Alfred of England "The Great"1

M, #1651, b. 849, d. 26 October 899

 
 

Father*Æthelwulf of Wessex2,3,4 b. bt 794 - 800, d. 13 Jan 858
Mother*Osburh (?)2,3,4 b. c 810, d. a 876
Alfred of England "The Great"|b. 849\nd. 26 Oct 899|p56.htm#i1651|Æthelwulf of Wessex|b. bt 794 - 800\nd. 13 Jan 858|p56.htm#i1654|Osburh (?)|b. c 810\nd. a 876|p56.htm#i1655|Ecgberht of Wessex|b. 775\nd. a 19 Nov 838|p56.htm#i1657|Rædburh (?)|b. c 788|p56.htm#i1658|Oslac (?)||p56.htm#i1656||||

Birth*849 Wantage, Berkshire, England2,3,4 
Marriage*868 Principal=Ealhswith Of Mercia Alswitha2,3,4 
Marriage869 Conflict=Ealhswith Of Mercia Alswitha1 
Burial* Hyde, Winchester, England3 
Death*26 October 899 2,3,4 
Hume* 5
Dickens* 6
DNB* Alfred [Ælfred] (848/9-899), king of the West Saxons and of the Anglo-Saxons, was born at Wantage. He was the youngest of at least six children of King Æthelwulf of Wessex (d. 858) and of Osburh, daughter of Oslac, the king's butler (said to be descended from the family that founded the kingdom of the Isle of Wight). Three of his elder brothers, Æthelbald, Æthelberht, and Æthelred, were successively kings of Wessex before him; his sister, Æthelswith, was wife to Burgred, king of the Mercians. In 868 he married Ealhswith (d. 902), daughter of a Mercian ealdorman, Æthelred Mucel, and of Eadburh. Their children were Æthelflæd, ‘lady of the Mercians’, Edward the Elder, king of the Anglo-Saxons, Æthelgifu, abbess of Shaftesbury, Ælfthryth, wife to Baudouin (II), count of Flanders, and Æthelweard. Among their grandsons were Æthelstan, Edmund, and Eadred, kings of the English; their many granddaughters were married into half the princely houses of Europe. Alfred's grandfather, Ecgberht, had been the first of his line since the later seventh century to be king of Wessex. His family vividly documents the ability of early medieval aristocrats to move in quite a short time from apparent obscurity to unprecedented power and glory.
Sources
From the perspective of a modern biography, the central point about King Alfred's life is that so much information is not available for any earlier Englishman, nor for any in the next two centuries. It is not usually possible to identify the birthplace or daughters of Anglo-Saxon kings, still less their in-laws. So high a level of documentation carries a danger of magnifying the king's image, and must itself be explained. The pre-eminent source is a seemingly contemporary life by his teacher and counsellor, the Welsh Bishop Asser. Although known to a few eleventh- and twelfth-century writers, it survived into modern times in only a single manuscript that was destroyed in 1731 by the fire in the Cotton Library. The sole access to it since the development of modern standards of scholarly enquiry has been through transcripts and editions made between c.1570 and 1722. For that reason, but also because of oddities in its presentation, and above all distaste for its account of the king's behaviour, the authenticity of the life has often been challenged. Yet to do so raises such problems in turn that there is really no option but to take it, with all its imperfections and difficulties, as the work of a man who came to know Alfred very well. That does not mean accepting all it says as literal truth. It does mean coming to terms with the fact that these things could be said by someone who influenced the king and was vastly impressed by him.

Second, and linked to Asser in that it was the main ingredient of his narrative, is a set of annals known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This is itself a much debated source. It is extant in a series of vernacular manuscripts and in Latin renditions like Asser's. The versions that seem closest to its original form blend the chronological summary in Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum with materials like the West Saxon genealogical regnal list (which prefaces some chronicle texts but was also transmitted separately), and with other annalistic information on the early church, the English settlements, and Wessex from the seventh to ninth centuries. There is a marked break in the chronicle's transmission in the early 890s, with the hand changing in the only contemporary copy, and the sundry texts tending to go separate ways thereafter; it is reasonably deduced that the ‘core’ chronicle was assembled about then. Linguistic analysis suggests that a series of compilers was involved. But it is hard to resist the suspicion that royal patronage stands somewhere behind a work whose theme may be read, and for many centuries was read, as the rise of the house of Alfred to the leadership of the English struggle with their Danish enemy. The activity of Danish armies increasingly dominates events as the story proceeds, with the first great battles following the alleged recognition of Ecgberht as Brytenwalda (‘Britain-ruler’) in succession to the kings said by Bede to have held imperium over the southern English; and with the first continuation of the ‘core’ chronicle offering a close account of Alfred's campaigns in 893–6. Most telling of all, perhaps, is the way that the annals of the 880s almost abandon English history to follow the continental progress of the Danish army that in 892 crossed to attack the English. It follows from all this that the chronicle, like Asser, is as good or bad a source as anything connected with Alfred would be. It may be trusted for insight into royal views but was hardly disinterested.

Other sources pose less risk of a massaged record but still tend to raise Alfred's profile. His ‘law book’ is the first English legislation of its type for at least one century and perhaps two. It is matched by a short statement of the legal terms agreed between Alfred's realm and the Danes to the east. Each is a further sign of determination that his rule be recorded in writing. On the other hand, the surviving charters of his reign are strangely few: a mere twenty-one for the area he directly ruled, of which just fifteen (ignoring a few palpable forgeries) are records featuring Alfred's name, six from Kent and nine from Wessex. The contrast with his immediate predecessors is clear: the reigns of his elder brothers produced twenty-one extant charters, eleven Kentish, in under thirteen years; his father's nineteen-year rule saw a minimum of twenty-five. The dearth of Alfredian records is, however, more than compensated by the document known as the Burghal Hidage, which shows every sign of being an official memorandum (though at one or more removes from the original) of the chain of forts that the king organized, together with arrangements for their upkeep and defence. Moreover, a text of the king's will was preserved. Quite apart from the important light it sheds on the politics of Alfred's close family, and one or two intriguing personalia, this is the earliest record of the resources in money and land at the disposal of an early English king.

Lastly, but above all, there is what Alfred wrote himself. Not all the works sometimes attributed to him were his: some, like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle itself, were clearly by other hands, if probably done under his aegis. But there is no good reason to doubt that the four books that stand in his name, plus one other, were in a real sense composed by him: these are his law book, together with more or less free translations of Pope Gregory's Book of Pastoral Rule, of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, of Augustine's Soliloquies, and of the first fifty psalms. The only books for centuries either way to express the ideas of a secular monarch, they on their own establish that there was something extraordinary about Alfred. They would be grounds enough to study him closely, even if his other achievements were less epoch-making.
‘Deeds’ and their setting: Ecgberht's dynasty
Early medieval kings and their historians inherited from the Roman empire the notion that a ruler's gesta, by which was especially meant his victories, were the most important thing about him. Alfred's were of quite special importance, because they were the foundation for the eventual emergence of a kingdom of the English. But any account of them should begin with notice of their background. The near monopoly exerted by the Danish wars over the ninth-century English narrative has obscured the politics that set the pattern of Alfred's career and perhaps of his character.

The kingdom ruled by Alfred's predecessors was almost certainly a more loose-knit structure than appears from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's retrospect. Its kings from the mid-seventh century to the early ninth were all credited with descent from the alleged founders of the kingdom; but there is little to suggest any close relationship between successive kings. The evidence is at least compatible with a kingship disputed and/or exchanged between the realm's chief families. That might help to explain one of the strangest things about Alfred's grandfather, Ecgberht (r. 802–39): the hints, none in itself conclusive but cumulatively persuasive, that whatever his West Saxon ancestry, his background was essentially Kentish; his father seems to have been among Kent's last independent kings. After they wrested south-east England from Mercian control (825–7), Ecgberht and his son Æthelwulf were more careful of Kentish sensitivities than were Mercian overlords. Whether or not they were outsiders, they did break with West Saxon tradition in another way: Ecgberht insisted on being succeeded by his son, as no West Saxon ruler since 641 demonstrably had. Æthelwulf's accession was perhaps buttressed by his unction at the Council of Kingston in Ecgberht's final year; until at least 979, Kingston would remain the site for royal inaugurations, just as after 1066 kings were (preferably) crowned at Westminster since it was thence that English kingship took its new direction. One reason for Æthelwulf's marriage to Osburh was no doubt to strengthen his position by an alliance with one of the chief West Saxon princely families.

If this is the correct construction to put upon the policy of Ecgberht and Æthelwulf, it very nearly failed. Asser reveals, though the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle perhaps typically does not, that when Æthelwulf came back in 856 from a journey to Rome and the West Frankish court (accompanied by the young Alfred), he was faced with a revolt by his eldest surviving son. Æthelbald may have been alienated by his father's return with a fresh royal bride, Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald (d. 877), and potential mother of illustrious competitors for the throne: Æthelbald eventually married her himself. But his supporters were the ealdorman of Somerset and the bishop of Sherborne, pillars of the West Saxon establishment; and the outcome could have effectively broken the Kentish connection. By what Asser thought superhuman forbearance, but what looks as much like an admission of defeat, Æthelwulf left Wessex to Æthelbald, and settled for rule of his family's original south-eastern base. Partition was to continue on his death in 858, with the accession to Kent of his next son, Æthelberht.

Nevertheless, Æthelwulf did not forget the dynastic imperative. Two years before they journeyed together to Rome, he had sent four-year-old Alfred on a visit to the pope. The chronicle's story that Leo IV had consecrated him to kingship has naturally raised doubts. But a letter of Leo survives to show that he did make Alfred a ‘consul’; a procedure that in other early medieval contexts was easily confused with royal ceremony. The inspiration for the episode was pretty clearly the papal unction in 781 of two infant sons of Charlemagne (742–814), Pippin and Louis, who went on to rule Italy and Aquitaine respectively. Yet had Æthelwulf meant to subdivide his kingdom in 853, he should have sent all junior sons. His move is best read as an effort to underpin his dynasty by a gesture in favour of its youngest and least secure scion. A complex scheme in his will as relayed by Alfred's own seems to have bestowed on his younger sons enough of the land that was his to dispose of (his ‘bookland’) to maintain them in strength and style. From the perspective of the 850s, the danger of a fraternally disputed throne may have paled beside that of the displacement of the whole dynasty by one of the lineages that had previously aspired to kingship of Wessex.
Alfred's accession
As it turned out, Æthelbald's childless death in 860 gave Ecgberhtian strategy a second chance. Æthelred and Alfred temporarily transferred their endowments to Æthelberht, so endorsing his rule over Wessex as well as Kent. When Æthelberht too died heirless, in 865, the arrangement was repeated in Æthelred's favour, though not without hesitation on Alfred's part. Æthelred did leave sons at his own early death in 871, but they were so young that, in the dire emergency of the moment, Alfred's accession could not be challenged. He was, however, obliged to guarantee his nephews' previously agreed property rights; and here lay a foretaste of the trouble that would erupt between his son and nephew when he died. Alfred's dynasty, therefore, was neither monolithic nor stable. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and still more Asser, liked to dwell on the disastrous outcome of dynastic splintering in other kingdoms under Scandinavian attack. The problem could have imperilled Alfred too, as it did his heir.

A second corollary of Alfred's background is more elusive but possibly more important. In the nature of ninth-century politics, there were at least two views as to what to do with younger sons. If Æthelwulf were bent on maintaining Alfred's kingly potential, others (most obviously his elder brothers and their contacts) would wish to steer him in other directions. The counter-influences may have included the boys' mother, who in Asser's famous tale gave Alfred a book of ‘Saxon’ poems as reward for precociously memorizing it, thereby prefiguring his scholarship. Alfred, in other words, may very well have grown up under conflicting impulses. The life of a warrior and of a clerk had never yet been fully blended in the Germanic kingdoms of northern Europe. In Alfred they were. But he paid a price in loss of inner peace. One of Asser's most obscure—and to doubters of his authenticity suspect—chapters gives a long account of a series of illnesses that Alfred actually prayed to be inflicted upon him as a penitential discipline, though not so as to disfigure him or impede the performance of his duties. (These disorders are now diagnosed as culminating in Crohn's disease.) Since the disorder flared again on his wedding day, it is a fair deduction that it was fuelled by a conflict in Alfred's mind between secular and clerical callings. If so, the conflict was never resolved. But it was arguably the key to his unique creativity.
The Danish assault
Over the last generation, studies of ninth-century Scandinavian action have been driven by debate as to whether ‘vikings’ were as destructive of life and property as is suggested in sources produced by their Christian victims. There is no doubt that Scandinavian expansion, like most of history's major developments, was a complex process with many-sided effects. Nor is there much doubt that the typical activity of vikings, properly so-called, was raiding in quest of moveable wealth, whether in the form of treasure itself or of captives for ransom or sale as slaves. Most of those who experienced such visitations did indeed recover from them in due course. None the less, there were times when raiders consolidated their efforts under formidable leadership, and on those occasions the outcome could be something like a conquest. There is reason to believe that the armies which descended on Anglo-Saxon Britain from 865 were expeditions of this more ambitious type. A persistent but elusive tradition represents the first ‘great army’ as led by Ivarr the Boneless, a hero of later Scandinavian saga, and his brothers Hálfdan and Ubba.

To appreciate the threat that Alfred faced, it is only necessary to contemplate this army's record in other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Northumbria was overrun and its kings killed in 866–7. East Anglia followed suit in 869–70. Mercia was reduced to a west midlands rump after attacks in 868–9 and 872–4, and King Burgred departed for Rome. Native kings were initially replaced by indigenous rivals, but before long Scandinavian kings and ‘earls’ took control. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle explicitly records the organized settlement of armies in Northumbria (876), Mercia (877), and East Anglia (880). There is ample linguistic and toponymic evidence for a Danish and Norwegian presence in Yorkshire, the east midlands, East Anglia, and also the Lake District. Scandinavian political ascendancy in these areas lasted at most for eighty years, so it is hard to imagine what could have had that effect if not relatively numerous settlers. Many stories of the desecration of churches are late and unreliable; Christianity survived and soon enough spread to the invaders. But the succession to all bishoprics bar York and Lindisfarne was disrupted, and nearly every church lost all its muniments. Whether or not Scandinavians took their paganism seriously, and the family of Ivarr seems to have done, their arrival clearly did not make for a thriving church.

If, therefore, Alfred was not fighting for the existence of English identity and Christian civilization, as Victorians thought, much was at stake for his people, for their spiritual guides, and for himself. Contemporary Anglo-Saxons could indeed have had as strong a sense of impending catastrophe as Victorians thought appropriate. They did not need to know much about their past to be aware of what a pagan people, their very selves, had once done to the Britons; the word wealh, which increasingly meant ‘slave’ as well as ‘Welshman’, was a reminder. Scandinavians for their part wanted what Germanic invaders usually wanted: a political context they could dominate, land on which to settle their followers, and treasure with which to cement their warbands and prime their less predatory enterprises. They would take as much of lowland Britain as they could get at less than ruinous cost. If these objectives made them difficult to get rid of, steady resistance could induce them to go off in search of easier targets.

In the winter and early spring of 870–71, before Alfred became king of the West Saxons, their forces fought five times against the Danish enemy and lost thrice. A month after his accession, Alfred fought again and again lost. The clashes included one on the Berkshire downs (then called Ashdown) which English sources represent as a spectacular victory, perhaps because it was Alfred's first; but the ensuing defeats took the Danes into the heartland of Wessex, into what is now Wiltshire. It was not because they were beaten in battle or outmanoeuvred that they left Wessex alone for the next five years. They were simply sufficiently discouraged by months of fighting to come to terms—not improbably in return for what other ages would call danegeld. But the real crisis had merely been put off.

In early 871 the first ‘great army’ had been joined by a second force under Guthrum. It was this army, when Hálfdan had settled the first in the north, that conquered Mercia. Alfred, who may well have thought that the West Saxons had invited the 870–71 assault by the assistance they had given Burgred in 868, took no steps to stop them. But Guthrum's force had not yet lost its momentum. From a base in Cambridge it launched attacks on Wareham and then on Exeter (876–7). The upshot was another fragile peace: oaths were sworn, hostages given, and silver paid. As a result, it was what was left of Mercia that was shared out. But almost at once Guthrum (using knowledge of the church calendar that was one viking asset) nearly captured Alfred in twelfth night carousal at Chippenham. The situation may have looked more serious in retrospect than it really was. The ealdorman of Devon was able to repel a further attack from the north. Alfred himself made his refuge in the Somerset wetlands a base for guerrilla operations. Yet the crisis was grave enough. The varying texts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle add up to the assertion that much of Wessex was subjected and settled; analogy with the fate of other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms shows what that could have meant.

There is thus a symbolic truth in the mélange of legends that associated this period with the consolatory ministrations of saints. One of these stories, in an eleventh-century life of St Neot, was the origin of the tale of how, brooding on ‘God's just judgment’, Alfred was berated by the wife of a swineherd for letting her loaves (or ‘cakes’) burn. In any event, he did draw fresh inspiration from somewhere. By early May 878 he had rallied enough of an army from the shires of Somerset, Wiltshire, and West Hampshire to rout a Danish force at Edington and put Guthrum under siege. The Danish king was probably as completely surprised as Alfred had been at another Wiltshire royal estate four months before. He surrendered and was baptized with thirty leading followers.
The final crisis
There is an obvious case for seeing Edington as a decisive victory. On 9 May 957 King Eadwig's council gathered there to issue a charter which (in a unique formula) invoked divine goodness to his ancestors (AS chart., S 646). It looks like an anniversary celebration. But the problem with making so much of a single battle is that Scandinavian assailants were often beaten and baptized elsewhere without much effect on their behaviour, let alone the entire national history of the victors. Guthrum's army was still intact enough to be ‘honoured with goods’ (ASC, s.a. 878), and to stage a leisurely withdrawal which for a whole year took it no further than Cirencester. But it did at last retire to East Anglia, which was now itself shared out, Guthrum becoming king with the baptismal name of Æthelstan. The crucial point about Edington was that it once and for all established that Wessex could not be so easily conquered as the other English kingdoms. The Danes did better to be content with what they had. Settlement released the steam from the second Danish army, as it had from the first.

Unfortunately, it was the way of the viking world that a third army was immediately at hand. After exploratory contact with Guthrum's army in the aftermath of Alfred's victory, its significant reaction was to transfer its attention to the continent. Its movements in the fragmenting Frankish empire over the next dozen years were duly noted by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as if in awareness that it might return. So, in late 892, it did. But there were major differences between the war that followed, anyway as described by the chronicle, and that of the 870s. The first was that the Danes found it harder to break into Wessex or west Mercia. Early in 893 they were within 10 miles of where they had been victorious just before Alfred's accession, but were beaten back and besieged on an islet in the Thames by an army under Alfred's son. In 877 they had had to be negotiated out of an occupied Exeter, but in 893 they took so long besieging it that the king came up with a relieving force. A second point was that this army was almost continuously shadowed by English troops. Even at Buttington, on the upper Severn, an alliance of West Saxons, Mercians, and Welsh bottled it up and drove it back to the Thames estuary. The cycle was repeated twice more all along the Anglo-Danish border. This time around, it was besieged English who sallied out to attack, Danes who were successfully blockaded. Their very ships became a wasting asset as a fortified bridge blocked their descent of the Lea in 895. The emerging impression, and it may not be much exaggerated, is of the hunters hunted. In the end, the third army gave up the struggle, as had the other two. The difference was that they had no new kingdom in lowland Britain to show for it. Those not accommodated among their predecessors in the north and east went back to Francia. If, as is likely, they formed the nucleus of the future duchy of Normandy, the English would one day hear from them again; but not before they had formed their own kingdom.
Military initiatives
The course of the 893–6 campaigns shows quite clearly that much had been done since the 870s to stiffen resistance. Historians isolate three military ‘reforms’ of Alfred as making all the difference. One, reported in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's annal for 893, is the division of the fyrd (‘militia’) into two ‘so that always half were at home and half on service’. Nothing is here said to imply an interchange of swords and ploughshares. It is not stated that the policy was new. But the arrangement does betray a cast of mind which will reappear in the next section. A second, with a special appeal to later patriots, was the king's naval initiative. The 896 annal is emphatic that he built ships to an enlarged sixty-oar design of his own. Presumably because of their very size and lack of manoeuvrability, they ran aground on their first outing, their crews incurring heavy losses from the ensuing struggle in the mud. The Anglo-Saxons, themselves the vikings of the post-Roman era, hardly needed lessons in the value of maritime operations. But in so far as the naval system of later Saxon England was certainly predicated on sixty-oared ships, Alfred was the father of an English navy.

Much the most important of Alfred's strategic departures, however, both in immediate effects and in longer-term results, was the third: the chain of forts around his kingdom, from Devon and Somerset to Sussex and Surrey, which is recorded in the Burghal Hidage. The hidage as it stands certainly dates from his son Edward's second decade. But it was no less clearly undergoing revision as it took its extant form. That Alfred initiated the scheme it attests is strongly implied by what Asser says and generally agreed by archaeologists. The scheme provided a fortified site, whether built more or less from scratch or reused Roman or Iron Age defences, within 20 miles of every West Saxon settlement, and in particular along Wessex's coastal or riverine perimeter. Each was allotted a number of ‘hides’, which meant in this context the service of an equivalent number of individuals on the building, maintenance, and defence of the wall. One version supplies a formula to calculate the personnel needed for any given length of wall; it is a striking and now famous fact that the defensive circuit of most (if not all) of the list's sites is about what the manpower yielded by the hidage formula would have covered. Some of these places look like emergency refuges that could never have been viable settlements. Others, like Winchester, seem to have been planned as the towns they did become. Upwards of 27,000 men, if the figures are credible, could be mobilized to implement the scheme. One need look no further for the reason why the Danes of the 890s made so little headway in Alfred's kingdom; nor for proof of his organizing ability.
The making of England
Alfred's success also had a political dimension. The mangled Mercian kingdom was handled with both firmness and tact. Its ruler from the early 880s was Æthelred, who was in no formal context allowed the title of king. But he did not always have to defer to his ‘lord’ King Alfred, whose daughter he married and who (it is said) gave him responsibility for the long-since Mercian town of London. Æthelred played a crucial role in the fighting of 893–6, not just in defence of Mercia but in reinforcing his brother-in-law Edward. Asser gives the outline of a complex web of alliances that brought most Welsh kings into Alfred's camp; like Æthelred, Welshmen fought at Buttington. Less immediately productive feelers were put out towards the north, to the Danes of what is now Yorkshire and perhaps to the community of St Cuthbert. But Alfred's most important (or best recorded) negotiations were with Guthrum. A text of some date after Edington and before Guthrum's death in 890 traces a frontier between their peoples and fixes terms for their relationship in matters of homicide, trade, and fugitives. Importantly, it was a treaty of equals. But here Alfred also took a major further step. He headed ‘the councillors of all the English people [Angelcynnes]’ (English Historical Documents, 1.380).

Likewise, at the time when London was ceded to Æthelred, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle asserts of Alfred that ‘all Angelcyn except what was under subjection to the Danes submitted to him’ (ASC, s.a. 886). Some of his charters now called him ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’, the point presumably being that he was lord of (Anglian) west Mercians as well as West Saxons. But ‘Angelcyn’ has a deeper resonance than that. In Alfred's writings of the 890s, it in effect translated Bede's gens Anglorum—‘the English people’. Asser went further yet (perhaps beyond even the king's vision) in hailing him as ‘ruler of all Christians of the island of Britain’. The priority in the wars of the 870s and in the burghal system of the 880s was of course the defence of the kingdom he inherited. But his success, in combination with that of Danish armies everywhere else, opened the road to a hegemony of which his grandfather could only dream; and rule of ‘the English’ had all the ideological impetus of Bede's great history of how that people had first come to God. From the near disaster of 878 to the vision of the 890s was a transformation to stir the blood, even had it not led on to the creation of a state that still endures.
Government: administration and household
Part of the foundation for Alfred's military success thus lay in skilled administration. The hide, key component of the burghal scheme, was, with its Celtic and continental counterparts, the portent of pre-bureaucratic rule in Europe. It involved sophisticated assessment of the resources in men and materials extractable from units of land: a calculation that in its earlier days can only have been done in the head. Totals, multiples, and fractions of hidage measured services due and payments owed. The indispensable skill of early medieval government was mental arithmetic. Alfred's government was good at it. The symmetry in his will's disposal of money between his family, churchmen, and magnates bears out Asser's highly coloured account of the allocation of his revenue and of the duty roster in his household. Here (as in Charlemagne's will, known to Asser, so presumably to Alfred, through its quotation by Einhard, the emperor's biographer), is a complex parcelling of labour and reward whose logic stands out when put down on paper in figures. Of the sums bequeathed by his will, half is split between his two sons. The other half is distributed in a ratio of 9:6:5 among his close family, secular following, and Christian causes respectively. It is the same sort of scheme as Asser describes, the main difference being that Christian causes got an eighth rather than Asser's half (though the four causes that divide God's share are similar in the will and in Asser).

Asser's record of the cyclical allotment of household tasks may also err on the visionary side: it owes something to the account of Solomon's arrangements in the book of Kings. But it also corresponds to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's report of Alfred's fyrd organization; and a post-conquest source preserves a garbled account of how the care of the royal chapel and relics was arranged in triple shifts, just like the deployment of Alfred's retainers according to Asser. That there were some important changes in the royal household appears from the witness lists of his family's charters. ‘Priests’ are unusually evident already under his father and brothers, and in Edward's early years they become plentiful; among their names are those said by Asser to have been Alfred's recruits. The assumption would be that they served the king's chapel and ‘school’.
Resources and enrichment
Two other aspects of Alfred's government come in here. One is his accumulating wealth. A total of 2000 silver pounds is distributed by his will. This is only what he was free to bequeath, but is even so twenty-five times the size of the period's largest known silver hoard. A king's wealth in the early middle ages might have a variety of sources. Alfred must have been milking his erstwhile Scandinavian enemies as they had once milked him. Some of his south-western forts were well placed to exploit the local tin, lead, and silver mines. Rents from ‘borough’ tenures would be a main source of revenue for his successors. Clearing vikings from the western seas fostered commerce that paid toll at West Saxon ports. In any event, the change in Alfred's political fortunes is vividly revealed by his coinage. In the 870s it was heavily debased, like that of Mercia with which it was closely linked. There is then (one would think after Edington, though numismatists incline to date it a bit before) recovery to a real silver standard, and from about the time of the 886 ‘submission’ a silver penny heavier than any before.

This evidence for Alfred's wealth is in marked counterpoint to a feature of his government noted in the discussion of sources: the paucity of his charters. Some of the blame for the dearth must lie with the decline of learning that Alfred bemoaned: west midland churches, home of several of the scholars he enrolled, had a relatively healthier charter output. By contrast, Kent, the source of most earlier ninth-century documents, was entering a phase when its clerks were evidently unable to draft them properly. But there may also be a foretaste of his son's reign: after a dozen charters in Edward's early years, most linked with Winchester, the series ceases altogether until after his death—a development with no parallel in Anglo-Saxon history. Particularly suggestive is that many of the charters of Alfred and Edward are of the same type: exchanges of lands with churches, from which the churches were far from obviously gainers. One remarkable transaction (AS chart., S 354) saw Alfred deferring the implementation of his father's bequests to Winchester in return for letting them off the share of the ‘tribute that our whole people was accustomed to pay the pagans’ in the 870s; then allowing the bequest to go ahead after 879 in exchange for a large (and highly strategic) estate along the northern scarp of the Berkshire downs. Æthelwulf's one-time bequest was also just about all the land that Winchester got from Alfred's will. According to Asser, he founded a monastery at Athelney and a convent at Shaftesbury. But Athelney was always a rather marginal foundation and Shaftesbury came to regard its true founder as Alfred's granddaughter-in-law. Overall, the evidence for Alfred's husbanding of his resources creates the suspicion that when Asser hymned his generosity to God, it was what he (and perhaps the king) wished were possible, not what was done in fact.
Law making
The king's law book is quite another matter. Here, the laws laid down by Alfred and his councillors are followed by those in the name of his predecessor Ine, and prefaced by a translation of those given by God to Moses. With one or two important exceptions, Alfred's own laws are, as he claimed in his preface, traditional both in subject matter and expression. In several ways they are more like the very earliest Anglo-Saxon legislation than Ine's, and they look like statements of custom only marginally, if at all, adjusted. But the whole of Alfred's law book was greater than the sum of its parts. By appending Ine's code, despite the contradictions arising from his own revisions of it, he highlighted the distinguished legislative record of his dynasty and of his people. In his preface, he also acknowledged the inspiration of laws made in the time of Æthelberht of Kent and Offa of Mercia: the former was the first English king to be baptized and his code is extant; the latter received the legates of Pope Gregory's successor in 786, and the edict they issued may well be what Alfred had in mind. Crucial moments in English relations with God were subtly evoked at the same time as tribute was paid to other than West Saxon law makers. But in addition, West Saxon and other English legislation is juxtaposed with that of God himself; and the linking passage in Alfred's preface is so constructed as to bring out the continuity as well as the contrasts between the dispensations of the present and of Sinai. What is at least implied is that the laws of Angelcyn are themselves laws of God, as befitted those of another ‘chosen people’ that had received its own ‘land of promise’ in return for its obedience to the divine will. The ideological charge inherent in the idea of Angelcyn is given new and legally binding force.

That explains the most important innovation amid so much that was traditional in Alfred's laws: the opening clauses on the keeping of ‘oath and pledge’. A code of Edward just a few years later shows that oath and pledge was something sworn by ‘the whole people’, and that it covered not just fidelity to the king but obedience to his law and God's: criminals were perjured. From the final years of Alfred's reign come the first hints of the fierce criminal jurisdiction enforced by his successors, and itself the germ of the cruel notion of felony: that all serious crime is in effect treasonable. Such severity was condign. God's law for God's people deserved no less. It was with Alfred's law making and its ideology that English law began to become a system set apart from every other.
The reading and writing of books
Asser's last chapter describes Alfred's dealings with his judicial officers. They were to remedy their shortcomings by learning sapientia (‘wisdom’), which was to say that they were to learn to read, as the king had. ‘Wisdom’ did not mean knowledge of the law book: Asser does not mention it. The language used in this chapter is the same as that which earlier describes Alfred's own quest for a sapientia that is unambiguously the wisdom of Solomon. Solomon was wise because he knew that wisdom itself was more important than the good things of this world, which flowed only from knowledge of their strictly relative value. To be wise was to adopt God's priorities, as revealed above all in the Bible. That idea of wisdom observably drove Alfred's programme of spiritual and cultural revival and inspired his own astonishing writings.

These writings, like the law book, are not described by Asser, who was writing in 893 and who does refer to a version of Pope Gregory's Dialogues by Werferth, bishop of Worcester (which is extant). Presumably, then, most of the Alfredian œuvre was the work of his last years. The programme's objectives are set out in a preface to a translation of Gregory's Pastoral Rule, whose relatively unevolved style suggests that, apart perhaps from the law book, it was Alfred's first work. The argument (English Historical Documents, 1.818) is that learning had once flourished among Angelcyn, who as a result ‘prospered in warfare and wisdom’. Now it had declined to the point that very few could render Latin into English; and ‘remember what temporal punishments came upon us when we neither loved [wisdom] … nor allowed it to others’. The critical issue here is not whether Alfred drew a blacker picture of contemporary learning than was truly warranted, but that he was looking back to the golden outlines of the one drawn by Bede. For Alfred, as implicitly for Bede, it was the wisdom and so warfare of all Englishmen that was at stake. The English really would go the way of the Britons and Israelites if, like Britons and Israelites, they forgot what God expected of them. The revival of learning was as badly needed as the building of forts.

The preface shows how Alfred proposed to set about this revival. An initial stage was to establish a court of scholars, as Charlemagne had; and the preface acknowledges the help of four visitors. One was Asser himself; the way that his account of his summons follows the lines of Charlemagne's recruitment of Alcuin (d. 804) in Alcuin's life suggests that such parallels were in the air. Another was Alfred's archbishop, Plegemund, like Werferth a product of the evidently superior Mercian sphere of learning. But the two most important actually were from the Carolingian realm: John the Old Saxon who, as such, is likely to have known what the Carolingian Renaissance did for the development of Saxon and High German vernaculars; and Grimbald of St Bertin, who was sent to the king by Fulk, archbishop of Rheims, and who should thus have been conscious of the profuse writings of Fulk's predecessor, Hincmar (d. 882), on Frankish law, government, and history.

Another Carolingian expedient was an educational system. But Alfred's differed in three ways from Charlemagne's. First, the emphasis was on a school at court itself rather than in the kingdom's major churches. Second, what is attested for Charlemagne only by later stories is stated by Asser and implied by Alfred's preface: children of lesser as well as noble birth were schooled there. And third, above all, schooling was to begin in the vernacular, not for its own sake but, as Alfred said, to lay foundations on which Latin learning could then be built in those continuing to ‘higher rank’. There is some reason to think that the ‘Alfredian Renaissance’, like its Carolingian counterpart, went part of the way towards producing a cadre of educated aristocrats. More obvious was an effect somewhat other than that intended: the vernacular received such a boost that English now became a language of prose literature, with all that was to mean for its survival when its place was taken for three centuries after 1066 by Latin and French.

The most obvious outcome of Alfred's movement, however, was Alfredian literature. Asser finds his niche here. First and foremost a work of insular learning, the life was also influenced by Carolingian writings on kingship, including Einhard and the ‘mirror of princes’ by the Irishman Sedulius Scottus (fl. 840×51–860×74). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, though not very like the Frankish royal annals, may derive general inspiration from their Rheims continuation by Hincmar. Neither of these works comes in the category of what Alfred says that he was having translated as ‘books necessary for all men to know’ (English Historical Documents, 1.819). The Pastoral Rule, whose preface lays out his whole scheme, clearly did. So, presumably, did two complementary works of history that are not attributed to the king himself and were probably by court scholars: a translation of Orosius's History Against Pagans, which gives world history a strongly confessional slant; and one (by a Mercian) of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, where the underlying thesis of the Pastoral Rule preface receives full expression. Equally significant are artefacts. The ‘Alfred jewel’ was found in Somerset in 1693; it bears the legend ‘+AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN’ (‘Alfred had me made’) , is in the style of the court atelier, and shows a figure most plausibly interpreted as Christ personifying wisdom. A no less characteristic piece that could be from the same workshop was a sword found at Abingdon in 1874; the hilt is adorned with the evangelist symbols, as befitted a weapon for God's soldiers. A third such work is the Fuller brooch, its iconography very clearly linked with ideas conveyed by Alfredian literature.

But important and fascinating as are all these works, they hardly compare with the record of the Carolingian Renaissance. What gives Alfred's movement its unique distinction is his own part in it. No Carolingian king is known to have put quill to parchment; Einhard explicitly says that Charlemagne was unable to do so. But the four books which have a preface or epilogue that ascribes them to Alfred share a consistent (if perceptibly developing) vocabulary and syntax. To argue that Alfred may not actually have written these books is to split hairs; more certainly than any other work of Europe's middle ages, they bear the impress of a single, royal, mind. The two that most merit notice are the Gregory and the Boethius. The first is a fairly literal translation of Gregory's treatise on the life and tasks of the bishop. But it has been observed that the line between episcopal and secular government, already eroded by Gregory's regular references to Old Testament kings (especially Solomon), is further blurred by Alfred. A book about how to be a bishop becomes one about how to be a king. The king's pursuit of learning and wish to impart it to others is thereby clarified. That was just what Gregory expected of bishops.

But much of the Pastoral Rule is devoted to the officeholder's besetting sin: the temptations of worldly pomp. Gregory's remedy was contemplation of true, other-worldly, values. It may well be that Alfred's other works were not ‘for all men to know’, but (as implied by a manuscript transmission more restricted than the Gregory) studies for personal use. Augustine's Soliloquies is professedly contemplative; the psalms were the staple of monastic meditation. As for the Boethius: what could be a better reminder of the transitoriness of glory than a book written by a fallen minister under sentence of death? The main strands picked out by the justly intensive study given to Alfred's Boethius are its debt to Carolingian (even perhaps Welsh) commentaries on the Consolation, which is clear enough but can be exaggerated; and the realism, even secularity, of Alfred's paraphrase compared with the original. Alfred of course wrote as a Germanic aristocrat with a full appreciation of power's imperatives. But his objective remains a focus on a good greater than power. Where Boethius turned a nice Hellenistic phrase about honour being given not to virtues by office but to office by virtue, Alfred is moved to the Solomonic observation that power is wisdom's reward. In a sense, therefore, Alfred's books hold the answer to why he wrote them. They instructed him to do so. Gregory the Great was, after God, the first maker of Angelcyn in that he was the architect of its conversion. Would-be kings of Angelcyn must rule and live as he had taught.
Significance and character
Alfred died on 26 October 899. He was barely fifty. His successor was his son Edward, though only after a challenge from Æthelwold, son of Æthelred, who called in the Danes of the north and east. about 901 Edward buried his father in the New Minster which he was founding at Winchester; the story went that Alfred planned the foundation and that his ghost insisted that he be moved there from the cathedral, where he had first been buried. It is needless to endorse all that has been thought of Alfred as history transmuted into myth. The historical record plainly establishes that he was among the most remarkable rulers in the annals of human government. Posterity required what it seeks of any national hero: a figure matching the preoccupations of the moment. The late medieval Alfred founds a college, like other monarchs of that age. The sixteenth-century Alfred's fosterage of vernacular devotion led Archbishop Parker, Queen Elizabeth's first archbishop of Canterbury, to collect Alfredian manuscripts and publish Asser: an early step in Alfred's climb to an eminence where ‘the Great’ follows his name almost as automatically as in that of Charlemagne. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Alfred of course builds ships (and makes clocks): ‘Rule Britannia’ was written for Alfred: a Masque in 1740 (with works by James Thomson and David Mallet and music by Thomas Arne). The Alfred of E. A. Freeman in the Dictionary of National Biography did more than save, build, and enlighten the English nation. An embodiment of Victorian virtues, he met ‘with triumph and disaster’, and treated ‘those two impostors just the same’. The story of Alfred and the cakes is one of the best known in English history.

Yet there is more to all this than a need to father present values on past heroes. Most of the Alfreds of later ages are to be found in the sources. The encomium nearest his own time, that of his kinsman Æthelweard, stresses just what Asser singled out as abnormal: his learning. Rather than reject the Victorian icon, as modern scholars so typically have, its pigments should be explored. That Alfred was out of the ordinary is argued by the amount that is known, and put beyond doubt by what is known of his own mind. The clue to the phenomenon of Alfred lies squarely in its extreme rarity. When stories like Asser's were told elsewhere in the ninth and tenth centuries, it was in saints' lives like that of the eccentric Count Gerald of Aurillac. Asser's is not a saint's life, because Alfred chose to be less (or more) than a saint. But his biography testifies to the pressures that might have made him one. Throughout the Carolingian era, intellectuals framed a programme for secular life which, Einhard apart, made scant concessions to the norms of the battlefield or bedroom. The laymen who took it on board needed upbringings as ambiguous as Alfred's perhaps was; they were predictably few and strange. Alfred attained the standards of the intelligentsia in that he wrote books. But the culture of classical and patristic Rome was not easily reconciled with that of the northern warrior, to which he was also called, and which was at a premium in the prolonged crisis of his reign. The resulting tensions readily explain the disciplinary bodily affliction for which he prayed. Yet Alfred absorbed those tensions. The resilient intellectual in politics who could glimpse the political potential of Bede's ideal of Englishness also fathered five children. And it was to Ealhswith that, in an unmistakably personal touch, he bequeathed the places of his birth and of his two greatest victories.

Patrick Wormald
Sources

Asser's Life of King Alfred: together with the ‘Annals of Saint Neots’ erroneously ascribed to Asser, ed. W. H. Stevenson (1904); repr. with a supplementary article by D. Whitelock (1959) · ASC, s.a. 853–901 · English historical documents, 1, ed. D. Whitelock (1955), no. 33 · F. Liebermann, ed., Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols. (Halle, 1903–16), vol. 1, pp. 16–129 · AS chart., S 217–23, 287, 319, 342a–357, 1202–3, 1275–9, 1415–16, 1441–2, 1445, 1507–8, 1513, 1627–8, 1652, 1819 · H. Sweet, ed., King Alfred's West Saxon version of Gregory's ‘Pastoral care’ (1871) · W. Sedgefield, ed. and trans., King Alfred's version of the ‘Consolations’ of Boethius: done into modern English (1900) · J. Bately, ed., The Old English Orosius (1980) · Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and other contemporary sources, ed. and trans. S. Keynes and M. Lapidge (1983) [incl. trans. of all major sources] · D. Hinton, Catalogue of the Anglo-Saxon ornamental metalwork, 700–1100, in the department of antiquities, Ashmolean Museum (1974) · F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn (1971) · J. Campbell, ed., The Anglo-Saxons (1982) · C. Plummer, The life and times of Alfred the Great (1902) · A. P. Smyth, Alfred the Great (1995) · D. N. Dumville, ‘The Ætheling: a study in Anglo-Saxon constitutional history’, Anglo-Saxon England, 8 (1979), 1–33 · P. A. Stafford, ‘The king's wife in Wessex, 800–1066’, Past and Present, 91 (1981), 3–27 · S. Keynes, ‘The control of Kent in the ninth century’, Early Medieval Europe, 2 (1993), 111–32 · J. L. Nelson, ‘Reconstructing a royal family: reflections on Alfred, from Asser’, People and places in northern Europe, 500–1600: essays in honour of Peter Hayes Sawyer, ed. I. Wood and N. Lund, [another edn] (1991), 47–66 · D. Hinton, Alfred's kingdom (1977) · D. Hill and A. Rumble, eds., The defence of Wessex: the Burghal Hidage and Anglo-Saxon fortifications (1996) · N. P. Brooks, ‘England in the ninth century: the crucible of defeat’, TRHS, 5th ser., 29 (1979), 1–20 · D. N. Dumville, Wessex and England from Alfred to Edgar (1992) · R. Abels, ‘King Alfred's peace-making strategies with the vikings’, Haskins Society Journal, 3 (1991), 23–34 · J. Maddicott, ‘Trade, industry, and the wealth of King Alfred’, Past and Present, 123 (1989), 3–51 · J. Maddicott, R. Balzaretti, and J. L. Nelson, ‘Trade, industry, and the wealth of King Alfred: debate’, Past and Present, 135 (1992), 142–88 · M. A. S. Blackburn and D. N. Dumville, eds., Kings, currency and alliances: the history and coinage of southern England in the ninth century (1998) · S. Keynes, ‘The West Saxon charters of King Æthelwulf and his sons’, EngHR, 109 (1994), 1109–49 · J. M. Wallace–Hadrill, ‘The Franks and the English in the ninth century: some common historical interests’, Early medieval history (1975), 201–16 · J. Bately, ‘The compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 60 BC to AD 890: vocabulary as evidence’, PBA, 64 (1978), 93–129 [1980 for 1978] · J. Campbell, ‘Asser's Life of Alfred’, The inheritance of historiography, ed. C. Holdsworth and T. P. Wiseman (1986), 115–35 · A. Scharer, ‘The writing of history at King Alfred's court’, Early Medieval Europe, 5 (1996), 177–206 · A. Frantzen, King Alfred (1986) · J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic kingship in England and on the continent (1971) · D. A. Bullough, ‘The educational tradition in England from Alfred to Ælfric: teaching utriusque linguae’, Settimane di studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull' Alto Medioevo, 19 (1972), 453–94 · P. Szarmach, ed., Studies in earlier Old English prose (1986), pt 1 · K. Sisam, ‘The publication of Alfred’s Pastoral care’, Studies in the history of Old English literature (1953), 140–47 · J. Bately, ‘Lexical evidence for the authorship of the prose psalms in the Paris psalter’, Anglo-Saxon England, 10 (1982), 69–95 · J. Wittig, ‘King Alfred's Boethius and its Latin sources: a reconsideration’, Anglo-Saxon England, 11 (1983), 157–98 · J. Nelson, ‘The political ideas of Alfred of Wessex’, Kings and kingship in medieval Europe, ed. A. J. Duggan (1993) · J. Nelson, ‘The Franks and the English in the ninth century revisited’, The preservation and transmission of Anglo-Saxon culture, ed. J. T. Rosenthal and P. Szarmach (1996) · D. Pratt, ‘The illnesses of King Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England, 30 (2001), 39–90 · Willelmi Malmesbiriensis monachi de gestis regum Anglorum, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series (1887–9), vol. 2, p. 124 · R. Abels, Alfred the Great (1998) · P. Kershaw, ‘Illness, power, and prayer in Asser's Life of King Alfred’, Early Medieval Europe, 10 (2001), 201–24
Archives

BL, Add. MS 47967 · CCC Cam., MS 173 | Bodl. Oxf., MS Hatton 20 [copy]


Likenesses

silver penny, 871–99, BM [see illus.] · miniature in historiated initial, 1321, BL, Cotton MS Claudius D.ii, fol. 5r · portrait, 17th cent. · Count Gleichen, statue, 1877, market place, Wantage · H. Thornycroft, statue, 1901, Winchester
Wealth at death

2000 silver pounds; also lands: will, S 1507; Domesday book
© Oxford University Press 2004–5
All rights reserved: see legal notice      Oxford University Press


Patrick Wormald, ‘Alfred (848/9-899)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/183, accessed 23 Sept 2005]

Alfred (848/9-899): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/1837 
Name Variation Ælfred 
Crowned*871 Winchester, England2,4 
HTML* 
THE LIFE OF KING ALFRED by Asser, Bishop of Sherborne
Anglo-Saxon Chronical

King Alfred Page

Catholic Encyclopedia
Alfred the Great

The Alfred Jewel
King Alfred the Great and Our Common LawHistory of the Monarchy

National Politics Web Guide
Alfred the Great
Famous Men of the Middle Ages
 

Family

Ealhswith Of Mercia Alswitha b. c 852, d. 904
Children

Last Edited23 Sep 2005

Citations

  1. [S338] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 8th ed., 1-14.
  2. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-15.
  3. [S218] Marlyn Lewis, Ancestry of Elizabeth of York.
  4. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-14.
  5. [S337] David Hume, History of England.
  6. [S336] Charles Dickens, A Child's History of England.
  7. [S376] Unknown editor, unknown short title.
  8. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-16.
  9. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 162-17.

Ealhswith Of Mercia Alswitha

F, #1652, b. circa 852, d. 904

Father*Æthelred Of Mercia1,2
Mother*Edburga of Mercia (?)1,3,2
Ealhswith Of Mercia Alswitha|b. c 852\nd. 904|p56.htm#i1652|Æthelred Of Mercia||p56.htm#i1653|Edburga of Mercia (?)||p173.htm#i5162|||||||Wigmund (?)||p330.htm#i9899||||

Birth*circa 852 Mercia, England1 
Marriage*868 Principal=Alfred of England "The Great"4,1,3 
Marriage869 Conflict=Alfred of England "The Great"2 
Death*904 Winchester1,2 
Burial* Hyde1 
Deathcirca 905 4,3 
DNB* Ealhswith (d. 902), consort of Alfred, king of the West Saxons from 871 and of the Anglo-Saxons from 886, was the daughter of Æthelred Mucel, ealdorman of the ‘Gaini’ (presumably an old tribal group of the Mercians), and his wife, Eadburh, who, according to Alfred's biographer Asser, was a member of the Mercian royal family. She had a brother, an ealdorman named Æthelwulf, whose appearance in a charter of 897 confirms the siblings' Mercian royal pedigree (AS chart., S 1442). In 868 she married Alfred (848/9-899), at that time apparently regarded as ‘heir-apparent’ to his brother Æthelred, king of the West Saxons (r. 865–71). The Mucel who appears in two charters of that year in company with West Saxon dignitaries was probably her father (AS chart., S 340 and 1201).

In marked and curious contrast to her husband, the best-attested of all the Anglo-Saxon kings, Ealhswith is very obscure in the sources. Asser never names her explicitly, and, in accordance with what he says was the West Saxon custom of the time, she was apparently never called ‘queen’; nor does she appear as a witness to any of Alfred's extant charters. The couple had three daughters and two sons who survived into adulthood. Their first-born child, Æthelflæd (d. 918), married Æthelred (d. 911), ealdorman and ruler of the Mercians from at least 883. Another daughter, Æthelgifu, was made abbess of his own foundation of Shaftesbury by her father. Ælfthryth married Baudouin (II), count of Flanders, at some time after 893. Of the two sons, Edward (the Elder) (d. 924) succeeded his father as king of the Anglo-Saxons. The youngest child, Æthelweard, was well educated at the royal court, received generous provision in his father's will, attested several of his brother's charters, and died on 16 October, probably in 920.

It was probably on her own initiative, and perhaps after Alfred's death in 899, that Ealhswith founded the convent of St Mary at Winchester, usually called Nunnaminster. The bounds of her land in Winchester, which survive in a tenth-century addition to an earlier prayer book which came into Nunnaminster's possession, probably describe the site of the foundation, to the east of Edward's New Minster, founded in 901. The New Minster's Liber vitae, compiled c.1030, describes her as Nunnaminster's builder. Construction was probably not completed until c.908, if the tower which (according to the chronicler Æthelweard) Archbishop Plegmund then dedicated belonged to Nunnaminster.

In his will (AS chart., S 1507), Alfred left to his wife the highly symbolic bequest of three key estates: Edington (Wiltshire), the site of one great victory over the vikings; Lambourn (Berkshire), at or near the site of another—Ashdown; and Wantage (Berkshire), his birthplace. These were all part of Alfred's ‘bookland’, which, in order to ensure that they remained in the king's family, could be purchased by any of his male kin during Ealhswith's lifetime, and would pass to his direct male descendants on her death: all three were still royal estates in the tenth century. Ealhswith died on 5 December 902, and was buried, with Alfred, by their son Edward, in the newly consecrated New Minster, Winchester. She is commemorated in two manuscripts of an early tenth-century metrical calendar as ‘the true and dear lady of the English’ (McGurk, 110), finally but posthumously sharing the honour so recently won by her husband.

Marios Costambeys
Sources

Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and other contemporary sources, ed. and trans. S. Keynes and M. Lapidge (1983) · M. Biddle and D. J. Keene, ‘Winchester in the eleventh and twelfth centuries’, Winchester in the early middle ages: an edition and discussion of the Winton Domesday, ed. M. Biddle, Winchester Studies, 1 (1976), 241–448 · S. J. Ridyard, The royal saints of Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th ser., 9 (1988) · S. Keynes, ed., The Liber vitae of the New Minster and Hyde Abbey, Winchester (Copenhagen, 1996) · AS chart., S 340, 1201, 1442, 1507, 1560 · P. McGurk, ‘The metrical calendar of Hampson: a new edition’, Analecta Bollandiana, 104 (1986), 79–125
© Oxford University Press 2004–5
All rights reserved: see legal notice      Oxford University Press


Marios Costambeys, ‘Ealhswith (d. 902)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39226, accessed 24 Sept 2005]

Ealhswith (d. 902): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/392265 
Name Variation Ealhswith of Gainsborough (?)1 

Family

Alfred of England "The Great" b. 849, d. 26 Oct 899
Children

Last Edited24 Sep 2005

Citations

  1. [S218] Marlyn Lewis, Ancestry of Elizabeth of York.
  2. [S338] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 8th ed., 1-14.
  3. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-14.
  4. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-15.
  5. [S376] Unknown editor, unknown short title.
  6. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-16.

Æthelred Of Mercia

M, #1653

Marriage* Principal=Edburga of Mercia (?)1,2 
Name Variation Ethelred Mucil (?)1 
Title* Ealdorman of the Gaini3 

Family

Edburga of Mercia (?)
Child

Last Edited21 Nov 2004

Citations

  1. [S218] Marlyn Lewis, Ancestry of Elizabeth of York.
  2. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-14.
  3. [S338] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 8th ed., 1-14.

Æthelwulf of Wessex1

M, #1654, b. between 794 and 800, d. 13 January 858

Father*Ecgberht of Wessex2,3,4 b. 775, d. a 19 Nov 838
Mother*Rædburh (?)2,3,4 b. c 788
Æthelwulf of Wessex|b. bt 794 - 800\nd. 13 Jan 858|p56.htm#i1654|Ecgberht of Wessex|b. 775\nd. a 19 Nov 838|p56.htm#i1657|Rædburh (?)|b. c 788|p56.htm#i1658|Ealhmund O. Kent|b. c 758|p56.htm#i1659|Anonyma (?)||p370.htm#i11098|Bristric (?)|b. 800|p213.htm#i6376|Ethelburga o. M. (?)||p213.htm#i6377|

Marriage* Bride=Osburh (?)2,3,4 
Birth*between 794 and 800 1 
Birthcirca 806 Wessex, England3 
Divorce*853 Principal=Osburh (?)1 
Marriage*1 October 856 Verberie-sur-Oise, France, 1st=Judith of France3,1 
Death*13 January 858 2,3,4 
Burial* Stambridge, but removed to Winchester3 
Hume* THIS PRINCE had neither the abilities nor the vigour of his father; and was better qualified for governing a convent than a kingdom.n He began his reign with making a partition of his dominions, and delivering over to his eldest son, Athelstan, the new conquered provinces of Essex, Kent, and Sussex. But no inconveniencies seem to have arisen from this partition; as the continual terror of the Danish invasions prevented all domestic dissention. A fleet of these ravagers, consisting of thirty-three sail, appeared at Southampton; but were repulsed with loss by Wolfchhere, governor of the neighbouring county.o The same year, Aethelhelm, governor of Dorsetshire, routed another band which had disembarked at Portsmouth; but he obtained the victory after a furious engagement, and he bought it with the loss of his life.p Next year, the Danes made several inroads into England; and fought battles, or rather skirmishes, in East-Anglia and Lindesey and Kent; where, though they were sometimes repulsed and defeated, they always obtained their end, of committing spoil upon the country, and carrying off their booty. They avoided coming to a general engagement, which was not suited to their plan of operations. Their vessels were small, and ran easily up the creeks and rivers; where they drew them ashore, and having formed an entrenchment round them, which they guarded with part of their number, the remainder scattered themselves every where, and carrying off the inhabitants and cattle and goods, they hastened to their ships, and quickly disappeared. If the military force of the county were assembled, (for there was no time for troops to march from a distance) the Danes either were able to repulse them and to continue their ravages with impunity, or they betook themselves to their vessels; and setting sail, suddenly invaded some distant quarter, which was not prepared for their reception. Every part of England was held in continual alarm; and the inhabitants of one county durst not give assistance to those of another, lest their own families and property should in the mean time be exposed by their absence to the fury of these barbarous ravagers.q All orders of men were involved in this calamity; and the priests and monks, who had been commonly spared in the domestic quarrels of the Heptarchy, were the chief objects on which the Danish idolaters exercised their rage and animosity. Every season of the year was dangerous; and the absence of the enemy was no reason why any man could esteem himself a moment in safety.
These incursions had now become almost annual; when the Danes, encouraged by their successes against France as well as England (851.for both kingdoms were alike exposed to this dreadful calamity), invaded the land in so numerous a body, as seemed to threaten it with universal subjection. But the English, more military than the Britons, whom, a few centuries before, they had treated with like violence, rouzed themselves with a vigour proportioned to the exigency. Ceorle, governor of Devonshire, sought a battle with one body of the Danes at Wiganburgh,r and put them to rout with great slaughter. King Athelstan attacked another at sea near Sandwich, sunk nine of their ships, and put the rest to flight.s A body of them however, ventured, for the first time, to take up winter-quarters in England; and receiving in the spring a strong reinforcement of their countrymen in 350 vessels, they advanced from the Isle of Thanet, where they had stationed themselves; burnt the cities of London and Canterbury; and having put to flight Brichtric, who now governed Mercia, under the title of King, they marched into the heart of Surrey, and laid every place waste around them. Ethelwolf, impelled by the urgency of the danger, marched against them, at the head of the West-Saxons; and carrying with him his second son, Ethelbald, gave them battle at Okely, and gained a bloody victory over them. This advantage procured but a short respite to the English. The Danes still maintained their settlement in the Isle of Thanet; and being attacked by Ealher and Huda, governors of Kent and Surrey, though defeated in the beginning of the action,853. they finally repulsed the assailants, and killed both the governors. They removed thence to the Isle of Shepey; where they took up their winter-quarters, that they might farther extend their devastation and ravages.
This unsettled state of England hindered not Ethelwolf from making a pilgrimage to Rome; whither he carried his fourth, and favourite son, Alfred, then only six years of age.t He passed there a twelvemonth in exercises of devotion; and failed not in that most essential part of devotion, liberality to the church of Rome. Besides giving presents to the more distinguished ecclesiastics; he made a perpetual grant of three hundred mancusesu a year to that see; one third to support the lamps of St. Peter's, another those of St. Paul's, a third to the pope himself.w In his return home, he married Judith, daughter of the emperor, Charles the Bald; but on his landing in England, he met with an opposition, which he little looked for.
His eldest son, Athelstan, being dead; Ethelbald, his second, who had assumed the government, formed, in concert with many of the nobles, the project of excluding his father from a throne, which his weakness and superstition seem to have rendered him so ill-qualified to fill. The people were divided between the two princes; and a bloody civil war, joined to all the other calamities under which the English laboured, appeared inevitable; when Ethelwolf had the facility to yield to the greater part of his son's pretensions. He made with him a partition of the kingdom; and taking to himself the eastern part, which was always at that time esteemed the least considerable, as well as the most exposed,x he delivered over to Ethelbald the sovereignty of the western. Immediately after, he summoned the states of the whole kingdom, and with the same facility conferred a perpetual and important donation on the church.
The ecclesiastics, in those days of ignorance, made rapid advances in the acquisition of power and grandeur; and inculcating the most absurd and most interested doctrines, though they sometimes met, from the contrary interests of the laity, with an opposition, which it required time and address to overcome, they found no obstacle in their reason or understanding. Not content with the donations of land made them by the Saxon princes and nobles, and with temporary oblations from the devotion of the people, they had cast a wishful eye on a vast revenue, which they claimed as belonging to them, by a sacred and indefeizable title. However little versed in the scriptures, they had been able to discover, that, under the Jewish law, a tenth of all the produce of land was conferred on the priest-hood; and forgetting, what they themselves taught, that the moral part only of that law was obligatory on Christians, they insisted, that this donation conveyed a perpetual property, inherent by divine right in those who officiated at the altar. During some centuries, the whole scope of sermons and homilies was directed to this purpose; and one would have imagined, from the general tenor of these discourses, that all the practical parts of Christianity were comprized in the exact and faithful payment of tythes to the clergy.y Encouraged by their success in inculcating these doctrines; they ventured farther than they were warranted even by the Levitical law, and pretended to draw the tenth of all industry, merchandize, wages of labourers, and pay of soldiers;z nay, some canonists went so far as to affirm, that the clergy were entitled to the tythe of the profits, made by courtezans in the exercise of their profession.a Though parishes had been instituted in England by Honorius, archbishop of Canterbury, near two centuries before,b the ecclesiastics had never yet been able to get possession of the tythes: they therefore seized the present favourable opportunity of making that acquisition; when a weak, superstitious prince filled the throne, and when the people, discouraged by their losses from the Danes, and terrified with the fear of future invasions, were susceptible of any impression, which bore the appearance of religion.c So meritorious was this concession deemed by the English, that, trusting entirely to supernatural assistance, they neglected the ordinary means of safety; and agreed, even in the present desperate extremity, that the revenues of the churc[h should be exempted from all burthens, though imposed for national defence and security.d
5 
DNB* Æthelwulf (d. 858), king of the West Saxons, was the son of Ecgberht (d. 839), king of the West Saxons. His mother's identity is unknown; no siblings are recorded. He was sent by his father to take control of Kent in 825. In 838 Ecgberht held an assembly at Kingston, Surrey: Æthelwulf was acknowledged as Ecgberht's heir, and perhaps (the evidence is oblique) received royal consecration from episcopal hands, in return for concessions to Canterbury and other churches. When Ecgberht died in 839, Æthelwulf succeeded, giving his eldest (and perhaps adult) son, Æthelstan, ‘the kingdom of Kent, of Essex, of Surrey and of Sussex’ (ASC, s.a. 836). Æthelwulf's wife was Osburh (fl. 839), who as far as is known bore all his recorded offspring. Her ancestry was traced back to ‘Goths and Jutes’, who had received control of the Isle of Wight from their royal Cerdicing kinsmen. Æthelwulf married Osburh well before 839—their second son, Æthelbald, subscribed charters from c.840. Their daughter Æthelswith married the Mercian king Burgred in 853. Four of their five sons successively became kings of Wessex: Æthelbald (858–60), Æthelberht (860–65), Æthelred (865–71), and Alfred (871–99). In 856 Æthelwulf married Judith [see below], daughter of the Carolingian king Charles the Bald (823–877) of West Francia and his queen, Ermentrude (d. 869); whether Osburh had died or been repudiated is uncertain. Æthelwulf and Judith had no offspring and Æthelwulf died on 13 January 858.

Æthelwulf's reign has been relatively under-appreciated in modern scholarship. Yet he laid the foundations for Alfred's success. To the perennial problems of husbanding the kingdom's resources, containing conflicts within the royal family, and managing relations with neighbouring kingdoms, Æthelwulf found new as well as traditional answers. He consolidated old Wessex, and extended his reach over what is now Devon and Cornwall. He ruled Kent, working with the grain of its political community. He borrowed ideological props for his kingship from Mercians and Franks alike, and went to Rome, not to die there, like his predecessor Ine (as recalled in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's account of Æthelwulf's genealogy), but to return, as Charlemagne had, with enhanced prestige. Æthelwulf coped more effectively with Scandinavian attacks than did most contemporary rulers.
Æthelwulf and Kent and Mercia
Possibly himself descended from the kings of Kent, Æthelwulf oversaw the evolving association of Kent with Wessex rather than, as had formerly been the case, with Mercia. His sub-kingship of Kent is well documented in charters: in some, Ecgberht acted in Kent with his son's permission. The Rochester mint may have worked for son as well as father. Æthelwulf in turn established his son Æthelstan as sub-king of Kent, but exercised a more direct control over the sub-kingdom than Ecgberht had. Æthelstan, who attested as ‘king’ his father's charters for Kentish beneficiaries, apparently never issued charters or coins of his own. Æthelwulf visited Kent on several occasions: taking only a small retinue of West Saxons, he drew local Kentish nobles into his presence, and had them attest his Kentish charters. Æthelwulf, like Ecgberht, but unlike Kent's earlier Mercian overlords, had indigenous Kentish nobles as loyal ealdormen. For instance, Ealdorman Alhhere benefited directly from Æthelwulf's largess and also requested Æthelwulf's grant to a Kentish thegn of property at Canterbury. Already in 838, Kentish minster communities had chosen Æthelwulf ‘for protection and lordship’, and he had promised them freedom to elect their heads without interference from ‘any other party’: they were exchanging the archbishop of Canterbury's ‘protection’ for Æthelwulf's. Æthelwulf ran a Carolingian-style family firm of plural realms, held together by his own authority as father-king, and by the consent of the distinct élites. Increasingly heavy Scandinavian attacks convinced Kentishmen in halls and minsters, in countryside and town, that their best hope of security lay in West Saxon royal power. In Kent as elsewhere, local ealdormen had born the brunt, but in 850, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘King Athelstan and Ealdorman Alhhere destroyed a great host at Sandwich in Kent, captured nine ships and drove off the rest’ (ASC, s.a. 851). (Æthelstan may have died soon after this, his last recorded action.) Hardly coincidentally, Alhhere and Æthelstan came also in 850 to Wilton (in modern Wiltshire) and Æthelwulf granted the ealdorman a vast estate in Kent. Archbishops of Canterbury now remained firmly within the West Saxon orbit; and Canterbury housed the main mint for Æthelwulf's whole kingdom.

From the 820s, Mercian dominance south of the Thames had weakened. In 840 Ashdown, in the west of what is now Berkshire, was already under West Saxon control and the birth of Æthelwulf's youngest son, Alfred, at Wantage in 848 or 849 suggests West Saxon control there then. By 858 the whole shire was in West Saxon hands. King Berhtwulf of Mercia (r. 840–52) was Æthelwulf's close ally. Their moneyers co-operated. In 853 Æthelwulf was asked by Berhtwulf's successor Burgred (r. 852–74) and his witan ‘to help them bring the Welsh back into subjection’ (ASC, s.a. 854): a joint campaign was successful. That same year, Æthelwulf gave his daughter in marriage to Burgred, perhaps claiming a certain superiority over the new Mercian king. This kind of alliance was to continue under Æthelwulf's sons.
Æthelwulf in Wessex
Wessex remained the heart of Æthelwulf's kingdom: charters show him staying at, or summoning assemblies to, Wilton, Southampton (Hamtun), Edington, Dorchester, and Winchester. Æthelwulf's interest in Winchester, where his father was buried, and where Bishop Swithun was his appointee in 852–3, represented a shift of focus, only partially balanced by generous grants of a new shrine for St Aldhelm at Malmesbury and of land in what is now Somerset to his princeps Ealdorman Eanwulf. This area was to become the power base of Æthelwulf's second son, Æthelbald, as, later, of his youngest son, Alfred. Æthelwulf's grant to himself, dated 26 December 846, of the large estate at South Hams, in the west of modern Devon, reveals a clear strategy: as ‘bookland’, it would be available for him ‘to leave eternally to anyone whatever as it may be pleasing to me’ (AS chart., S 298). Æthelwulf would thence reward loyal followers and fund the establishment of West Saxon control in this frontier zone. The Hams charter, surviving as an original, was subscribed by ‘Æthelbald, king's son’, perhaps already endowed in Somerset. In a Kentish charter dating to 855, and attested by his third son, Æthelberht as ‘king’, Æthelwulf granted land near Rochester to his thegn Dunn ‘on account of the tithing of lands which … I have decided to do for some of my thegns’ (AS chart., S 315). This grant, dated in relation to Æthelwulf's ‘proceeding to Rome’, referred back to the ‘decimation’ mentioned by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under 855 (apparently correct for Kent, though West Saxon charters suggest 854): ‘King Æthelwulf booked the tenth part of all his land throughout all his kingdom’. Although much of the charter evidence is shaky, this ‘decimation’ certainly occurred (unlike an alleged earlier one in 844). Æthelwulf apparently released from secular burdens one tenth of all land in lay hands hitherto subject to them, thus enabling the owners to make grants to churches: a royal act of exceptional piety, and also of exceptional astuteness, designed to win the king secular as well as ecclesiastical friends, since laymen were keen to endow churches under their own patronage; but designed, too, to ensure a constant supply of the prayers believed to bring victory.
The papacy and the Franks
The consecration of Offa of Mercia's son Ecgfrith as king in 787 may have inspired whatever Ecgberht arranged for Æthelwulf in 838. Carolingian precedent was probably more influential still. The Kingston assembly took place only months after the 837 Christmas assembly at Aachen, when Louis the Pious granted his son Charles (the Bald) a kingdom. Early in 839 Ecgberht was in touch with Louis about the Scandinavian threat to Franks and English and the need for repentance to avert divine punishment. Ecgberht sought permission to travel through Francia on pilgrimage to Rome, but died before he could accomplish it. In 855 Æthelwulf made a similar request to Charles the Bald, and this time the journey was made. Continental contemporaries registered its impact. Charles gave ‘the king of the Anglo-Saxons … all the supplies a king might need, and … an escort, with all the courtesies due to a king’ (Annals of St Bertin, s.a. 855). The biographer of Pope Benedict III recorded Æthelwulf's arrival at Rome ‘with a multitude of people’, and carefully noted Æthelwulf's gifts to St Peter: ‘a fine gold crown weighing 4 lb., … one sword bound with fine gold; four silver-gilt Saxon bowls; one all-silk white shirt with roundels, with gold-studding; and two large gold-interwoven veils’, as well as lavish donations of gold and silver to ‘the clergy, leading men, and people of Rome’ (Davis, 187). On the way home in 856, Æthelwulf enjoyed Charles's hospitality for three months, perhaps joining him in a successful campaign against Scandinavians west of the Seine. Lupus, abbot of Ferrières, Charles's confidant, had written to Æthelwulf c.852 to felicitate him on a recent victory against pagans and to solicit, in return for prayers, a gift of lead for the monastery roof (the request implies appreciation of Æthelwulf's access to the resources of the Mendip Hills). In July 856 Æthelwulf was betrothed to Charles's daughter Judith (b. after 843, d. c.870); on 1 October the marriage was solemnized and Judith was consecrated in an elaborate ceremony, while her husband ‘conferred on her the title of queen: something not customary before then to him or his people’ (Annals of St Bertin, s.a. 856). Charles, constructing a network of quasi-imperial alliances, and perhaps anxious to concert operations against the vikings, evidently thought Æthelwulf a useful son-in-law. Æthelwulf wanted a share of Carolingian charisma, emphasizing his own status through Judith's. His Frankish connection, insistently recalled by the compilers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the early 890s, continued Ecgberht's, and was as politically significant. Already, in the 840s, a Frank named Felix ‘was responsible for Æthelwulf's letters’: Lupus, who thought Felix wielded much influence over the king, referred in similar wording to Felix's job and to that of Charles's arch-chancellor. The influence of Carolingian diplomacy is undetectable in the texts of Æthelwulf's charters, yet Æthelwulf may have had a little chancery and Felix may have headed it. In Wessex, as in Francia, the drafting of charters was the work of notaries (such as, in Æthelwulf's entourage, the deacon Eadberht), but a Carolingian's arch-chancellor might oversee added enactment clauses: perhaps Felix was behind Carolingian-style references in ‘decimation’ charters of 854 to their production in palatio nostro. Felix's appointment indicates substantial similarities of form and substance, as well as high-level contacts, between West Saxon and Frankish regimes.
Judith
Judith's consecration may have restored, even enhanced, the status of queenship in Wessex: within two generations, a queen's rite complemented the king's in Anglo-Saxon liturgical books. The prestige she herself conferred explains why, when Æthelwulf died, her stepson Æthelbald ‘against God's prohibition and Christian dignity, and also contrary to the practice of all pagans … married Judith, daughter of Charles king of the Franks’. Asser's further comment about ‘great disgrace’ (Life of Alfred, chap. 17) was not echoed in the Frankish record of the event. Although Asser's claim about its being contrary to pagan practice had been anticipated by Bede, who cited St Paul to the same effect, none the less Augustine of Canterbury had found it necessary to consult Pope Gregory about the lawfulness of stepmother marriage and Eadbald of Kent had married his father's widow in 616. Similar cases are attested among early medieval peoples in the British Isles and on the continent. A dowager queen seems to have been regarded as in some sense embodying her late husband's realm, hence to marry her conferred, or strengthened, a claim to rule.

Æthelbald's death in 860 left Judith little future in Wessex. She was no older than seventeen, and still childless. ‘Selling up the possessions she had acquired’ there (Annals of St Bertin, s.a. 860), she returned to her father who kept her ‘under episcopal guardianship, and with all the honour due to a queen’ (ibid.), in his stronghold of Senlis. Thence, early in 862, she fled with Baldwin, count of Flanders, at his instigation, and married him. The couple sought diplomatic support from King Lothar II and Pope Nicholas I, and apparently an offer of refuge from Roric, the viking lord of Frisia. Charles the Bald, initially furious, soon forgave his daughter, who settled down in Flanders and produced two sons. Baldwin died in 879. Some time between 893 and 899, their son Count Baldwin (II) married Alfred's daughter Ælfthryth. If Judith was still alive, she probably helped negotiate this match. If not, the advantages of cross-channel alliance behind her own successive West Saxon marriages were not lost on her son. Perhaps she brought him up on stories of her youthful career. In the mid-tenth century Judith was remembered by the genealogist of the counts of Flanders as ‘most wise, and beautiful’, the transmitter of Carolingian blood to the comital dynasty, while any scandals were forgotten. Six generations after Judith, her descendant and namesake, the daughter of Count Baldwin (IV), remade an English connection through her marriage to Tostig Godwineson.
Dealing with Scandinavians
From the early 840s the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports Scandinavian raids as increasingly frequent, and, in 850–51, a viking force as overwintering ‘for the first time’. Æthelwulf's efforts at resistance are reported too: he fought unsuccessfully against thirty-five ships' companies of Danes at Carhampton in what is now Somerset in 843; in 851, after Danes had stormed Canterbury and London, and put the Mercians to flight, ‘Æthelwulf and his [second] son Æthelbald with the West Saxon levies fought against them at Acleah and there made the greatest slaughter of a heathen host that we have heard tell of up to this present day’ (ASC, s.a. 851). News of this important success reached West Francia. Notable in the chronicle's coverage of Æthelwulf's reign are repeated references to victories won by ealdormen with the men of their shires. Derived from contemporary records, and contrasting with the emphasis in the 870s on royal command, these entries present a more consensual leadership style in Æthelwulf's reign than in the earlier part of Alfred's.
Family politics
Vikings were not Æthelwulf's only problem in the 850s. For him in his later years, as for Alfred and several ninth-century Carolingians, tensions revealed in other sources, between the ageing father and adult sons, and between older and younger sons, are suppressed in the main annalistic record. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 853, Æthelwulf sent Alfred to Rome, where Pope Leo IV ‘consecrated him king and stood sponsor to him at confirmation’. A fragment of a letter from Leo to Æthelwulf reports Alfred's reception and investiture ‘with the belt of consulship’ (English Historical Documents, 1, no. 219). Mid-ninth-century entries in the Liber vitae of San Salvatore, Brescia, indicate that Æthelred accompanied Alfred to Italy (he too may have been given an honorific reception at Rome, though neither the chronicle compilers nor the eleventh-century excerptor of Leo's letter were interested in recording that) and also suggest that Alfred went to Rome a second time, with his father. The terms of Æthelwulf's will, as described in Alfred's will (made between 879 and 888), indicate a considerable age gap between his two older surviving (after 851) sons and the two younger. These terms bear out charter evidence that Æthelwulf meant Æthelbald to inherit Wessex, and Æthelberht Kent. In sending his two younger sons to Rome (as Charlemagne had sent his, in 781), he affirmed their throneworthiness and hoped to secure them against the fate that threatened some little Carolingian contemporaries, of being tonsured (and hence excluded from the succession) by elder brothers. There was no better way to provide such security, and underwrite paternal arrangements, than to invoke papal authority (as Charlemagne sent his projected divisio regni of 806 to the pope for ‘approval’). If Æthelwulf intended Æthelred and Alfred to remain in the running, he may have thought Sussex, Essex, or even Surrey, capable of being reconstituted as separate kingdoms. He was also providing against one or both the elder sons dying heirless.

One provision of Æthelwulf's will (mentioned in Alfred's will), concerned a particular part of his personal inheritance (yrfe), as distinct from the royal lands that sustained the kingship: evidently a rich estate (or cluster of estates) situated in old Wessex. The two younger sons were to have shares in this along with their eldest brother, Æthelbald, on condition that ‘whichever of us should live longest was to succeed to the whole [estate]’ (English Historical Documents, 1, no. 96). Pace some modern historians, this provision had nothing to do with the kingdom of Wessex, and introduced no new principles of fraternal succession or the realm's indivisibility. When Æthelbald died in 860, Æthelberht took over Wessex and became, at his younger brothers' request, temporary trustee for their shares of the yrfe. Asser in his Life of Alfred (written in 893) clarifies Æthelwulf's last years, without conflicting with the other, fragmentary, evidence. Asser states that Alfred went to Rome in 853, and again, with Æthelwulf, in 855. Then, ‘while King Æthelwulf was returning from Rome, his son Æthelbald with all his councillors [Asser names Ealhstan bishop of Sherborne and Eanwulf ealdorman of Somerset as chief conspirators] tried to perpetrate a terrible crime: expelling the king from his kingdom’. News of Æthelwulf's impending Carolingian marriage had evidently provoked the rebellion, as Æthelbald reacted to the threat of displacement by higher-born (half-)brothers. Father and son negotiated a peace, whereby Æthelwulf received his kingdom's ‘eastern districts’, Æthelbald the western. Asser disapproved, ‘because the western part of the Saxon land has always been more important than the eastern’ (Life of Alfred, chap. 12). Although this agreement has usually been read as severing Wessex again from the acquired lands to the east, Asser perhaps described a division of Wessex itself between parts west and east of Selwood: if so, Æthelwulf's West Saxon reign continued until 858, as implied by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's assigning him a reign length of eighteen and a half years. It is hard to see why Asser should have invented the story of the rebellion (though the chronicle understandably suppressed it).

In, or soon after, late 856 Æthelwulf made a will, says Asser, ‘so that his sons should not quarrel unnecessarily among themselves after his death’. He prospectively ‘divided his kingdom between his two eldest sons’, while ‘his personal inheritance was split between his sons, daughter and kinsmen’ (Life of Alfred, chap. 16). Æthelwulf's planned division of his recently constructed composite kingdom has been judged retrograde by some historians—a judgement coloured by teleology. Throughout the middle ages, dynastic thinking impelled the accumulation of plural realms in order to provide, through redistribution, for plural sons. Æthelwulf had long foreseen separate futures for Wessex and Kent. Yet Wessex itself was not to be divided (as perhaps in 856), and nor was any acquired realm. Æthelwulf's two younger sons, not yet of age, were designated to no kingdom. Within Wessex, Æthelwulf distinguished, significantly, between kingdom and personal inheritance. His moveable wealth (recall his resources in gold, silver, and lead) was to be split, in terms reminiscent of Charlemagne's will, between ‘children, nobles, and the needs of the king's soul’ for which last ‘a great sum of money should be taken every year to Rome’. Judith remained childless, yet may well have cared for her young stepchildren, as Carolingian stepmothers did theirs. Æthelwulf's death early in 858 may have been unexpected. His body was buried at Steyning, Sussex, and only later transferred to Winchester. As the will stipulated, Wessex went to Æthelbald, the ‘eastern districts’ to Æthelberht.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, especially its record of Æthelwulf's military effort against vikings, its stress on his Carolingian marriage, and its 855–8 entry with his lengthy genealogy, shows why his remembered reign had such importance for Alfred's court. Charter evidence shows the living Æthelwulf hard at work maintaining the support of aristocrats, West Saxon and Kentish, and especially of his thegns. A token, still extant, of that bond is the gold ring, about an inch across, richly decorated with religious symbols, and inscribed ‘Ethelwulf Rex’. Found at Laverstock, Wiltshire, in 1780, it was surely made to be a gift from this royal lord to a brawny follower: the sign of successful ninth-century kingship.

Janet L. Nelson
Sources

ASC, s.a. 823, 836, 851, 853, 854, 855 · Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and other contemporary sources, ed. and trans. S. Keynes and M. Lapidge (1983) · English historical documents, 1, ed. D. Whitelock (1955), nos. 88, 89, 96, 217, 218, 219 · J. L. Nelson, ed. and trans., The annals of St Bertin (1991) · R. Davis, ed. and trans., The lives of the ninth-century popes (Liber pontificalis): the ancient biographies of ten popes from AD 817–891 (1995) · AS chart., S 202, 288, 290, 292, 294, 298, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 307, 308, 314, 315, 320, 322, 326, 334, 1438, 1860, 1862 · S. Keynes, ‘The West Saxon charters of King Æthelwulf and his sons’, EngHR, 109 (1994), 1109–49 · B. Yorke, Wessex in the early middle ages (1995) · P. Wormald, ‘The ninth century’, The Anglo-Saxons, ed. J. Campbell (1982), 132–57 · J. L. Nelson, ‘Reconstructing a royal family: reflections on Alfred, from Asser’, People and places in northern Europe, 500–1600: essays in honour of Peter Hayes Sawyer, ed. I. Wood and N. Lund, [another edn] (1991), 47–66 · S. Keynes, ‘The control of Kent in the ninth century’, Early Medieval Europe, 2 (1993), 111–32 · D. P. Kirby, The earliest English kings (1991) · J. L. Nelson, ‘The Franks and the English in the ninth century reconsidered’, The preservation and transmission of Anglo-Saxon culture, ed. J. Rosenthal and P. Szarmach (1997), 190–208 · P. A. Stafford, ‘The king's wife in Wessex, 800–1066’, Past and Present, 91 (1981), 3–27 · N. Brooks, The early history of the church of Canterbury: Christ Church from 597 to 1066 (1984) · P. Stafford, ‘Charles the Bald, Judith and England’, Charles the Bald: court and kingdom, ed. M. T. Gibson and J. L. Nelson, 2nd rev. edn (1990), 139–53 · J. L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (1992) · A. Scharer, ‘The writing of history at King Alfred's court’, Early Medieval Europe, 5 (1996), 177–206 · S. Keynes, ‘Anglo-Saxon entries in the Liber vitae of Brescia’, Alfred the Wise: studies in honour of Janet Bately, ed. J. Roberts and J. L. Nelson (1997), 99–119 · L. Webster and J. Backhouse, eds., The making of England: Anglo-Saxon art and culture, AD 600–900 (1991), 268–9 · A. P. Smyth, King Alfred the Great (1995) · R. McKitterick, The Frankish kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751–987 (1983) · Asser's Life of King Alfred: together with the ‘Annals of Saint Neots’ erroneously ascribed to Asser, ed. W. H. Stevenson (1904) · John of Worcester, Chron.
Likenesses

coin, BM [see illus.]
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Janet L. Nelson, ‘Æthelwulf (d. 858)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8921, accessed 23 Sept 2005]

Æthelwulf (d. 858): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/8921
Judith (b. after 843, d. c.870): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/392646 
Crowned*839 4 
Note*851 Aclea, Surrey, England, won a great victory against the Danes4 
HTML* 
Monarchs of England
Aethelwulf's Grand Experiment: A New Kind of Succession
 

Family

Osburh (?) b. c 810, d. a 876
Children

Last Edited23 Sep 2005

Citations

  1. [S338] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 8th ed., 1-13.
  2. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-14.
  3. [S218] Marlyn Lewis, Ancestry of Elizabeth of York.
  4. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-13.
  5. [S337] David Hume, History of England.
  6. [S376] Unknown editor, unknown short title.
  7. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1B-14.
  8. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-15.
  9. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-14.

Osburh (?)

F, #1655, b. circa 810, d. after 876

Father*Oslac (?)1,2
Osburh (?)|b. c 810\nd. a 876|p56.htm#i1655|Oslac (?)||p56.htm#i1656||||||||||||||||

Marriage* 1st=Æthelwulf of Wessex3,1,2 
Birth*circa 810 Isle of Wight, England1 
Divorce*853 Principal=Æthelwulf of Wessex4 
Death*after 876 4 
DNB* Osburh [Osburga] (fl. 839), consort of Æthelwulf, king of the West Saxons, married Æthelwulf (d. 858), who was son of Ecgberht, king of Wessex (r. 802–39), while he was sub-king of Kent (825–39). The marriage probably occurred well before 839, for, on Æthelwulf's succession to Wessex, their eldest son became sub-king of Kent, while their second son was attesting charters from c.840. Osburh's father, Oslac, according to Asser, the late ninth-century biographer of her youngest son, Alfred (d. 899), was:

King Æthelwulf's famous butler, … a Goth by nation, for he was sprung from Goths and Jutes, namely from the seed of Stuf and Wihtgar, two brothers who received control over the Isle of Wight from their uncle King Cerdic and Cynric his son. (Life of Alfred, chap. 2)

This story identified the roots of Osburh's family, her Scandinavian ancestors, and also their relationship to the Cerdicings. Osburh, as far as is known, was the mother of all Æthelwulf's offspring: a daughter, Æthelswith, and five sons: Æthelstan, who seems to have died c.851, and Æthelbald (d. 860), Æthelberht (d. 865), Æthelred (d. 871), and Alfred, all four of whom were successively kings of Wessex. That Alfred bequeathed two of his three daughters (perhaps only a life-interest in) estates in the Isle of Wight may lend some colour to the story of Osburh's ancestral Wight-ish connections.

Osburh is not mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. No charter attestations of hers are known, though an ‘Osric princeps’, perhaps her brother, attested from the 840s to 860. According to the contemporary Frankish annals of St Bertin, s.a. 856, it was ‘not customary for the West Saxon king or his people to confer [on the king's wife] the title of queen’. In 856, when Æthelwulf married the Carolingian princess Judith, and broke with custom by naming her queen, Osburh may already have been dead, or else she was repudiated.

Asser, apparently relying on Alfred's reminiscences, says ‘[Osburh was] an extremely pious woman, noble in character and by birth’. She is best known through Asser's story about the book of ‘Saxon songs’ (carmina Saxonica) which ‘she showed to Alfred and his brothers, saying: “I shall give this book to whichever one of you can learn [that is, memorize] it the fastest”’; and when Alfred:

attracted by the beauty of the book's initial letter, … asked, ‘Will you really give this book to the one of us who can understand it the soonest and recite it to you?’, she smiled with pleasure and, reassuring him, said, ‘Yes, I will’. (Life of Alfred, chap. 23)

Asser's point was to highlight the special qualities of Osburh's youngest son, Alfred, who learned and recited the book first and presumably won the prize, and whose enthusiasm for ‘Saxon songs’, and for translations into the vernacular, was later to characterize his reign. The story finds a wider context in ninth-century manuscript evidence for the interest of high-status women in books, and for their role in educating their children.

Janet L. Nelson
Sources

Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and other contemporary sources, ed. and trans. S. Keynes and M. Lapidge (1983) · P. A. Stafford, ‘The king's wife in Wessex, 800–1066’, Past and Present, 91 (1981), 3–27 · P. Stafford, Queens, concubines and dowagers: the king's wife in the early middle ages (1983) · J. L. Nelson, ‘Reconstructing a royal family: reflections on Alfred, from Asser’, People and places in northern Europe, 500–1600: essays in honour of Peter Hayes Sawyer, ed. I. Wood and N. Lund, [another edn] (1991), 47–66 · A. P. Smyth, King Alfred the Great (1995) · M. Brown, ‘Female book-ownership in England during the ninth century: the evidence of the prayerbooks’, Reformed English women, ed. D. Dumville and L. Abrams [forthcoming]
© Oxford University Press 2004–5
All rights reserved: see legal notice      Oxford University Press


Janet L. Nelson, ‘Osburh (fl. 839)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20887, accessed 24 Sept 2005]

Osburh (fl. 839): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/208875 
Name Variation Osburgh (?)1 

Family

Æthelwulf of Wessex b. bt 794 - 800, d. 13 Jan 858
Children

Last Edited24 Sep 2005

Citations

  1. [S218] Marlyn Lewis, Ancestry of Elizabeth of York.
  2. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-13.
  3. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-14.
  4. [S338] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 8th ed., 1-13.
  5. [S376] Unknown editor, unknown short title.
  6. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-15.
  7. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-14.

Oslac (?)

M, #1656

Name Variation Oslac (?)1 
Title* the Royal Cup Bearer2,3 

Family
Child

Last Edited21 Nov 2004

Citations

  1. [S218] Marlyn Lewis, Ancestry of Elizabeth of York.
  2. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-14.
  3. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-13.

Ecgberht of Wessex1

M, #1657, b. 775, d. after 19 November 838

 

Father*Ealhmund Of Kent2,3,1 b. c 758
Mother*Anonyma (?)4
Ecgberht of Wessex|b. 775\nd. a 19 Nov 838|p56.htm#i1657|Ealhmund Of Kent|b. c 758|p56.htm#i1659|Anonyma (?)||p370.htm#i11098|Eafa (?)|b. c 732|p56.htm#i1660||||Æthelberht (?)||p370.htm#i11099||||

Birth*775 2,3,1 
Marriage* Principal=Rædburh (?)2,3,1 
Death*after 19 November 838 2 
Death4 February 839 Wessex, England3,1 
Burial* Wincester3 
DNB* Ecgberht [Egbert] (d. 839), king of the West Saxons, became king in 802 and ruled Wessex for thirty-seven years and seven months. During the latter part of his reign he extended the territory under his authority to include Kent, Surrey, Essex, and Sussex, and he founded a dynasty which continued to rule this area (and later the whole of England) for the best part of two and a half centuries. The descent of the modern British royal family can be traced back to this dynasty.
Acquisition of the kingship, 802
Ecgberht appears to have gained power in Wessex by conquest. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that his predecessor, King Beorhtric (d. 802), helped Offa (d. 796), king of the Mercians and Beorhtric's father-in-law, to drive Ecgberht into exile in Francia some years earlier. It is therefore unlikely that Ecgberht was Beorhtric's designated successor. The chronicle also records that Beorhtric and one of his leading men, Ealdorman Worr, died on the same day, which suggests that they died by violence, and upheavals in Wessex at this time are attested by a battle between the men of what is now Wiltshire and an invading army of the Hwicce which occurred simultaneously with Beorhtric's death. The coinage which had begun to be minted in Wessex came to an abrupt halt. And a story incorporated into Asser's life of Alfred told how Beorhtric's queen, Eadburh, took countless treasures and fled the country: precisely what she could be expected to have done on the violent overthrow of her husband. Less plausible parts of the story of Eadburh, including the allegation that she poisoned her husband, may have originated as rumours spread by Ecgberht in order to strengthen his own (presumably precarious) position by discrediting his predecessor's regime and in particular his widow, who, if she had sons, remained a potential threat.
West Saxon or Kentish origins?
Ecgberht's origins have been the subject of controversy among modern scholars. Since he became king of the West Saxons, and his family claimed West Saxon descent, it has not unnaturally been assumed in the past that he was by origin a West Saxon and some scholars still take this view. Alternatively, however, there is some reason to believe that he may have been from Kent. The genealogy drawn up in the name of his son, Æthelwulf (d. 858), begins by stating that Æthelwulf was the son of Ecgberht, the son of Ealhmund, and it is quite possible that the genealogy is to be relied upon this far. A chronicler working at Christ Church, Canterbury, in the late eleventh or early twelfth century identified Ealhmund, the father of Ecgberht, with Ealhmund (fl. 784) [see under Æthelberht II], king in Kent, whose reign is attested by a charter of between 765 and about 785. If the family were West Saxon, it is difficult to see why Ealhmund should have sought power in Kent, thereby embroiling himself quite unnecessarily with Offa, who was mounting determined attacks on Kent both before and after Ealhmund's reign. If the family were Kentish, then Ealhmund's position is perfectly natural, and there is no great difficulty in accounting for Ecgberht's: by 802 the native Kentish rulers had been wholly dispossessed, so it is not surprising that a Kentish ætheling should turn up elsewhere, while the evidence that Ecgberht gained power by conquest precludes any necessity to assume that he had any prior support within Wessex. In the years since the reign in Kent of his putative father, Ealhmund, he may well have operated as an independent war leader (like the West Saxon Cædwalla, or St Guthlac, earlier), with his own following of fighting men at whose head he achieved his successful coup in Wessex.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, recording Ecgberht's annexation of south-east England in the 820s, asserts that the people of Kent, Surrey, Essex, and Sussex submitted to him because they had been forced away from his kinsmen. This appears to be a plain statement that Ecgberht's family were rulers in the south-east, dispossessed by the Mercian kings. Further evidence is provided by the chronicle's statement that when Offa and Beorhtric expelled Ecgberht (between 789 and 796), Beorhtric helped Offa because he had married Offa's daughter. Evidently Beorhtric had no personal quarrel with Ecgberht, so Ecgberht cannot at this time have been perceived as a possible claimant to the West Saxon kingship. Offa was the one who wanted rid of him, and the most likely reason for this is that Ecgberht was a potential contender for the throne in Kent.

The claim in Æthelwulf's genealogy of a West Saxon descent for Æthelwulf and his father is no evidence for the truth of this assertion. It would have been extraordinary if the family had not claimed descent from Cerdic, as West Saxon kings traditionally did. It may well be that the genealogy was drawn up during Ecgberht's reign as part of his attempts to legitimize his dynasty and secure the peaceful succession of his son.
Campaigns against the Cornish
Virtually the only recorded actions of Ecgberht during his first twenty years as king are campaigns against the Cornish. The earliest such expedition noted by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is dated 815, when Ecgberht is said to have ravaged Cornwall from east to west. But the thirteenth-century historian Roger of Wendover, possibly drawing on sources now lost, records campaigns in 809, when Ecgberht attacked and subdued the Cornish with heavy losses on both sides; in 810, when Ecgberht subdued the Cornish again and compelled them to pay tribute (a dubious detail, perhaps added by Roger); and in 811, when he ravaged Cornwall from north to south. Bearing in mind that a journey from the extreme north of Cornwall to the extreme south and one from the extreme east to the extreme west would both traverse the length of the peninsula, Roger's third entry sounds like a different record of the campaign mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; but unfortunately it is impossible to deduce the correct date, nor can the dates or details of any of these campaigns be absolutely relied upon.

More precise information is contained in an unusual charter-dating clause (AS chart., S 273), which states that the first draft of the charter was made at ‘Creodantreow’ on 19 August 825 during military service when Ecgberht moved against the Britons (that is, the Cornish). According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the men of Devon fought the Cornish in the same year, but the outcome is not stated. It is possible that the men of Devon, led by their ealdorman, were defeated and that Ecgberht then mounted a further campaign to retrieve the situation.
Rivalry with the Mercians and annexation of south-eastern England
The same year there occurred the second major turning point of Ecgberht's career, when he defeated King Beornwulf of the Mercians in a battle at Wroughton, in what is now Wiltshire. The East Anglians, also in conflict with Mercia, appealed to Ecgberht for ‘peace and protection’, which should probably be interpreted as a wish for an alliance against the common enemy. Whether Ecgberht was able to give them any assistance is unknown, but Beornwulf was killed in battle against the East Anglians, probably in 826. It may have been after his death that Ecgberht sent an army to Kent, under the leadership of his son, Æthelwulf, Ealhstan, bishop of Sherborne, and Ealdorman Wulfheard; there they drove out the Mercian sub-king Baldred (fl. 823–827) and took control. There is no record of a battle and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that the former kingdoms of Kent, Surrey, Essex, and Sussex, subject in recent years to Mercian control, now submitted to Ecgberht. This process may in fact have been more difficult and time-consuming than the chronicle suggests, and it is probable that Sussex was not annexed until 827. In Kent the coinage of Archbishop Wulfred was terminated and coins were struck in Ecgberht's name; the series of Mercian grants to Wulfred ended; and Ecgberht seized an estate which Baldred had given to Christ Church at the time of his flight.

In 829 there was another battle between the West Saxons and the Mercians and Ecgberht defeated King Wiglaf (fl. 827–840). This seems to have been a more comprehensive victory than the earlier one, reducing Mercia to total disarray. Ecgberht was apparently in control of Mercian territory for some time, as he is assigned a one-year reign in a Mercian king-list and issued coins as king of the Mercians from the London mint. Moreover, he was able to raid as far north as Northumbria and compel the Northumbrians to submit to him. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states, probably with some exaggeration, that at this time Ecgberht controlled everything south of the Humber, and describes him as bretwalda, adding his name to Bede's list of overlords.

Ecgberht's immense conquest could not be maintained and within a year or two Wiglaf had recovered his kingdom and begun to issue charters. But no coins of Wiglaf can be securely dated to his second reign and no coins were minted at London between the 830s and c.843; nor does it appear that Mercian power in the south-east was restored. There Ecgberht remained in control, ruling Kent in a style very different from that of the earlier Mercian overlords. The Mercians had issued charters relating to Kentish affairs from councils held in Mercia. Ecgberht, however, held councils in Kent itself, and involved the Kentish nobility in the affairs of the province. While the Mercians presumably regarded Kent as conquered territory from which wealth could be creamed off and taken home to Mercia, it is tempting to see in Ecgberht's rather different approach, the attitude of a man for whom Kent was home.

Direct rule of the extensive territory brought together by his successive conquests must have presented many problems, and by 830 Ecgberht had appointed his son as king in Kent, whereupon Æthelwulf presumably took over much of the work and responsibility relating to Kentish affairs, enabling Ecgberht to devote more time to Wessex. Unfortunately there is very little evidence for Wessex during the 830s. Surviving charters, other than those concerning Kent, are very few for the whole reign, and in most cases have been altered by later generations, so that they afford only a few glimpses of Ecgberht's life as king of the West Saxons.
Charters, patronage, and coinage
Ecgberht's earliest recorded grant dates from 824, when he gave land on the River Meon in what is now Hampshire to Wulfheard, who was an ealdorman, probably of that area. Another charter, spurious as it stands but possibly recording a genuine transaction, mentions a grant to the layman Burhheard of land at Alton Priors, Wiltshire, in 826. On 26 December 833 Ecgberht was at the royal vill at Dorchester and confirmed arrangements relating to estates in Dorset and Devon, the inheritance of three sisters. The land in Devon was at Dartington, no further west than Crediton (where there is evidence for West Saxon control much earlier), but a long way south of it, and one of the sisters went to live there, which tends to imply that the West Saxons were effectively in power in this area at this time, probably as a result of Ecgberht's earlier Cornish campaigns. The majority of coins in Ecgberht's name were minted in Kent, mostly at Canterbury between 825 and 839, with a smaller number produced at Rochester. In the 830s, however, coins were struck for Ecgberht in Wessex, probably at Southampton, then an important centre of trade.
The Council of Kingston, 838
In 838 Ecgberht held a council at Kingston in Surrey, attended by his son, Æthelwulf, the archbishop of Canterbury, Ceolnoth (d. 870), who had succeeded to his see in 833, and numerous other prominent men. The report of the conclusions of this council is of unimpeachable authenticity, but of such poor Latinity that it is difficult to interpret. It appears that Ecgberht and Æthelwulf restored to Archbishop Ceolnoth the estate at ‘Malling’ (probably East Malling, Kent, or South Malling, Sussex) which the West Saxons had seized on their first arrival in Kent. In return Ceolnoth ceded to the West Saxon kings that control over the estates of the Kentish minsters which Archbishop Wulfred had fought for so long to deny to the Mercian kings. The grant of ‘Malling’ was made on condition that Ecgberht and his heirs should henceforth enjoy the firm and unshakeable friendship of the archbishop, his community, and his successors, and the provisions regarding the Kentish minsters are followed by further reference to the perpetual peace which was to obtain between the parties. It has been calculated that the estates of the Kentish minsters added up to a quarter of the land in Kent, so the Kingston agreement gave Ecgberht control over very considerable wealth. However, Ecgberht had already been king of the West Saxons for thirty-six years, and had been active politically for at least six years before that, and he must have been very much aware at this time that the future belonged to his descendants. Both the material wealth and the archbishop's reiterated promise of eternal friendship served to strengthen the position of Æthelwulf and his sons, and it seems likely that the future of the dynasty was Ecgberht's chief concern at this meeting. It may well be that Æthelwulf was formally anointed as king on this occasion, just as Offa's son, Ecgfrith, had been consecrated as king in his father's lifetime as part of Offa's strenuous efforts to ensure his succession. It has been convincingly argued that the earliest surviving English liturgy for king-making, which incorporates provision for the anointing of the king, dates from no later than the first half of the ninth century. Moreover, Kingston was by the early tenth century the place where West Saxon kings were crowned.
Advent of the vikings and death
Ceolnoth's motive both for ceding control of the estates and promising to support the West Saxon dynasty was probably fear of viking attacks, which by this time posed a serious, recurring threat. The archbishop probably recognized that an effective defence was only likely to be achieved by the West Saxon kings. Ecgberht had fought the Danes at Carhampton, on the Somerset coast in 836, apparently unsuccessfully, as the vikings are said to have retained possession of the battlefield. However, two years later, in the same year as the Council of Kingston, he defeated a coalition of vikings and Cornishmen at Hingston Down, west of the Tamar, in Cornwall. In 839 Ecgberht died, leaving his property to the male side of his family. Æthelwulf succeeded as king of the West Saxons.

Heather Edwards
Sources

ASC, s.a. 784 [text F], 802, 815, 825, 829, 830, 836, 838, 839, 855 [texts A, E] · AS chart., S 271, 272, 273, 274, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 286, 323, 1438, 1623 · Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and other contemporary sources, ed. and trans. S. Keynes and M. Lapidge (1983) · Rogeri de Wendover chronica, sive, Flores historiarum, ed. H. O. Coxe, 4 vols., EHS (1841–2) · N. Brooks, The early history of the church of Canterbury: Christ Church from 597 to 1066 (1984) · S. Keynes, ‘The control of Kent in the ninth century’, Early Medieval Europe, 2 (1993), 111–32 · P. Wormald, ‘The ninth century’, The Anglo-Saxons, ed. J. Campbell (1982), 132–57 · A. Scharer, ‘The writing of history at King Alfred's court’, Early Medieval Europe, 5 (1996), 177–206 · J. L. Nelson, Politics and ritual in early medieval Europe (1986) · H. Edwards, The charters of the early West Saxon kingdom (1988) · H. Pagan, ‘Coinage in southern England, 796–874’, Anglo-Saxon monetary history: essays in memory of Michael Dolley, ed. M. A. S. Blackburn (1986), 45–65 · English historical documents, 1, ed. D. Whitelock (1955) · P. A. Stafford, ‘The king's wife in Wessex, 800–1066’, Past and Present, 91 (1981), 3–27 · P. Grierson and M. Blackburn, Medieval European coinage: with a catalogue of the coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 1: The early middle ages (5th–10th centuries) (1986) · D. N. Dumville, Wessex and England from Alfred to Edgar (1992)
© Oxford University Press 2004–5
All rights reserved: see legal notice      Oxford University Press


Heather Edwards, ‘Ecgberht (d. 839)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8581, accessed 23 Sept 2005]

Ecgberht (d. 839): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/85815 
Hume* THE KINGDOMS of the Heptarchy, though united by so recent a conquest, seemed to be firmly cemented into one state under Egbert; and the inhabitants of the several provinces had lost all desire of revolting from that monarch, 827.or of restoring their former independent governments. Their language was every where nearly the same, their customs, laws, institutions civil and religious; and as the race of the ancient kings was totally extinct in all the subjected states, the people readily transferred their allegiance to a prince, who seemed to merit it, by the splendor of his victories, the vigour of his administration, and the superior nobility of his birth. A union also in government opened to them the agreeable prospect of future tranquillity; and it appeared more probable, that they would thenceforth become formidable to their neighbours, than be exposed to their inroads and devastations. But these flattering views were soon overcast by the appearance of the Danes, who, during some centuries, kept the Anglo-Saxons in perpetual inquietude, committed the most barbarous ravages upon them, and at last reduced them to grievous servitude.
The emperor Charlemagne, though naturally generous and humane, had been induced by bigotry to exercise great severities upon the Pagan Saxons in Germany, whom he subdued; and besides often ravaging their country with fire and sword, he had in cool blood decimated all the inhabitants for their revolts, and had obliged them, by the most rigorous edicts, to make a seeming compliance with the christian doctrine. That religion, which had easily made its way among the British-Saxons by insinuation and address, appeared shocking to their German brethren, when imposed on them by the violence of Charlemagne: and the more generous and warlike of these Pagans had fled northward into Jutland, in order to escape the fury of his persecutions. Meeting there with a people of similar manners, they were readily received among them; and they soon stimulated the natives to concur in enterprizes, which both promised revenge on the haughty conqueror, and afforded subsistence to those numerous inhabitants, with which the northern countries were now overburthened.g They invaded the provinces of France, which were exposed by the degeneracy and dissentions of Charlemagne's posterity; and being there known under the general name of Normans, which they received from their northern situation, they became the terror of all the maritime and even of the inland countries. They were also tempted to visit England in their frequent excursions; and being able, by sudden inroads, to make great progress over a people, who were not defended by any naval force, who had relaxed their military institutions, and who were sunk into a superstition, which had become odious to the Danes and ancient Saxons, they made no distinction in their hostilities between the French and English kingdoms. Their first appearance in this island was in the year 787,h when Brithric reigned in Wessex. A small body of them landed in that kingdom, with a view of learning the state of the country; and when the magistrate of the place questioned them concerning their enterprize, and summoned them to appear before the king, and account for their intentions, they killed him, and flying to their ships, escaped into their own country. The next alarm was given to Northumberland in the year 794;i when a body of these pirates pillaged a monastery; but their ships being much damaged by a storm, and their leader slain in a skirmish, they were at last defeated by the inhabitants, and the remainder of them put to the sword. 832.Five years after Egbert had established his monarchy over England, the Danes landed in the Isle of Shepey, and having pillaged it, escaped with impunity.k They were not so fortunate in their next year's enterprize, when they disembarked from thirty-five ships, and were encountered by Egbert, at Charmouth in Dorsetshire. The battle was bloody; but though the Danes lost great numbers, they maintained the post, which they had taken, and thence made good their retreat to their ships.l Having learned by experience, that they must expect a vigorous resistance from this warlike prince, they entered into an alliance with the Britons of Cornwal; and landing two years after in that country, made an inroad with their confederates into the county of Devon; but were met at Hengesdown by Egbert, and totally defeated.m While England remained in this state of anxiety, and defended itself more by temporary expedients than by any regular plan of administration, Egbert, who alone was able to provide effectually against this new evil, unfortunately died;838. and left the government to his son, Ethelwolf.
6 
Name Variation Egbert7 
Crowned*802 King of Wessex2,1 
Title*between 827 and 836 King of England7 
HTML* 
Catholic Encyclopedia
Egbert: First King of All English
 
Note* was an exile at the court of Charlemagne as a young man. Added Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Essex, and (for a time) Mercia to the West Saxon Kingdom. He also fought the Danes.1 

Family

Rædburh (?) b. c 788
Child

Last Edited23 Sep 2005

Citations

  1. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-12.
  2. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-13.
  3. [S218] Marlyn Lewis, Ancestry of Elizabeth of York.
  4. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-11.
  5. [S376] Unknown editor, unknown short title.
  6. [S337] David Hume, History of England.
  7. [S338] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 8th ed., 1-12.
  8. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-14.
  9. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-13.

Rædburh (?)

F, #1658, b. circa 788

Father*Bristric (?)1 b. 800
Mother*Ethelburga of Mercia (?)1
Rædburh (?)|b. c 788|p56.htm#i1658|Bristric (?)|b. 800|p213.htm#i6376|Ethelburga of Mercia (?)||p213.htm#i6377|Cenulphe (Kenwolph) (?)|b. 780|p213.htm#i6378||||Offa (?)||p213.htm#i6379|Quendrida (?)||p213.htm#i6380|

Marriage* Principal=Ecgberht of Wessex2,1,3 
Birth*circa 788 1 
Note* "regis Francorum sororia", meaning a relative of a sister of the King of the Franks. Possibly identical to St. Ida.3 

Family

Ecgberht of Wessex b. 775, d. a 19 Nov 838
Child

Last Edited24 Oct 2003

Citations

  1. [S218] Marlyn Lewis, Ancestry of Elizabeth of York.
  2. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-13.
  3. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-12.
  4. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-14.
  5. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-13.

Ealhmund Of Kent

M, #1659, b. circa 758

Father*Eafa (?)1,2,3 b. c 732
Ealhmund Of Kent|b. c 758|p56.htm#i1659|Eafa (?)|b. c 732|p56.htm#i1660||||Eoppa (?)||p56.htm#i1661||||||||||

Birth*circa 758 Wessex, England2 
Marriage* Principal=Anonyma (?)3 
DNB* King Ealhmund (fl. 784) in 784 which make no reference at all to Offa. There is now general agreement that the men of Kent, probably led by King Ecgberht, rebelled against Mercian rule in 776 and succeeded in winning independence from Offa for almost a decade. Ecgberht seems to have become king of the whole of Kent (the fate of Heahberht is uncertain); there survive about a dozen coins in his name, probably struck at Canterbury, which are some of the earliest examples of a new silver coinage based on Carolingian weights (the dating of these coins is uncertain and they may belong to the period before the battle of Otford; there is a single example in the name of Heahberht). Ealhmund was probably Ecgberht's successor (and apparently the father of the future King Ecgberht who was to rule Wessex from 802 until his death in 839). But Offa's power could not be withstood for much longer, and by 785 he had reimposed his control on the kingdom. In that year he issued the first of a series of charters making direct grants of land in Kent, without reference to any native ruler; it is to be assumed that Ealhmund had been killed or driven out. From 785 until the 820s Kent was treated as a province of the Mercian kingdom; only in 796–8 was there a brief resurgence of Kentish independence, when Eadberht Præn (perhaps a descendant of the ancient Kentish dynasty) ruled for a short time as king of Kent.4 
Title*784 king or subking in Kent3 
HTML* 

Kings of Kent

Kent 


Family

Anonyma (?)
Child

Last Edited24 Sep 2005

Citations

  1. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-12.
  2. [S218] Marlyn Lewis, Ancestry of Elizabeth of York.
  3. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-11.
  4. [S376] Unknown editor, unknown short title.
  5. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-13.
  6. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-12.

Eafa (?)

M, #1660, b. circa 732

Father*Eoppa (?)1,2
Eafa (?)|b. c 732|p56.htm#i1660|Eoppa (?)||p56.htm#i1661||||Ingild (?)|d. 718|p56.htm#i1662||||||||||

Birth*circa 732 Wessex, England3 
Marriage* 3 
Name Variation Effa (?)3 

Family
Child

Last Edited24 Oct 2003

Citations

  1. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-112.
  2. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-10.
  3. [S218] Marlyn Lewis, Ancestry of Elizabeth of York.
  4. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-12.
  5. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-11.

Eoppa (?)

M, #1661

Father*Ingild (?)1,2 d. 718
Eoppa (?)||p56.htm#i1661|Ingild (?)|d. 718|p56.htm#i1662||||Cenred (?)|d. 694|p56.htm#i1663||||||||||

Family
Child

Last Edited24 Oct 2003

Citations

  1. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-10.
  2. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-9.
  3. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-112.
  4. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-10.

Ingild (?)

M, #1662, d. 718

Father*Cenred (?)1,2 d. 694
Ingild (?)|d. 718|p56.htm#i1662|Cenred (?)|d. 694|p56.htm#i1663||||Ceolwald (?)||p56.htm#i1664||||||||||

Death*718 1 

Family
Child

Last Edited24 Oct 2003

Citations

  1. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-9.
  2. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-8.
  3. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-10.
  4. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-9.

Cenred (?)

M, #1663, d. 694

Father*Ceolwald (?)1,2
Cenred (?)|d. 694|p56.htm#i1663|Ceolwald (?)||p56.htm#i1664||||Cutha (?)||p56.htm#i1665||||||||||

Death*694 3 
Note* was subking2 

Family
Children

Last Edited21 Nov 2004

Citations

  1. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-8.
  2. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-7.
  3. [S338] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 8th ed., 1-7.
  4. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-9.
  5. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-8.

Ceolwald (?)

M, #1664

Father*Cutha (?)1,2,3
Ceolwald (?)||p56.htm#i1664|Cutha (?)||p56.htm#i1665||||Cuthwine (?)|d. 584|p56.htm#i1666||||||||||

Note*688 Rome, Italy, visited4,2 

Family
Child

Last Edited21 Nov 2004

Citations

  1. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-8.
  2. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-6.
  3. [S338] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 8th ed., 1-6.
  4. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-7.
  5. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-7.

Cutha (?)1

M, #1665

Father*Cuthwine (?)2,3 d. 584
Cutha (?)||p56.htm#i1665|Cuthwine (?)|d. 584|p56.htm#i1666||||Ceawlin of the West Saxons|d. 593|p56.htm#i1667||||||||||

Family
Children

Last Edited21 Nov 2004

Citations

  1. [S338] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 8th ed., 1-5.
  2. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-6.
  3. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-5.
  4. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-8.
  5. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-6.
  6. [S338] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 8th ed., 1-6.
  7. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-7.

Cuthwine (?)

M, #1666, d. 584

Father*Ceawlin of the West Saxons1,2 d. 593
Cuthwine (?)|d. 584|p56.htm#i1666|Ceawlin of the West Saxons|d. 593|p56.htm#i1667||||Cynric of the West Saxons|d. 560|p56.htm#i1668||||||||||

Death*584 in battle3 

Family
Child

Last Edited21 Nov 2004

Citations

  1. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-5.
  2. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-3.
  3. [S338] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 8th ed., 1-4.
  4. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-6.
  5. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-5.

Ceawlin of the West Saxons1

M, #1667, d. 593

Father*Cynric of the West Saxons2 d. 560
Ceawlin of the West Saxons|d. 593|p56.htm#i1667|Cynric of the West Saxons|d. 560|p56.htm#i1668||||Cerdic of the West Saxons|d. 534|p56.htm#i1669||||||||||

Death*593 according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle2,1 
DNB* Ceawlin (d. 593), king of the Gewisse, was the son of Cynric and the third recorded ruler of the Gewisse, later known as the West Saxons. He was remembered as one of the most powerful kings of his day. The dating of his reign presents particular problems, and like that of other sixth-century West Saxon rulers seems to have been deliberately lengthened, probably when the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was compiled in the late ninth century. In the chronicle annals he is said to have come to the throne in 560 and to have been driven out of the kingdom in 592, though he may have ceased to rule in 591, when the accession of his successor (and nephew), Ceol, was recorded. In the regnal lists Ceawlin is allotted a much shorter reign of either seven or seventeen years, which would imply accession in either 574–5 or 584–5. He may have been associated with his father's rule previously, and the chronicle records both men fighting the Britons at Barbury in 556. Ceawlin in turn seems to have shared power with Cuthwulf (who may have been his brother) and then with his son Cuthwine. In 568 Ceawlin and Cutha (probably Cuthwulf) are said to have put to flight Æthelberht of Kent at ‘Wibbandun’. Cuthwulf fought against the British at ‘Biedcanford’ in 571, leading to the capture of the tunas (‘estate centres’) of Limbury, Aylesbury, Bensington, and Eynsham, while Ceawlin and Cuthwine are said to have killed three British kings, Conmail, Condidan, and Farinmail at Dyrham in 577 and to have taken their cities of Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath. In 584 Ceawlin and Cutha fought the Britons at ‘Fethanleag’ (possibly in the north-east of modern Oxfordshire); Cutha was killed, but Ceawlin captured numerous unspecified tunas before ‘returning in anger to his own land’ (ASC, s.a. 584).

The reliability of these entries is hard to assess, and at the very least their dates must be suspect. The names of the three kings and their cities which fell to Ceawlin in 577 could have been taken from a Welsh triad, but whether they have been correctly allocated to Ceawlin's reign is another matter. Saxon settlement had begun in what is now Gloucestershire before 577, and the places said to have fallen to Cuthwulf in 571 are even less likely to have been still in British hands at that date, for these were areas with some of the earliest evidence for Anglo-Saxon settlement and the captured places all have Anglo-Saxon names. Bensington certainly, and possibly the other places in the 571 annal, were in dispute in the eighth century between Mercia and Wessex, and it has been suggested that the entry could have been constructed, or reconstructed, to help support the West Saxon cause by giving them a long-established claim to these local administrative centres. The impression given of Ceawlin as a successful and wide-ranging ruler does, however, receive some corroboration from his inclusion in Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum as the second name in a list of kings who exercised substantial power in southern England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is probably also correct in placing his activities in the upper Thames valley and beyond, for when King Cynegils was baptized in 635 he chose Dorchester-on-Thames for his episcopal see, which would suggest that the area was central to West Saxon interests. Ceawlin's reign appears to have ended with discord with rival members of the royal house after his nephew Ceol apparently seized the throne in 591. After ‘a great slaughter’ at Woden's Barrow on the Ridgeway, near Alton Priors in what is now Wiltshire, Ceawlin was driven out and his death is recorded the following year, 593, together with that of Cwichelm and Crida, who were presumably also members of the West Saxon royal house but are otherwise unknown (ASC, s.a. 592).

Barbara Yorke
Sources

ASC, s.a. 556, 560, 568, 571, 577, 584, 592, 593 · D. N. Dumville, ‘The West Saxon genealogical regnal list and the chronology of early Wessex’, Peritia, 4 (1985), 21–66 · P. Sims-Williams, ‘The settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle’, Anglo-Saxon England, 12 (1983), 1–41 · Bede, Hist. eccl., 2.5 · B. Yorke, Wessex in the early middle ages (1995)
© Oxford University Press 2004–5
All rights reserved: see legal notice      Oxford University Press


Barbara Yorke, ‘Ceawlin (d. 593)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4973, accessed 24 Sept 2005]

Ceawlin (d. 593): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/49733 
Crowned*560 King of Wessex2,1 
Title*between 581 and 588 according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle4 
Note* was able to exact tribute from some of the kingdoms already established in southern England.5 

Family
Child

Last Edited24 Sep 2005

Citations

  1. [S338] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 8th ed., 1-3.
  2. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-4.
  3. [S376] Unknown editor, unknown short title.
  4. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-2.
  5. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-3.
  6. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-5.

Cynric of the West Saxons1

M, #1668, d. 560

Father*Cerdic of the West Saxons2,3 d. 534
Cynric of the West Saxons|d. 560|p56.htm#i1668|Cerdic of the West Saxons|d. 534|p56.htm#i1669||||||||||||||||

Death*560 according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle4 
DNB* Cynric (fl. 6th cent.), king of the Gewisse, was one of the founders of the royal house of the Gewisse (later known as the West Saxons) and their second recorded king. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle he is presented as the son of Cerdic (fl. 6th cent.), and is said to have arrived with him in 495 and to have shared in his early successes against the British. However, in certain genealogies Cynric appears as the grandson of Cerdic, via a son called Creoda who does not feature in the annals at all. In the chronicle Cynric is said to have succeeded to the throne with Cerdic in 519, but his regnal years were counted from 534, said to be the year of Cerdic's death. He is reported to have ruled for twenty-six or twenty-seven years. His successor, his son Ceawlin, seems to have been given too long a reign in the chronicle, however, and Cynric's dates need to be brought forward, though they cannot be established with any certainty. Following Cerdic's death, Cynric is represented as extending West Saxon control into what is now Wiltshire. In 552 he is recorded as defeating Britons at Old Sarum, and in 556, with the assistance of Ceawlin, as fighting them at Barbury Castle; both are sites of Iron Age hill forts. It is quite possible that these areas of what is now Wiltshire came under the control of Cynric's family in the second half of the sixth century, but it was not necessarily the case that those who opposed them would have been ‘British’, for there had been Anglo-Saxon settlement in the Salisbury area since the fifth century.

Barbara Yorke
Sources

ASC, s.a. 495, 508, 519, 527, 530, 534, 552, 556 · D. N. Dumville, ‘The West Saxon genealogical regnal list and the chronology of early Wessex’, Peritia, 4 (1985), 21–66 · B. Eagles, ‘The archaeological evidence for settlement in the fifth to seventh centuries AD’, The medieval landscape of Wessex, ed. M. Aston and C. Lewis (1994), 13–32 · B. Yorke, Wessex in the early middle ages (1995)
© Oxford University Press 2004–5
All rights reserved: see legal notice      Oxford University Press


Barbara Yorke, ‘Cynric (fl. 6th cent.)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6991, accessed 24 Sept 2005]

Cynric (fl. 6th cent.): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/69915 
Note*495 Hampshire, England, invaded6 
Titlebetween 534 and 560 King of the West Saxons1 
Title*between 554 and 581 King of the West Saxons7 
Note was possibly the son of Creoda, son of Cerdic, not Cerdic.7 

Family
Child

Last Edited24 Sep 2005

Citations

  1. [S338] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 8th ed., 1-2.
  2. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-2.
  3. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-1.
  4. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-3.
  5. [S376] Unknown editor, unknown short title.
  6. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-1.
  7. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-2.
  8. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-4.

Cerdic of the West Saxons1

M, #1669, d. 534

Death*534 according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle2,1 
DNB* Cerdic (fl. 6th cent.), king of the Gewisse, was believed to be the founder of the ruling dynasty of the Gewisse (or West Saxons, as they subsequently became known), and so the individual from whom all kings of the West Saxons are said to have traced their descent. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Cerdic and his son Cynric are said to have arrived with five ships at ‘Cerdicesora’ in 495; to have fought against a British king, called Natanleod, in 508; and to have become kings in 519 after defeating the British at Cerdicesford, identified in the tenth century with Charford in Hampshire. In 527 they appear fighting the Britons at ‘Cerdicesleag’, and in 530 are said to have captured the Isle of Wight and placed it under the control of their kinsmen Stuf and Wihtgar. Cerdic's death is recorded in 534.

There are insuperable problems to accepting these annals as an accurate historical record. The chronology cannot be correct, and certain events appear to have been duplicated nineteen years apart: for instance, Cerdic's arrival in 495 is a replication of an entry for 514 recording the arrival of the West Saxons at ‘Cerdicesora’. Such duplication could be the result of miscopying or misinterpretation of events recorded after the conversion of the West Saxons in a Dionysiac Easter table, where entries would have been grouped in discrete cycles of nineteen years. Cerdic's accession in 519 and death in 534 is in keeping with a reign length of sixteen years allotted to him in the West Saxon regnal lists, but discrepancies between the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle annals and other regnal list entries for the sixth century suggest that his reign must have been placed too early, though it is difficult now to provide it with accurate dates.

The arrival of a pair of founders with alliterating names and a small number of ships recalls other Anglo-Saxon foundation myths, which are in turn part of a broader Indo-European tradition. Another sign of oral story telling is the apparent invention of individuals to explain place names; so Natan leaga (Netley Marsh, Hampshire) is said to take its name from the British king Natanleod who fell there, but in fact it seems to be a Germanic place name meaning ‘wet wood’. A final problem is the name of Cerdic himself, which is not Germanic in origin but an Anglicization of the British name Caraticos. It is difficult to explain how Cerdic could have arrived straight from Germany with such a name, but it would become explicable if his family had already been established in Britain in a milieu where Germanic settlers mixed with Romano-British. The area of the upper Thames, where the first Gewissan or West Saxon bishopric was established at Dorchester-on-Thames and where Cerdic's grandson Ceawlin appears to have been based, would meet these requirements, as it was one of the first areas in southern England to receive Germanic settlers in the fifth century. If Cerdic was indeed the first king of the Gewisse, he is more likely to have come to power in the upper Thames than in what is now southern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, which appear to have been under the control of separate Jutish dynasties in the sixth century. By the seventh century, descent from Cerdic seems to have been regarded as essential for claimants to the West Saxon throne and, even if no other genealogical information is given, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and regnal lists are likely to claim for a ruler that ‘his kin goes back to Cerdic’.

Barbara Yorke
Sources

ASC, s.a. 495, 508, 514, 519, 527, 530, 534 · D. N. Dumville, ‘The West Saxon genealogical regnal list and the chronology of early Wessex’, Peritia, 4 (1985), 21–66 · B. A. E. Yorke, ‘The Jutes of Hampshire and Wight and the origins of Wessex’, The origins of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, ed. S. Bassett (1989), 84–96 · F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn (1971) · K. Harrison, The framework of Anglo-Saxon history (1976) · B. Yorke, Wessex in the early middle ages (1995) · R. Coates, ‘On some controversy surrounding Gewissae/Gewissei, Cerdic and Ceawlin’, Nomina, 13 (1989–90), 1–11
© Oxford University Press 2004–5
All rights reserved: see legal notice      Oxford University Press


Barbara Yorke, ‘Cerdic (fl. 6th cent.)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5003, accessed 24 Sept 2005]

Cerdic (fl. 6th cent.): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/50033 
Note*495 Hampshire, England, Invaded England according to the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. Other scholars put the date as about 532.2 
Crowned*519 according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle2 
HTML* 
Kings of Wessex from Cerdic to Alfred the Great
Saxons and Jutes of Southern England
Anglo-Saxon Genealogy

Anglo-Saxon Chronical: 6th Century
Arthur, Cerdic, and the Formation of Wessex

 
Title*between 538 and 554 King of the West Saxons, founder of the West Saxon dynasty4 

Family
Children

Last Edited24 Sep 2005

Citations

  1. [S338] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 8th ed., 1-1.
  2. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-1.
  3. [S376] Unknown editor, unknown short title.
  4. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents.
  5. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 1-2.
  6. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-1.
  7. [S232] Don Charles Stone, Ancient and Medieval Descents, 10-2.

Joan Danvers1

F, #1670, d. 1505

Father*John Danvers1
Joan Danvers|d. 1505|p56.htm#i1670|John Danvers||p470.htm#i14086||||||||||||||||

ChartsAnn Marbury Pedigree

Marriage* Principal=Richard Fowler2 
Death*1505  
Name Variation Jane 
Married Name Fowler2 

Family

Richard Fowler
Child

Last Edited6 Oct 2004

Citations

  1. [S284] Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, Chamberlain 12.
  2. [S190] F. N. Craig, "Ralegh of Farnborough", p. 18.

Richard Chamberlayne

M, #1671, b. 1391, d. 1439

 

Father*Sir Richard Chamberlayne1,2 b. 1320, d. 24 Aug 1396
Mother*Margaret Loveyne1 b. c 1372, d. 18 Apr 1408
Richard Chamberlayne|b. 1391\nd. 1439|p56.htm#i1671|Sir Richard Chamberlayne|b. 1320\nd. 24 Aug 1396|p75.htm#i2232|Margaret Loveyne|b. c 1372\nd. 18 Apr 1408|p75.htm#i2233|Sir Richard Chamberlain Knt.|b. 1315\nd. 1391|p76.htm#i2267|Joan Reynes||p450.htm#i13471|Sir Nicholas de Loveyne||p77.htm#i2286|Margaret de Vere|d. 15 Jun 1398|p543.htm#i16279|

ChartsAnn Marbury Pedigree

Birth*1391 England3,4,5 
Birthcirca 1392 (aged 16 in 1408)6 
Marriage*before 1436 "Actually, what F. N. Craig wrote in his article 'Chamberlains in the Marbury
Ancestry' in NEHGR (v. 138, 1984), p. 319 was 'Margaret was the daughter of Sir
John Knyvet, according to the material cited by Colket (English Ancestry, 41,
54)' Proving the Knyvet relationship to the Chamberlains was not the focus of
his article.

Turning to Meredith B. Colkert, Jr.'s "The English Ancestry of Anne Marbury
Hutchinson and Katherine Marbury Scott," (Philadelphia: The Magee Press,
1936), on page 41 one can find the pertinent entry for Richard Chamberlain
which reads: "10. Richard Chamberlayne, of Tilsworth, Bedfordshire, etc., b.
ca 1392 as age 16 in 1408, d. 1439, m. (2) Margaret, dau. of John above
[referring to Sir John Knyvet and wife Elizabeth Clifton]. She was about 20
years younger than her husband and d. 1458. (VCH Beds III p. 433, VCH Bucks IV
p. 340, MGH os I p. 25 showing coat quartering Knyvet, Basset, Clifton, SS 144
p. 10, H V p. 236 contains errors.)

page 54 of the same, Appendix B, reads: "The Visitation of Oxford has it that
Richard Chamberlayne married Margaret, daughter of William (John?) Knyvet by a
daughter of the Duke of Buckingham. The will of William dated 1514, the
Visitation of Yorkshire and Surtees 144 all disprove this statement. Margaret
was an aunt of this William Knyvet and a daughter of John Knyvet by his wife
Elizabeth Clifton. The Surtees Society 144 p. 10 shows that John Knyvet had a
daughter Margareta. The coat of Richard Chamberlayne as given in MGH (I os. p.
25) impales the arms of Margareta's immediate ancestors, including Cromwell,
Clifton, Botetourt and Basset. (See SS 144 p. 10 and 155 for her ancestors).
Papworth and Morant's Alphabetical Dictionary is a guide to the identofocation
of the arms."

Surtees Society Publications, vol. 144 (London, 1930) in Visitations of the
North - Part III - A Visitation of the North of England circa 1480-1500, p. 10,
shows the children of John Knyvet and wife Elizabeth Clifton as::

1. John Knyvet = Alice Lynne
2. Margaret Knyvet
3. Joan Knyvet

When you consider the Visitation of Oxfordshire in 1566, 1574 and 1634
(Harleian Society, vol. 5, 1871, p. 235-236) shows Richard Chamberlain married
to 'Margareta fil. Willi. (? John) Knevett, militis," the foregoing Visitation
of the North showing John and Elizabeth (Clifton) Knyvet with a daughter named
Margaret, and the arms of Richard Chamberlain impaling those of his wife's
immediate ancestors: Cromwell (Elizabeth, wife of Sir John de Clifton),
Clifton (Elizabeth, wife of Sir John Knyvet), Botetourt (Joan, wife of John
Knyvet) and Basset (Alianore, wife of Sir John Knyvet), you have convincing
evidence. I have not pursued this beyond this point." - Kay Allen

, 1st=Margaret Knyvet3,7,4,8,9,6 
Death*1439 3,4,5,6 
Feudal* Tilsworth, Bedfordshire, and Petsoe (in Emberton), Buckinghamshire.6 
Name Variation Richard Chamberlain Esq.6 

Family 1
Child

Family 2

Margaret Knyvet b. c 1412, d. shortly before 12 May 1458
Children

Last Edited10 Sep 2005

Citations

  1. [S192] F. N. Craig, "Chamberlains in the Marbury Ancestry", p.319.
  2. [S374] Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry, Chamberlain 8.
  3. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-11.
  4. [S195] Ronny Bodine, Chamberlain of Buckinghamshire and Northhamptonshire in "Chamberlain," listserve message 26 Mar 1999.
  5. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 53-10.
  6. [S284] Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, Chamberlain 11.
  7. [S183] Jr. Meredith B. Colket, Marbury Ancestry, p. 41.
  8. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 53-11.
  9. [S299] Ronny Bodine, Richard Chamberlain in "Chamberlain, Knyvet and Reynes," listserve message 27 Mar 1999.
  10. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-12.
  11. [S192] F. N. Craig, "Chamberlains in the Marbury Ancestry", p.318.
  12. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-13.

Margaret Knyvet

F, #1672, b. circa 1412, d. shortly before 12 May 1458

 

Father*Sir John Knyvet1,2 b. c 1380, d. 9 Nov 1445
Mother*Elizabeth Clifton1,3 b. c 1392, d. b 8 Dec 1461
Margaret Knyvet|b. c 1412\nd. shortly before 12 May 1458|p56.htm#i1672|Sir John Knyvet|b. c 1380\nd. 9 Nov 1445|p56.htm#i1673|Elizabeth Clifton|b. c 1392\nd. b 8 Dec 1461|p56.htm#i1674|Sir John Knyvet|b. c 1358\nd. 4 Dec 1418|p56.htm#i1676|Joan de Botetourte|d. 1417|p56.htm#i1677|Constantine de Clifton Esq.|b. 1372\nd. 19 Feb 1395|p56.htm#i1675|Margaret Howard|d. 25 Mar 1434|p57.htm#i1706|

ChartsAnn Marbury Pedigree

Birth*circa 1412 1,4,5 
Marriage*before 1436 "Actually, what F. N. Craig wrote in his article 'Chamberlains in the Marbury
Ancestry' in NEHGR (v. 138, 1984), p. 319 was 'Margaret was the daughter of Sir
John Knyvet, according to the material cited by Colket (English Ancestry, 41,
54)' Proving the Knyvet relationship to the Chamberlains was not the focus of
his article.

Turning to Meredith B. Colkert, Jr.'s "The English Ancestry of Anne Marbury
Hutchinson and Katherine Marbury Scott," (Philadelphia: The Magee Press,
1936), on page 41 one can find the pertinent entry for Richard Chamberlain
which reads: "10. Richard Chamberlayne, of Tilsworth, Bedfordshire, etc., b.
ca 1392 as age 16 in 1408, d. 1439, m. (2) Margaret, dau. of John above
[referring to Sir John Knyvet and wife Elizabeth Clifton]. She was about 20
years younger than her husband and d. 1458. (VCH Beds III p. 433, VCH Bucks IV
p. 340, MGH os I p. 25 showing coat quartering Knyvet, Basset, Clifton, SS 144
p. 10, H V p. 236 contains errors.)

page 54 of the same, Appendix B, reads: "The Visitation of Oxford has it that
Richard Chamberlayne married Margaret, daughter of William (John?) Knyvet by a
daughter of the Duke of Buckingham. The will of William dated 1514, the
Visitation of Yorkshire and Surtees 144 all disprove this statement. Margaret
was an aunt of this William Knyvet and a daughter of John Knyvet by his wife
Elizabeth Clifton. The Surtees Society 144 p. 10 shows that John Knyvet had a
daughter Margareta. The coat of Richard Chamberlayne as given in MGH (I os. p.
25) impales the arms of Margareta's immediate ancestors, including Cromwell,
Clifton, Botetourt and Basset. (See SS 144 p. 10 and 155 for her ancestors).
Papworth and Morant's Alphabetical Dictionary is a guide to the identofocation
of the arms."

Surtees Society Publications, vol. 144 (London, 1930) in Visitations of the
North - Part III - A Visitation of the North of England circa 1480-1500, p. 10,
shows the children of John Knyvet and wife Elizabeth Clifton as::

1. John Knyvet = Alice Lynne
2. Margaret Knyvet
3. Joan Knyvet

When you consider the Visitation of Oxfordshire in 1566, 1574 and 1634
(Harleian Society, vol. 5, 1871, p. 235-236) shows Richard Chamberlain married
to 'Margareta fil. Willi. (? John) Knevett, militis," the foregoing Visitation
of the North showing John and Elizabeth (Clifton) Knyvet with a daughter named
Margaret, and the arms of Richard Chamberlain impaling those of his wife's
immediate ancestors: Cromwell (Elizabeth, wife of Sir John de Clifton),
Clifton (Elizabeth, wife of Sir John Knyvet), Botetourt (Joan, wife of John
Knyvet) and Basset (Alianore, wife of Sir John Knyvet), you have convincing
evidence. I have not pursued this beyond this point." - Kay Allen

, 2nd=Richard Chamberlayne1,2,6,7,8,5 
Marriage*after 1439 Groom=William Gedney6,5 
Death*shortly before 12 May 1458 1,4,5 
Name Variation Knyvett5 
Married Name Chamberlayne1 
Married Nameafter 1439 Gedney6 

Family

Richard Chamberlayne b. 1391, d. 1439
Children

Last Edited6 Oct 2004

Citations

  1. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-11.
  2. [S183] Jr. Meredith B. Colket, Marbury Ancestry, p. 41.
  3. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 53-9.
  4. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 53-10.
  5. [S284] Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, Chamberlain 11.
  6. [S195] Ronny Bodine, Chamberlain of Buckinghamshire and Northhamptonshire in "Chamberlain," listserve message 26 Mar 1999.
  7. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 53-11.
  8. [S299] Ronny Bodine, Richard Chamberlain in "Chamberlain, Knyvet and Reynes," listserve message 27 Mar 1999.
  9. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-12.
  10. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-13.
  11. [S192] F. N. Craig, "Chamberlains in the Marbury Ancestry", p.319.

Sir John Knyvet

M, #1673, b. circa 1380, d. 9 November 1445

 

Father*Sir John Knyvet1,2,3 b. c 1358, d. 4 Dec 1418
Mother*Joan de Botetourte1,3 d. 1417
Sir John Knyvet|b. c 1380\nd. 9 Nov 1445|p56.htm#i1673|Sir John Knyvet|b. c 1358\nd. 4 Dec 1418|p56.htm#i1676|Joan de Botetourte|d. 1417|p56.htm#i1677|Sir John Knyvet|b. b 1326\nd. 1381|p56.htm#i1679|Alianore Basset|b. c 1325\nd. 1388|p56.htm#i1680|Sir John de Botetourte|b. c 1333\nd. 1377|p56.htm#i1678|Katherine de Weyland||p368.htm#i11029|

ChartsAnn Marbury Pedigree

Birth*circa 1380 1 
Birthbetween 1394 and 1395 4 
Marriage*before 1412 Principal=Elizabeth Clifton1,2,5,4 
Death*9 November 1445 4 
Death1446 1,2,5 
Title* Knight of the Shire for Northamptonshire4 
Feudal* Southwick, Northamptonshire; Hamerton, Huntingdonshire; and Mendelsham, Suffolk.6 
Event-Misc*September 1415 He was present at the siege and fall of Harfleur4 
Event-Misc1417 He was part of King Hnery V's second invasion of Normandy4 
Event-Misc1421 He was briefly captured by the French near Senlis and incurred great debt paying the ransom.4 
Occupation*7 November 1427 Sheriff of Northamptonshire1,2,5,4 
Event-Misc1435 He was coheir to his Weyland cousin, John Stretch, by which he inherited the manors of Charsfield, Brandeston, and Westerfield, Suffolk, and Oxborough, Norfolk.4 

Family

Elizabeth Clifton b. c 1392, d. b 8 Dec 1461
Children

Last Edited6 Oct 2004

Citations

  1. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-10.
  2. [S183] Jr. Meredith B. Colket, Marbury Ancestry, p. 41.
  3. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 52-8.
  4. [S284] Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, Gurdon 10.
  5. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 53-9.
  6. [S284] Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, Chamberlain 11.
  7. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 52-10.
  8. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-11.

Elizabeth Clifton

F, #1674, b. circa 1392, d. before 8 December 1461

Father*Constantine de Clifton Esq.1,2,3 b. 1372, d. 19 Feb 1395
Mother*Margaret Howard1,3 d. 25 Mar 1434
MotherElizabeth Scales2
Elizabeth Clifton|b. c 1392\nd. b 8 Dec 1461|p56.htm#i1674|Constantine de Clifton Esq.|b. 1372\nd. 19 Feb 1395|p56.htm#i1675|Margaret Howard|d. 25 Mar 1434|p57.htm#i1706|Sir John de Clifton|b. c 1353\nd. 10 Aug 1388|p57.htm#i1709|Elizabeth Cromwell|d. 24 Sep 1391|p58.htm#i1713|Sir Robert Howard|b. c 1342\nd. 18 Jul 1388|p468.htm#i14012|Margaret de Scales||p468.htm#i14016|

ChartsAnn Marbury Pedigree

Birth*circa 1392 4,5 
Marriage*before 1412 Principal=Sir John Knyvet4,6,7,5 
Death*before 8 December 1461 5 
Married Name Knyvet4 
(Witness) Probate1447 Principal=Sir John Clifton5 

Family

Sir John Knyvet b. c 1380, d. 9 Nov 1445
Children

Last Edited13 Oct 2004

Citations

  1. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 188-10.
  2. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 52-9.
  3. [S284] Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, Marmion 11.
  4. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-10.
  5. [S284] Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, Gurdon 10.
  6. [S183] Jr. Meredith B. Colket, Marbury Ancestry, p. 41.
  7. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 53-9.
  8. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 52-10.
  9. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-11.

Constantine de Clifton Esq.1

M, #1675, b. 1372, d. 19 February 1395

Father*Sir John de Clifton b. c 1353, d. 10 Aug 1388; son and heir2,3
Mother*Elizabeth Cromwell3 d. 24 Sep 1391
Constantine de Clifton Esq.|b. 1372\nd. 19 Feb 1395|p56.htm#i1675|Sir John de Clifton|b. c 1353\nd. 10 Aug 1388|p57.htm#i1709|Elizabeth Cromwell|d. 24 Sep 1391|p58.htm#i1713|Constantine de Clifton|d. b 1373|p57.htm#i1710|Catherine de la Pole||p58.htm#i1712|Sir Ralph Cromwell|d. 27 Aug 1398|p58.htm#i1715|Maud Bernacke|b. bt 1335 - 1338\nd. 10 Apr 1419|p58.htm#i1716|

ChartsAnn Marbury Pedigree

Birth*1372 2,4 
Marriage*after February 1390 1st=Margaret Howard5,4 
Marriage* Principal=Elizabeth Scales6 
Death*19 February 1395 2,4 
Feudal* Buckenham, Babingley, Hilborough, Norfolk; Little Waltham, Essex.4 
Title* 2nd Lord Clifton1 
Summoned*from 13 November 1393 to 20 November 1394 Parliament4 

Family

Margaret Howard d. 25 Mar 1434
Children

Last Edited13 Oct 2004

Citations

  1. [S284] Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, Gurdon 10.
  2. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 218-34.
  3. [S284] Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, Marmion 10.
  4. [S284] Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, Marmion 11.
  5. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 188-10.
  6. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 52-9.

Sir John Knyvet1

M, #1676, b. circa 1358, d. 4 December 1418

 

Father*Sir John Knyvet2,3 b. b 1326, d. 1381
Mother*Alianore Basset b. c 1325, d. 1388; son and heir2,1
Sir John Knyvet|b. c 1358\nd. 4 Dec 1418|p56.htm#i1676|Sir John Knyvet|b. b 1326\nd. 1381|p56.htm#i1679|Alianore Basset|b. c 1325\nd. 1388|p56.htm#i1680|||||||Sir Ralph Basset of Weldon|b. 27 Aug 1300\nd. b 4 May 1341|p57.htm#i1681|Joan Sturdon||p57.htm#i1682|

ChartsAnn Marbury Pedigree

Birth*circa 1358 4,1 
Marriage*before 1377 Bride=Joan de Botetourte2,3,5,1 
Marriage*circa 1418 Bride=Joan (?)1 
Death*4 December 1418 Mendlesham, Suffolk, England2,5,1 
Feudal* Southwick and Apethorpe, Northamptonshire, Winwick, Huntingdonsire, Boxworth, Elsworths (in Conington), Fen Drayton, and Papworth, Cambridgeshire, and, in right of his first wife, Mendlesham, Suffolk, and Hamerton, Huntindonshire.1 
Title* Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, Knight of the Shire for Huntingdonshire.1 
Arms* Argent, a bend and a border engrailed sable.1
Name Variation Knyvett1 
Occupation*between 1397 and 1398 England, Member of Parliament2,3 
Event-Misc*1398 They received a papal indult for a portable altar, Principal=Joan de Botetourte1 
Event-Misc*1400 He was co-heir to Richard Basset, his mother's great-nephew1 

Family

Joan de Botetourte d. 1417
Children

Last Edited29 Dec 2004

Citations

  1. [S284] Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, Gurdon 9.
  2. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-9.
  3. [S183] Jr. Meredith B. Colket, Marbury Ancestry, p. 41.
  4. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 188-9.
  5. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 52-8.
  6. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-10.

Joan de Botetourte

F, #1677, d. 1417

Father*Sir John de Botetourte b. c 1333, d. 1377; daughter and heir1
Mother*Katherine de Weyland2,3
Joan de Botetourte|d. 1417|p56.htm#i1677|Sir John de Botetourte|b. c 1333\nd. 1377|p56.htm#i1678|Katherine de Weyland||p368.htm#i11029|Sir Otto de Botetourte|b. b 1319\nd. 11 Nov 1345|p368.htm#i11033|Sibyl (?)||p368.htm#i11034|Sir Robert de Weyland||p368.htm#i11030|Cecily de Baldock||p368.htm#i11031|

ChartsAnn Marbury Pedigree

Marriage*before 1377 1st=Sir John Knyvet4,5,1,6 
Death*1417 6 
Event-Misc*1398 They received a papal indult for a portable altar, Principal=Sir John Knyvet6 
Married Name Knyvet4 
Residence* Mendlesham, Suffolk, England5 

Family

Sir John Knyvet b. c 1358, d. 4 Dec 1418
Children

Last Edited9 Oct 2005

Citations

  1. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 52-8.
  2. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 216A-31.
  3. [S374] Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry, Gurdon 8.
  4. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-9.
  5. [S183] Jr. Meredith B. Colket, Marbury Ancestry, p. 41.
  6. [S284] Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, Gurdon 9.
  7. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-10.

Sir John de Botetourte

M, #1678, b. circa 1333, d. 1377

 

Father*Sir Otto de Botetourte1,2 b. b 1319, d. 11 Nov 1345
Mother*Sibyl (?)1
Sir John de Botetourte|b. c 1333\nd. 1377|p56.htm#i1678|Sir Otto de Botetourte|b. b 1319\nd. 11 Nov 1345|p368.htm#i11033|Sibyl (?)||p368.htm#i11034|Sir John de Botetourte M.P.|d. 25 Nov 1324|p368.htm#i11035|Maud FitzThomas|b. c 1263\nd. 27 Nov 1328|p368.htm#i11036|||||||

ChartsAnn Marbury Pedigree

Birthcirca 1332 3 
Birth*circa 1333 4 
Marriage* Principal=Katherine de Weyland4 
Death*1377 4,3 
Feudal* Mendlesham, Suffolk, and Hamerton, Huntingdonshire.4,3 

Family

Katherine de Weyland
Child

Last Edited9 Oct 2004

Citations

  1. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 216A-30.
  2. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 52-8.
  3. [S284] Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, Gurdon 8.
  4. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 216A-31.

Sir John Knyvet1

M, #1679, b. before 1326, d. 1381

 

ChartsAnn Marbury Pedigree

Marriage* Principal=Alianore Basset2,1,3,4,5 
Birth*before 1326 of Winwick, Northampton, England6,1 
Death*1381 6,3 
DNB* Knyvet, Sir John (d. 1381), justice and administrator, was the eldest son of Richard Knyvet of Southwick, Northamptonshire (d. 1353), the keeper of Rockingham Forest in that county, and Joanna, daughter and heir of Sir John Wurth. Knyvet was practising in the courts by 1347; in 1354 he became serjeant-at-law, and from 1356 to 1361 served as a king's serjeant. On 24 June 1361 he was appointed a justice of the court of common pleas and was knighted, and on 29 October 1365 he was raised to the office of chief justice of the king's bench. In the parliament of 1362 he served as a trier of petitions for Aquitaine and other lands overseas, and afterwards in each parliament until 1380, except while he was chancellor, was a trier of petitions for England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.

On 5 July 1372, after the death of Sir Robert Thorpe, Knyvet was appointed chancellor. His period of office may have seen significant developments in chancery's emerging function as a court of equity. Speeches which he made at the openings of parliament in 1372, 1373, and 1376 are recorded in the parliament rolls. However, in January 1377 Edward III's government reverted to the custom of appointing ecclesiastical chancellors, and Adam Houghton was appointed to succeed Knyvet on 11 January. But the former minister remained in high standing with the court, for on the day after his dismissal Knyvet was retained for life as a member of the king's council, with an annuity of £200 payable from the hanaper of the chancery. Before he was replaced Knyvet was also appointed ex officio as one of Edward III's executors. He did not again hold judicial office, but was appointed to the first continual council of Richard II's minority government (July–October 1377) and had his annuity confirmed by the new king on 27 February 1378.

Knyvet's principal residence probably remained Southwick, where the hall shows evidence of extensive rebuilding during his tenure. He held large estates in Northamptonshire and throughout East Anglia, and his local connections are reflected by his frequent appointment as justice of assize, gaol delivery, and oyer and terminer in the central and eastern counties. During the 1350s he was also regularly appointed as a justice of the peace in Northamptonshire, and more occasionally in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk. He had close connections with the royal family, serving as steward of Queen Philippa's estates, counsellor of the Black Prince, and justice of the forest in Lancashire to John of Gaunt. He received fees from the abbot of Ramsey and was in the service of William de Bohun, earl of Northampton, becoming guardian to the latter's son Humphrey.

About 1358 Knyvet married Eleanor (d. 1388), daughter and coheir of Ralph, Lord Basset of Weldon. They left five children: John, Robert, Richard, Henry, and Margery, and their descendants established themselves as a leading family in Norfolk. Knyvet died on 16 February 1381; a few months later the escheators' investigations of his lands were disrupted by the outbreak of the peasants' revolt.

W. M. Ormrod
Sources

Sainty, King's counsel · Sainty, Judges · Baker, Serjeants · G. O. Sayles, ed., Select cases in the court of king's bench, 7 vols., SeldS, 55, 57–8, 74, 76, 82, 88 (1936–71) · Tout, Admin. hist. · RotP · CIPM, 15, no. 364 · Northamptonshire, Pevsner (1961) · HoP, Commons · Chancery records · S. Walker, The Lancastrian affinity, 1361–1399 (1990) · G. A. Holmes, The estates of the higher nobility in fourteenth-century England (1957) · J. R. Maddicott, Law and lordship: royal justices as retainers in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England (1978)
© Oxford University Press 2004–5
All rights reserved: see legal notice      Oxford University Press


W. M. Ormrod, ‘Knyvet, Sir John (d. 1381)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/15798, accessed 24 Sept 2005]

Sir John Knyvet (d. 1381): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/157987 
Occupation* Lord Chancellor of England6,3 
Occupation Chief Justice of the King's Bench6,3 

Family

Alianore Basset b. c 1325, d. 1388
Child

Last Edited24 Sep 2005

Citations

  1. [S183] Jr. Meredith B. Colket, Marbury Ancestry, p. 41.
  2. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-9.
  3. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 52-7.
  4. [S325] Rev. C. Moor, Knights of Edward I, p. 53.
  5. [S284] Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, Gurdon 9.
  6. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-8.
  7. [S376] Unknown editor, unknown short title.

Alianore Basset

F, #1680, b. circa 1325, d. 1388

Father*Sir Ralph Basset of Weldon1,2 b. 27 Aug 1300, d. b 4 May 1341
Mother*Joan Sturdon3
MotherAlianore de la Wade4
Alianore Basset|b. c 1325\nd. 1388|p56.htm#i1680|Sir Ralph Basset of Weldon|b. 27 Aug 1300\nd. b 4 May 1341|p57.htm#i1681|Joan Sturdon||p57.htm#i1682|Sir Richard Basset M.P.|b. c 1273\nd. bt 24 Jun 1314 - 18 Aug 1314|p57.htm#i1684|Joan de Huntingfield||p57.htm#i1683|||||||

ChartsAnn Marbury Pedigree

Birth*circa 1325 England5 
Marriage* Principal=Sir John Knyvet6,3,7,4,8 
Death*1388 5 
Name Variation Eleanor Basset4 
Married Name Knyvet6 

Family

Sir John Knyvet b. b 1326, d. 1381
Child

Last Edited9 Oct 2004

Citations

  1. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-8.
  2. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 52-6.
  3. [S183] Jr. Meredith B. Colket, Marbury Ancestry, p. 41.
  4. [S325] Rev. C. Moor, Knights of Edward I, p. 53.
  5. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 188-8.
  6. [S168] Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots, 238-9.
  7. [S233] Frederick Lewis Weis, Magna Charta Sureties, 52-7.
  8. [S284] Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, Gurdon 9.
Close