Viking Britain: A History. Thomas Williams

Чтение книги онлайн.

      1

       Outsiders from Across the Water

      When the watchman on the wall, the Shieldings’ lookout

      whose job it was to guard the sea-cliffs,

      saw shields glittering on the gangplank

      and battle-equipment being unloaded

      he had to find out who and what they were. So he rode to the shore,

      this horseman of Hrothgar’s, and challenged them

      in formal terms, flourishing his spear.

       Beowulf 1

      In the days of King Beorhtric of Wessex (r. 786–802), ‘there came for the first time three ships of Northmen from Hordaland’,2 and ‘they landed in the island which is called Portland’.3 ‘[T]he king’s reeve, who was then in the town called Dorchester, leapt on his horse, sped to the harbour with a few men (for he thought they were merchants rather than marauders), and admonishing them [the Northmen] in an authoritative manner, gave orders that they should be driven to the royal town. And he and his companions were killed by them on the spot. The name of the reeve was Beaduheard.’4

      ‘Those were the first ships of Danish men which came to the land of the English.’5

      Looking south from the summit of the barrow, the land feels like it is slipping away, yielding itself to the ineffable splendour of the ocean. Away in the distance the dark bulk of Portland languishes, a last defiant redoubt set in the glittering sea. The world is wide here, the coast of England laid out in broad wings to east and west; on a bright clear day – the ozone hollowing out the sinuses – you feel weightless, as if you could step from the top of that mound and be lifted into the firmament, soar into that white light obliterating the edges of land, sea and sky, tumbling in the breeze.

      The mound is known, for reasons now lost, as Culliford Tree. It is a tumulus, a Bronze Age burial mound – one of five running east to west – that had stood on the Dorset chalk for more than 2,000 years before it received a name in the English tongue. Like breakwaters in the surf, the mounds and their ancient dead have endured the battering tides of time, forcing history to shape itself around them. At some point after it was named, the barrow became the meeting place of Culliford Tree Hundred, the administrative district of which Portland formed part at the time of the Domesday Survey in 1086. It had probably served this purpose for hundreds of years prior to William the Conqueror’s great national audit and by the end of the eighth century it was almost certainly a significant regional meeting place. It was in this place and in others like it that royal officials enacted the king’s will and delivered his justice, adjudicating disputes and pronouncing verdicts which could include fines, mutilation and death. From the summit of the barrow, the landscape reveals itself to the watcher – a place from which the land could be claimed, authority enacted in the act of seeing.

      On that day at the end of the eighth century when three ships came unasked to Portland, the man riding down to Portland strand might well have paused and looked back over his shoulder, looked for Culliford Tree. He might have sought comfort from the distant mound on the horizon – a dark beacon of antiquity and earth-fast custom, a symbol of territory and authority, of land and legitimacy. This man, Beaduheard, would have known that the barrow watched over him, lending him the power in the land, confirming the prerogatives of his office. He was reeve to the king of Wessex, Beorhtric, and as such he exercised the king’s delegated authority. Reeves represented the king in towns, ports and sometimes across whole shires; the modern and medieval word ‘sheriff’ has its origin in these ‘shire-reeves’. Beaduheard, therefore, was an important man – responsible, perhaps, for local government in Dorchester and the surrounding countryside, a man used to getting his own way.

      Beaduheard arrives on Portland to find a group of travellers arrayed on the beach, their ships drawn up behind them, their backs to the sea. They are wary – frightened even. They are strangers in a strange land, conditioned perhaps to expect a frosty welcome. Beaduheard dismounts from his horse to receive them, others following his lead, shingle crunching beneath leather-shod feet. Words are exchanged but their meaning is lost – whatever mutual words they understood failing in the tension of the moment, drowned by the crashing of the waves. But Beaduheard is no diplomat, and the tenor of his words is clear enough. He ‘admonishes’ the newcomers in an ‘authoritative manner’, he attempts to ‘drive them’ to the king’s residence (‘against their will’ as the chronicle of John of Worcester adds).6 He knows his duty, and he knows the law.

      The West Saxon edicts that are closest in date to these events are the laws of King Ine (r. 688–726). Clause 20 gives a sense of the sort of welcome that the unfortunate wanderer could expect in eighth-century Wessex: ‘If a man from afar, or a stranger, goes through the woods off the highway and neither calls out nor blows a horn, he may be considered a thief, to be slain or to be redeemed [by paying his wergild (“man-price”)].’7 Britain’s most southerly realm offered cold comfort to the lost.

      In the Old English poem Beowulf – composed at some point between the early eighth and the early eleventh century – there can be found, expressed in the Reeve’s own West Saxon tongue, a form of words that we might imagine Beaduheard speaking in his final hours: an echo of a lived experience.8

      ‘What kind of men are you who arrive

      rigged out for combat in coats of mail,

      sailing here over the sea-lanes

      in your steep-hulled boat? […]

      Never before has a force under arms

      disembarked so openly – not bothering to ask

      if the sentries allowed them safe passage

      or the clan had consented […]

      So now, before you fare inland

      as interlopers, I have to be informed

      about who you are and where you hail from.

      Outsiders from across the water,

      I say it again: the sooner you tell

      where you come from and why, the better.’9