by Adams, Max;
The shuffling pack of Insular dynastic succession produced new cards in this decade. Cyngen, the Powysian king who built the famous Pillar of Eliseg in memory of a great ancestor, perhaps under pressure from both Mercian ambitions to the east and a newly aggressive kingdom of Gwynedd in the north, abdicated and travelled to Rome, where he died in 854. The following years saw Viking raids deep into the Welsh marches among the dwellers of the Wrekin and on Môn.10 In 856 Powys was annexed by Rhodri Mawr (who impressed the Irish annalists by killing a Viking chieftain called Orm in the same year) and absorbed into a greater Gwynedd.11 King Æðelweard of East Anglia, an obscure figure, died and was succeeded by the more famous Eadmund. In Northumbria, the death of a King Eanred was followed by a number of short reigns and depositions, the fruits of ancient rivalries, and the once-great kingdom descended into factional warfare. In Pictavia, in 858, Cináed died and was succeeded by his brother Domnall.
Æðelwulf, whose father, Ecgberht, had ruled from 802 to 839, had five sons (Æðelstan, Æðelbald, Æðelberht, Æðelred and Ælfred) and may have felt sufficiently secure—or old—by 855 to undertake his own pilgrimage to Rome, taking with him his youngest child Ælfred and, on his return a year later, bringing home a new bride: Judith, the daughter of Charles the Bald. The king of the West Saxons now enjoyed sufficient prestige to dine at Europe’s high table.
The king’s eldest son, Æðelstan, his regent in Kent, must by now have died. Like Charlemagne in Francia, Æðelwulf tried by agreement and treaty to ensure a peaceful succession by the division of the kingdom in his will. At least one of his sons now pre-empted that will, perhaps fearing that his new, very young Frankish stepmother might produce rival heirs. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is diplomatically silent on the matter; but Ælfred’s Welsh biographer, Bishop Asser, recorded that on Æðelwulf’s return from Rome and Francia in 855–856, Æðelbald relegated him to the subordinate throne of Kent and Sussex. After his father’s death in 858 Æðelbald married his stepmother Judith, much to the disgust of the church.12 As Æðelstan had ruled in Kent as a subregulus, so Æðelbald deployed his next brother Æðelberht in the same role; but after Æðelbald’s own untimely death in 860 Æðelberht came to rule over all the southern kingdoms.
A disputed succession that might have metastasized into dynastic war, as it had in Francia, was resolved by Æðelbald’s death and by that of his brother Æðelberht five years later in 865. The fourth son, Æðelred, succeeded to a united Wessex, Kent and Sussex. His only surviving brother, Ælfred, was just sixteen.## Æðelred could not have chosen a more unpropitious time. The leaders of a fleet laid up menacingly on Thanet through the winter of 864–865 negotiated a large tribute from the Kentishmen and then, in secret and by night, left their camp and plundered eastern Kent. Worse was to come:
þy ilcan geare cuom micel here on Angelcynnes lond.
The same year a great host came to the land of the Angles.
The year 865 marks a pivotal moment in the Viking Age: when raiders became conquerors. From this year, Scandinavian kings ruled parts of Britain, through fluctuating fortunes, for almost a century. The arrival of the mycel hæþen here,∫∫ the Great Heathen Host, shocked contemporaries. It may have been no more than a great raid that morphed into a longer campaign, with no initial strategy other than the winning of booty and slaves. But it altered British history irrevocably and, in a connected world, it has a political and geographical context that requires some explaining. South-eastern Britain, facing the Continent and familiar to generations of Scandinavian traders and raiders, was a soft target; even so, it would help if we knew where the Great Host had been before it arrived on the shores of East Anglia.
One might see, in the death of King Horik in Denmark a dozen years previously, the collapse of Danish royal authority and in its aftermath the sort of political chaos that propels ambitious rivals to try their hand abroad. Here the evidence of the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto offers a clue: the invaders of 865 were, it says, led by one Ubba, leader of a Frisian contingent, and Hálfdan, a Danish king; and together the Host is referred to as Scaldingi.13 The Scaldingi might be the Scyldings of Beowulf, as argued by Colin Chase: that is to say, Danes, for whom this is a generic term.14 Alex Woolf has suggested, however, that they were identified as Scaldingi because they had recently crossed the Channel from the mouth of the River Scheldt, where they had established a longphort and trading centre on the island of Walcheren. In the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the term Deniscan,ΩΩ Danes, was later used to denote Scandinavians who had crossed from Continental Europe, as opposed to the Norðmannum, ‘Northmen’, who came from either Norway or Ireland.
To add to the possible confusion, the absence of a great Norse chief, the celebrated Ívarr, from Irish annals at this time might suggest that he was seeking new territorial conquests: he is named as a leader of the Great Host by the late tenth-century chronicler Æðelweard≈≈ and in the Norse saga Knutsdrápa.15 In the Irish records he appears, fighting with and against Irish kings, alongside Óláfr and Ásl from a base in Dublin, and one source describes them as brothers.16 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that he was a brother of Hálfdan.17 Ívarr, sometimes called Ivar ‘the Boneless’, is much discussed by historians because he spawned three generations of formidable leaders—the so-called Uí Ímair—among the kingdoms of Ireland and Britain. If so, he stands alongside the Ailpín dynasty of Alba, the Ecgberhtings of Wessex and the descendants of Merfyn Frych in Wales as a founding dynast of medieval Britain.
It is quite plausible that several sons of a powerful family might seek their fortunes beyond the seas and, at some point, agree to combine in a grand expedition of conquest; or that they should fix on the Insular kingdoms, weakened by internal rivalries, to try their hand. The Annals of Ulster record that Óláfr and Ásl plundered Fortriu in 866,∂∂ initiating a series of campaigns in the North with profound implications for the future of Alba.
To understand the timing of the Great Host’s arrival in East Anglia it is worth looking across the Channel again, to events in Francia. Charles the Bald may have been seeking allies to assist in his defence against Viking raids when he gave his daughter Judith to Æðelwulf in 855. Western Francia, an enormous territory with a very long and exposed coastline, had been subject to many damaging raids during previous decades. Pippin of Aquitaine, another grandson of Charlemagne, went so far as to conspire with Viking raiders on the River Loire after escaping from enforced monastic retirement and together, in 857, they sacked Poitiers in Aquitaine. A year later Charles’s brother Louis the German invaded West Francia and Charles was forced to flee to Burgundy. In 859, according to the Annals of St Bertin, the Danes ‘ravaged the places beyond the Scheldt’—that is to say, the Frisian coastline. The monastery at St Valery sur Somme in Picardy was laid waste, as were the civitas of Amiens and the island of Betuwe in the River Rhine. In Paris, the monks of St Denis removed the relics of their great saint to a safe place, as previously the community of Colm Cille had taken their saint’s shrine to safety.
Charles’s restoration in 860 signalled an outbreak of fragile internal peace in Francia; even so, large and numerous bands of increasingly confident pirates were able to penetrate the great waterways of northern and eastern Francia at will. Like an unquenchable forest fire, the extinguishing or paying off of one band simply invited the arrival or return of another. In 861 a Viking fleet attacked and burned Paris. Another fleet, lately returned from an attack on England (an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the sacking of Winchester in that year), sailed up the Seine with 200 ships, besieging a ‘Norse’ fortification on the island of Oissel, south of present-day Rouen.
In 862 Charles won a small but significant victory in his attempt to frustrate the pirates. They had penetrated his defences along the River Marne, burning a bridge at a place called Trilbardou. Charles responded rapidly, following ‘indispensable advice’, as the chronicler of St Bertin put it, rebuilding the bridge while the pirate vessels were upstream and trapping them. The
raiders were forced to come to terms. Charles, seizing the moment, called a great assembly at Pîtres on the Seine in Normandy, just upstream from Rouen, and ordered defensive bridges to be built all along the Seine, reasoning that physical barriers across rivers might act as both a disincentive to piracy and as a means of concentrating and manoeuvring his own forces in rapid response to intelligence.ππ
Two years later, in 864, Charles reconvened the assembly at Pîtres and issued thirty-seven edicts which have taken their place in French history as Magna Carta has in England. Like that charter, his edicts’ role as founding documents of French statehood might be overstated. What we can say is that they represented an attempt by Charles, following in the footsteps of the late Roman codices, to impose universal military burdens, to revalue and reform coinage, to reorganize the army and create a rapid-response cavalry unit; to ban the sale of weapons to ‘foreigners’ and expand the provision of strategic bridges. In strengthening the economic and military defences of West Francia, Charles cannily increased both his personal power and that of the state. In adversity lay opportunity.18 The mycel here landed in East Anglia a year after the edicts issued at Pîtres; it is not certain that invasion was a direct reaction to the frustration of their Frankish ambitions, but it seems very likely. They overwintered there, perhaps in the secure, watery fastnesses of Flegg, north of Great Yarmouth.∆∆ King Eadmund sued for peace and gave them horses. From this point onwards, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle follows their fortunes in detail:
Her for se here of Eastenglum ofer Humbre muþan to Eoforwicceastre on Norþhymbre...
In this year the host went over the mouth of the Humber to York in Northumbria... and there was great dissension of the people among themselves; and they had repudiated their king Osberht and accepted Ælle, a king not of royal birth; and it was late in the year when they set about making war against the host.19
At the end of 866, then, Northumbria appears to have been in a state of civil war, and lay fatally exposed. If the Historia of St Cuthbert is right in saying that the two kings were brothers, they must have been rivals from an ancient Deiran dynasty, its ancestral heartlands in East Yorkshire, from which King Edwin had risen in the seventh century to the heights of imperium over almost all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Edwin had built his first church in the ruins of the Emperor Constantine’s city of Eboracum: Eoforwicceastre to the Anglo-Saxons; Jorvik to the Vikings, modern York. We should not be surprised if the leaders of the Scandinavian Host were aware of the military potential for decapitating the brittle ruling house of southern Northumbria and seizing the weakened kingdom for themselves. All the evidence suggests that their intelligence-gathering was effective. But they did not, to begin with, have it all their own way.
The various sources recording Northumbria’s conquest combine to paint a vivid picture of swinging fortunes and much spilt blood.20 In November the mycel here captured the ancient Roman legionary fortress at York and wasted the surrounding area.21 The bulk of the invading army may have travelled by ship from East Anglia along the coast of Lindsey and thence into the Humber, past its confluence with the Trent and followed the Ouse north. But the Host had acquired horses in East Anglia, so it seems more likely that fleet and land army agreed a rendezvous; and two points suggest themselves. If the fleet sailed up the Yorkshire Ouse to its confluence with the River Wharfe and thence to Tadcaster, where it bisects the Roman road, they could have met a rapidly moving mounted force arriving there overland. With the support of the main force in ships, the Host might then advance on York, lying exposed a mere 5 miles (8 km) away.
The military risk attached to this route was its necessarily passing through the heart of Mercia, where an attempt to engage it on home territory by King Burghred posed dangers. More likely, I think, the fleet first met and ferried the army across the Humber, where Ermine Street runs north from Lincoln; then the mounted force continued to York by road through territory lacking organized military control, while the fleet arrived on the Ouse in support shortly afterwards.
Early in 867 the two Northumbrian rivals put aside their differences and combined to attack the Danish Host, who retreated behind what was left of the Roman walls of the city, on the north-east bank of the only-too-navigable River Ouse. But the attack on the Host besieged in the city failed. In a bloody pitched battle inside the walls both sides suffered heavy casualties; but the Northumbrian army was destroyed, the two rival kings killed, and ‘the remnant’ made peace with the invaders.*** Recalling those events the community of Cuthbert regarded Osberht’s and Ælle’s fate as divine punishment for having ‘stolen’ between them six vills from St Cuthbert and for having ‘hated’ the saint.22 No chronicler recorded the devastating and permanent loss of York’s great library and monastic school, where Alcuin had acquired his scholarship in the previous century. The city’s subsequent flowering under Scandinavian influence would be industrial and commercial, rather than intellectual. Coin evidence suggests a vacuum in political control in the immediate aftermath of the battle for York; and the trading centre that lay at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss beneath medieval Fishergate, excavated in the 1980s, all but ceased to function. We do not know under whose direct administration York, or the kingdom, fell. The twelfth-century chronicler Symeon of Durham understood that one Ecgberht was set up as a puppet king north of the River Tyne, in Bernicia.
A foreign army sat in York’s crumbling ruins, feeding off its hinterland by whatever direct form of taxation it saw fit to impose and dispensing justice by right of arms. Northumbria, it seems, split into its ancient components, Bernicia and Deira. It is a salutary fact that north of the River Tees, perhaps an ancient boundary between the two Northumbrian kingdoms, there are virtually no Scandinavian place names, so common in Yorkshire. The descendants of the great seventh-century Bernician overlords may not have been able to expel the foreigners from the lands south of the Tees; but the dynasty that emerges as the Reeves of Bamburgh and later Earls of Northumbria does seem to have been able to halt the mycel here on the line of the Tyne.
The Host did not stay long in York to rule it directly. Towards the middle or end of 867 they turned south and, again, their destination suggests a co-ordination of land and water forces, this time at a point where Roman road and navigable river met on the River Trent in Mercia. They took winter quarters at Nottingham, if nothing else a statement of intent that could not be ignored by King Burghred. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 867 records that the Mercians ‘begged’ for help from King Æðelred and his young brother Ælfred, a partisan entry that can be read, more neutrally, as a formal request for military alliance against a common enemy. One might speculate that the Mercian queen, Æðelswið, was the intermediary between her husband and her brothers in Wessex.
Wessex responded, and the combined army came on the mycel here in their newly fortified river-front camp early in 868. The Chronicle records that despite a siege there was ‘no serious engagement’ and that the Mercians ‘made peace with the Host’. They were, it seems, given money to go away. Confronted with a large, if not superior, enemy and an apparently united front the Host returned to York and stayed there for a year, more or less secure in the knowledge that no Northumbrian force could engage them on equal terms.
If nothing else this early encounter between an invading Scandinavian force and the combined armies of two Anglo-Saxon kingdoms shows that the Host, from long practice on the Continent, could rapidly construct a defensive camp capable of withstanding a siege; and that the latter had no means of breaching such defences. Siege warfare was in its infancy; the initiative lay with the invaders: mobile, battle hardened and alive to every opportunity to divide and rule, or raid and vanish.
*
The seriousness of the threat posed by the mycel here to the southern kingdoms was by no means underestimated, even in its earliest phases. The impromptu alliance of 868 was cemented in the same year by the marriage of a Mercian ealdorman’s daughter, one Ælswið, to the ætheling of Wessex
, Ælfred. Ælfred was nineteen years old. He had been born on a royal estate at Wantage, now in Berkshire, in the year 849, the youngest of five brothers.††† Stories recorded by Bishop Asser from Ælfred’s childhood—of illness, of his eagerness to learn his letters, of his comely appearance and piety, of his two journeys to Rome (one in company with his father in 855)—belong to the irreducible canon of English legend. He can have grown up with little or no expectation of becoming king after his father Æðewulf and four older brothers.
Ælfred has played a central role in narratives of the Viking Age in England for three perfectly good reasons. Firstly, his gifts in military strategy, administration, learning and Christian philosophy were considerable, perhaps unrivalled in his age; secondly, because he is the first Englishman whose life we know in the sort of detail that allows biographers to write convincingly, and at length, about his character, achievements and failures; and, lastly, because his heirs and successors cemented his legacy and constructed a superbly powerful state on the foundations that he and his forbears laid. Part of that legacy was the retrospective creation of what we might call the grand unification project—an idea of ‘England’.
The detail of Ælfred’s life comes, to begin with, from a species of contemporary biography, Bishop Asser’s Life of King Ælfred. Asser came from south-west Wales to Ælfred’s court in 885 during a period of relative political calm. Just as Charlemagne had brought scholars into his imperial court, so Ælfred picked men of intellect and vision to help him with his grand educational and institutional ambitions. The Life was composed, or finished, in about 893, a year which was anything but calm in the realm of Wessex. Whatever its historical and literary merits, it opens a dramatic window on the machinery of the West Saxon court, on the legacy that Ælfred wished to build, and on many of his personal and political struggles. It must, naturally, be read with caution.