We would know very little about what happened at the Blackwater were it not for the survival of an extraordinary poetic fragment, The Battle of Maldon, which offers in 325 lines of Old English verse a detailed and dramatic account of what transpired. The poem lacks its beginning and its end, a loss that predates the early eighteenth century, but it is remarkable that the poem survives at all. It formed part of the Cotton library (named after its collector, the MP and antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton, 1571–1631), an enterprise of far-sighted bibliophilia undertaken in the wake of the Dissolution of the Monasteries of the 1530s. Cotton’s efforts preserved the Lindisfarne Gospels and the vast bulk of surviving Old English poetic literature, among many other priceless works, but all were nearly lost in 1731 when the building in which the library was preserved – the aptly named Ashburnham House – caught fire. Much was saved – including the badly singed Beowulf manuscript, but The Battle of Maldon was destroyed. Thankfully, however, the poem had been transcribed in 1724 – less than seven years before the fire. It is this version that now provides the basis of all modern versions of the poem.
The poem begins with a Viking spokesman shouting his demands across the water, for rings (beagas) and speedily sent tribute (gafol) to avert the inevitable killing. The response that the poet places in Byrhtnoth’s mouth is the father of all doomed declamations of defiance, words that find their echo in every steadfast utterance delivered throughout England’s pugnacious history: the resolve of a proud nation – in the first century of its self-consciousness – to choose death before dishonour. ‘Out spoke Byrhtnoth,’ the poet proclaims,
lifted his shield, shook his slim ash spear, held forth with words and, angry and single-minded, gave him answer:
‘Do you hear, sea-wanderer, what this nation says? They will give you spears as tribute, the poison-tipped javelin and ancient swords, those warlike accoutrements which will profit you nothing in battle. Seamen’s spokesman, report back again; tell your people much more distasteful news: that here stands a worthy earl with his troop of men who is willing to defend this his ancestral home, the country of Æthelred, my lord’s nation and land. The heathens shall perish in battle.’17
There would be blood. And yet, to fight across the causeway was impossible; for a proper battle to take place, the Viking army had to be allowed to cross, and this is precisely what Byrhtnoth, on account of ofermod, determined to do. This word – ‘over-mood’ rendered literally into modern English – has stimulated an enormous amount of speculation and learned wrangling over its precise meaning. Tolkien saw it in almost irredeemably negative terms – as hubris, overweening pride and misplaced confidence, a personal flaw that doomed Byrhtnoth, his men and his nation to destruction.18 Others, however, have stressed the connotations of exceptional courage, unusual reserves of energy and spirit.19 The ambiguities are obvious – does ‘over’ in this context imply ‘too much’ or an exceptional quantity? What, precisely, does ‘mood’ mean when it is left unqualified? My personal view is that the ambiguity is deliberate, that the poet has chosen to use a term that is essentially an empty vessel, ready to be filled with our own value judgements; all we see is Byrhtnoth, overflowing with spirit, with gusto, with eagerness to go head on with fate – it is up to us, readers or listeners, to judge his motives and his wisdom.
Across the river ‘the slaughter-wolves waded, caring not for the water, the Viking war-band; they came west over Pant, bearing shield-boards over bright water and up onto land, linden-wood braced’.20
Some have observed the strategic sense of allowing the Viking army to cross; it was perhaps the only opportunity to bring this Viking horde to battle and prevent them from continuing the coastal rampage that had already struck Folkstone, Sandwich and Ipswich.21 This may be so, although it is worth remembering that this is a poem – a self-consciously literary product – and may not reflect reality with any great accuracy. Its purpose was to emphasize Byrhtnoth’s courage, his stoicism and the resolve of his closest followers to stand and die beside him rather than face the ignominy of surrender or retreat.
Byrhtnoth, for all his valiant leadership, was struck down by a spear and died a prolonged Hollywood death – fending off foes until finally slumping to the earth. Some of the English fled the battlefield, the poet ensuring that their names (Godric, Godwine and Godwig) would live for ever in infamy for what was – in reality – probably the wiser path in the circumstances. But wisdom was not what was at stake here: the animating ethic was one of loyalty, even in death, and of the moral courage that the English shared with their Viking enemies – the idea that to face death unflinching, though it came at them up the salt-flats as inevitably as the tide, and to die in heaps around the body of their slain lord was the greatest end to which a warrior could aspire.
The words that the poet gives to the elderly retainer Byrhtwold, steadfast despite Byrhtnoth’s demise, echo down the centuries as the unparalleled expression of heroism in defeat, the determination to go down fighting while all around ‘fighting men dropped down dead, exhausted by wounds’:
‘Will shall be harder, hearts the keener, our mettle shall be more as our strength lessens. Here lies our leader, all hewn down, goodness on the ground. He has cause to mourn whosoever from this fight thinks to flee. I am old in life. I will not leave this place, but I will lie me down by my lord’s side, by the man I think so dear.’22
Maldon is a better poem than Brunanburh, a paean to heroic defeat that transmits pathos and emotional heft through the bitter-sweet song of hard-fought failure – sorrow and glory entwine together, pride and despair. These qualities are nowhere to be found in the crude triumphalism of Brunanburh, its poetic force squandered on surface glitter and hollow bluster, an English retort to the skaldic verses prepared for Viking warlords. And for all of the older poem’s proto-nationalism, it is Maldon that speaks more deeply and with greater truth to sentiments that the British have enduringly valued: that to face one’s opponent on a level field and to play the game fairly – to play with heart and courage no matter the outcome, to fight until the bitterest of ends – is where true glory resides, worth a thousand hollow victories or a thousand weaklings sent sprawling in the dirt.
The Battle of Maldon was, however, an anachronism even when it was written, a recapitulation of a heroic ideal that was growing old, couched in language that harked back to the ideals of a vanished past – to the sixth-century world of Beowulf, a legendary lost past. Perhaps this was the poet’s intention – to inspire his audience to hold themselves to a higher standard, to raise their spears in the face of unfolding calamity, a call to arms to resist the tidal wave of aggression, whatever the cost: a renewal of the heroic values of Old England. Now, however, the monsters were real, and the heroes were dying. As one scholar remarked, ‘the poem looks with longing eyes at a vanished world where heroes could act like heroes’ but in the context of ‘a world that was rapidly spinning out of English control’ – passing, as another Old English poet might have put it, into ‘dark beneath the helm of night, as though it had never been’.23
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle account of what happened at the Blackwater is far less expansive. It does, however, record the death of Byrhtnoth at Maldon (the nearest burh to where the fighting took place). Crucially, it also records another event that took place in the aftermath of the battle – one which would have great ramifications over the fifteen years that followed. ‘[I]n that year,’ the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle explains, ‘it was decided that tribute [gafol] be paid to the Danish men for the great terror they had wrought along the sea coast; that was, at first, ten thousand pounds.’ Of course, as previous experience and common sense had shown, the only thing this would bring was time, while providing an incentive for further attacks. And, of course, the attacks kept coming, unending, devastating. And as the years of Æthelred’s ill-starred reign progressed, the size of the tribute that was paid got ever larger: £16,000 in 994 and £24,000 in 1002. In 1007, at the end of the campaign with which this chapter opened, £
36,000 was paid. In 1012, the English crown handed over £48,000 with an undisclosed sum paid out in 1013. The final sum – an astronomical £72,000 – was agreed, in rather different circumstances, in 1016.24
These were vast quantities of silver. A pound represented 240 ordinary silver pennies, and the smallest of these sums – the Maldon tribute of £10,000 – was therefore the equivalent of 2,400,000 coins, each one of which had to be hammered out by hand. For context, this would mean having to multiply all of the coins in the Cuerdale Hoard by a factor of 340 to reach this number. The 1016 tribute – if delivered exclusively in coins – would have amounted to a ludicrous 17,280,000 silver pennies. There is no reason, however, to assume that the tribute was all handed over in coins – silver in all sorts of forms, and gold as well, would no doubt have been equally welcome, and the higher value of the latter material would have reduced the volume of material accordingly. But these are still massive sums of material wealth – so much, in fact, that the reliability of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s figures has been repeatedly called into question.25 There seems little reason, however, even if the specific figures are suspiciously rounded, to doubt the overall size of these payments: certainly the late Anglo-Saxon state had the administrative and economic machinery to raise and produce coinage on this scale, and huge numbers of Æthelred’s coins – more than the number found in England – have been discovered in Scandinavia. Some of them, like those in the hoard of eighty-two pennies found at Tyskegård on the island of Bornholm (Denmark), appear to have been freshly minted and never to have circulated, as though produced in bulk for the express purpose of raising a tribute payment.26 The impact all these coins had is clear – the distinctive punky hairstyle with which Æthelred’s image is blessed on these coins influenced the royal currency of Danish kings for decades afterwards.27
Perhaps this policy would seem wiser in hindsight had Æthelred’s military endeavours met with more success; he certainly seems to have tried – refortifying defences that had dropped out of use and throwing up emergency fortifications at places like Old Sarum and South Cadbury; he also reinvested heavily in the English navy, as his father had before him, and it is from Æthelred’s reign that we have the first evidence of ‘ship-sokes’ – a formalized land-based system of militarized naval obligation. But, no matter what he tried, it seemed always to turn out badly: as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ruefully put it, Æthelred’s ship-army ‘achieved nothing, except the people’s toil, and wasting money, and the invigoration of their enemies’,28 and the situation wasn’t helped by the king’s reliance on treacherous and inept councillors, a habit that earned him the sobriquet ‘the Ill-Advised’ (or more familiarly, and inaccurately, ‘the Unready’) in accounts written after his death (from OE unræd, ‘bad-counsel’, a play on his name Æthel-ræd, ‘noble-counsel’).
It has been argued, convincingly, that Æthelred has had a bad press.29 Certainly the primary source for his reign – the version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle preserved in the C, D and E manuscripts – was written after his reign had come to an ignominious end, and was composed with a degree of bitter hindsight. There were perhaps few kings who could have weathered the storm that broke on him with greater fortitude. But, for one incident at least, Æthelred deserves all of the opprobrium heaped upon him. In 1002 the king had finally decided (on advice) to arrange a payment of £24,000 to a Viking fleet that had, over previous years, ‘raided and burned almost everywhere’ across the south-west and into the Wessex heartlands.30 ‘It was in every way a heavy time,’ the CDE chronicler sums up, ‘because they never left off their fierce evil.’31 There were, therefore, circumstances around the turn of the millennium that perhaps allow us to understand why the king may have felt under siege and susceptible to the temptation of drastic action. The decree that followed, however, was as indiscriminate as it was ill conceived. Later in 1002, Æthelred ordered that ‘all the Danish men who were among the English race were to be killed on Brice’s Day [13 November], because it was said to the king that they wished to ensnare his life’.32
It is obvious that the order cannot have been intended to apply to everyone who had ever been considered ‘Danish’ in the wider sense; this would have been an absurd idea and impossible to carry out – especially in the north. It is, in fact, entirely unclear to whom Æthelred intended his order to apply, particularly given the multiplying vagaries of Anglo-Danish ethnicity. The tenor of the command, however, was plain enough. Words spoken by power carry weight, legitimizing impulses that might otherwise be suppressed; Æthelred’s order was taken seriously in many parts of England, and was most likely interpreted through whatever local animus most energized his subjects. Edgar’s policies of multi-cultural authoritarianism had gone, dissolved in the chaos of the renewed Viking menace that had broken on England from 980. Where his father had once punished harshly those who had infringed the rights of foreign traders, Æthelred exhorted the English to murder their neighbours. And murder them they did.
Excavations at St John’s College, Oxford, in 2008 discovered the remains of thirty-seven men aged sixteen to twenty-five whose bodies had been dumped in a ditch; study of the bones suggests that they were hacked to death in the years around 1000, many receiving multiple savage blows. There is no evidence that they had attempted to defend themselves – no wounds to hands or forearms that might have come from recent combat; only scorch marks on the bones. They were probably running away. A chilling document survives that spells out the realities of ethnic cleansing in Oxford: a charter, dated to 1004, that explains – in a horribly matter-of-fact tone – the need to rebuild the Church of St Frideswide:
it will be well known that, since a decree was sent out by me with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination, and thus this decree was to be put into effect even as far as death, those Danes who dwelt in the afore-mentioned town [Oxford], striving to escape death, entered this sanctuary of Christ, having broken by force the doors and bolts, and resolved to make refuge and defence for themselves therein against the people of the town and the suburbs; but when all the people in pursuit strove, forced by necessity, to drive them out, and could not, they set fire to the planks and burnt, as it seems, this church with its ornaments and its books. Afterwards, with God’s aid, it was renewed by me.33
It has been suggested that the age of the victims, and the evidence of healed prior injuries, implies that the men found at St John’s College were fighters, not ordinary townsfolk. But in a violent and militarized society the distinction is hardly a useful one. However one chooses to explain or justify the events of 1002, the image that both documents and archaeology present is a grim one: of people driven in terror to seek refuge in the safest place they could find, barricading themselves within what was probably the largest – if not the only – stone building within reach; shut inside, praying desperately that the sanctity of the space might preserve them. There they would have huddled, listening to the sounds outside – the angry shouts, the thud of wooden beams piled against doors and windows. Perhaps, once the burning had begun, once the heat became unbearable and the smoke robbed them of their breath, once they were blinded and choking and wild with panic, the Danes decided to run – to run through the doors and out into the street, into the light and the clean autumn air, there to be hacked apart by the howling mob.34
These were not the glorious battles that the Maldon poet had imagined – nor was this the strong and stable nation that Edgar had worked for. That nation would return, but it would take a new dynasty to restore it: a Danish dynasty – a ‘Viking’ dynasty.
21
Mortal Remains
King Cnut greets in friendship his archbishops and his diocesan bishops, and Earl Thorkel and all his earls, and all his people […] ecclesiastic and lay, in England. And I [Cnut] inform you that I will be a gracious lord and faithful observer of God’s rights
and secular law.
‘Letter of Cnut to the English’ (c. 1019–20)1
Svein Forkbeard became king of England on Christmas Day 1013. Although his actions seemed to fit the classic Viking mould of seaborne raiding and extortion, Svein was no mere chancer. Unlike self-made men such as Guthrum back in the 870s, Svein Forkbeard was an established figure on the international stage. The son of Harald Bluetooth, king of Denmark (d. c. 985), Svein had taken the Danish throne from his father in the 980s. When he conquered England in 1013 he was already a king.
Svein’s assaults on England had begun early, in the 990s, and he had spent two years pillaging the country between 1003 and 1005. Although he did not lead the assaults that followed throughout the first decade of the eleventh century – the most devastating of which fell under the command of a fearsome character known as Thorkell the Tall – in 1013 he returned with a fleet and, it seems, a clear sense of purpose. He arrived at Sandwich (Kent), and from there led his ships northward, prowling the eastern coastline until they reached the Humber – the gateway to Northumbria. At Gainsborough (Lincolnshire), the Northumbrians submitted swiftly. Shortly afterwards northern Mercia followed suit and then all the regions north of Watling Street, the old boundary set out in the treaty of Alfred and Guthrum.
Viking Britain- an Exploration Page 34