The Anglo Saxons at War 800-1066

by Paul Hill

  It happened again in 884–5 at Rochester, but this time the mention of hostages is different. A Viking force, which had been terrorising Francia for the opening years of the 880s, came from Boulogne to try its luck in Alfred’s new kingdom. It came expecting to wreck the place. They had brought many horses with them, fine mounts from Francia. But they had brought something else, too. Their army consisted of an unknown number of Frankish hostages. Alfred cut a dashing figure by 885. His army and fortification system were organised to cope with such an event as this new invasion (see pp. 88–93). The garrison at Rochester proudly withstood. Alfred came to relieve the men of the town. The Vikings, as a result, fled back to Francia without either their horses or their hostages, two vital accessories of warfare. The fate of these hostages is unknown, but they are most likely to have been truly rescued by the king of the Anglo-Saxons. For those Danes who had chosen to stay in England after their defeat at the hands of Alfred, hostages were once again exchanged, perhaps in the old style. But also in the old style, these Vikings twice broke their agreement and sent raids into the wooded heartlands of southern England. Some things, it seemed, could not change.

  The agreement between Alfred and Guthrum, who was now ruler of East Anglia, was bound by a treaty referred to as the Treaty of Wedmore. It effectively divided England into a Danish and an English-controlled half. From now, to the north of Watling Street which stretched from London to Chester, there would be a land that would be under Danish-inspired law, a land that ultimately became known as the Danelaw. Alfred and his family were left with the rump of English Mercia and Wessex from which to provide the platform for a re-conquest. The surviving copy of the document that outlines the treaty probably refers to the settlement arrived at between the two sides after a period between around 880–6 when the countryside to the north of London was very much up for grabs. Here again, after much bloodshed and double dealing, we have mention of hostages:

  And we all agreed on the day when the oaths were sworn that no slaves or freemen might go over to the army without permission, any more than any of theirs to us. If, however, it happens that from necessity any one of them wishes to have traffic with us–or we with them–for cattle and for goods, it is to be permitted on this condition, that hostages shall be given as a pledge of peace and as evidence whereby it is known that no fraud is intended.

  So, in this new Anglo-Danish world, hostages could be given as surety against fraudulent trading activity. We can only imagine how many people were dragged across Watling Street from one side to the other to provide confidence in a trading deal.

  As Alfred progressed with his grand military and ecclesiastical reforms, the years went by with no recorded deals involving hostages. It was not until the return of the Vikings in 892 that the campaigns began again in earnest. A Viking army with its 250 ships came to Appledore, and new leader Hæsten’s 80 ships came to Milton Regis threatening to cut off a giant corner of the country from the English king. Moreover, although Guthrum was now dead, the Danish-led armies of East Anglia and Northumbria were full of confidence and prepared to help their cousins assault the king of the Anglo-Saxons once again. This is why Alfred needed yet another hostage arrangement.

  Alfred managed to secure oaths from the Northumbrians and the East Anglian Danes not to attack him. He procured six ‘prime’ hostages from the East Anglian Danes, although we are not told how. We are informed, however, that the deal was not kept to, as it seems the English-based Danes kept helping their cousins in the south east of the country by aiding their raiding and foraging activities during this uneasy stand-off. The fate of the ‘prime’ six is not recorded.

  The Appledore Danes, laden with booty from their periodic raids, soon attempted to push north to find a ford across the Thames with the intention of making it to Essex to join with other Viking ships there. It ended in disaster for them, with Alfred’s son the ætheling Edward (soon to be king himself) intercepting and defeating them at Farnham. Edward drove them across the Thames at a place where there was no ford. Soon they found refuge of sorts on a river island near Iver in Buckinghamshire known as Thorney. Edward began a protracted siege which came to an end when the English system of military rotation meant that that besieger’s supplies had run out and their time in the field was up. Unfortunately, this all happened before King Alfred was able to relieve his son. We are told, however, by the chronicler Æthelweard that the Danes who had been surrounded and starved at Thorney Island and whose leader was wounded did exchange hostages and agree to leave the kingdom. To Essex they went, to join up with Hæsten’s force which had now relocated to Benfleet.

  Alfred, at some stage during this campaign decided to attempt to bring Hæsten to heel through the offer of baptism, with the king himself standing sponsor to one of the Viking’s sons and Æthelred, Lord of the Mercians to the other. We know less about it than we do of the arrangements made with Guthrum. Hæsten’s base at Benfleet was eventually captured by the English in a siege that saw women and children, ships and money seized and brought to London. Also seized by the besieging Æthelred, Lord of the Mercians, were Hæsten’s sons. The Dane had been out on a raid when all this happened. The young men were sent to Alfred’s court, probably in the hope they would prove to be very valuable bargaining chips. But Alfred sent them straight back to Hæsten delivering a message of extraordinary mercy for these times. Perhaps it is fair to say that Alfred knew he had his enemy defeated, but he seems not to have been able to hold his own godson as a hostage.

  The Vikings’ subsequent movements to Buttington and Chester both ended in sieges which saw great suffering for the enemies of Alfred. At Buttington, Æthelweard tells us that ‘they [the Danes] did not refuse hostages, they promised to leave that region’. In 894 Æthelnoth, Alfred’s trusted ealdorman from Somerset, visited York in an ambassadorial capacity with a view to persuading the Northumbrian Danes to cease their pillaging of parts of Rutland held by the English under the Alfred and Guthrum treaty, but again we do not know how this deal was cemented. What we do know is that by the time the Danes had been outwitted by Alfred’s clever fortifications surrounding their ships at Hertford in 895, the Danes, under a new leader following Hæsten’s death, moved out to Bridgnorth from where they dispersed never to reform again.

  The historic record falls quiet in respect of hostages towards the end of Alfred’s reign. When Edward took the throne after the death of his father in 899, there was a revolt against him from Æthelwold, the son of Alfred’s brother Æthelred I. This revolt, which is documented below (see pp. 101–4), involved the pretender to power taking a nun against the king’s leave before stealing away from the watchful eyes of Edward’s army in a dash to Northumbria. It is not known if the nun was a hostage, had been kidnapped or was a willing participant. However, to take a nun from a nunnery without the bishop or king’s permission was a ‘criminal’ offence and clearly Æthelwold was using this as a way of defying Edward.

  The next reference to hostages is only by inference. In 906 Edward is said to have ‘confirmed the peace’ at Tiddingford with the Northumbrian and East Anglian Danes. No mention is made of an exchange, but from what we have observed already it is an agreement likely to have involved them. We can be more certain of the next mention, however. Edward, by 915 had succeeded in defeating the Danes and had embarked on his great re-conquest of the midlands. But in this year, a Viking force had come from Brittany led by Jarls Ohtor and Hroald (sic) and it headed up the Severn raiding as it went. The force went into Wales and took a bishop named Cameleac, Bishop in Archenfield, as hostage. Edward then paid 40 pounds to ransom him back, one of the few recorded arrangements of this kind. As the Vikings headed to Archenfield for richer pickings, they were met by the men of Hereford and Gloucester and nearby forts. The resulting battle saw Ohtor and Hroald defeated with Hroald perishing and Ohtor’s brother also being killed. The Vikings were subsequently driven to an ‘enclosure’ where they were besieged until they gave hostages in return for leaving the kingdom. It
sounds as one sided as some of the later Alfredian agreements, but the reality was that the force hung around for some time on the Severn Estuary embarking on sporadic raids before eventually leaving for Ireland.

  Edward’s sister, the famous Æthelflæd, sometimes called ‘the Lady of the Mercians’, had her part to play in the history of the hostage. It was she who in 916 sent a force to Brecon Mere in Wales to break down the fortification there and in doing so took the wife of the Welsh king of Brycheiniog ‘as one of thirty-four’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. There would be many more organised strategic conquests of such citadels as Danish Derby and Leicester, the key boroughs of the Danelaw. Just before her death in 918, the chronicler tells us, Æthelflæd after taking Leicester had even got the leaders of Viking York to swear oaths that they would be at her disposal. They did not keep to this, of course, but the fact that the agreement happened at all is testimony to the increasing power being displayed by Æthelflæd and her brother Edward south of the Humber. As more Scandinavians poured into the northern parts of Britain, the Danish forces of yesteryear, now settled in England, began to see the sense in aligning themselves with the resurgent Anglo-Saxon monarchy in the south. In fact, before he died in 924 Edward the Elder had secured the allegiance of the Scots, a new Norse leader at York, the lords of Bamburgh, the king of the Strathclyde Britons and the Northumbrians of all cultures.

  At Æthelflæd’s death an event took place that has received a number of interpretations. The Mercian Register of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in an entry for 919 records it thus: ‘Here also, the daughter of Æthelred, Lord of the Mercians, was deprived of all control in Mercia, and was led into Wessex three weeks before Christmas; she was called Ælfwynn.’ The most likely interpretation of this is that it was no simple hostage taking, but a political abduction. Edward the Elder, who had achieved so much in alliance with Ælfwynn’s mother (his own sister), could not afford for the spectre of Mercian independence to raise its head just when it looked like the Kingdom of the English was finally taking shape under his own leadership. In Ælfwynn many traditional-minded Mercian noblemen may have seen a standard bearer for that independence. So, the king spirited away his own niece to avoid this happening. The Kingdom of the English was growing in confidence.

  King Athelstan’s (924–39) use of human resources was a far cry from the desperate hostage exchanges of the Alfredian campaigns. A kingdom of England was very much in the making now, and Athelstan’s negotiations were on an international level, binding his kingdom into the fortunes of, among others, the great Holy Roman Empire controlled by the Ottonian dynasty. In the sparse entries for Athelstan’s reign in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle there are hints at hostages, however. In 934 for example, Athelstan’s combined campaigns by land and sea in Scotland resulted in the Scottish King Constantine having to give his own son as a hostage.

  There is no mention of hostages in the years preceding Athelstan’s great Battle of Brunanburh of 937. During these years, an imperious Athelstan, able to draw an army from the length and breadth of his new kingdom did indeed hold imperial-style councils at places like Cirencester, calling in tribute from the Welsh kings which amounted to huge quantities of gold, silver, oxen, hounds and hawks. But the Scots and the Norse-Irish led a confederacy against Athelstan at Brunanburh, at a battle site that is still to be identified with certainty. Once again, even in their crushing defeat there is no mention of hostages from the lords of the north, just a mention of them fleeing the field for home.

  It would seem that Athelstan’s victories might have paved the way for a Golden Age in Anglo-Saxon kingship, but this was yet to come. Olaf Guthfrithson, the enemy who had caused the great king so much trouble, swept back into the picture after Athelstan’s death on 939. A complex marriage alliance in the midlands with the daughter of a Danish jarl, and some military campaigning in the north, saw the Dane in the ascendancy again. It was Athelstan’s younger brother, King Edmund (939–46) who had to re-capture the five Danish boroughs of the midlands for the southern English crown. In 943 a new enemy, Olaf Sihtricson, had taken Tamworth from the English and had fled to Leicester. In time-honoured style, we are told this was the same year in which this Olaf received baptism with Edmund as his sponsor. But the records of the tenth century are more complicated than those of other eras. There are allusions to further submissions in York, for example, but we are not told how these arrangements were cemented.

  On Edmund’s death in 946, he was succeeded by another brother Eadred (946–56), who in the first year of his reign conquered Northumbria and was granted oaths by the Scots ‘that they would do all that he wanted’. More oaths then, but no details. At Tanshelf, in 947 Archbishop Wulfstan of York and the councillors of the Northumbrians are said to have pledged themselves to the king, but ‘within a short while they belied both pledge and oaths also’. The reason for this recalcitrance lay in the arrival of a famous Viking leader, one Eric Bloodaxe whose control of the Viking kingdom of York quickly became legendary. Eric, who held Northumbria from an apparent promise made by Athelstan, was eventually defeated, murdered by one of his own men after the grim campaigning of Eadred in the area.

  The brief reign of Edwy, king in Wessex (955–9) records no hostage exchanges, but plenty of domestic politicking. Edwy’s grip on power subsided as his brother the young Edgar (959–75) gained acceptance in both Mercia and Northumbria and eventually Wessex itself. Edgar’s reign over England was one of peace bought by the threat to any enemy of overwhelming military force. A huge and energetic navy and a vast land army were enough for Edgar to concentrate on matters such as monastic reform and other political issues. In an act of overwhelming symbolism the king took an army to Chester. Here, at the edge of the old Roman world, King Edgar symbolically took the helm of a rowing vessel and was rowed by up to eight subservient leaders on a boat along the River Dee to the monastery of St John the Baptist. Oaths were sworn, and the promise from all these rulers was that they would be faithful to the king of the English and support him both on land and at sea. These men were Malcolm, king of the Cumbrians; Kenneth, king of the Scots; Maccus, king of ‘Many Islands’; Dunfal (Dunmail), king of Strathclyde; Siferth; Jacob (Iago of Gwynedd); Huwal (Jacob’s nephew and enemy); and one Juchil. Edgar’s passing remark after this event would ring in the ears of regional kings for centuries. Any of his successors, he said, could pride himself on being king of the English having such subservience beneath him.

  On Edgar’s death in 975, Anglo-Saxon England was at its peak of power and influence. He was succeeded by his son Edward (975–9) whose reign leaves no record of hostage giving or oath taking. However, after Edward’s infamous murder at Corfe Castle and the rise to power of his half brother Æthelred II (979–1016) we enter a period of history whereby the role of the hostage once again leaps out from the pages of the chronicles and histories.

  Æthelred’s reign was a little over eighteen months old when the Scandinavian raiders returned to England. Southampton was targeted first and we are told that many of the inhabitants were killed or taken prisoner. We are not told of the fate of these hostages, however. Nor are we told what happened to the people of Thanet in Kent and the region of Cheshire who also suffered similar fates. Soon, in 991, the Battle of Maldon would be played out in Essex (pp. 117–20) between the local ealdorman Byrhtnoth and an invading Viking force. Here again, there is a mention of a hostage, but he is this time a Northumbrian hostage in the East Saxon Army. Pointedly, he is mentioned as having a bow, not a sword as one might expect. It is possibly an interesting glimpse into the equipment allowed for hostages when asked to participate in their captors’ campaigns.

  Hostages were once again exchanged in 994 when the legendary Olaf Tryggvason and Swein of Denmark unsuccessfully attacked London. The chronicler Æthelweard, who, as we have observed, was a nobleman himself, played his own part in this negotiation as he and the Bishop of Winchester arranged for hostages to be sent to the Danish ships and for Olaf to be brought to King Æthelred for a
baptism perhaps in the style of that which had happened to Guthrum all those years ago. Olaf’s interests would soon turn to Norwegian matters, but it remains the case that after this agreement with Æthelred, he never returned to England.

  The later part of Æthelred’s reign saw the usage of hostages become widespread. Nothing, however, would quite match the drama of the fate of one man in particular whose fame throughout the northern Medieval world was eclipsed only by that of Thomas à Becket 150 years later. The Danish assault on Canterbury in September 1011 marked a notorious episode in the king’s reign. The Danes, when they entered the city, are supposed to have gone wild. Their rampage resulted in the capture of Ælfhere, the Archbishop of Canterbury and one Ælfweard, a king’s reeve, among others. Christchurch was plundered and countless people murdered in a long-remembered orgy of destruction.

  The Danes stayed the winter in Canterbury. They suffered from illnesses brought about by the apparent unsanitary water supplies, but this much divine intervention was not enough to rid the English of their tormentors. It was, however, their key hostage whose fate attracted the attention of chroniclers. Not content with the silver offered to them to leave, they asked also for a ransom for the return of the archbishop. Ælfhere would have none of it. For his intransigence the pious archbishop was murdered at the hands of his captors in Greenwich. In a drunken frenzy, here at the termination of the Rouen to London wine trade route, one Dane pulverised the head of the archbishop with the butt end of his axe while the others hurled cattle skulls and bones at him on the hustings. The hideous event was carried out against the wishes of an observing Dane called Thorkell the Tall and it was an event that marked the beginning of a significant switch in Thorkell’s allegiance from the side of the Dane to that of the English king himself (pp. 63–4).