Seen at ground level

Simon Keynes BLOODFEUD: MURDER AND REVENGE IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND by Richard Fletcher Allen Lane/Penguin, L14.99, pp. 211, ISBN 071399391X

Historians of Anglo-Saxon England do not have much to joke about. In the early 1940s Professor Dorothy Whitelock told sir Frank Stenton how she had recently read a paper to the Medieval Society in Oxford on a late 11th-century tract known as De obsessione Dunelmi ('On the siege of Durham'). A don at Somerville had seen a notice advertising the event and was heard to enquire, `Who was Dunelmus and what was he obsessed by?' Stenton's reaction is not recorded.

It is the same short tract, extending to all of three pages in a modern translation, which now provides the inspiration for Richard Fletcher's book. The tract describes a bloodfeud sustained over four generations, which usually comes to mind when one's thoughts turn, as they do, to the nature and effectiveness of law enforcement in 11th-century Northumbria. In '969' (corrected by modern scholarship to 1006) Uhtred, son of Earl Waltheof, saved Durham from the Scots, slaughtering almost all of the invaders and impaling their heads on stakes placed around the walls. For this act, Uhtred was rewarded by Ethelred the Unready with the earldom of the whole of Northumbria. After more heroic deeds in the king's service, Uhtred rose further in his own estimation, dumped his first wife (daughter of the Bishop of Durham) and received instead the hand of Sige, daughter of Styr, accepting as a condition of the marriage that he should kill Thurbrand, his prospective father-in-law's mortal enemy. Yet Uhtred was slow off the mark and sooner or later he dumped his second wife in order to marry Aelfgifu, the king's daughter, releasing himself in this way from his murderous obligations.

In the event, therefore, it was Thurbrand who struck first, killing Uhtred and 40 of his men in 1016, at a place called Wiheal. Earl Uhtred's feckless brother, Earl Eadwulf, was not concerned to avenge Uhtred's death, being more fearful that the Scots would take revenge on him for the earlier massacre at Durham; so he ceded Lothian to King Malcolm II, in order to distract their attention. Earl Uhtred's more heroic son, Earl Ealdred, was rather better at feuds than his uncle, and thus took it upon himself to kill Thurbrand. Carl, son of Thurbrand, remained for some time on good terms with his father's killer; but eventually he did what he had to do and killed Ealdred. The advent of the Normans made little difference. One day in the early 1070s when Carl's sons and grandsons were feasting at Settrington, near York, a band of young men acting for Earl Ealdred's grandson, another Earl Waltheof, burst in on the family party and massacred the lot. At this point in the narrative the author of the tract returns to more serious business, which was of course to describe the history of some estates formerly belonging to the church of Durham.

It is stories of this kind which have given the Anglo-Saxons a bad name. This is not, however, a book about bloodfeud as such, so there is little discussion of the extent to which Uhtred and the others conducted their feud in strict accordance with the patterns of behaviour suggested by Frankish, Icelandic and Sicilian analogies. Fletcher explains disarmingly at the outset that he lives at Wighill, between Leeds and York, which he fondly believes to be the place where it started (brushing aside the philologically more correct presumption that Wheal is Worall near Sheffield). His purpose is to show how a text such as this can evoke so many unfamiliar aspects of a period so easily consigned to oblivion. He enlarges skilfully on the historical context in which all the events took place and artfully on their other dimensions, taking the opportunity at the same time to expound his views on various tangential matters, including apprehension of the millennium and the quality of the Anglo-Saxon taxation system. English history in the 11th century is normally the tale of Edward the Confessor, Harold Godwinsson and William the Conqueror, with illustrations courtesy of the Bayeux Tapestry and statistics courtesy of Domesday Book. Fletcher's story is driven not by the royal succession or even by sex, honour, money and the desire for power, but, in the hallowed tradition of the mediaeval historian, by land. And since behaviour of the kind he describes was prevalent throughout the kingdom, not just in the parts of northern England remote from the forces of law and order, it has much wider implications. Modern historians of the period are obsessed with grandiose themes such as the 'Unification of England', the 'Anglo-Saxon state' and the emergence of a sense of 'Englishness'. It is all the more refreshing, therefore, to be shown how things look when the story is told from a different perspective, at ground level, and in this way to be reminded that there were so many other players involved and so many other issues at stake. In short, three pages expanded to 200, to very good effect.

Copyright Spectator Mar 2, 2002
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