by H A CULLEY
‘Yes, that and Rædwulf standing up to oppose them, claiming that he and his father had more right to be regarded as æthelings. He was out of order and his father was right to tell him to shut up and sit down.’
‘But wasn’t he correct? I mean he belongs to a senior branch of Ida’s descendants.’
‘Perhaps, but that’s not the point. His father doesn’t want to be considered for the throne and I don’t blame him. We have an even better claim to be æthelings, after all one of our ancestors was king, but I wouldn’t accept the crown even if it was offered to me.’
‘Why not? I would.’
‘Are you sure you would want to be king? Eardwulf died of old age but many of his predecessors were assassinated, deposed and dispossessed of their lands or forced to become monks. Few ruled for very long. In any case it’s a thankless task. Keeping your nobles happy and your borders safe isn’t easy. ’
‘Well, Eardwulf didn’t keep Cumbria’s borders safe did he?’
‘No, and I suppose that will be Eanred’s first challenge now he has been elected king.’
‘Are we staying for the crowing ceremony tomorrow?’
‘Of course; it would look very odd if we didn’t, especially as Eanred has named me as his hereræswa, a role I neither expected nor particularly wanted.’
‘Why not? It’s one of the most senior appointments the king can make? You’re one of his inner council now.’
‘Which means that I’ll have to be wherever the king is, instead of being with my family at Bebbanburg.’
‘Oh! I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘At least he’s allowed me to travel back home so I can see you safely to Lindisfarne. I’ve already told Garr that he will have to look after Bebbanburg whilst I’m away.’
‘Garr?’ Ilfrid said looking over towards the captain of his father’s warband. ‘Won’t mother take charge in your absence?’
‘She’ll becoming with me to Eoforwīc, as will Edmund.’
‘Oh! Of course.’
Ilfrid suddenly felt that his whole world was changing. He hadn’t minded the thought of moving to Lindisfarne when his family were only six miles away across the sea. Now that they were going to be far away in the south of Northumbria he felt very alone.
-℣-
Eighteen months later, in the spring of 832, Eanred was at long last ready to lead the campaign to take Cumbria back from the Britons and the Norsemen. By then over two thirds of the shire had been wrested from the control of Rædwulf’s father. The border with Strathclyde now rested on the River Derwent in the west and Ullswater in the east. Practically all the coast from the mouth of the Derwent southwards had been settled by the Norse and they had even made some inroads further south into Luncæstershire.
However, just as he and Eafa were about to set out something more urgent demanded their attention. Egbert of Wessex had marched north and was about to cross the River Ouse from Mercia into Northumbria. After Egbert had subdued the Mercians three years before, their king, Wiglaf, had fled into exile. He had returned just after Eanred had been crowned in 830 and acknowledged Egbert of Wessex as Bretwalda. However, Egbert wasn’t content with being just the overlord of Mercia and had made Wiglaf kneel to him and give him his oath as his vassal. Now it seemed that he was intent on doing the same with the new King of Northumbria. Instead of marching north-west, the Northumbria army of three thousand men headed south-east to confront Egbert.
‘He’s no longer there, Cyning,’ the chief scout told Eanred and Eafa as soon as they reached Selby.
‘Well, where is he?’ the king demanded.
‘We don’t know, Cyning. All the signs of a large encampment are there on the south bank, but there are no tracks heading east or west to find a crossing place.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Of course,’ the man replied curtly, affronted by the unnecessary question. He would never have reported to his king until he was certain.
‘I suggest we send the scouts across the river to find out where he has gone, Cyning’ Eafa said quietly. ‘It could well be he has headed south to put us off the scent and then doubled back to cross the Ouse elsewhere.’
He had learnt from bitter experience that his king was a somewhat volatile character who needed handling carefully.
Eanred chewed his lip in agitation for over a minute.
‘If we do that it is an act of aggression. No, I won’t be the first to set foot in his territory. It may be that he was just testing our resolve.’
‘It’s more likely that he thought that we had already departed for Cumbria and sought to take advantage of an undefended land,’ the Ealdorman of Catterick muttered, earning a sharp look from his king.
‘I agree that would explain his sudden withdrawal,’ Eanred said, ‘but we mustn’t jump to conclusions. We need to find out the truth.’
‘How are we going to do that if we sit here like impotent old men, twiddling our thumbs?’
‘Remember to whom you are speaking,’ the king said, glaring at the ealdorman. ‘If you want to retain the shire of Catterick, that is.’
‘Perhaps I have a solution, Cyning,’ Eafa interrupted before the exchange got any more heated. ‘My servant, Erik, is Norse. He could follow the tracks of Egbert’s army and see where they are headed. If he falls into their hands he’s just one man, and a Viking at that. There’s nothing to connect him to Northumbria.’
‘Unless he talks,’ Eanred pointed out. ‘Very well, it’s the best idea I’ve heard. We’ll camp at Selby until he returns.’
‘They have halted at Dore, a settlement on a hill above the River Sheaf. I heard rumours that Wiglaf and the Mercians have revolted against Egbert’s rule, mainly because of the taxes he’s imposed on Mercia.’
The truth of what Erik had reported was confirmed the next day when a small delegation of Wessex emissaries arrived to invite Eanred to discuss a truce at Dore.
‘Do you think me a fool, to cross the border and place myself at your king’s mercy?’ Eanred responded. ‘Let Egbert come here if he wants to talk to me.’
‘Umm, he is unable to leave Mercia at the moment,’ the ealdorman leading the delegation replied. ‘However, he’s sent his eldest son, Æthelwulf, to act as hostage against your safe return, Cyning.’
At this a young man dressed an expensively embroidered tunic and a finely woven scarlet cloak urged his horse forward and gave Eanred a half smile.
‘Good day to you, cousin. I assure you that my father is the last person to play you false.’
He and Eanred weren’t related. The use of cousin in this context was meant to indicate that both men were of royal blood.
‘Very well. But I will take my warband with me and, should I not return within four days, my hereræswa will hang Æthelwulf and wreak revenge on Egbert for his perfidy.’
For late April the weather had been warm and fine but that changed as soon as Eanred left Northumbria. Grey clouds scudded in from the north-east and the wind turned chilly. That first night the rain started and, when he woke up the next morning, Eafa looked out onto black clouds and sheets of near horizontal rain. He knew that the farmers in the fyrd would be fretting about their newly planted crops but, to give them their due, only a few deserted and made their way home. Of course, they would be punished later but one of the problems with an army that was mainly made up of men who weren’t primarily warriors was that their minds would always be back at home, especially when they were doing nothing, as now.
The rain had stopped by midday and blue patches of sky appeared. The wind was still cold, however. The next two days were a mixture of sunshine and showers, which infuriated the Northumbrians. As soon as they put their clothes out to dry, they’d get wet again.
All of this seemed to amuse Æthelwulf, who Eafa got to know reasonably well as there was little else for them to do except talk, drink and play dice or nine men’s morris. He found him a congenial character who didn’t seem in the least worried about the prospect of hanging if Ean
red didn’t come back in time. However, he must have been slightly relieved when the king returned, however well he managed to hide it.
Eanred was in a foul mood and stomped into the thegn’s hall at Selby, which he had commandeered after kicking the owner and his brood out with scarcely a word of apology.
‘Get out, Æthelwulf, you can return to your charlatan of a father. Just be thankful I don’t hang you out of hand.’
The young man bowed and left with a smile on his lips and a nod to Eafa.
‘What happened Cyning?’ Eafa asked as soon as they were alone.
‘I was tricked!’ he shouted, kicking the table in his ire. ‘Wiglaf hadn’t revolted against Egbert. It was a false rumour, no doubt spread by that Wessex fox. They were both waiting for me with a combined army nearly five thousand strong.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I had no choice. I was forced to submit to Egbert. He made me swear an oath on the bones of one of his saints that I would become his vassal.’
‘Oh, I see.’
Eafa didn’t know whether to feel pleased that his arrogant king had been humbled or concerned about Egbert’s growing power.
‘Not that it matters,’ Eanred continued. ‘An oath sworn under duress isn’t binding. I’ll get Archbishop Wulfsige to release me from it as soon as we get back to Eoforwīc.’
Wulfsige did as the king asked but word spread about the humiliating way that Eanred had been forced to acknowledge the King of Wessex as his overlord and his reputation suffered in consequence. For the next few years he didn’t dare embark on a campaign in the far north-west of his kingdom in case Egbert invaded, as well he might when he heard that Eanred had repudiated his pledge of fealty. Eanred also became paranoid that, having lost the respect of his nobles, as he saw it, they would depose or kill him. Of course, this just made that more of a possibility. However, Eafa remained loyal and the respect in which he was held did much to dissuade potential rebels.
Chapter Nine – The Cumbrian Campaign
839 – 840
Eafa was annoyed with King Eanred, and not for the first time. The situation in Cumbria had continued to deteriorate to the extent that the invading Britons were now struggling to hold back the tide of invading Norsemen and their families who were settling all along the coast.
Rædwulf had become the ealdorman when his father was killed in a skirmish with the Britons but his shire was now effectively confined to the south-east of what had been Cumbria. Luncæstershire had also come under pressure from Norse settlers, who were also colonising the Isle of Man and the area near the Irish settlement at Duibhlinn, mainly centred on the River Poddle, a tributary of the Liffey.
The Northumbrians on the west coast had to cope with the incursions by those wanting to settle as well as frequent raids from Man and Duibhlinn. In early 839 Eanred decided that he had to do something about the situation, mainly because of the increasing pressure from his ealdormen and the bishops, alarmed at the influx of pagans. However, he had more sense than to undertake the seemingly impossible task himself, so he claimed that he needed to remain at Eoforwīc in case of invasion by Wessex or Mercia.
It was a poor excuse. Although Egbert had continued to threaten to invade Northumbria in retribution for the breaking of Eanred’s oath of fealty to him, he had recently died and his son and successor, Æthelwulf, was a very different character. He was seen by most as excessively pious and incompetent as a ruler. Certainly he was extremely unlikely to embark on a war of conquest against Northumbria.
It was obvious that Eanred’s instruction to Eafa to conduct the campaign in the west on his behalf was driven more by fear of failure than by the need to defend his southern border. However, Eafa decided that his strategy should be diplomatic rather than martial, at least as far as the Norse were concerned.
The inclusion of Bishop Egfrid of Lindisfarne, together with several of his priests and monks, didn’t arouse much comment. Everyone assumed that they were there to look after the spiritual needs of the army and to tend the wounded. They were, of course, but they were also there to try and convert the Norse settlers to Christianity.
Ilfrid had remained behind to look after Bebbanburg and Islandshire. He was now nineteen and had pleaded to go with this father, saying that his mother and his brother Edmund could look after the shire. However, Breguswid was getting frail, even at the relatively young age of thirty seven, and Edmund was being trained as a warrior at Dùn Èideann. He had therefore had little option but to stay behind.
Eafa began his campaign in the south, sweeping along the coast, capturing Norse settlement after Norse settlement. He gave the invaders a choice: they had to become Christians and accept Rædwulf as their ealdorman, or they would be sold into slavery. Unsurprisingly many chose to be baptised, though Eafa wasn’t so naive as to think that their sudden conversion was genuine. He just hoped that the priests that remained with them could convince them to become true Christians.
More importantly, they were fierce fighters and Rædwulf recruited a number to swell the ranks of his warband. Of course, they weren’t accepted by his existing Cumbrian warriors, but that was Rædwulf’s problem, not his.
As they moved northwards he found the Norse settlements deserted. For a while he thought that they had returned to Duibhlinn, but that proved to be a forlorn hope. They had banded together and near the promontory the Cumbrians called Saint Bee’s Head he was confronted by a Norse army four hundred strong. Eafa had four times that number, but he wanted to avoid a conflict if he possibly could; he needed all the warriors he had for the inevitable battle against the Strathclyde Britons.
The Norsemen held the far bank of a small river that ran north to south across the headland. It wasn’t much of an obstacle but it would put the Northumbrians at a considerable disadvantage as the far bank was quite steep and slippery. He formed those of his warriors who were afoot and the men of the fyrd just out of arrow range and waited whilst his horsemen rode off to cross the river further upstream.
Although the enemy saw his eighty riders disappear northwards it didn’t seem to bother them. Eafa smiled grimly; he doubted whether the Norsemen had encountered warriors on horseback before – at least not ones who could fight from the saddle.
Once his horsemen were in position to the north of the enemy, he gave the order for his archers to advance, protected by a man with a shield. They sent flight after flight of arrows into the massed ranks of the Norsemen. Most struck helmets or shields but some found exposed flesh. Only a few of the Norse had bows with which to respond.
The man carrying his banner waved it to and fro – the signal for his mounted warriors to charge. Coincidentally Eafa gave the order for his warriors on foot to advance through the ranks of the archers and attack. Just as they reached the enemy shield wall the Norse became aware of the horsemen thundering towards them in a wedge formation. They crashed into the flank of the enemy, killing and disrupting the enemy formation like a wave crashing onto a beach.
The shield wall broke apart as the Norsemen turned to defend themselves against the horsemen and, with a cheer, those Northumbrians on foot hacked their way into the Norse ranks. The battle deteriorated into a series of individual fights and Eafa signalled to one of his warband with a horn to sound the pre-arranged signal for the horsemen to withdraw before they got too embroiled in the general melee.
The Norsemen were outnumbered, outmanoeuvred and disorganised. Within a short time they started to make a fighting withdrawal, but by then Eafa had sent the fyrd around their right flank to encircle them. Many fought on and were killed but eventually the survivors surrendered.
By the middle of the afternoon it was all over. The Norsemen had lost half their number killed or badly wounded and ninety had been captured. Those who had escaped were not enough to defend the rest of the settlements; the grip of the Norse on the south-west of Cumbria had been broken – at least for the foreseeable future. Now Eafa could turn his attention towards the Strathclyde Britons.
‘How many did we lose?’ Eafa asked his fellow ealdormen when they met the day after the battle.
‘The pagans fought hard, Eafa,’ Rædwulf replied. ‘I lost forty two men killed and twenty too badly wounded to continue.’
The other ealdormen reported their losses in turn and, when they had finished, Eafa turned to the monk who had been writing down what each noble had said.
‘The total is three hundred and forty two dead and another two hundred and ninety one badly wounded, lord,’ the monk said after he had totted up the two columns of figures.
Eafa sucked his teeth. He was left with roughly one thousand nine hundred men, and that included the newly baptised Norsemen who were now part of Rædwulf’s warband. They had fought bravely against their fellow countrymen, but Eafa still wasn’t sure that he could trust them. Either way, they wouldn’t be enough to take on the Britons if their king, Riderch, brought his main army south to defend Caer Luel.
However, he had one advantage: the impetuosity of the Britons meant that they were difficult to control and tended to fight as individuals or as small groups rather than a cohesive whole. It was therefore a matter of choosing ground which favoured the defenders over the attackers.
-℣-
Eafa stood in the centre of the first rank of the Northumbrian army alongside Garr and his warband. A little way further down the line he could see Rædwulf’s banner. Three other ealdormen and their warbands made up the first rank of the shield wall whilst the warriors of Iuwine of Luncæstershire, Kendric and three more ealdormen made up the second rank. The third rank consisted of the rest of the ealdormen and their warbands. Behind them stood the massed fyrd with the archers on the flanks. The banners of Northumbria and each shire flapped soggily in the wind driven rain above their heads as Bishop Ecgred and his priests went along the lines saying mass and dispensing bread and wine to give spiritual and physical sustenance to the men.