Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

the opposite: of the long reach of the state. Blindings, scalpings, hangings: all were sponsored with a grim efficiency. Violence was met with violence; savagery with savagery. Even whole counties, if they presumed to oppose the royal will, might be systematically ravaged. Justice and order were what Edgar, in his coronation oath, had sworn to give the English; and justice and order, by his own stern lights, were precisely what he delivered. That such an iron-fisted man could end up being known as ‘the Peaceable’ suggested that his subjects did not disagree.

Were preachers merely deluded, then, when they warned the English that the signs of Doomsday were all around? There were many who feared not. When Edgar died in 975, only two years after his jamboree in Bath, the united kingdom of England that he left behind him was still very much a work in progress: none could be certain that it would hold together. As the Witan, the assembly of the greatest men of the realm, met to elect a new king, so a comet began to scorch across the heavens, leading many to dread what it portended. As well they might have done – for the throne was claimed by rival half-brothers. The first, Edward, was vicious, unstable, possibly illegitimate – and in his teens. The second, Ethelred, was the son of the Lady Aelfrida, the most powerful and ambitious woman in the kingdom, and Edgar’s anointed queen – but he was only seven. The vote duly went to Edward. Aelfrida withdrew into an embittered retirement.

Civil war was avoided; but beneath the surface the rival factions continued to manoeuvre. In 978, three years after ascending the throne, Edward dropped his guard sufficiently to go hunting near Corfe, a stronghold on the Wessex coast where his stepmother just happened to be staying. As he rode through the forest, a group of armed men suddenly confronted and surrounded him; his right arm was seized and broken, and a dagger plunged into his side; the dying king, his foot caught in his stirrup, was then dragged away through brambles and over trackways by his bolting horse. The corpse, when it was finally recovered, was flung into a bog. ‘No worse deed for the English race was done than this,’ it would subsequently be judged, ‘since they first sought out the land of Britain.’ The murder of an anointed king, and the failure of his kinsmen to avenge him, could hardly help but appear an ominous sign of the times. A column of fire, it was reported, flickering over the wasteland to which Edward had been consigned, marked the awful spot where his dishonoured body lay; still more frighteningly, even as the ten-year-old Ethelred was being consecrated king, ‘a bloody cloud was seen, many times in the likeness of flames; and it appeared most of all at midnight; and it was formed of various beams; and then, when it became day, it glided away’. Well might his subjects have shuddered; for there were some among them, no doubt, who would have recalled that the appearance of ‘a great bloody cloud arising in the North, and covering all the heavens’, was to be reckoned a certain proof that the Last Day had come at last.

Yet still it did not arrive. No matter that Ethelred was only a child; no matter that his mother—whether justly or not — stood under suspicion of murder; no matter that he was only the second king, after his half-brother, to inherit the rule of a united England, rather than to have to fight for it: thejcingdom did not fall to pieces. Indeed, that Edward’s murder was seen as peculiarly shocking was evidence of just how habituated his contemporaries had become to the rule of law; for the young king, it has credibly been suggested, was ‘the first man of high blood to have perished as a result of civil strife among the English for more than fifty years’.’ Ethelred’s advisers did all they could to ensure that he would also be the last. Rivalries were consciously dampened. The Lady Aelfrida, who had returned to court purring with triumph, was sufficiently gracious in her victory to ensure that prominent partisans of the murdered king were granted their fair share of the available public offices. Nor even, a year into Ethelred’s reign, did she object to the dredging up of her stepson’s corpse, and its re-interment with full royal honours. In no time at all, visitors to the tomb were reporting spectacular miracles and hailing Edward a martyr: potent testimony to the hold that a king from the House of Cerdic, even one who in life had certainly been no saint, could exert on the English. Hardly surprising, then, that Ethelred should have survived the years of his childhood unchallenged, for he had been left the very last of his famous line.

Yet ultimately, as was evident from the wretched end of the Carolingians, the pretensions of even the most glorious dynasty were nothing if not raised on solid foundations. Prestige had to be earned as well as inherited, a maxim that the West Saxon kings had always adhered to with a hard-headed literalness. The most precious legacy that Edgar had bequeathed to his successors was not the aura of sanctity with which he had sought to endow himself at Bath, but rather a measure enacted in the same year of973, one so ambitious that it had provided him with a licence, literally, to coin in his kingdom’s cash. A single currency for a single people: such had been the philosophy of Edgar. Foreign coins, obsolete coins, coins lacking the requisite purity of silver: all had been pronounced illegal tender. Here, at a time when anything up to twenty different currencies might be in circulation within a single county of France, was a truly imperious reform. A lucrative one as well: for not only was the kingdom transformed into a single market, but it was made easier to soak. No