STAFFORD CRIPPS:
THE FIRST MODERN CHANCELLOR
GLENDA JACKSON:
THE BIOGRAPHY
POSSIBLE DREAMS:
A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE BRITISH
CHRISTIAN SOCIALISTS
PARLIAMENT: THE BIOGRAPHY
VOLUME I: ANCESTRAL VOICES
PARLIAMENT: THE BIOGRAPHY
VOLUME II: REFORM
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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Doubleday
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Copyright © Chris Bryant 2017
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Left to right: Edwyn Francis Scudamore-Stanhope, 10th earl of Chesterfield, and his page, Ferdinand Fairfax
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Show the people that our Old Nobility is not noble, that its lands are stolen lands – stolen either by force or fraud; show people that the title-deeds are rapine, murder, massacre, cheating, or court harlotry; dissolve the halo of divinity that surrounds the hereditary title; let the people clearly understand that our present House of Lords is composed largely of descendants of successful pirates and rogues; do these things and you shatter the Romance that keeps the nation numb and spellbound while privilege picks its pocket.
Tom Johnston, Our Scots Noble Families, 1909
I AM INDEBTED to many people for their assistance and advice in bringing this book to fruition. My agent Jim Gill has regularly steered me in a wiser direction; my editor, Doug Young, was supportive from the beginning, was patient when nothing seemed to be forthcoming and made excellent suggestions when I submitted my first draft; Gillian Somerscales tidied up my typos and my prose with elegant fastidiousness; and Amanda Russell has researched the illustrations.
It has only been possible to cover such a large period thanks to the scholarship of many others who have gone before. I would particularly like to mention the work of David Cannadine, David Crouch, Peter Mandler, Helen Cam and Rosemary Baird, who in their specialist periods have dug deep in the archives to haul out gems, and who have inspired many of the ideas behind this book. I am grateful to them, although any mistakes in this book are entirely my own.
I am especially grateful to the libraries and manuscript collections I have consulted, including the British Library, the Bodleian, the Lambeth Palace library and the collections at King’s College London and Southampton University. The staff at the House of Commons Library have always been immensely helpful, especially Phillip Arnold and Greg Howard.
I am very grateful to my friends, family, colleagues and staff who have listened to me while I have attempted to regale them with tales of ancient aristocratic misdemeanours or noble derring-do – and have put up with me when I have disappeared into a library or a book for whole weekends, and when I have stayed up far too late or got up far too early to try to hone another chapter.
Above all, the people of the Rhondda, which was mined, developed and exploited by the marquess of Bute, whose title lives on in street names in Treorchy and in Treherbert, have shown me the greatest forbearance. I have endeavoured faithfully to be their voice since 2001 and will ever be in their debt. I hope they will find an echo of their own distrust of aristocratic privilege and entitlement in these pages.
Porth, the Rhondda, June 2017
IT WAS THREE o’clock in the morning of Thursday, 6 April 1837 when Henry Beresford, the 3rd marquess of Waterford (25), and John Cust, Viscount Alford (24), turned up with a band of aristocratic friends at the Thorpe End tollgate in Melton Mowbray after a heavy night’s wining and dining at Croxton Park races. They were in a boisterous, disdainful mood. Having first boarded up the tollgate with the keeper locked inside, they stormed through the town, overturning a caravan in which people were sleeping, vandalizing the post office, demolishing flowerpots, threatening the police with murder, and daubing doors, shutters, signs and police constables with red paint. The event gave us the phrase ‘painting the town red’.
Plenty of contemporaries were not impressed. The Stamford Mercury voiced its contempt for the marauders in pointed sarcasm:
On being obstructed in their career of mischief by the watchmen, the blood of the Beresfords rises, and the Noble Marquis as nobly offers to fight them all! and then (oh Most Noble, most magnanimous deed!) knocks down and tramples upon a poor old man of 60! vows he’ll murder the bridewell-keeper for refusing to set at liberty a prisoner, one of his fellow-rioters; and at length succeeds in releasing him and carrying him away in triumph on his back – a feat we have no doubt it would be his highest ambition to have recorded in the history of the Noble House of Beresford, and emblazoned on its shield.1
True, Beresford – a regular duellist, prankster and gambler – paid for the damage, and he and his roistering friends were fined a hundred pounds each for common assault, but such was their sense of entitlement that they imperiously demanded local editors expunge the story from their newspapers; and such was the misplaced sense of deference to the nobility that several editors did as they were asked.
Beresford’s antics were by no means the worst aristocratic misdemeanours in British history – other members of the nobility got away with rape, fraud, deception and murder – but his arrogance has been the default attitude of countless numbers of the well-bred and well-heeled through the ages, right up to the members of the Bullingdon Club who did ten thousand pounds’ worth of damage to an Oxfordshire pub in 2004. At the heart of their self-indulgent destructiveness lay their sense of entitlement. They knew they could wreak mayhem because nobody would dare question them – and anyway, they could easily afford to pay for the damage.
This book is an attempt to expose and explain that sense of entitlement; that conviction, running through the ages, held by a tiny proportion of society that they have an inherent right to rule, to do what they will, to lord it over others and to receive special treatment and privileges.
When I started my research I, perhaps in common with the many thousands who visit Chatsworth House and Blenheim Palace every year, found the aristocracy of past centuries fascinating. I was intrigued by their luxurious and eventful lives – they were, after all, the celebrities and political leaders of their day – and I appreciated the stately homes they built and the art they collected. I admired several of them, too, for their wit, their bravery and their political courage. Yet as I delved into the archives and history books I found a very different aspect to Britain’s noble families. Behind the architraves and pilasters lay a legacy of theft, violence and unrepentant greed. Four key themes emerged.
In every generation the aristocracy sought to enrich themselves way beyond their personal needs. Anglo-Saxon warriors and Norman invaders demanded vast tracts of lands in reward for their valour in battle. Tudor and Stuart lords sought royal monopolies and exclusive patents to enable them to exploit trade and commerce, enclosed common land for their personal use, and gorged themselves on the profits of land stolen from the church. Eighteenth-century magnates grew wealthy on sinecures, pensions and ministerial office, and their successors ruthlessly exploited their broad acres with little consideration for those who tenanted their land or worked in their mines. When their British estates did not bring in enough profit, they turned their acquisitive eyes abroad, creating and investing heavily in the bloody triangular trade of goods and slaves between Britain, west Africa and the Caribbean, the proceeds of which helped found many of Britain’s proudest houses. Today’s aristocrats still figure prominently in every list of Britain’s richest people, possessing some of the largest estates and the most profitable real estate in the world, and employing the most expensive lawyers to create complex legal arrangements to enable them to avoid inheritance and other taxes while raking in millions of pounds in agricultural subsidies.
The result of all these centuries of self-seeking endeavour has been a phenomenal accretion of land and money in the hands of a tiny number of families. In 1872 twelve peers owned more than four million acres, twenty-nine luxuriated in an annual income from land of more than £75,000, the dukes of Westminster, Buccleuch, Bedford, Devonshire and Northumberland all had incomes of more than £175,000, and the duke and duchess of Sutherland headed the list of landowners, their 1,358,545 acres earning them the nickname ‘leviathans of wealth’. Remarkably, despite a century of stories of ducal poverty and stately-home demolitions, a third of Britain’s land still belongs to the aristocracy and the Country Land and Business Association’s 36,000 members own half the rural land in the country; nearly half of Scotland remains in the hands of 432 private individuals and companies, and more than a quarter of all Scottish estates larger than 5,000 acres are held by aristocratic families.
While envy proved a potent force in establishing and endowing many noble houses, jealousy played an equally powerful role in preserving and sustaining them, as a small cadre of families desperately clung to their riches, position and power and took great umbrage when anyone attempted to scale the walls of the peerage to gain admittance. Those in possession of rank and status argued endlessly about rules of precedence – who sat or processed closest to the king – and guarded their rights and privileges with a self-protective ferocity. Medieval exactions such as the relief payable on inheriting a title – an ancient form of death duty – infuriated them. So did the habit of the Stuart kings of awarding new titles to royal favourites and political supporters. Whenever their private interests were affected, they claimed the constitution was at stake, and were quite prepared to bring the nation to civil war in their defence. Well into the twentieth century they, their families and their clients dominated both houses of parliament, drafting laws that defended their financial interests and opposing every step in the long and uneven march towards democracy and equality.
The aristocratic politics of jealousy also directed internal family affairs. Lest the great households’ inheritances be frittered away or atomized, they insisted that each pass in its entirety to the eldest son, thereby constantly concentrating more and more wealth in the hands of a few. And lest their bloodlines be tainted by commoners, they arranged matches so that nobody should marry outside their tight circle – unless snobbery was trumped by greed, in a peculiar form of aristocratic pragmatism that saw impecunious noble households happily admitting wealthy but common heiresses to their ranks when their stocks were running low. So when the news broke that Lord Lincoln, the heir to the duke of Newcastle, was to marry Henrietta Hope, the heiress to a banking fortune, in 1866, Lord Stanley commented that while Henrietta was ‘illegitimate but pretty’ and her father was ‘ugly’, since the latter was paying off Lincoln’s debts and ‘starting him fresh on the Turf’, and she came with a big house in Piccadilly and all her father’s fortune, ‘it [was] a great thing for the Dukedom of Newcastle and will put it on its legs again’.2 William, 6th Baron Monson, was even more open about marital ambitions, repeatedly urging his son ‘to find a girl with a fortune to rescue the house of Monson from its predicaments’ and admitting: ‘I should be very sorry for you to marry for money but a nice rich wife would not be bad.’3
At the very heart of the idea of ‘aristocracy’, which directly translated from its Greek origins means ‘rule by the best’, lies an assertion that true quality is inherited only through the male bloodline, and that power and prestige should be passed down from father to son in perpetuity. It was an argument that was still being articulated by the supremely arrogant and irrationally vain David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, who told the House of Lords in 1934 that
a man who has spent all his life in politics and public affairs is more likely to have a son capable of following in his footsteps in that particular line, than a man who has never paid any attention to either, especially when that son has been brought up in the atmosphere of public work, and has always been aware that the day would come when he would have to bear his part as a duty.4
That the British aristocracy lasted as the dominant political force in the country well into the twentieth century – and that ninety-two hereditary peers still sit in our legislature – is in no small measure thanks to the fierce determination with which successive generations of the nobility have fenced themselves off. From the very earliest times, families who thought themselves above the common cry sought means of asserting their exclusivity. They spoke of noble blood. They sent their sons to the same schools and colleges, joined the same regiments and whiled away the hours gambling at the same clubs, chasing foxes in the same hunts and racing at the same courses. They established rituals that celebrated their distinctiveness and drew up family trees that ‘proved’ (often falsely) their ancient honour. They claimed to live by a special code of noble honour, based on ancient chivalry, that led to endless unnecessary duels – and when their central role in the political life of the nation was challenged, they attempted to buff up their credentials with an appeal to the age of chivalry and noblesse oblige.
Above all, established families with long pedigrees haughtily disdained anything that smacked of new money. When Robert Spencer, whose peerage dated from 1603, was addressing the Lords in 1621, Thomas Howard, who was immensely proud of being the 21st earl of Arundel (a title that went back to 1267), cut Spencer short, saying: ‘My Lord, when these things you speak of were doing, your ancestors were keeping sheep.’ Not to be outdone, Spencer instantly replied: ‘When my ancestors, as you say, were keeping sheep, your ancestors were plotting treason!’5 It was a fair riposte, as Howard’s father had been attainted and executed in 1589; but it did nothing to puncture this attitude of disdain for people with newer titles or no title, which persisted through the centuries. The incongruity of such arrogance is striking. As the Spectator put it in 1831: ‘It is remarkable, that so many of the highest rank of nobility, in so moral a country as England, should be the produce [sic] of concubinage.’6 Even so, the fact that the dukes of Beaufort, Grafton, Richmond and St Albans all stem from illegitimate births never hindered the holders of those titles from proudly affirming their own ancient nobility. Nor did they observe the laws on sexual morality that they were so keen to enforce for commoners. Among many other high-born philanderers, the 3rd marquess of Winchester had four natural sons and secured knighthoods for them all; the 5th duke of Devonshire had two children by his wife Georgiana’s confidante Elizabeth Foster, the daughter of the earl of Bristol, and another child by another mistress; the said Georgiana, daughter of the Earl Spencer, had a natural daughter by Charles, later Earl Grey; and the twice Prime Minister the 3rd duke of Grafton had a very public affair with the courtesan Nancy Parsons while his duchess became pregnant by the earl of Upper Ossory.
For the aristocracy, it was never enough to be wealthy; there was a constant pressing need to be seen to be wealthy. The earl of Suffolk built Audley End on a prodigious scale before being sacked as Lord Treasurer for embezzlement in 1619, while the earl of Arundel and the duke of Buckingham competed to amass the greatest collection of art in their respective palaces on the Strand. The duke of Beaufort had twelve resplendent residences in the 1670s; the duke of Chandos spent so much building Cannons near Little Stanmore in Middlesex and filling it with expensive bric-a-brac that his son had to sell it in a twelve-day demolition sale in 1747; and later in the eighteenth century the marquess of Rockingham deliberately reconstructed his family home at Wentworth-Woodhouse so that its façade was the longest in Europe. Nor was this preoccupation confined to their lifetimes: so concerned were they about their legacy that they paid artists to portray them in their best finery, they spent inordinate sums creating vast family mausolea, and they littered the parish churches and cathedrals of the land with their individual funerary monuments.
Celebrations for the coming of age of a son and heir could be especially grand and designed to impress. When the earl of Berkeley’s first son was born in 1786, a vast cask of ale was brewed; it was duly drunk twenty-one years later, along with two twenty-gallon bowls of punch. The 5th duke of Rutland’s coming of age was celebrated in 1799 at a cost of ten thousand pounds (roughly a million in 2017), including 120 guineas for sixty pineapples. Even in August 1939, with Europe on the verge of war, the duke of Devonshire held an extravagant two-day party at Chatsworth for his son and heir, the marquess of Hartington, who had turned twenty-one the previous December; thousands of people came, and by the end of the evening it was said that the duchess’s arm was in a sling from too much hand-shaking.
Not all such ostentatious expenditure had the desired effect. When Archibald Montgomerie, the 13th earl of Eglinton, 14th Lord Montgomerie, Baron Ardrossan and chief of the clan Montgomery, organized a medieval tournament at his castle in Ayrshire in 1839, tens of thousands of spectators turned up to see dozens of his noble friends joust as part of his attempt to revitalize the art of chivalry, but the event was a disaster: heavy rain turned the tiltyard into a pond, most of the public were stranded in the grounds, and although the cast list was impressive, with twenty-four British peers in attendance, spectators were disappointed that the jousting was not violent enough. Indeed, the only hint of danger came with the contest between the Knight of the Black Lion (the Viscount Alford) and the Knight of the Dragon (the marquess of Waterford), as the two men set to with abandon as if settling a personal score and had to be dragged apart. The would-be chivalric hero Eglinton had spent most of his family fortune on a ludicrous washout.
In the middle ages, the aristocratic obsession with displays of wealth and status led them to prohibit the lower orders from wearing rich fabrics such as ermine, satin and silk, while drawing up complex and beautiful coats of arms for themselves and requiring their retainers and servants to wear their special colours. Even in the twentieth century their descendants continued to assert their privileged place at the pinnacle of society, proudly having their photographs taken in robes of state, coronets, tiaras and jewels for Edward VII’s coronation in 1902. The occasion brought forth some notably tortuous special pleading. Just weeks before the coronation, Tatler had defended the fact that the members of the Goldsmiths’ Company had been openly advertising their wares on the grounds that ‘now that some of our oldest and best families are very poor, while millionaires are running up the prices of everything, the Goldsmiths have every justification for announcing that they can manufacture the necessary coronets at moderate prices’.7 On the day itself, the holder of one of the oldest English titles, Daisy Brooke, countess of Warwick, appeared without any diamonds; so Tatler generously laid emphasis on ‘the absolute perfection of her beauty’.fn1 There must have been much sniggering at this, for Daisy had inherited a fortune from her grandfather and lost it thanks to an extravagant lifestyle. Yet on coronation day in 1902 she made all the peeresses in their diamonds and pearls feel ‘as if we were a lot of American or South African millionairesses vying with each other in the weight of our money-bags’.8 In the ultimate irony, people who had only escaped vulgarity by virtue of an ancestor’s acquisition of a fortune sneered at new money.
Two comments about terms are necessary. First, British aristocratic titles provide many challenges. One person can hold several titles simultaneously. Edward Fitzalan-Howard, for instance, is primarily known as the 18th duke of Norfolk, but he is also the 36th earl of Arundel, the 19th earl of Surrey and the 26th Baron Maltravers, and he holds six other titles. One person can also rise through the ranks, holding several titles in succession. Thus, in the seventeenth century, George Villiers became in turn (and in very short order) Baron Whaddon, Viscount Villiers, earl of Coventry and duke of Buckingham. I have done my best to make such preferments clear, without overloading the text with too many titles. A further complication relates to so-called ‘courtesy titles’, which come into play through the provision that the heir apparent to a higher title such as duke, marquess or earl may use one of the incumbent’s lesser or subsidiary titles ‘by courtesy’. Thus the duke of Norfolk’s eldest son and heir, Henry, is styled the earl of Arundel, the duke of Devonshire’s heir is referred to as the marquess of Hartington and the marquess of Salisbury’s heir is known as Viscount Cranborne. None of these entitles the user to a seat in the House of Lords, although several sons and heirs have been summoned to the Lords by a ‘writ of acceleration’ in the name of the family’s original peerage.fn2 In addition, the younger sons of dukes and marquesses are granted the courtesy title of ‘the Lord’, as in the Lord Randolph Churchill, younger son of the duke of Marlborough; the daughters of dukes, marquesses and earls are titled ‘the Lady’, as in the Lady Diana Spencer, daughter of the Earl Spencer; and the younger children of earls and the children of viscounts and barons are styled ‘the Honourable’. And of course the term ‘lord’ is often used generically for any member of the peerage. So it is easy to get confused. I have attempted throughout to make these distinctions as clear as possible, occasionally omitting courtesy titles to this end. In addition, several historic titles have become extinct when the family line has died out and have then been re-created or granted to a new family. The dukedom of Bedford, for example, was created six times, and as a result, formally speaking, William Russell was the first duke of Bedford ‘in the sixth creation’; but I have omitted such references as unnecessarily complex. In most cases, however, I have included the number of the title (e.g. Andrew Russell, 15th duke of Bedford) except where the individual is the first to hold the title (e.g. William Russell, duke of Bedford). I have not resorted to the practice common among some modern aristocrats of referring to a man by his Christian name and toponymic (e.g. Andrew Bedford).
Second, although many members of the landed gentry were also wealthy and powerful, I have defined the ‘aristocracy’ as those families with hereditary titles conferring a seat in the House of Lords. This means that although knights and baronets (a hereditary form of knight) were often wealthy and had lengthy landowning pedigrees, I have not included them in the purview of this book except where they acquired peerages.
Narcissism and inbreeding led British aristocrats to believe themselves entitled to their wealth, status and power. Their nobility was not earned, but intrinsic, inherited, in their blood.
Yet their defining feature was not a noble aspiration to serve the common weal but a desperate desire for self-advancement. They stole land under the pretence of piety in the early middle ages, they seized it by conquest, they expropriated it from the monasteries and they enclosed it for their private use under the pretence of efficiency. They grasped wealth, corruptly carved out their niche at the pinnacle of society and held on to it with a vice-like grip. They endlessly reinforced their own status and enforced deference on others through ostentatiously exorbitant expenditure on palaces, clothing and jewellery. They laid down a strict set of rules for the rest of society, but lived by a different standard. Obsessed with precedence and hierarchy, they granted themselves special privileges, they sneered at those without money or title and they established a complete dominance of the political system, which they used to perpetuate their mining, sporting and financial interests. For much of their history they were a perpetual grievance machine, standing on their dignity, asserting their private rights and privileges, and instigating unnecessary wars at home and abroad.
Such was their sense of entitlement that they believed – and persuaded others to believe – that a hierarchical society with them placed firmly and unassailably at the top was the natural order of things. Even to suggest otherwise, they implied, was to shake the foundations of morality.
They were shocked and angered when others sought to deprive or degrade them. They clung tenaciously to their position. They developed ever more specious arguments to defend their privileges. They eulogized themselves and built great temples to their greatness. They jealously guarded access to their hallowed halls. And when democracy finally and rudely shunted them aside, they found new means of preserving their extravagant riches without the tedium of pretending they sought the common interest. Far from dying away, they remain very much alive.
COULD YOU SPOT an aristocrat even if he were pretending to be of humble stock?
The Venerable Bede thought so, sitting in his monk’s cell in Jarrow in 731. He told the story of the bloody battle of the Trent, in which King Æthelred of Mercia took on the might of Northumbria under King Ecgfrith in 679. Æthelred won the day but was persuaded to pay compensation for the death in battle of Ecgfrith’s young brother Ælfwine, in order to prevent a bout of mutual noble blood-letting. One of Ælfwine’s warriors, an unmarried noble called Imma, was seriously wounded, and lay unconscious amid the bodies of his dead comrades through the night. Regaining consciousness the next morning, he fled the field. The Mercians caught him and took him before one of Æthelred’s noble commanders, who demanded to know his name. Afraid to own up to his noble status, which would almost certainly mean he would be killed in revenge for the many Mercian nobles who had been slain, Imma lied, claiming that he was a poor, married peasant. Taking him at his word, the Mercian commander had Imma’s wounds dressed and kept him as a prisoner. His captors soon had doubts, though. As Bede put it: ‘Those who attentively observed him, by his countenance, habit, and discourse, took notice that he was not of the meaner sort as he had said but of some quality.’1 Imma was summoned back before the commander, who promised that he would come to no harm if he confessed. When Imma revealed his real identity, the Mercian honoured his pledge and, instead of putting him to the sword, sold him into slavery.
Bede’s purpose in telling the story was to show the power of prayer: for, he said, no matter how many times the Mercians bound Imma, his chains miraculously fell off at the precise moment when, unbeknown to him, his brother Tunna was saying mass on his behalf. Yet the true essence of the tale is even more extraordinary: that, as early as the seventh century, there was a concept abroad in Britain of indelible nobility, which would always shine through any attempt at disguise. It brought privileges and responsibilities, and it could never be hidden. Quality will show. Blood will out.
This early aristocracy was a warrior class, because Britain in the first millennium was a scene of constant conflict. For much of the period the land was divided between the warring kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, Kent, East Anglia, Wessex, Sussex and Essex. In the north, the Gaelic-speakers of the Dal Riata, the Britons of Alt Clut and the lowland kingdom of Bernicia did battle for centuries before the kingdoms of Alba and Scotia were formed. In the west, a myriad Brythonic-speaking kingdoms came and went. Some of these found their way into the history books but the majority disappeared from view, their kings slain, their people subjugated, their history forgotten.
A warrior class was needed to repel marauders, too, as Britain was highly susceptible to invasion. First came the Romans, whose reign dwindled into nothingness in the fifth century; soon thereafter the Germanic Angles and Saxons used Britain’s wide, navigable estuaries and rivers to steal deep into the hinterland. Viking raiders from Norway, Sweden and Denmark made the same trip, seizing control of swathes of Britain, establishing their cultures and exacting heavy compensation in the form of Danegeld.
With kingdoms and lands under constant threat of seizure by force, invaded, invaders and settlers alike were on near-constant war footing. In these conditions, the people looked for their leaders to successful military commanders who could protect them. Martial prowess was prized above all other qualities of leadership, weaponry was counted as a man’s most valued possession, and the ability to inspire troops, master a horse, trick an opponent and/or deal a mortal blow to the enemy was seen as central to a man’s quality. As one poet put it: ‘Power goes with pride, bold men with brave ones: both must be quick to make war.’2 Kings and provincial leaders trained loyal retainers in warfare and did battle in their midst, creating a bond of mutual assurance between the leader and his chosen followers, who travelled with him, slept in his hall, ate and drank at his expense and were prepared to die with him on the battlefield. Bede gives a glimpse of such a band of noble warriors in a poetic passage that compares the mutability of life to the swift flight of a sparrow ‘through the house wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your ealdormen and thegns, while the fire blazes in the midst, and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad’.3
The harsh reality of this warfare comes into focus in the fragment of historical poem known as The Battle of Maldon. It tells of the death in 991 of the nobleman Byrhtnoth of Essex, who stood in the midst of his ‘hearth troop, who had all his trust’, and prepared them for battle with stirring words. When the Danish invader, Olaf, offered the English their lives in exchange for gold, Byrhtnoth was defiant, shouting that his men ‘will give you spears for their tribute, / Poisoned points and ancient swords’.4 Inexplicably, either out of pride or from an excess of magnanimity, Byrhtnoth then allowed Olaf to cross a narrow causeway so as to have enough room for a battle. This proved a disastrous mistake: Olaf seized the initiative, Byrhtnoth’s nephew, Wulfmær, was hacked down in a single full shoulder force blow and some of Byrhtnoth’s troops fled. When Byrhtnoth himself was hit, he laughed and gave thanks to God, but when a second soldier charged at him, determined to steal his gold trappings and ornamental sword, his arm suddenly collapsed by his side and he was hacked to death. All was lost; but such was the bond of honour that his retainer Ælfwine encouraged the troops to continue fighting, reminding them of all the bold things they had said when they were drinking mead in Byrhtnoth’s hall. Two more of Byrhtnoth’s followers spoke up. Leofsunu declared that he would not go ‘lordless’ on a homeward journey, and Byrhtnoth’s old retainer Byrhtwold thrust his shield into the air and proudly bellowed out: ‘I am advanced in years. I do not desire to be taken away. / By that favourite of men I intend to lie.’5
Such faithfulness unto death was central to this military code and to a man’s understanding of his self-worth. According to one of the earliest historical works on the history of Scotland, the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, the battle of Brunanburh (c.937) against the English King Æthelstan saw similar loyalty unto death as Dubacan, son of Indrechtach, mormaer of Angus, died alongside his lord, the son of his vanquished King Constantine II. The king was bound to his men because, in words from another poem Beowulf, death was ‘better for every earl than an existence of disgrace’.6 The bond was mutual. When Byrhtnoth was told by the monks of Ramsey Abbey that they could feed only him and seven of his men, not his whole entourage, he said that as he had no desire to fight without them all he would not dine without them all either – and passed on to the abbey at Ely. So acutely felt was this bond that from the time of King Æthelstan (924–39) it was considered inconceivable that any freeman should live without a lord, and lordlessness itself was outlawed.
When victory came or peace was negotiated, these warriors returned to their homelands, their wives and their families, but the honour of having been a military companion to the king gave them a special cachet – and with that came a much-coveted formal title. In Old English, especially between about 650 and 750, they were called ‘gesiths’, meaning companions. According to the laws of Ine, king of Wessex (688–726), for instance, gesiths were responsible for the good conduct of their households; they had to attend the call to arms to gather the king’s militia (the fyrd) or forfeit their land and pay a fine of 120 shillings; they had to keep a reeve (a form of early magistrate), a smith and a child’s nurse, and protect foreigners who had no family. Although many were single and in almost permanent attendance on the king or some other great person, they could marry, hold lands, build churches, keep attendants and provide sanctuary. There was a hierarchy among them, too. The killing of a gesith who held land incurred a wergild (or man-price) of 1,200 shillings, while a gesith with no land was worth 600 shillings and the family of a mere ceorl or freeman was entitled to just 200 shillings. Fashions in rank and terminology, as in much else, changed, and between the eighth and eleventh centuries such men were more commonly referred to as ‘thegns’ (a title also later adopted in Scotland with the alternative spelling ‘thane’, although there it carried different status and responsibilities). Yet the law of wergild continued to set them apart from freemen as ‘twelve hundred men’ rather than ‘two hundred men’, and an early form of death duty required a thegn to surrender a heriot, his ‘war gear’, to his lord or to the king on his death. Under the Danish invader King Cnut, this consisted in Wessex of a horse, its trappings and the thegn’s personal weapons – a clear indication that above all else a thegn, like a gesith, was a warrior.
In these early days, the noble rank of thegn was open to newcomers who proved their worth or wormed their way into royal affections. It was assumed that military companions would be rewarded for their bravery, loyalty and prowess – and ambition was to be praised. So, in the Old English epic Beowulf, when the eponymous hero returned to his lord and kinsman, Hygelac, he received large estates, a princely stool in Hygelac’s hall and a sword as a symbol of his new authority. Another warrior, Shield Sheafson, is described as progressing as far as the throne, thanks entirely to his military worth:
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
As his powers waxed and his worth was proved
In the end each clan on the outlying coast
Beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
And begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.
The early eleventh-century author of the Geþyncđo (Gethinktho or ‘Dignities’), who was probably Wulfstan II, Æthelred’s archbishop of York, emphasized another key characteristic of this early nobility. The concept of thegnhood was intrinsically linked with landed wealth. In his words, ‘if a ceorl thrived, that he possessed fully five hidesfn1 of his own land, church and kitchen, bell-house and “burh”-gate-seatfn2 and special duty in the king’s hall, then was he henceforth of thegn-right worthy’.7 Land and title were indivisible, and noble jealousy ensured that the social divide thus created was well policed. Clause 10 of the ninth-century list of wergilds, the Nordleoda Laga, made it clear that even if a man had a burnie (shirt of mail), a helmet and a gold-adorned sword, he was still a ceorl if he did not possess five hides of land. What was more, once attained, the status of thegnhood would endure for the life of the king who conferred it: an early ordinance of King Edgar the Peaceful (959–75) guaranteed that his thegns would keep their rank as long as he lived, just as they had done in his father Edmund’s lifetime,8 and successor kings, including the conquerors Cnut and William, reaffirmed the guarantee. The title could even last beyond the death of the holder, for if the son of a thegn held the same lands as his father then he too would be a thegn – and after a couple of generations thegnhood would be a permanent feature of the family tree, even if, as the Domesday Book suggests, the property qualification were no longer met. In other words, a warrior who had been awarded land as the spoils of war would be officially recognized as a noble and his nobility would pass to his sons and his grandsons. The landed hereditary nobility was born.
Not all thegns were equal, though. Most owed their immediate allegiance to a local lord rather than a king, so the ‘king’s thegns’ were a class apart, enjoying special privileges. According to the laws of King Wihtraed of Kent (c.690–725), a king’s thegn could acquit himself of an allegation on the basis of his own oath alone; conversely, under the peace treaty of 878 between Alfred of Wessex and the Viking Guthrum, a king’s thegn required the support of twelve other king’s thegns to clear himself of ‘man-slaying’, while a lesser man could do so with eleven of his equals and just one thegn. Under King Æthelred (968–1016), the twelve ‘senior thegns’ in the local hundred or wapentakefn3 played a role in criminal prosecutions, and under Cnut the family of a king’s thegn was expected to render a heriot or duty on his death of four horses (two of them saddled), two swords, four spears, four shields, a helmet, a coat of mail and a large payment in gold – considerably more than that expected of a simple thegn.
There was another distinction. As kingdoms grew and amalgamated, the geography of the realm required another rank of men charged with substantial regional powers. These vicegerents, variously entitled eorl, ealdorman or earl, might have authority in a single shire or a whole region; but while their geographical scope varied, their role was consistent. They were the highest secular authority below the king in the shire or region to which they were appointed. They had responsibility for raising troops for the fyrd or royal expeditionary army, for maintaining defensive fortifications and for collecting taxes and duties; and, alongside the local bishop, they presided over the twice-yearly shire courts. In exchange they took a cut from fines collected within their territory, keeping every third penny as their very lucrative legal due (a perquisite that was to last for centuries).
The north of Britain had a similar system. No books of early medieval Scottish laws survive, but the twelfth-century additions to the tenth-century Latin Gospel Book known as the Book of Deer suggest that when St Columba came from Iona to Aberdour in the sixth century he was greeted by Bede the Pict, the ‘mormaer of Buchan’, who granted him the monastery ‘in freedom till Doomsday’.9 This title of ‘mormaer’ (meaning great steward) may be an anachronism, as Bede seems to have been an under-king,fn4 but by the eleventh century several hereditary Scottish mormaerdoms had been established and the kingdom of Alba, which lasted from 900 to 1286, was said to have seven mormaerdoms for seven brothers, the earliest being Oengus (Angus). At various times Scottish kings appointed mormaers of Atholl, Buchan, Carrick, Lennox, Mar, Menteith, Ross and Moray; the last of these proved particularly bloody during the two centuries or so during which Moray was ruled by a Gaelic-speaking dynasty. In 1020 Findlaech, the son of Mormaer Ruaidri of Moray, was killed by his nephews. Twelve years later Macbeth killed his cousin, Mormaer Gilla Comgain, slaughtered fifty of his men, assumed the mormaerdom, married his opponent’s widow Gruoch – and in 1040 defeated Duncan I to seize the Scottish crown. Macbeth was killed in 1057 and was briefly succeeded by his stepson Lulach, who lasted a single year before being killed and succeeded by his own son as Mormaer Mael Snechtai. In 1130 the last mormaer of Moray, Lulach’s grandson Angus, was killed in battle by Robert the Bruce. In an indirect line the mormaers of Moray would become the earls of Sutherland and of Atholl. Like English ealdormen, mormaers derived their provincial authority, which included the third penny, from the king, but they also held land in their own right – as did Scottish thanes such as Macbeth, thane of Glamis.
An English king’s primary purpose in appointing ealdormen was to protect national security. Sometimes this meant appointing a newly subjugated king as ealdorman of his former realm, as when King Sigered of Essex (798–812), who had previously acted as a witness for charters for King Cenewuf of Mercia as rex or subregulus (king or under-king), was downgraded to dux. Elsewhere it meant deploying loyal acolytes as regional commanders and viceroys. So, when Alfred of Wessex saw off the Danish invaders in the mid-ninth century, he appointed one ealdorman for each shire in Wessex, and two for the easily invaded shire of Kent. When his ealdorman for Wiltshire, Wulfhere, ‘deserted without permission … in spite of the oath that he had sworn to the king and all his leading men’,10 Alfred replaced him with a more reliable ally, Æthelstan, and in the vulnerable shires of Devon and Somerset he appointed two proven military compatriots. The strategy worked. The Devon ealdorman Odda proved his worth by fighting off the Viking siege of Cynwit in 878, and in Somerset Æthelnoth led the Anglo-Saxon army at Buttington in 893 and on the mission to Northumbria the following year.
Far from receiving an honour they could be sure of passing on, ealdormen were appointed at the king’s pleasure, and if the king changed or if he changed his mind, the noble could be removed and the post abolished. The poem ‘The Death of Edgar’, for instance, which forms part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, relates that in 975 Ealdorman Oslac, who was probably the first ealdorman for York, ‘was driven from the country [by the king], over the tossing waves, the gannets’ bath, the tumult of the waters, the homeland of the whale; a grey-haired man, wise and skilled in speech, he was bereft of his lands’.11 So too in 1002 Leofsige, ealdorman of the East Saxons, was banished for killing a royal high-reeve or senior magistrate called Ælfric in his own house and without warning, and his sister ÆthelfIæd forfeited her land at Fen Stanton and Hilton in Huntingdonshire for harbouring him as a fugitive. A fall from royal favour could bring harsh retribution. In 993 King Æthelred ordered that Ealdorman Ælfric’s son Ælfgar be blinded, in 1001 Cnut had all his noble hostages blinded when he was forced out of England, and in 1005 it was the turn of Ealdorman Ælfhelm’s sons Wulfheah and Ufegeat to be mutilated, again on the orders of Æthelred.
The post of ealdorman may have been insecure, but once elevated, incumbents fought jealously to protect their status and authority. This was particularly difficult when there was a contested royal succession or a hostile invasion. Then the wealthy ealdormen, each with a host of loyal retainers at his disposal, elbowed their way into the dispute, picking sides and changing their allegiance as they saw which way the wind was blowing. These contests were frequent, as there was no assumption in Anglo-Saxon law or custom that the eldest son would inherit. A younger son by a second or third wife might have a doughty dowager queen to fight his cause. An elder son might have his legitimacy or his ability questioned. Collateral wings of the royal family might lay rival claims. And in the whirl of indecision the ealdormen and thegns regularly threw their weight about.
Just such a situation arose when King Eadred died in 946, leaving two nephews, Eadwig and the infant Edgar, as potential heirs. The former was initially made king, but a pro-Edgar faction developed around disaffected aristocrats and churchmen that led to a conclave of thegns from the old kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria; and in 957 the kingdom was divided, with Edgar taking all his elder brother’s lands north of the Thames before reuniting the kingdom on Eadwig’s death two years later. Much the same thing happened when Edgar died in 975, leaving two sons: one aged six or seven called Æthelred, who was the undisputed son of the dowager Queen Ælfgifu; and his elder half-brother Edward, whose mother Æthelflæd’s marital status was hotly disputed. Edward became king, but the nobles and churchmen were divided and resentments about the old king resurfaced. In the ensuing rows several ealdormen were ranged against one another and civil war was only narrowly avoided. Recognizing the threat posed by these overmighty lords, Edward removed several rebellious ealdormen, but ultimately to no avail: in 978 he was murdered at Corfe Castle, quite probably at the instigation of his stepmother the dowager queen, who was busily rooting for her own son Æthelred.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle12