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For the people of Lundenwic, however, it was the southern road that held the greater everyday importance during the eighth and early ninth centuries. Connecting the Roman walled city (and the church of St Paul’s) with an area of timber-built settlement encompassing what is now Covent Garden and the surrounding environs, the road ran just to the north of the sloping Thames foreshore, overlooking and providing access to the water. Before the twelfth century it was known formally as Akeman Street (Akemannestraet), from the Old English name for Bath (Acemannesceastre), the Roman city where the road terminated its straight-line drive through the western shires of England.¹³ But to the people of Lundenwic, just as to modern Londoners, their local stretch of this great road was almost certainly known by association with the shoreline that it shadowed: the Strand, a word unchanged in sound, form or meaning from the Old English (strand: ‘shoreline’, ‘beach’, ‘bank’).¹⁴

Craven Passage is one of the many crannies that riddle the city behind the grand façades, the modern steel and concrete. These are the mouseholes of history, the places where forgotten vistas and lost walks cling on in the shadows, pattering footsteps and muttered voices caught when the traffic dies away, when the light dims – a stone tape-recording. The Passage, the dingy underbelly of Charing Cross station, is a brick and flagstone vault that bores beneath the platforms of the Victorian station. At its eastern end in the subterranean half-light is the point of egress to Heaven nightclub on Villiers Street, one of the most famous of London’s gay clubs. It was just to the south of this dank underpass – part alleyway, part catacomb – that evidence of the Anglo-Saxon embankment was discovered in 1987: to walk the passage from Northumberland Avenue to Villiers Street is to promenade on the edge of Lundenwic’s waterfront, to jostle with sailors and dock-hands, barrels and slaves. At its western end the passageway emerges into daylight, splitting The Ship & Shovell into two – the only London pub that occupies both sides of a thoroughfare. Just beyond the pub, the passage crosses Craven Street where, left towards where the water once lapped against the Anglo-Saxon boardwalk, Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick, lived for two months in 1849 at lodgings in number 25 – a handsome end-of-terrace Georgian house that still stands.

The writing of Moby-Dick probably began almost at the moment that Melville left London; his journal indicates that he had little enough time for writing amidst visits to the British Museum (‘big arm & foot­–Rosetta stone–Ninevah sculptures–&c’), antiquarian shopping trips (‘Looked over a lot of ancient maps of London. Bought one (A.D. 1766) for 3 & 6 pence’), meetings with publishers and bouts of general indulgence (‘Porter passed round in tankards. Round table, potatoes in a napkin. Afterwards, Gin, brandy, whiskey & cigars’) – all in all, a fine summation of a writer’s ideal life in London. Ideas for the novel, however, were undoubtedly congealing during his stay in the city.¹⁵ ‘It is not a piece of fine feminine Spitalfields silk,’ wrote Melville in 1851 of his masterpiece, ‘but is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.’^16fn5 It would no doubt have pleased him, thrilled him maybe, to have known that his lodgings were perched above the Anglo-Saxon waterline, where briny-arsed northern sailors once roamed.

The waterfront was further north than it is today, free from the brick and concrete accretions of later centuries that have squeezed the river into an ever-narrowing channel. But even in the eighth century the river’s edge was being adapted to human purposes. Fragments of the Anglo-Saxon waterfront have been found near Charing Cross station and Buckingham Street, running from 18–20 York Buildings towards Somerset House, skirting the north edge of Victoria Embankment Gardens. Here the foreshore was embanked with wooden and wattle revetments, creating an artificial timber floor which boats could be brought alongside and goods unloaded on to, and where much of the trade and barter probably took place. This timbered shoreline was the true heart of Lundenwic, a pulsing valve through which people, goods and silver passed back and forth along the water.

Between the Strand and Oxford Street, the other main roads of Lundenwic seem largely to have served as access to and from the waterfront. For the most part these are known from short fragmentary stretches of gravel highway that have been uncovered archaeologically or are inferred from the orientation of buildings. Drury Lane and St Martin’s Lane both seem to have been originally laid out in the seventh century as Lundenwic developed, and another north–south route probably ran from Charing Cross to Westminster, and north towards Oxford Street (the Silchester Road). The lines of these roads probably corresponded fairly closely to their modern counterparts, and can be traced in the earliest Tudor maps.

Elsewhere, excavations have produced evidence of narrow gravel lanes, running towards and parallel with the river, lined by rectilinear buildings and ditches laid out in a way that implies a regular street plan: little streets at right angles to each other, the dwellings and workshops of the townspeople set out in tidy rows. At the site of the Royal Opera House, at Maiden Lane and Exeter Street, at 36 King Street and 28–30 James Street and tucked at the north-eastern corner of Covent Garden square itself, the paths and holloways of the Anglo-Saxon settlement carved and crossed, etched into the clay by the footfall of people and beasts, the passage of carts and goods, the flow of games and fights and dancing. Passers-by would have drifted across the fronts of rectangular timber houses, many (though not all) with their gable-ends flush to the roadside, doors opening into rutted filth and stagnant water, mud, gravel and dung. Others were accessed from the long side, from narrow footpaths through yards that stank with refuse and the shit of cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and humans. There were gardens and animals, fences and outhouses, workshops and fruit trees and forges – a humming community of men, women, children and creatures.

Around a hundred buildings have been discovered in Lundenwic, not all of them active at the same time (many were built on top of the remains of others, making the job of archaeologists harder than it would otherwise be, obscuring and confusing the sequence of habitation at particular locations). The average size of a dwelling or workshop was approximately forty feet long and eighteen feet wide – not palatial by any means, although a cash buyer for that sort of square footage in Covent Garden today would have to be a multi-millionaire. Buildings were timber-framed and single-storey, with walls of wattle and daub and roofs of thatch or oaken shingles; they were heated by rectangular floor-hearths or round ovens, and lit by ceramic oil-lamps and candles. Doors swung on iron hinges and were secured with iron bolts. It was in these buildings – whether homes or workshops or both – that the craftsmen and women of Lundenwic worked.

One of the things that seems to have attracted foreign traders to Lundenwic (and other English wics) was worked textile: cloth – both linen and wool – was not merely exchanged at London’s market, but was also made there. The evidence can be found across Lundenwic. Finds of spindle whorls and loom weights in considerable numbers imply a substantial output, a craft industry that supplied textiles to serve personal needs and domestic markets as well as to meet a demand for high-quality exports. Particular concentrations of evidence for weaving have been found at two sites that lie on the line of Drury Lane (55–57 Drury Lane and Bruce House at 1 Kemble Street), and at a location in Covent Garden on the edge of Lundenwic, bounded by Shorts Garden, Earlham Street and Neal Street – a stone’s throw from Seven Dials.

That Anglo-Saxon cloth was prized on the continent is confirmed by the contents of an extraordinary letter of 796 from Charlemagne (at that time king of the Franks and the Lombards) to King Offa. Evidently, Offa had grumbled about the size of imported quern-stones – used primarily for grinding cereals – as well as some issues concerning the treatment of merchants. Charlemagne responds:

Now about those black quern-stones you wanted; you had better send a guy over here to tell us what sort of thing you want; then we can sort that out for you and help with the transport. But since you’ve got into this size issue, I’ve got to tell you that my guys have a thing or two to say about those short cloaks you’ve been sending us. You’re going to have to get your people to make up some cloaks like they used to, bro; you know – like the ones we used to get back in the day … ^fn6

Anglo-Saxon cloaks were evidently in demand by the Frankish great and good – the longer, apparently, the better.

It wasn’t only weaving that drove the industry of Lundenwic – numerous other crafts were practised in the buildings that once lay between the River Fleet and Tyburn. Antler and bone were turned into combs in workshops where the Royal Opera House extension now stands, quiet work that would have been disturbed by the skriking of hammers from the smithies nearby. Glass was worked and leather was punched, wood was shaped and animals were butchered. What the inhabitants could not produce was brought in from further afield – animal produce from farms outside the settlement, fish caught downriver in the estuary, wine brought from overseas, figs from the Mediterranean, quern-stones from the Rhineland.

All the evidence suggests that Lundenwic in the eighth century was a lively, prosperous place where people lived in relative comfort. They ate bacon and drank ale, munched on apples and warmed their heels by flaming hearths in winter. They crafted day-to-day objects, wove cloth and farmed produce, and presumably took good money and – more often – goods in exchange from the foreign traders who trod the timber embankments beside the Strand. It was a place stocked with humans, young and hale, and animals good for work and food and riding; a place that might well have presented an attractive target to the ruthless and the bold.

Although most of the sailors whose boats arrived at the Strand from overseas would have been Franks or Frisians, it is very likely that Scandinavians were also regular visitors to Lundenwic’s markets. Familiarity may well have spurred the raids on Lundenwic and other North Sea emporia – the Vikings already knew of the wealth to be found in such places, and if they hadn’t been there themselves, they had heard about it from others – from friends and kinsmen, from Frisian traders, from chattering monks bound for slavery. Some, perhaps, hawking their wares on the Strand and filling their shallow-keeled ships with good Lundenwic cloth, had made cold calculation even as they bartered: of profits to be made from ships filled with stolen silver, of slaves taken at the sword’s edge – the risk of death weighed against the reward of plunder.

If they did, and if the raid of 842 was truly the first of its kind, then they had left it very late to roll the die. By the mid-ninth century, Lundenwic was a shadow of what it had been in the eighth century. Occupation seems to have come to an end in many parts of the settlement, and while activity continued it was no longer as coherent or as wealthy as it had been; it was fragmented, knots of buildings and associated smallholdings scattered over the site of Lundenwic, separated by wasteland and punctuated with rubbish pits. Serious fires had taken a toll – in 764, 798 and 801 – but there should be little doubt that Viking raids were largely responsible for the severe economic malaise that settled in the first half of the ninth century. This is not to say that Lundenwic was no longer important. It was clearly important enough to call down the Viking raid of 842, and a hoard of 250 coins buried around the same time (and possibly related to the Viking threat) stands testament to the wealth that still flowed through the settlement.^fn7 Substantial ninth-century ditches, dug at Maiden Lane and the Royal Opera House, bear witness to both a heightened sense of danger and to the continued presence of something in the region of Covent Garden that was worth labouring to protect. Nevertheless, a lack of security depresses economic growth and investment – as true then as it is now – and the risk to places accessible by water was only growing stronger.

In 851 another Viking fleet entered the Thames. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 350 ships slid into the estuary, sacking Canterbury before moving on to London. There are no surviving Viking ships that date to the mid-ninth century. The closest parallel to the vessels that attacked London in 851 is a ship recovered from a burial mound at Gokstad near Oslo in Norway. Constructed in the 890s, the Gokstad ship is a beautiful object, a masterpiece of technology and design. The strakes of its clinker-built hull taper with the smooth curves of living trees up to the razor-edged prow: a sleek and deadly serpent of the waves. Broad enough in the belly for a substantial crew and cargo, but still fast and lethal under sail and oar, the Gokstad ship could have carried around thirty-five rowers, all of whom would probably have been expected to fight. If ships of the fleet that entered the Thames in 851 were of similar size, and if the numbers provided by the Chronicle are accurate, this Viking warband could have fielded up to 12,250 warriors.

This is a large number by any measure, and the reported size of Viking fleets and armies has been repeatedly called into question over the years, with suspicions that the numbers were inflated by monastic writers to heighten the sense of existential danger and to excuse Anglo-Saxon defeats. Nevertheless, it is likely that this was a serious threat. From the 850s onward, the nature of the Viking threat to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had changed. Large forces, bigger than those that had raided the coastline of Britain in previous decades, began to ‘over-winter’ – that is, to set up camp rather than go home over the off-season, maintaining a pattern of raiding and mounting ever more damaging and ambitious campaigns. The raid on London in 851 was effectively the dawn of this grim new day: it is recorded in the same Chronicle entry that ‘for the first time, heathen men settled over the winter’.¹⁹ It also marked the effective end of Lundenwic, both in reality – within a couple of decades the settlement had become archaeologically invisible, covered by a layer of dark earth – and in the minds of near-contemporaries.^fn8 According to the retrospective account in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written in the 890s, the attack of 851 was launched not against Lundenwic, but against Lundenburh: against ‘fortress London’.

II
Lundenburh

In 865, a micel hæðen here (a ‘great heathen horde’) arrived in East Anglia. It was a Viking warband larger than any seen before in Britain, and with extraordinary speed it set about tearing up the geopolitical order, shattering ancient kingdoms the length and breadth of the island: Northumbria (866), East Anglia (870), Alt Clud (870), Mercia (873) – all fell to the conquerors or were transformed out of all recognition. In England, only Wessex remained intact, preserved by good fortune and the fortitude of its rulers.

In 871, returning from Wessex after having been fought to a standstill by Alfred and his brother, King Æthelred, the great heathen horde had made camp at London and remained there over the winter. A hoard of silver found at Croydon can be dated to this period, and may well relate to the comings and goings of Viking warbands from their winter-setl at London. The Mercian King Burgred eventually ‘made peace’ with the Viking army (i.e. paid them off), and they returned to East Anglia. It was to be a short-lived reprieve – the Vikings invaded Mercia in 873, deposing Burgred and driving him into exile. In 878 a different Viking fleet, lately arrived from the continent, made camp at Fulham – then a site to the west of London. It too left after a single winter, travelling to Ghent (in modern Belgium) before rampaging onward into the Frankish kingdom.

There is no record that details activity at either of these camps, and no archaeology to pinpoint their locations or illuminate the day-to-day lives of their temporary inhabitants. ‘It is very difficult,’ as one historian has put it, ‘to gather from these random comings, goings and hibernations any coherent impression of what the occupation amounted to.’¹ The circumstances may have varied. The earlier camp might have been either within or without the walls of the city; either around the precincts of St Paul’s or thrown up west of the Fleet River amongst the derelict remains of Lundenwic. The camp at Fulham was perhaps more likely to have been newly built, a freshly laid out site with access to the Thames. Excavated Viking camps at Torksey (Lincolnshire), Repton (Derbyshire) and another site in North Yorkshire suggest that such camps covered extensive areas and hummed with activity. Trade, manufacture, engineering, gaming and family life – the site at Torksey has revealed all of this on a site of over sixty-five acres, more a small town than a temporary barracks.

Whatever conditions were like inside the perimeter of the camps at London and Fulham, relations with the locals were likely tense and probably violent. Raiders plundering the local countryside would have first secured the winter essentials – pigs, cattle, grain, ale – before coming for the horses, the silver, the women. It was a burden felt widely. The bishop of Worcester, Wærferth, was forced to sell off some of his land to cope with the ‘very pressing affliction and immense tribute of the barbarians, in that same year when the pagans stayed in London’.² Neither camp seems to have lasted more than a season, and the immediate threat of Viking occupation was in both cases transient. But in the fields and farms beyond the city, the world was changing fast, old certainties falling away sharply. In a little over a decade from the advent of the great horde in 865, two of the kingdoms that had traditionally exerted influence over London had been conquered (East Anglia) or dismantled (Mercia) by Viking armies. And although Alfred’s Wessex had endured, the resulting peace had left London on the front line of a volatile border. The story of how Alfred defeated an army led by the Viking leader Guthrum at Edington (Wiltshire) in 878, of how he had dwelt in the fen-fastness of Athelney (Somerset) before returning to smite his enemies like the avenging sword of the Almighty, has been told many times. Like all of the literary products of its time and place, it is replete with Alfredian myth-making.

In the peace that followed Edington (and the so-called Treaty of Wedmore), Alfred extracted from his erstwhile foe a number of key concessions, including his baptism and an agreement to change his name from Guthrum to Æthelstan. The key part of the whole ritualized encounter seems to have been – from Alfred’s perspective at least – the acceptance by Guthrum-Æthelstan of a symbolic filial subordination: he became, in the process of baptism, Alfred’s godson. It was a tacit acceptance of Alfred’s overlordship – an agreement to be his man. And though it might seem from a West Saxon perspective like total victory – a heathen warrior humbled, forced to his knees to kiss the cross and the ring of his conqueror – in reality it is hard to believe that Guthrum received nothing in return, that his defeat had been so total that it warranted nothing but humiliation.

Instead it seems likely that the negotiations included the recognition of Guthrum-Æthelstan as king of East Anglia – albeit a king who owed notional fealty to Alfred as his ‘father’ and overlord. Certainly, when the two men next met, it was perceived as a royal summit: the so-called Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum styles both men as ‘rex’. Amongst other provisions, that treaty – which is broadly datable to somewhere between 878 and Guthrum’s death in 890 – defined the respective spheres of influence of both kings. The dividing line was to be a boundary that ran ‘up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to Watling Street’. It was a treaty which conspicuously, and with obvious deliberation, scored a boundary around London, keeping it tucked just within the limits of Alfred’s authority.

Today the River Lea empties out into the Thames in Poplar, just east of the Isle of Dogs. To walk its course upriver is to pass through Stratford and past Hackney Marshes to Tottenham, Edmonton, Walthamstow, the river filling the Lea Valley reservoir chain, Epping Forest stretching away to the east. Its path carves through the Olympic Park, the ‘Olympicopolis’ so despised by Iain Sinclair: a ‘city of pop-ups, naming rights, committee-bodged artworks, cash-cow academies, post-truth blogs and charity runs’, an ‘emerging digital conceit on the Viking bank of the River Lea’.³ Sinclair seems at times unmoored by despair, enraged by the changes wrought by corporate money and empty technocracy on the cherished, untidy banks of the river. During construction of the Olympic Park he beat like an angry wasp against the notorious blue fence that enclosed the development, body and rhetoric levelled against the barrier. After Olympicopolis inevitably shimmered into three dimensions, he railed at this ‘theme park still to identify its theme’, still ‘waiting on input from a content provider’.⁴

Alfred, I am sure, would have approved of the Olympic Park; he emerges from the sources as a lover of order, a man didactic in his inclinations, managerial in style. He admired the Romans, planned grand building projects, enjoyed a good right-angle. I imagine he would have agreed that cleanliness is next to godliness. The world he and his scribes envisaged was a place of order and easy management, of binary choices and simple ethnicities: English, Danish; Christian, Heathen; Good, Bad. There were no shades of grey in Alfred’s little England, no room for conflicted loyalties, identities or beliefs: those things were chaos, and chaos lived beyond the pale in fifelcynnes eard – in ‘monster world’.⁵ In the ninth century, it was the slow drift of the Lea that became the limes, the tear in the fabric that separated Alfred’s ‘Anglo-Saxon’ realm from another place – a world of confused allegiances and sundered bonds, where the alien Guthrum reigned as king of East Anglia and a host of unnamed Viking warlords and embattled Anglo-Saxon thegns struggled to make sense of a disordered world.

In truth, it is hard to imagine how this boundary was ever inscribed in reality – there were no ramparts, no watchtowers. No wall. Even within the city, the lines of authority were blurred, a messy West Saxon/Mercian compromise involving Kentish and Mercian bishops and the shadow of the new Scandinavian regime in East Anglia.^fn1 As a notional approximation of the length of Alfred’s reach, the treaty placed London at the very tips of his outstretched fingers, barely within his grasp.

Perhaps it was this sense of insecurity that informed the tenor of what is perhaps the most famous of all mentions of London to emerge from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the record of a moment that has taken on an almost mythic status in the history of the city and of the nation, the moment in 886 when ‘King Alfred restored [gesette] fortress London [Lundenburh], and all the English [Angelcyn] turned to him, except for those in bondage [hæftniede] to Danish men [Deniscra manna], and he then bestowed [befæste] the stronghold on Ealdorman Æthelred to hold’.⁷ This, the Chronicle wishes us to know, is a moment for the ages, the apotheosis of English kingship, the reclaiming of London’s imperial destiny, the moment when Alfred transcended West Saxon parochialism to lay claim to a greater inheritance: a new realm, a realm of all the English, united against the common foe. Alfred had come to London as defender and liberator, to restore and to build, to fortify the mighty stronghold-city on the borders of his kingdom, to renew the legacy of Rome.

And yet, to turn a critical eye to the words and phrases the scribe employs in this one sentence is to find the half-truths, omissions and over-simplifications falling over themselves.

According to the mighty dictionary of Old English originally compiled by John Bosworth in 1838 and added to in 1898 and 1921 by Thomas Northcote Toller, the verb gesettan has numerous meanings – sixteen, in fact: ‘to set, put, fix, confirm, restore, appoint, decree, settle, possess, occupy, place together, compose, make, compare, expose, allay’.^fn2 Thus, one could say that Alfred ‘restored’ London; or that he ‘settled’ it; or that he ‘occupied’ it. Indeed, from this multiplicity of meanings an elaborate narrative could be constructed: of Alfred capturing the city, restoring its defences, settling it with new inhabitants, issuing it with new laws and status, publicly affirming its place as an important and indissoluble bastion of the new English realm. On the other hand, it need not mean any more than that the king had some sort of formal triumph to confirm his status, or, even more weakly, that he simply wished to announce his ‘possession’ of London in some abstract and remote sense. If so, this might have amounted to little more than a putting-into-writing of a de facto situation that may have already been recognized for some time. By the same token, it could have signified the implementation of some entirely novel political arrangement.

This ambiguity was probably deliberate. In reality, Alfred had no traditional claim to London at all: the city had been part of the Mercian kingdom since the seventh century. It is true that West Saxon influence there had been on the increase. Earlier in the ninth century, in 829, London-based moneyers had briefly produced coins for the West Saxon King Ecgberht after his military suppression of Mercia in that year; and Alfred’s power and authority had been apparent in London from the 870s onward, with London moneyers producing coins in his name alongside those of the Mercian kings Burgred and Ceolwulf. But the city had never been convincingly absorbed by the West Saxon realm. In fact, the man upon whom the Chronicle claims Alfred ‘bestowed the stronghold’ – ‘Ealdorman’ Æthelred – was probably (or had been) the king of Mercia, at least in his own mind and sometimes in the minds of his own people and his enemies.⁹ For many people London was therefore already Æthelred’s patrimony – not Alfred’s to bestow.

Nor is there any real evidence to suggest that London was ever in thrall to Viking power during the ninth century, no Danish yoke for Alfred to manfully lift from the necks of the oppressed Angelcyn. The only indication of Viking occupation (besides the 886 Chronicle entry) is a retrospectively inserted reference to a siege of 883 – when Alfred’s army was ‘encamped against the horde at London’.¹⁰ If this event did in fact properly occur in 883 (which is not universally accepted), it is utterly without context: any number of scenarios involving West Saxons, Vikings and Mercians (as well as the Londoners themselves) could be conjured to explain it. It could even be that this siege was intended to consolidate Alfred’s authority over the city and to force Æthelred to recognize his demotion in the Anglo-Saxon pecking order. (The earliest evidence for Æthelred’s acceptance of Alfred’s overlordship comes from a charter dated to 883, the same year as the siege.) The events of 886, therefore, might in fact describe a carefully choreographed diplomatic entente between the two rulers – a mutual face-saving affair at which Alfred’s over-kingship was affirmed, but Æthelred’s practical lordship acknow­ledged. If this were the case, it would explain why the siege of 883 was excluded from the official West Saxon record: an inconclusive attempt to bully Mercian London sat awkwardly with Alfred’s later concern with promoting the image of himself as saviour and liberator of all the English, Mercian Angle and West Saxon alike.

In any case, regardless of technical authority, London had long been a place where a multitude of regional identities collided and merged. Here the people of Kent and Essex, East Anglia and Mercia, Surrey and Wessex butted snugly up against one another to meet and trade and mingle, not to mention the Britons, Northumbrians, Frisians, Franks and Scandinavians who came as visitors, traders and settlers, forging long-term relationships with the place and its people. It is more than likely that the city’s inhabitants, if they did not identify with their own regional origins, thought of themselves primarily as Londoners (Anglo-Saxon sources refer to the inhabitants as burgware or Lunden-ware: literally ‘stronghold-dwellers’ or ‘London-dwellers’). Any notion of Englishness, of Angel-kinship, came much later.

Nevertheless, in the long term the popularization of an inclusive sense of ‘Englishness’ was a triumph of Alfredian propaganda. The concept of a single English community had never had a clear limit to its compass beyond a vague sense of linguistic community and some tenuous notions of overseas origins. Before Alfred’s regime got hold of them, even these ideas may not have spread far beyond the ecclesiastic think-tanks in which they were spawned. The idea of Englishness preceded the reality, logos before demos. It was as a result of the king’s programme of education, translation, literary commission and propaganda that the Angelcyn were transformed into a people, a gens, a folc. The English, united by language and faith, were provided with a name and a shared heritage – the latter assiduously constructed in the pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and elsewhere. At the outset, the very flimsiness of the concept was its genius; a semiotic sleight-of-hand that collapsed the regional and ethnic identities of any English-speakers who drifted within its capacious and ill-defined orbit into a singularity, both infinite and void.