Aelfred's Britain

by Adams, Max;

  *** Lurid stories about a blood feud between Ívarr and Ælle, recorded in a late Scandinavian poem, resulting in Ælle’s ritual evisceration, might just be true; but most historians treat the story, and the punishment, with scepticism.

  ††† Ælfred also had an older sister, Æðelswið. See above pp. 93 and 102 and below, p. 125.

  ‡‡‡ John Peddie, who has made a study of military tactics in this period, suggests the possibility that they came south-west along the ancient Icknield Way and crossed the Thames at Goring, a few miles north of Reading. Peddie 1999, 79.

  §§§ Flash weir: an arrangement of vertical planks slotted through a beam. The planks could be temporarily removed to allow passage of boats up and down river.

  ### John Peddie quotes John Man, a nineteenth-century Reading historian, who identified the remnants of the earthwork as late as 1816 on land now occupied by Reading railway station. Peddie 1999, 84.

  ∫∫∫ Caution must be exercised by those wishing to read into Asser’s account an eye-witness record of battle-dispositions and tactics. The shield wall had become something of a poetic trope by Asser’s day.

  ΩΩΩ The surviving king is named by the Chronicle as Hálfdan. One wonders if Ubba had been left behind in East Anglia with part of the army, or whether he remained at York.

  THE END OF DAYS

  RAGNARÖK AND THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT—THE ANTAGONISTS—TORKSEY AND REPTON—THE CONQUEST OF YORK—INCOMERS—THE ATTACK ON WESSEX—ATHELNEY—EDINGTON—

  4

  And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth...

  ...And, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood...

  ...And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains...

  ...For the Great Day of His wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand.1

  Thus the New Testament revelation of the Day of Judgement. The Norse poem Völuspá, or the Seeress’s Prophecy, is scarcely less apocalyptic on the subject of Ragnarök, the last battle of the gods. The god Heimdallr blows his great horn and Yggdrasil, the world tree, shudders and groans. The Midgard serpent writhes in anger and, in the churning of the seas that follows, the ship Naglfar, constructed from the fingernails and toenails of the dead, breaks free from its moorings; the eagle shrieks its anticipation of doom. The giants advance into battle; the armies of Muspelheim, the land of fire, are unleashed. One by one the gods of the Norse pantheon engage in deadly combat: Oðin fights the wolf, Fenrir, and is swallowed whole; his son Thor does battle with Jörmungandr, the Midgard serpent, and dies from exhaustion and his wounds, before:

  15. RAGNARÖK: the end of days. Cross shaft fragment from St Andrew’s church, Andreas, Isle of Man.

  The sun turns black, land sinks into the sea

  The bright stars vanish from the sky;

  Steam rises up from the conflagration,

  Hot flame plays against heaven itself.2

  In the decade and a half after the arrival of the mycel here in 865, when all but two* of the Anglo-Saxon dynasties were extinguished, it must have seemed that the end of days was come. Kings were martyred, deposed or, through civil war, failed to protect their people; houses of God were destroyed, their monks enslaved by pagans; the wealth of the land was taken overseas, treasures and heirlooms stolen. The forces of heathenism advanced inexorably. The rules by which Christian states maintained order—the bonds of lordly patronage, of oath-swearing and loyalty which held society, religious and secular, in its delicate equipoise of reciprocity—seemed cast aside. The trading settlements that underpinned an explosion in wealth in the eighth century no longer functioned; many minsters were abandoned or barely survived; royal estates were plundered.

  Intolerable burdens were imposed on the free men of the shires: to fight seemingly from one end of the year to the other in the king’s host, to repair fortifications and build bridges. Even the institutional might of the church was threatened. Wærferth, Bishop of Worcester, forced to rent his lands out to pay his share of tribute to the raiders in London, bemoaned ‘the pressing affliction and immense tribute of the barbarians’.† King Ælfred later lamented that south of the River Humber there was scarcely a literate priest left.3 Scholarship and literacy, already in decline in the ninth century, plumbed such depths that at Canterbury the single active scribe had gone blind and could barely copy out a line correctly.4

  Northumbria, once the greatest power in the north of Britain, languished in a state of apparent anarchy comparable to that which Bede, referring to the apostate year of 633, described as having been deleted by ‘those who compute the dates of kings’. Hoards of coins and hacksilver‡ were buried and never retrieved, just as they had been during the dark days at the end of the Roman Empire. Coldingham Abbey, founded in the seventh century by Æbbe, sister of that King Oswald who had brought the Irish mission to Lindisfarne, was destroyed in a raid in 870.5

  Further north, in that same year, the ancestral fortress of the Northern Britons, Alclud on Dumbarton Rock, was captured by Dublin Norse chiefs Óláfr and Ívarr after a four-month siege.6 A year later, according to the Annals of Ulster, those armies returned to Dublin in 200 ships laden with immense booty and ‘a great prey of Angles and Britons and Picts’. Arthal ap Dyfnwal, Dumbarton’s king, was assassinated in a plot by Constantín mac Cináed the following year.7 Gwgon ap Meurig, the last attested king of Ceredigion, was drowned, perhaps while fighting Norse raiders.8 In 872 the mycel here, joined from the Continent by another supporting army, stood poised to conquer all. Six years later almost the last Anglo-Saxon king standing, Ælfred, was left ruling no more than a few acres of fetid marsh in the Somerset levels.

  This apocalyptic scenario, which conveniently sets up Ælfred as the hero of a pervasive English nationalist narrative, deserves to be balanced by the scrutiny that modern textual critique and sober archaeological witness bring to bear. If the future looked grim in 871, as it must have done, there is no evidence that Scandinavian raiders and would-be conquerors wilfully set about destroying the apparatus of the state, embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing, the proscription of Christian worship or, indeed, the obliteration of Insular culture. Far from it. They set no precedent for their Norman descendant William, whose Harrying of the North in 1069–70 laid waste great swathes of territory, inducing famine and economic destruction. Like earlier (and later) would-be invaders, much of their interest in the Insular kingdoms was fostered by admiration for their wealth, their administrative sophistication and cultural confidence. What they wanted was a share.

  The pope in Rome may have demanded that heathens be destroyed but the spiritual antipathy felt by many Christians towards the ‘gentiles’, as the chroniclers called them, was not necessarily reciprocated. Scandinavians, seeing much to envy and many similarities with their own beliefs, were curious, sometimes bemused—amused, even—by Christian worship, by the swearing of oaths on holy relics and by the rites of baptism practised in Christian kingdoms. In the eschatology of the heathen North, death and the afterlife were much greater preoccupations than the beginnings of life or religious induction. They also thought it very odd, not that Christians followed the sayings of the prophet of Judea, but that they had use for only a single God, presumed to be able to control all the forces of nature and of human destiny everywhere, at once and exclusively.

  British, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon and Irish élites shared many cultural affinities with Scandinavian societies in their love of martial valour and their pursuit of glory, in some cases sharing even mythological heroes like Wayland the Smith. The Irish epic tale Táin Bó Cúailnge (The cattle raid of Cooley), with its teenage hero Cú Chulainn
, was a poetic legend with themes and motifs that any Viking could admire: a great cattle raid, proven valour in single combat, a campaign of guerrilla warfare; an animist transformation into monstrous form. And of crucial importance for the nature of their interaction over the next two centuries was that Anglo-Saxon, Dane and Norseman were, for the most part, mutually intelligible on some functional level.§ Above all, the leaders of the mycel here came to appreciate that native respect for the institutions and offices of church and state, and the fundamental rationality of that relationship, might be turned to their advantage.

  There is no evidence either that, whatever their seafaring genius, Scandinavian armies were inherently superior to those of their Insular antagonists. It is true that they were highly effective raiders, veterans of campaigns in Francia, in Ireland and at home. Their weaponry—spear, axe, shield and sword—may often have been of a very high quality. Their martial culture and the bonds which held ships’ crews together as fighting units in pursuit of glory and treasure made them justly feared. Their tactical knowledge of coastal, riverine and overland routes gave them significant advantages against a slow territorial opponent, as did their fast, shallow-draughted ships. Once they had constructed bridgeheads, and seized or bought sufficient horses to create mobile mounted forces, they were capable of striking with apparent impunity across large swathes of territory and retreating laden with booty and prisoners.

  However, even if the military organization of the Insular kingdoms was flawed by its reliance on the regional muster, its part-time field capabilities and its slowness to respond to the lightning raiding tactics of the Scandinavian marine assault, there is no suggestion that the ninth-century armies of the Anglo-Saxons, Britons and Scots were poorly led, unskilled or ill equipped. In open-field encounters with the enemy they were often successful. Their ealdormen were tied by strong historical bonds of lordship and tenurial obligation downwards to the men in their fyrð and upwards to their own lords, the kings. Their loyalties might have been regional rather than ‘national’; but that did not mean that they failed to recognize the value of mutual defence.

  Inter-dynastic warfare was rife in Early Medieval Britain; no generation had forgotten how to fight. Tactical flexibility is shown in the Chronicle account of the battle of Ashdown and by reports of local militias taking on Viking raiders and defeating them. Indigenous forces were even able to tackle marauding fleets, although the surviving details of such encounters are negligible. Above all, perhaps, Insular armies were supported by the wealth of agricultural surplus that these fertile lands produced. If that wealth had been targeted by raiders over several decades, it had by no means been exhausted—yet.

  The Insular military response was, even so, hampered by significant disadvantages. As Ryan Lavelle points out in his survey of Alfred’s campaigns, generals are always guilty of fighting their last war.9 In the days of Ecgberht and even Æðelwulf, opponents had played by the same rules. Kings’ retinues met at the sorts of places where battles had traditionally been fought: river crossings on ancient routes, on borders, or sites with a bit of elbow room. Shield walls formed, pressing for advantage; skirmishes and duels were fought; the army that held the field claimed the victory. The victors claimed tribute and bragging rights. Superiority over neighbouring territory was affirmed by raiding, by exchange of hostages and by dynastic marriage, sealing a tributary alliance. Viking armies, increasingly large, battle hardened and effective, brought a new set of hit-and-run tactics. They came, initially, for cash and slaves, and proved perfidious in negotiations even if, on the Continent, they periodically acted as allies or auxiliaries of one or other Frankish faction.

  And then, the opportunity afforded by Viking raids for Insular warlords to press their own historical claims, to kick old enemies while they were down, sometimes prevented the sort of co-operation that would have made a Christian alliance (for want of a better phrase) more initially effective. The combined Mercian–West Saxon offensive against the Host in 868, before the freshly turfed ramparts of Nottingham, may have failed in its objective but it demonstrated that a united show of strength could halt the Danish advance.

  More compromising was the tradition by which the men of the mustered fyrð, in a world overwhelmingly dominated by the cycles of the farming season, left the field of battle and returned to their land when need arose: at harvest time, in autumn to turn their pigs into the woods and slaughter beasts; in spring to sow their corn and weed their fields. An enemy that increasingly overwintered on British soil, that raided and fought throughout the year, posed a significant economic and military threat, to which Insular military leaders were, at first, painfully slow to respond.

  The system of ‘common burdens’, first attested at a synod held by King Æðelbald of Mercia at Gumley in 749 and re-affirmed in Offan charters from the 790s, by which free men# were obliged to serve in the fyrð and assist in the repair and construction of bridges and fortifications was, in Wessex and elsewhere in Britain, in its infancy. As Bede had warned early in the eighth century, the extensive and increasingly secularist acquisition of land by minsters meant that estates once held of the king in return for military service were now largely held without such obligations and were prone to be retained by the abbot’s or abbess’s family: that is the overwhelming testimony of the charters. The events of the decade 870–880 show that attempts to impose the Mercian idea of the common burdens on the shires of Wessex, Sussex, Kent and Devon were by no means met with enthusiasm. It is ironic that the minsters, the most successful centres of production and consumption, should have disproportionately attracted the interest of the raiders. For a while, kings might have felt grim satisfaction that the church should be forced to give up so much of the wealth that had once belonged to them.

  *

  In 872, after the fall of Northumbria, East Anglia and parts of Mercia, the colonization of Shetland and Orkney, the Hebrides, the Western Isles and Man, the destruction of the old Gaelic overlordship of Dál Riata and of the British kingdom of Strathclyde, fortunes lay finely balanced between foes of contrasting motivations and capabilities but broadly equal in strength.

  Ælfred made peace with the Host (for an undisclosed amount of silver—perhaps several thousand pounds of it) after a year in the field had exhausted both sides. In 872 the mycel here left London and moved north, constructing a camp on a natural rise, often cut off by flood waters, overlooking the River Trent at Torksey in Lindsey, a few miles north-west of Lincoln.∫ Here they overwintered. Thousands of finds, located during a collaborative project between archaeologists and metal detector-users, have shown that the camp covered well over 100 acres, defended by the waters of the Trent to the west and marshes to the east. Clear evidence of trading, coin striking, smithing, textile production (and plenty of after-hours gaming) show that the Host was no mere army but a complete community on the move, numbering comfortably in the thousands. A thriving pottery industry grew up here from the period of Scandinavian occupation onwards, capitalizing on its excellent trading links and on the bounty of cash that the victorious raiders carried with them.

  Torksey’s brilliant strategic location shows the army to have planned their move with careful consideration: the village lies at the confluence of the Trent and the Fossdyke, the Roman canal that connected it with the former colonia at Lincoln. It controlled access upriver to Nottingham and the Trent headwaters, and along the main road between Lindsey and the Humber. Its pivotal role was valued and remembered for generations: at the time of the Domesday survey the inhabitants of Torksey bore special responsibility for accompanying royal messengers to York ‘with their ships and their means of navigation’.10

  16. THE LOCK AT TORKSEY, Lincolnshire, where the Roman Fossdyke meets the River Trent, and where the mycel here set up camp in 872.

  Until this point the status of Northumbria is unclear. The Host seems initially to have appointed a puppet administration. But the thirteenth-century chronicler Roger of Wendover, apparently drawing on earlier sou
rces now lost, recorded that in 872 the Northumbrians ‘expelled from the kingdom their king, the Bernician Ecgberht, and Archbishop Wulfhere, who thereupon took themselves to Burghred, king of the Mercians, by whom they were honourably entertained’.11 In his place, it seems, the Northumbrians chose one Ricsige as their king. This internal coup may have prompted the Host’s move north from London; but there is no evidence that they came to York or that an engagement was fought. Roger’s account suggests that the Mercians, for their part, made peace with the Host; he adds that Ecgberht died in the same year, but that Archbishop Wulfhere was restored to his see. However one tries to bring these undercurrents into focus, they remain defiantly obscure: we might surmise that Ricsige was a Deiran rival of Ecgberht; but we do not know what the Host’s leaders thought of the new king or the flitting of the archbishop. The lack of recorded military campaigns in 872 suggests that all sides were considering their options. The marvellous French phrase reculer pour mieux sauter, ‘to draw back in order to take a better jump’, which has no adequate English counterpart, about sums it up.

  The decisive move came late in 873 when the Host, perhaps leaving a significant section of their camp followers behind at Torksey, and for the moment ignoring events further north, took to their ships once more and sailed upriver along the Trent to Repton (Hreopedun) in the heart of ancient Mercia. Here they established another fortified camp and, in the bald statement of the West Saxon chroniclers, ‘took winter quarters, and drove king Burghred overseas... and conquered the entire kingdom’.12 It was a stunning military coup. All the chroniclers agree that Burghred cut his losses and travelled to Rome, where he died and was buried in St Mary’s church in the Schola Saxonum, the English quarter. His queen, Æðelswið, King Ælfred’s sister, is said to have died at Pavia in 888. In Burghred’s place the Host ‘gave the government of the kingdom of Mercia into the hands of Ceolwulf, a foolish king’s thegn’13—that is to say, to a compliant native.