Æthelwold of Wessex

Background

In the eighth century, Mercia was the most powerful kingdom in southern England, but in the early ninth century Wessex became dominant. In the 820s King Egbert of Wessex conquered south-east England (Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Essex). His reign saw the beginning of Viking attacks, but Egbert and his son Æthelwulf, who succeeded in 839, were able to resist them. Æthelwulf died in 858, and he was followed by four sons in succession. King Æthelbald died in 860, and King Æthelberht in 865; Æthelwold's father, Æthelred, then succeeded to the throne. In the same year the Viking Great Heathen Army invaded England. Within five years they had conquered Northumbria and East Anglia, and forced Mercia to buy them off. In late 870 the Vikings invaded Wessex, and in early 871 they fought armies under Æthelred and Alfred in four battles in quick succession, the last two of which Wessex lost. Æthelred died shortly after Easter that year, leaving young sons. Primogeniture was not established in this period, and it was believed that kings should be adults, so he was succeeded by his younger brother Alfred.

By 878 the Vikings had seized eastern Mercia and nearly conquered Wessex, and Alfred was reduced to being a fugitive in the Somerset marshes, but he fought back and won the Battle of Edington. This was followed by a period of peace, and in the late 880s Alfred concluded a treaty with Guthrum, king of the East Anglian Vikings, setting the boundary between Wessex and English Mercia on the one hand, and the Danelaw on the other. Further Viking assaults in the mid 890s were unsuccessful.

Early life

Very little is known of Æthelwold's immediate family. His father, Æthelred, was born in about 848 and died in 871, so his sons must have been young children when he died. Æthelred's wife was probably the Wulfthryth who witnessed a charter as regina in 868. Æthelwold and his older brother Æthelhelm are first recorded in King Alfred's will in the 880s. Æthelhelm is not heard of again, and he probably died soon afterwards. The only other record of Æthelwold before Alfred's death is as a witness to a charter that probably dates to the 890s.

After King Æthelred's death in 871, his sons' supporters complained about Alfred keeping property that should have belonged to his nephews. Alfred justified his conduct in a preamble to his will, which probably dates to the 880s. One of Alfred's biographers, Richard Abels, describes the text as "rather tendentious", and another, Alfred P. Smyth, as "ambiguous and vague – and deliberately so". Patrick Wormald views the will as "one of the seminal documents of pre-Conquest history, and like many such not easily understood."

The dispute concerned property bequeathed in the will of Alfred's father, Æthelwulf. This does not survive, but Alfred described some of its provisions in a preamble to his own will. Æthelwulf had left property jointly to three of his four surviving sons, Æthelbald, Æthelred and Alfred, stipulating that all of it was to be inherited by the brother who lived the longest. When Æthelred inherited the throne in 865, Alfred asked for the property to be divided between them. Æthelred refused, offering instead to leave it to Alfred on his death, together with any further property he acquired, and Alfred agreed. The Viking invasion of Wessex, and the need to provide for their children, led to a revision of the terms. Under an agreement in late 870 or early 871, the survivor was still to keep the property bequeathed jointly to the three brothers, but he would give his brother's children any lands which he had received separately from his father, and any he had acquired later.

In the preamble to his will, Alfred stated:

When we now heard many disputes about the inheritance, I brought King Æthelwulf's will to our assembly at Langandene, and it was read before all the councillors of the West Saxons. When it had been read, I urged them all for love of me – and gave them my pledge that I would never bear a grudge against any one of them because they declared what was right – that none of them would hesitate, either for love or fear of me, to expound the common law, lest any man should say that I had treated my young kinsmen wrongfully, the older or the younger. And then they all pronounced what was right, and said that they could not conceive any juster title, nor could they find one in the will. "Now everything has come into your possession, and you may bequeath it or give it into the hand of kinsman or stranger, whichever you prefer."

Æthelwold's Revolt

After Alfred's death in 899, Æthelwold made a bid for the throne. Janet Nelson comments that "in the eyes of many Englishmen as well as Scandinavians this ætheling had claims stronger than Edward's own." According to the 'A' version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Æthelwold abducted a nun from her convent without the permission of King Edward and against the command of the bishop. Her identity is not known, but it must have been intended to strengthen his claim, and in the view of the historian Pauline Stafford, the Chronicle's account is biased in favour of Edward and might have been intended to delegitimise a politically important marriage. Æthelwold took her to the royal manors of Twynham (now Christchurch) and then Wimborne Minster, symbolically important as his father's burial place, and declared that "he would live or die there". Lavelle sees Wimborne as strategically significant, close to Roman roads to Dorchester and Salisbury, and at a crossing point of the rivers Allen and Stour; it was the southernmost point for control of access to western Wessex and Æthelwold may have intended a division of the kingdom.

However, when Edward's army approached and camped at Badbury Rings, an Iron Age hill fort four miles west of Wimborne, Æthelwold was unable to gain sufficient support to meet them in battle. Leaving behind his consort, he fled to the Danes of Northumbria, who accepted him as king. Northumbrian coins were issued at this time in the name of a king called 'Alwaldus', who is thought to have been Æthelwold. Norse sagas record traditions of a Danish king Knútr, who briefly ruled Northumbria around 900. He is said to have been at first repulsed by an English king called Adalbrigt north of Cleveland, but then to have defeated him at Scarborough. In 1987, Smyth suggested that Adalbrigt could have been Æthelwold, but in 1995 Smyth put forward the alternative idea that the Northumbrian Danes accepted Æthelwold's claim to be king of the West Saxons rather than taking him as their own king.

Æthelwold's reign in Northumbria was short, in David Rollason's view because Æthelwold saw it only as a base for gaining power in Wessex. In 901 or 902 he sailed with a fleet to Essex, where Rollason states that he was accepted as king by the local Vikings. However, David Dumville points out that in the next year Æthelwold persuaded the Danes in East Anglia to wage war against Edward, and Dumville argues that it is unlikely that there was an unknown separate Viking army in Essex. In his view Æthelwold was aiming to secure recognition in part of the kingdom of Wessex in order to strengthen his claim to the throne, and he succeeded in gaining the submission of the English rulers of Essex.

Legacy

According to the historian Martin Ryan:

What is striking about Æthelwold's "rebellion" is the level and range of support he was able to draw on: he could call on allies from Wessex, Northumbria, East Anglia and, probably, Mercia and Essex. For a time Æthelwold had a claim to be the most powerful ruler in England. Edward's apparent reluctance to engage him in battle may have been well founded.

In the view of James Campbell, the bias in the sources has led historians to see Æthelwold's rebellion as a "somewhat odd episode", but he had a justifiable claim to the kingship, and he was nearly successful; if he had not been killed at the Holme, he might have united England with much less warfare than ultimately proved to be necessary. "Had it not been for the chances of battle and war Æthelwold might very well have been regarded as one of the greatest figures in our island's story". Lavelle argues that "it is important to acknowledge the audacity of Æthelwold's actions" and that he "well deserves to be ranked amongst the 'Nearly Men' of early Medieval Europe". The twelfth-century Annals of St Neots called him "king of the pagans".

It is not known whether he had any descendants, but the chronicler Æthelweard was a great-great-grandson of King Æthelred, and this may have been through Æthelwold. Shashi Jayakumar suggests the rivalry between King Eadwig and his younger brother Edgar in the 950s dates back to the conflict which resulted in the Battle of the Holme. Eadwig's wife, Ælfgifu, was probably Æthelweard's sister, and one of Eadwig's supporters, Byrhtnoth, may have been descended from the Mercian royal family through the ætheling Beorhtnoth, whose son Byrhtsige died fighting on Æthelwold's side at the Holme. Opponents of Eadwig included his grandmother, Eadgifu, and Eadwig confiscated her property. In Jayakumar's view: "The emergence of Ælfgifu, descendant of the ætheling Æthelwold, did not just threaten Edgar's position, it represented a revanche to a line and lineage with royal claims of its own ... The ancestors of Byrhtnoth and Æthelweard had in all likelihood fought together with Æthelwold on the Danish side at the Battle of the Holme, the opposite side to that which Eadgifu's father Sigehelm had fought for." The marriage between Eadwig and Ælfgifu was dissolved on the grounds of consanguinity, and Edgar succeeded to the throne when Eadwig died without leaving children. In the view of Nick Higham, Æthelweard shows a "lack of empathy" for Edward in his chronicle, which Higham attributes to Edward's victory over Æthelweard's ancestor. Æthelweard was Ealdorman of the Western Provinces in the late tenth century, showing that Æthelred's descendants held on to land and power in the century after his death. Æthelweard's grandson, Æthelnoth, was an eleventh-century archbishop of Canterbury.