest of Selwood that blocked, like a wall, the sweeping open lands of central Wessex from the maze of small hills, woods and marshes that were the hinterland of the west country.
And in Wilton, resting between its streams, it seemed that the terrible darkness which had lain over the land had receded, like a threatening bank of clouds and that, this winter at least, there would be a period of sunshine.
Since the Anglo-Saxon settlement of the island some four centuries earlier, there had been many changes and disturbances. One kingdom after another – first Northumbria, then midland Mercia, now southern Wessex had become more powerful than its rivals. Independent tribes in Kent, Sussex and East Anglia had gradually lost their separate status. The Jutes of Kent and the Isle of Wight now acknowledged the west Saxon king; the old British Celtic tribes in Devon to the south west had become part of Wessex too; even distant Cornwall looked up to Wessex as a greater kingdom. Only Wales and northern Scotland had held aloof from Saxon settlement, and they would keep their isolated independence for centuries more.
But despite the rise and fall of these kingdoms, which seldom took place without some bloodshed, the Anglo-Saxon world, now converted to Christianity, had flourished for the most part in peace.
The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons had taken time.
In 597 the monk known as St Augustine, sent by the great Pope Gregory, had landed in Kent, whose pagan king and Christian queen had allowed him to make converts amongst their people. From there, the Roman Church had made steady progress in converting the Saxons, moving up the island and encountering the remains of the older Celtic Christian Church as they did so. And although the Celtic monks of Britain, many of them trained in Ireland, had drawn apart from the Roman Church of Europe, they too were finally brought into a cohesive whole, acknowledging the supremacy of the pope, at the great meeting of churchmen in 664, since called the Synod of Whitby.
Primitive as the island was compared with its Roman past, the centuries when Northumbria and Mercia triumphed were great days. The splendid courts of the kings promoted the still more significant splendour of the great religious houses such as those in Northumbria that in the eighth century produced the great historian of the Anglo-Saxons, the monk Bede. Their arts flourished. The old Latin culture, though seen through the eyes of monks, grew once again. New bishoprics were founded and the archbiship received his pallium from Rome. The Anglo-Saxon island seemed blessed indeed.
Until the coming of the Norsemen.
They came from the great peninsula of Jutland, at the foot of the Baltic Sea. For some time, their raids had been held in check by the powerful and holy empire of the mighty Charlemagne, king of the Franks; but after his death early in the century, their activities had increased; and when a dynastic dispute in the Danish kingdom broke it up, a new and terrible age for Europe began: the age of the Vikings.
The term meant pirate – and despite the attempts of some modern historians to rehabilitate their reputation, the facts are still beyond dispute. The heathen Vikings were cruel, destructive raiders, whose main object was plunder. In a series of raids, stretching over two generations, they descended on the island like a plague. By the time that Alfred came to the throne of Wessex, England was in effect divided into two parts. Over the so-called Danelaw in the north – most of