The ceremony had begun hours before with the forming of a great procession from the king’s residence to the Minster itself—a walk of barely a hundred yards, but every yard of them seeming to demand some special observance. Then the high mass in the Minster, the nobles of the realm crowding up to take communion, not so much out of reverence as out of an earnest desire not to miss any luck or blessing that might be granted to others. Among them, Shef had noted, had been many seemingly incongruous figures, the undersized frames and rough clothes of slaves that Alfred had freed and churls he had promoted. They were now here to take the word back to their towns and villages: the word that there was no doubt, no doubt at all that Alfred Atheling was now Alfred King of the West Saxons and of the Mark, by all the laws of man and of the Christian God.
Also in the first row, towering over those around him, sat the Marshal of Wessex, the man chosen by custom as the most notable warrior of the kingdom hand-to-hand. The Marshal, Wigheard, was indeed an imposing sight, nearer seven foot than six and twenty English stone if an ounce in weight; he carried the king’s state sword at arm’s length as effortlessly as a twig, and had already shown uncanny ability to fence with a halberd as if it were a willow-wand.
There was one man in Shef’s group, sitting immediately to his left, who had difficulty following the ceremony, who glanced again and again at the Champion. This was the giant Brand, himself champion of the men of Halogaland, still wasted and shrunken from the belly-wound he had taken in his duel on the gangplank with Ivar the Boneless, but slowly regaining strength. Brand, shrunken as he was, still seemed the bigger man of the two. His bones were almost top big for his skin, with knuckles like rocks, and ridges jutting out over his eyebrows like armor. Brand’s fists, Shef had once noted by careful comparison, were bigger than a pint pot: not just huge, but disproportionate even to the rest of him. “Men grow big where I come from,” was all that Brand would ever say.
The noise of the congregation died as Alfred, now thoroughly blessed and prayed over, turned to face them to take his oaths. For the first time Latin was abandoned and the service broke into English as Alfred’s senior alderman asked the solemn question: “Do you grant us our rightful laws and customs to be held, and do you swear after your power to grant rightful dooms and defend the rights of your people against every enemy?”
“I do.” Alfred looked round the packed Minster. “I have done so, and I will do so again.” A rumble of assent.
Now a trickier moment, Shef thought as the alderman stepped back and the senior bishop stepped forward. For one thing the bishop was startlingly young—and for good reason. After Alfred’s dispossession of the Church, his excommunication by the Pope, the Crusade against him and his final declaration of non-communion with Rome, every senior cleric in his kingdom had left. From the Archbishops of York and Canterbury down to the least bishop and abbot. Alfred’s response was to promote ten of the best remaining junior priests and tell them the Church in England was in their hands. Now one of them, Eanfrith Bishop of Winchester, six months before priest of a village no-one had heard of, came forward to ask his question.
“Lord King, we ask you to grant to us protection for Holy Church and due law and rightfulness for all those who are members of it.”
Eanfrith and Alfred had been days working out the new formula, Shef recalled. The traditional one had asked for confirmation of all rights and privileges, tithes and taxes, ownerships and possessions—all of which Alfred had in fact taken away.
“I grant protection and due law,” Alfred replied. Again he looked round, again added words beyond tradition. “Protection to those within the Church and without it. Due law to members of it and to others.”
The highly trained choristers of Winchester, choir-monks and choirboys together, burst into the anthem of Zadok the Priest, Unxerunt Salomonem Zadok sacerdos, as the bishops prepared for the solemn moment of blessing with the holy oil, after which Alfred would be literally the Lord’s Anointed, against whom rebellion was also sacrilege.