Aelfred's Britain

by Adams, Max;

  A STORM BREWING—TWO HOSTS—A GREAT CAMPAIGN—A KING’S DUTY—PEACE, PLAGUE AND FAMINE—THE CODEX AUREUS—THE TRAVELS —OF OHTHERE—ÆLFRED’S LEGACY—KING EADWEARD

  6

  Goðrum se norþerna cyning forþferde, þæs fulluhtnama wæs Æþelstan, se wæs Ælfredes cyninges godsunu, 7 he bude on Eastenglum, 7 þæt lond ærest gesæt...1

  890. Guðrum, the northern king whose baptismal name was Æðelstan, passed away; he was King Ælfred’s godson, and he dwelt in East Anglia, and was the first to take possession of that country.

  891. Three Irishmen came to King Ælfred in a boat without any oars from Ireland... The boat in which they set out was made from two and a half hides... and after a week they came to land in Cornwall [Cornwalum ] and soon went to King Ælfred.

  892.* After Easter... appeared the star which in Latin is called ‘cometa’. In this year the great Host about which we formerly spoke went again from the east kingdom westward to Boulogne [Bunáan ] and were there provided with ships so that they crossed in one voyage, horses and all, and then came up into the mouth of the Lympne [Limene muþan ] with two hundred and fifty ships... Then soon after this Hæsten came with eighty ships into the mouth of the Thames [Temes ], and made himself a fort at Milton Regis [Middeltune ], and the other host at Appledore [Apuldre: literally ‘Apple tree’].2

  25. THE DANISH GAFF CUTTER Eda Frandsen: Gabriel Clarke on the bowsprit.

  The departure from the political stage of Guðrum, Ælfred’s former antagonist, could hardly have been more ill timed for the king of the West Saxons. A storm was brewing in the east. In 889 one of the Scandinavian armies, which had enjoyed rich pickings among the fractured Frankish kingdoms in the previous decade, came out of the Seine and, sailing up the River Vire to St Lô, was heavily defeated the following year by a Breton army. The Host now moved north and east, penetrating the River Scheldt, and encamped at Louvain on the River Dijle, a tributary of the Scheldt, 10 miles (16 km) or so east of what is now Brussels. Here it was met by an army of East Franks, Saxons and Bavarians under King Arnulf, son of the late Carloman. The Host was put to flight, its camp overrun. The gloating annalist of the monastery at Fulda recorded that the river was blocked by the bodies of dead pagans.3

  That winter a severe famine struck the region, ravaging Christian and pagan communities alike. The Scandinavian armies, perhaps sensing that the fates were against them, now decided that their Frankish game was no longer worth the candle. Odo, de facto king of the West Franks since 888, saw an opportunity to be rid of their menace, and gave them sufficient ships to leave. The annalist of St Vaast wrote that ‘seeing the whole realm worn down by hunger they left Francia in the autumn, and crossed the sea’.4 En masse, and perhaps in collusion with Northumbrian and East Anglian allies, they determined to mount a decisive assault on the Angelcynn.

  A highly detailed series of entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the next three years, at precisely the time when it was first being compiled, reads like an almost continuous war narrative, fought for the highest stakes. They crossed the Channel as two fleets: warriors, dependents, animals, the lot. Two hundred and fifty ships entered the mouth of the River Lympne on the south coast of Kent. Lympne, once a Roman port, is landlocked now, its ancient hythe lying high and dry at the foot of the chalk scarp that overlooks the flat expanse of Romney marsh; the Royal Military canal, a relic of more recent invasion fears, is its only access to the sea.† During the ninth century the river was sufficiently deep to enable the Viking Host to row as far up as Appledore, now some 8 miles (13 km) from the sea and lying at the east end of the Isle of Oxney whence the River Rother once issued.

  At or close by Appledore the Host captured ‘a fort of primitive structure, because there was [only] a small band of rustics in it’ and made of it a winter camp.5 Thirty miles (48 km) to the north, across the Downs of Kent, a smaller but no less menacing fleet of about eighty ships sailed up the Thames to the Isle of Sheppey; from there they rowed along the muddy channel of the River Swale and a mile or so up Milton Creek to make their winter camp uncomfortably close to the fortress at Rochester.

  Canterbury offered rich pickings, as did trading settlements at Sarre and Fordwich and minsters on Thanet and Sheppey.‡ Kent east of the Medway had not been fortified under Ælfred’s burghal plans of the 880s§ and we do not know what, if any, provision the Kentish administration had made for its defences. Ealdorman Sigehelm seems to have been a loyal ally of Wessex: his daughter became the third wife of Eadweard, Ælfred’s son and presumptive heir. Archbishop Plegmund was a member of Ælfred’s ‘renaissance’ court; a close political and military relationship is implied.

  26. CANTERBURY, the site of St Augustine’s missionary church of 597 and perhaps the only recognizable town in ninth-century Britain.

  Without the defensive and offensive advantages of garrisoned fortifications, Ælfred could not hope to expel such large forces; nor could he concentrate his attack on one for fear of allowing the other to penetrate west into Wessex with impunity. He had not yet, it seems, installed Eadweard, who makes his first stage entrance in the year of the invasion, as sub-king in Kent.# That Eadweard was being groomed to succeed him is in no doubt. He was provided with substantial estates in his father’s will, including all Ælfred’s booklands in Kent and, judging by the frequency with which he witnessed royal charters, he spent much time with the king on his itineraries through the shires.6

  Ælfred’s response to the arrival of the Continental fleets, early in 893, was to bring his own army to a point more or less equidistant between the two, unsure of their ultimate intentions. He had by this time instituted radical changes in the way his forces were able to respond to external threats. His field army, the fyrð, was now divided into two, so that one force was always in the field, with a contingency for those permanently on standby to garrison the burhs.7 The system was now to be tested to its limits.

  According to the Chronicle, the Host at Appledore disdained to take the field against Ælfred’s army. Instead its scouts, mounted warriors and foraging parties probed the edges of the vast dense woodland of the Weald: Andredesweald, the haunt of wild beasts, charcoal burners and an ancient iron-working industry stretching across the Downs as far as Hampshire. It was a form of guerrilla warfare: testing, teasing. They moved ‘through the woods in gangs and bands, wherever the margin was left unguarded; and almost every day other troops, both from the levies and also from the forts, went to attack them either by day or by night’.8

  Only after Easter did they abandon their redoubt and their fleet at Appledore and march west; they kept to ‘the thickets of a huge wood called Andred by the common people, spread as far as Wessex [Occidentales Anglos] and gradually wasted the adjacent provinces, that is Hamtunscire and Bearrucscire’.9 After this campaign of plundering with no attempt, it seems, at conquest, during which they were apparently shadowed but not engaged in open battle,∫ they ‘seized much plunder, and wished to carry that north across the Thames into Essex to meet the ships’.10

  Sometime during the early summer of 893 they were brought to battle at Farnham (Fearnhamme: ‘River meadow where ferns grow’) on the River Wey in Surrey. The Chronicle is silent regarding the names of the commanders, but Æðelweard, writing a hundred years later and drawing on material from a lost version of the Chronicle, names the West Saxon leader as Eadweard, the king’s son. Eadweard’s forces inflicted a heavy defeat on the Host, injuring its leader and retrieving all the booty that had been taken during the rampage across Sussex. The mycel here was driven north over the Thames somewhere near Staines, apparently in such disarray that they did not even manage to find a ford. One imagines the pell mell chaos of a rout: baggage, weapons, loot and even armour cast aside; panic, slaughter on the river banks and bodies floating downstream.

  The survivors followed the course of the River Colne as far upstream as the island called Thorney (on the north-west periphery of the Heathrow Airport complex, now swallowed by a motorway interchange)
and, their commander too ill to flee further, found themselves besieged by Eadweard.

  At the point of victory the momentum was lost: according to the Chronicle the levies, coming to the end of their deployment, ran out of provisions and left for home. Æðelweard says that the ‘barbarians’ asked for peace and that the West Saxons negotiated their withdrawal with an exchange of hostages; the Host retired not to Kent, but to East Anglia. But these accounts pose more questions than they answer. After Eadweard’s brief appearance at Farnham and Thorney his role in the war of 893–894 is obscure.Ω Was he written out of the official Ælfredan narrative to ensure that the king stood alone as hero? Or was his inability to keep his levies in the field regarded as a failure of leadership or loyalty? Who were these levies: his own retinue, certainly, and also those of the shires which had been ravaged by the Host, perhaps: Hampshire and Berkshire? But it is an intriguing possibility that, in preparation for his installation as sub-king of Kent, which may have happened in about 898, Eadweard was already in command of the Kentish levies; that they regarded themselves as having gone far beyond the traditional call of duty in chasing the Appledore Host across the southern shires and then beyond the Thames. And then, Æðelweard says that while Eadweard was still at Thorney, his brother-in-law Æðelred, ealdorman and sub-king of Mercia, came from London to his aid. If so, why lift the siege? Despite the contemporaneity of the Chronicle and the value of Æðelweard’s insider information at court, it seems that either the complexities of the 893 campaign were such that no coherent account could be constructed; or, if one wants to detect political undercurrents, the West Saxon spin doctors were already at work to contrive an official account that would cover unsightly stains and keep the narrative focused on Ælfred.

  Ælfred’s policy had always been to bargain straight and trust the enemy’s sense of decency: it seems extraordinarily naïve. Time and again the Scandinavian armies accepted Ælfred’s terms and defaulted, as they had so often in Francia. Given the otherwise sophisticated strategies displayed during the Viking wars, one must surmise that the underlying rationale of the Angelcynn leadership was always to buy time and limit its own casualties. There is a fine line between appeasement and low cunning.

  The West Saxon and Mercian leadership now anticipated fighting wars on multiple fronts. Their principal fear was probably not either Host in isolation but that the two forces should combine and that the slumbering giants of East Anglia, Danish East Mercia and Northumbria might join in. While Eadweard had expelled the Appledore Host from Wessex, Ælfred seems to have concentrated diplomatic efforts on persuading the force under Hæsten, in the Thames estuary, to cross the Thames to Essex. If this war band leader is to be identified with the Viking raider whose name appears periodically like a rash in Continental sources spanning half a century, then the Angelcynn had good reason to fear him. He is implicated in a notorious series of raids deep into the Mediterranean in the years 859–862, with campaigns along the Loire at the end of that decade and into the 870s. Later tradition has embellished his feats and cruelties; even so, he seems to have been an unusually successful and energetic warlord over several decades. Whatever the truth, his career took him to the mouth of the Thames in 893.

  In the uncertain political aftermath of Guðrum’s death, Ælfred and Æðelred may have hoped that Hæsten would compete for the East Anglian kingship, killing two birds with one stone. We gather, from events later in 893, that while the Host lay at Milton Regis, Hæsten and his family received baptism. At least, the Chronicle records that his two sons were godchildren of, respectively, Ælfred and Æðelred. No such ceremony is likely to have been conducted without a peace deal ensuring that the Deniscan would leave Wessex alone; they had, it seems, been paid off. Given that Æðelred is recorded as co-sponsor, we might reasonably argue that the venue for both negotiation and ceremony was London, the timeshare capital for Mercia and Wessex and symbol of their alliance.

  Hæsten’s fleet duly crossed the estuary and built a fortress in Essex, at Benfleet (Beamfleote: ‘Tree creek’) overlooking the edge of the marshes to the north of Canvey Island, even as their comrades were fighting their way out of trouble across the Upper Thames. Here the remnants of the Appledore Host also arrived that summer and the two forces now combined. The Angelcynn had bought time in exchange for future trouble; and they are unlikely to have anticipated the grim news coming from the West Country. A Northumbrian fleet had sailed south from a port somewhere on the Irish Sea≈ and landed on the north Devonshire coast, while an East Anglian fleet, sailing along the south coast, now besieged Exeter.

  This turn of events in the west looks like a co-ordinated plan to draw West Saxon forces away from the east and open up a second front. Hæsten, it appears, had successfully enrolled both the East Anglians (Guðrum’s veterans of the campaign of 877–878, perhaps) and those of Guðroðr, the nominally Christian king of Scandinavian York, in his plan to finish what the mycel here had begun in the 860s. If the community of St Cuthbert recorded their reaction to their adopted king’s involvement, it has not survived.

  Ælfred’s reaction was to march westwards with the bulk of the West Saxon levies, leaving Eadweard and Æðelred∂ behind to confront Hæsten and the, by now, combined forces from Milton and Appledore at Benfleet. They marched east through London, picking up extra forces as they went. When they arrived at Benfleet they found a part of the combined Host in residence; but Hæsten was away on a raiding expedition in Mercia. In a stunning coup, the English put the Host to flight, stormed the fort and took possession of everything inside, including Hæsten’s wife and children. The ships of their considerable fleet were burned, sunk or otherwise taken to Rochester or London. For good or ill the Host could not now retire to the Continent whence they had come.

  The Chronicle makes much of the victory at Benfleet and of Ælfred’s magnanimous treatment of Hæsten’s family, restoring them to the warlord in a one-sided gesture of good faith;π but Æðelweard ignores the Benfleet episode entirely and, given that the Host was able to take to the field again very shortly, and in dangerous numbers, we may judge that the bulk of its fighting force had been absent with their commander, leaving behind only a small garrison and the baggage train in his new fort. The victory at Benfleet had not, perhaps, been all that glorious.

  Far to the west, the East Anglian and Northumbrian forces retired to their ships on Ælfred’s arrival, precisely achieving their broader purpose to draw the main West Saxon fyrð from the east. Hæsten’s combined army, dispossessed of its fort at Benfleet, now took up station in a new stronghold at Shoeburyness (Sceobyrig on Eastseaxum: ‘the fort on the shoe-shaped spit’) nearly 10 miles (16 km) to the east.

  In that whirlwind year of punch and counterpunch, a new phase now opened. With the apparent knowledge that the fyrð was otherwise occupied, the Deniscan once again left their fortress and with extraordinary boldness marched along the entire length of the Thames into Gloucestershire, making a rendezvous with forces from Northumbria and East Anglia that seeped (or swept) through the Mercian border.

  Their intention must now have been to wage a final war of conquest, staking everything on a swift victory; but the geography of southern Britain had changed since the campaigns of the 870s.∆ The forts of the Burghal Hidage, with their well-provisioned and trained garrisons, severely compromised the Host’s ability to live off the land, to steal or buy horses and force the submission of shire ealdormen. The old river route, which had enabled deep and swift penetration into the heartlands of the Angelcynn, was closed to them.

  At Sashes, Wallingford, Oxford and Cricklade, along the full length of the Thames, they faced opposition secure behind new walls; opposition with the benefit of intelligence forewarning them of the advancing Host. The portable wealth of the countryside, its livestock, was corralled behind ramparts. The formerly overflowing cupboard of the Anglo-Saxon landscape was bare; and, for once, the Host was unsupported by its fleet, having lost the bulk of its ships at Benfleet. Moreover, the West Saxo
n-Mercian alliance was solid: Æðelred’s loyalty, sealed by his marriage to Ælfred’s daughter, Æðelflæd, was unimpeachable. There is no hint that even disaffected ealdormen would throw in their lot with the invaders.

  These were epic campaigns: battle-weary veterans on forced route marches through enemy territory, denied the means to live off the land and at all times watched, pursued and hunted by an exhausted but determined fyrð under active, committed commanders. If Francia had, finally, proved too hot to handle, then Wessex and Mercia were now also too well guarded, too deeply defended.

  Avoiding the burhs, then, and no longer tied to the river, the most direct route for the Host would have been to take Akemennestraete from London, heading north-west through St Albans and Bicester towards the Fosse Way, which would lead them directly towards Gloucester, avoiding the Thames burhs. Here, perhaps, a gathering of warriors and their jarls from the north and east, even from potential allies among the Welsh and Irish, might have been arranged. The combined army, reaching the River Severn, now traced a route north along the ancient marcher lands of Hwicce (surely avoiding Worcester, already fortified with a burh; but how?), Magonsaete and Wrocansaete, beneath the ramparts of ancient hillforts and past the ruins of Roman towns; and then, as the river turned west and south, into Powys.

  Even here the Angelcynn now had allies among those Welsh kings who had submitted to Ælfred after 880. All the time the Host was pursued by Æðelred, supported by the shire levies of Wiltshire and Somerset under Ealdormen Æðelhelm and Æðelnoth, who had long ago stood with Ælfred at Athelney and fought with him at Edington. The stores of the burhs, and their knowledge of the movements of the Host, allowed the pursuing levies to maintain pace and strength.

  At Worcester, perhaps, the levies paused to regroup and resupply, to gather intelligence and take counsel. At Buttingtune on Sæferne staðe,** a ford just north of Welshpool where the Severn meets Offa’s Dyke beneath the naturally imposing ramparts of the Long Mountain, the Host ran out of steam and built a fortress, as they had so often before. On their long march they had been unable to capture a single major settlement although they had, in all probability, wasted many smaller estates and vills. With Ælfred still occupied on his watching brief in Devon, the combined levies laid siege to the Host on the banks of the river and waited: waited until those inside were half-starved and had slaughtered all their horses for meat.