0302A

'The king went into Cumberland and ravaged very nearly all of it; and his ships went out round Chester and should have come to meet him, but they could not. Then they ravaged the Isle of Man. And the enemy fleet had gone to Richard's kingdom that summer'.
   Brief though it is, this entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 1000 is an epitome of the political history of Britain at the time. The king in question was Aethelred II, misnamed 'the Unready' (r. 978-1016), and seen here in a decidedly 'ready' mood. He was not indulging in mindless destruction for the sake of it, but furthering a process begun by his forebears: forging of a united kingdom of the English. A century earlier, his great-great-grandfather, Alfred, had defended the kingdom of Wessex from Viking assault and won the loyalty of all the English people 'except those who were under the power of the Danes'. Alfred's heirs, his son Edward, king of the West Saxons, and his daughter Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, overran the southern Danish settlements and absorbed them into a 'greater Wessex'. Edward's son, Aethelstan, conquered the Viking kingdom of York, and became the first 'king of the English' and Aethelstan�s brothers, Edmund and Eadred, consolidated his work. Edmund's sons, Eadwig and Edgar, ruled over an English kingdom which stretched northwards from the English Channel to the river Tweed in the north-east and to Stainmore in the north-west. This kingdom was the inheritance of Aethelred, Edgar's younger son, who received it after the murder of his half-brother Edward the Martyr at Corfe in Dorset in 978.
   The making of England was the achievement of the West Saxon kings. To the west lay the kingdoms of Wales, of which Gwynedd in the north and Dyfed in the south were the most powerful. Northward lay, the lands of the Scots, a kingdom as recently-created as that of the English; it was ruled by the line of' Kenneth MacAlpin (r. 840-58), who occupies a place in the history of Scotland comparable to that of Alfred in England. In fact Kenneth was not the first to rule both Picts and Scots, but it was his dynasty which destroyed the last Pictish kings, and imposed Gaelic customs and the Gaelic language throughout the kingdom of Alba. This united realm stretched northwards front the Clyde-Forth axis as far as the borders of Caithness, which was dominated by the Norse Earls of Orkney. South of the Clyde-Forth line lay the debatable lands. ln the east, the region between the Forth and the Tweed had formed part of the old English kingdom of Northumbria; to the west, the British kingdom of Strathclyde extended southwards to include Cumbria (modern Cumberland, Westmorland and much of Lancashire).
   In these regions the ambitions of the English and Scottish kings met and clashed. By the year 1000, the kingdom of Strathclyde was virtually an adjunct of the Scottish kingship, while Aethelred�s father, Edgar, had ceded much of the disputed territory in the east to Kenneth II (r. 971-95). These set-backs did not prevent the English rulers from presenting themselves as �overlords� of both the Scottish and the Welsh kings, though this ambition was rarely recognised. The borders of English and Scots remained unstable and hostilities continued. The picture was complicated by the presence of Norse rulers in the Isle of Man and the Western Isles, often loosely allied to the kings of Viking Dublin; Cumbria too had its share of Viking settlers. The early years of Aethelred's reign had seen a resurgence of Viking activity in the Irish Sea, and it was in response to this threat that the King attacked Cumbria and the Isle of Man in the year 1000.
   The dangers to Aethelred's kingdom did not lie only in the north. The land described in the Chronicle (the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles) as 'Richard's kingdom' was Normandy then ruled by Richard II (r. 996-1026). The 'enemy fleet', however, was not that of the Normans, but a Danish raiding-force which had been operating in England for the previous three years; it was to return in 1001. The willingness of the Normans to give aid and comfort to their Danish and Norwegian cousins had already provoked a reaction from the English; in 990 it took the dispatch of a papal legate to establish 'a most firm peace' between Aethelred and Duke Richard's father, Richard I (r. 942-996). It was probably as part of a similar agreement in 1002 that Aethelred took the Duke's sister Emma as his second wife, but even this did not break the link between the Danes and Normandy.
   The raids of Aethelred's time constitute part of the 'Second Viking Age' in Britain. Like England and Scotland, the kingdoms of Scandinavia were still in the process of formation. The kings of Denmark were the most successful; indeed the line of Denmark's founder, Harald Bluetooth (958-87), temporarily ousted the West Saxons from England between 1016 and 1042. The competing kings of the north needed money and treasure to pursue their ambitions, and this was what England in particular had to offer, as the discovery of 60,000 English pennies of the period in Scandinavian coinhoards vividly demonstrates. The English kings were unique at this time among the rulers of Britain in minting their own coins, the only ones which were legal tender within England. The quality of successive mintages, regularly changed from 975 onwards, gives eloquent testimony to the administrative competence of the West Saxon rulers. The composition of the coins themselves indicates the importance of English commerce, for the silver is not native to Britain but imported, largely from Germany. What the English exported in return we do not know, but wool and woollen cloth were probably as important then as later.
   The contrast between England and the British kingdoms extends to the related area of urban institutions. Successful towns depend upon a number of pre-existing factors: a relatively stable political environment; a settled population, living by commerce and manufacture as well as agriculture; a well-farmed hinterland to ensure regular supplies of food and raw materials; a network of trading contacts, whether local, national, international or all three; and a supply of coined money of an established standard. Neither tile Scots nor the Welsh kings issued coins, though some from elsewhere are occasionally found in treasure-hoards of both regions, and this lack of a native coinage goes some way to explain the almost total absence of urban centres in Wales and Scotland. One of the few exceptions, Swansea in South Wales, shows its origins in its Old Norse name; like the towns of Ireland, it was a Viking foundation.
   Even in England, the balance between urban and rural populations in the year 1000 (and for some time to come) was almost exactly the reverse of what it is today. About 90% of the population lived and worked in the countryside, with only about 10% based permanently in towns. But throughout the 10th century and into the 11th, English towns were growing in size and importance, and most of those which would be significant in later years were already in existence by the time of the Domesday survey in 1086. The earliest trading centres were the emporia of the 8th and 9th centuries, mostly founded by or near deserted Romano-British sites, like Hamwic (Southampton), Eoforwic (York) and Lundenwic (London). Most lay in the south arid east, indicating their connection with the southern trade-routes to northern Frankia, the Rhineland and Italy, and (in the west) to Brittany, south-west Frankia and Spain. The trade of these years was mainly in luxury goods, silk, spices and precious metals. The emporia, being undefended, were badly mauled by the Vikings, and by 900 the survivors had either been fortified, or (as at London) had moved within the refurbished walls of the nearby Roman towns.
                                                                                                        More in Part B....