WARLORDS AND ANCESTRY

The authority of the early warlords was a direct product of success in battle. But the Britons, at least at first, claimed legitimacy as the successors of Rome and the champions of Christianity, as well as the heirs of noble ancestors.

The Anglo-Saxons were similarly obsessed with ancestry. Their leaders boasted of descent from pagan gods, generally Woden. None but the ‘Woden-born’ could hope to exercise major power.

Most of their early leaders headed small groups only. To attain greater power, such leaders needed a reputation for courage or cunning as well as a respectable ancestry. They especially needed to be able to distribute costly presents to their followers.

KINGDOMS AND HIDES

The most successful rulers were those who welded small groups of peoples into kingdoms, eventually resulting in the larger ‘Anglian’ realms of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia, and the ‘Saxon’ kingdoms of Wessex, Essex and Sussex.

Particularly powerful rulers were remembered for achieving overlordship, reflecting the supremacy of their kingdom over others. The names of many of their subsumed peoples are recorded in the ‘Tribal Hideage’, probably compiled before the Viking wars of the later 9th century. To each people was assigned a notional number of ‘hides’, the amount of land considered necessary to support a single household, and the basic unit of taxation and government.

WAPENTAKES AND THE WITAN

Groups of nominally 100 households met to deal with local affairs at ‘hundred courts’, assembled at a well-known place: a hilltop, perhaps, or a standing stone or landmark like Grimshoe Mound at Grime's Graves, Norfolk. In the Scandinavian-settled Danelaw, these ‘hundreds’ were called wapentakes. As Domesday Book would later show, the Danelaw contained far more freemen than English England, the latter having a far greater proportion of bondmen and even slaves.

Hundreds were further grouped into shires governed by royally appointed ealdormen. In the north, the huge shires of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire were divided into three ‘thirdings’ (later ‘Ridings’), each defining an area in which a portion of the Danish Great Army had settled.

Ealdormen would attend the king’s council, sometimes called the Witan, meaning ‘men of knowledge’. Originally chosen from a ruler’s war companions, at its peak of influence under King Æthelstan (r.924–39) it included bishops and abbots as well as lay magnates and royal ministers from all over the land, Danes as well as English.

WEAKENING MONARCHY

The Witan retained the traditional right to elect monarchs from within the royal house, not always choosing the eldest son. Once elected, the king would be expected to accept its counsels or ‘redes’. His failure to do so gave King Æthelred (r.978–1016) his nickname the ‘Unready’ – not the unprepared, but rather the man who was ill-advised.

The disasters of Æthelred’s reign began a fatal weakening of the English monarchy. This was exacerbated by the division of the country by King Cnut (r.1016–35) into provinces governed by quasi-independent ‘earls’, many of Danish origin.

It was one of these, Harold Godwinson, who seized the throne after the death of Edward the Confessor in 1066, setting off the train of events which led to the Norman Conquest.