by Paul Hill
Deception is also in evidence for our period. Egil’s Saga contains an example of Anglo-Saxon brinkmanship promoted by England’s most powerful monarch. According to tradition, the field of Brunanburh (937) was ‘enhazelled’ by arrangement with King Athelstan: it was marked out by hazel poles. The idea was that both armies should turn up and slug it out on a level playing field. But when the warriors of Olaf Guthfrithson reached the place they found the hazel poles and a little more besides:
there King Athelstan’s men had pitched, and their tents quite filled the space between the wood and the river. They had so pitched that in every third tent there were no men at all, and in one of every three, but few. Yet when King Olaf’s men came to them, they had then numbers swarming before all the tents, and the others could not get to go inside. Athelstan’s men said that their tents were all full, so full that their people had not nearly enough room. But the front line of the tents stood so high that it could not be seen over them whether they stood many or few in depth. Olaf’s men imagined a vast host must be there . . .
That said, according to legend, a night surprise was attempted by the Danes on Athelstan’s tent after Olaf had infiltrated the camp dressed as a minstrel to find out where it was. Athelstan, on receiving intelligence that this visit had been made, swapped his tent for that of the bishop of Sherborne, who was the unfortunate recipient of a subsequent night surprise which the English and their allies eventually won.
Tales of deceiving one’s enemy are one thing, but treacherous deception is quite another matter. To the perfidious Earl Eadric Streona on the field of Sherston (1016) must go the plaudits in this regard. Here is what John of Worcester says of the English turncoat:
For when the fight was thickest and he [Streona] perceived that the English had the best of it he struck off the head of a man named Osmær, whose features and hair were very like King Edmund’s [Ironside], and holding it up, shouted to the English that they were fighting to no purpose: ‘Flee quickly’ he said ‘Ye men of Dorsetshire, Devon, and Wilts; ye have lost your leader: lo! here I hold in my hands the head of your lord Edmund the king: retreat with all speed’. The English were panic struck at these words, more from the atrocity of the manoeuvre, than from their belief of what was announced . . .
The English did hold their nerve at Sherston, of course, but in terms of authenticity the story has an attractive ring to it, even if once again there are literary classical precedents to detract from its credibility. Perhaps Duke William’s insistence on showing his face beneath his helmet during the heat of battle at Hastings serves as a recognition of the impact on troops of such rumours. Again, the artist of the Bayeux Tapestry might well be drawing on a known device, but it remains the case that rumours of a fallen leader on any battlefield are hardly good for morale.
If the ambush can be counted as a stratagem, then little is known of how the Anglo-Saxons went about them, save for the example of Earl Uhtred’s bloody demise at the hands of Thurbrand the Hold (p. 23). Alfred’s banishment to the Somerset marshes seems to have involved instigating ambushes against foraging parties, perhaps more out of desperation than military design. Furthermore, Ealdorman Æthelwulf of Berkshire’s attack on a foraging party at Engelfield in 871 has all the hallmarks of an ambush about it (p. 19). The fact that the Anglo-Saxons had a word for it must also mean something. A ‘færsceaða’ translates as a ‘sudden harmer’. Quite how he performed his surprises is unknown but we might very well assume there were countless unrecorded examples of it.
1. Offa’s Dyke, the most famous of Anglo-Saxon England’s linear defences. Offa’s Dyke, the Mercian frontier fortification, is testimony to the organisational power of Middle Anglo-Saxon kings. Alfredian reforms of the ninth century, however, provided a newer direction for the fortification of a kingdom with a defence-in-depth strategy incorporating carefully placed forts throughout the landscape. (Author’s collection)
2. Ashdown Field, the site of one of the great pitched battles of the campaign against the Great Heathen Army of 871. Alfred’s attritional fighting philosophy at Ashdown in Berkshire was repeated throughout the Wessex campaign but became a huge drain on his manpower resources. In the years to come Alfred would develop a much more sophisticated way to protect his kingdom from incursion. (Author’s collection)
3. Maldon Causeway. Ealdorman Byrhtnoth lined up his troops on this landward side of a causeway connected to Northey Island in Essex in 991. After initial successes on the causeway, the redoubtable leader accepted a Viking plea for their army to come across to the mainland to bring a more even battle to bear. The result was defeat for Byrhtnoth, and a place in English legend. His decision, although criticised, may have been his only option. (Author’s collection)
4. The Maldon battlefield, as viewed from the point of view of the freshly deployed Vikings who had come ashore after their stand off on the causeway in 991. To the right of the picture upon slightly rising ground lay the burh of Maldon, already known for withstanding sieges in the past. There is no record of its fate after the English forces lost the battle. (Author’s collection)
5. The Maldon battlefield from the English lines. The coastline at Northey Island was probably less marshy in 991 than it is to today. With the burh of Maldon to the left of the picture, this scene would have been viewed by many an English thegn at the commencement of Ealdorman Byrhtnoth’s final stand. (Author’s collection)
6. (Left) Byrhtnoth Statue at All Saints Church, Maldon. The town of Maldon celebrates its Anglo-Saxon past with understandable pride. Here on the south wall of All Saints Church is the first of many reminders in the town of the significance of the great ealdorman’s contribution to local history. (Author’s collection)
7. (Right) Byrhtnoth Statue on Promenade Walk, Maldon. John Doubleday’s modern statue is a continuing reminder of the efforts of the great ealdorman to protect his eastern shoreline at the dawn of the second Viking Age. Inaugurated in 2006 by Lord Petre, the ceremony was particularly noted for the words of the Norwegian ambassador who apologised for the Viking invasion. (Author’s collection)
8. The battlefield at Hastings. This unusually high vantage point of the battlefield of Hastings gives a good idea of the nature of the slope upon which the Norman cavalry were forced to attempt the most difficult of all approaches–a frontal assault. Because of the nature of the restricting grounds on either side of the ridge behind the abbey, the English were equally stuck, having to withstand a classic battle of attrition on the defensive. (Author’s collection)
9. Wallingford, one of the many planned burhs of Alfred’s re-fortified kingdom, and especially important as a crossing place over the Thames. Each burh was little more than a day’s march from another. It is calculated from a document called the Burghal Hidage that the garrison strength in Wessex at this time was around 27,000 men. This photograph, taken in 1951, still shows the outline of the Alfredian town of Wallingford.
10. A mailcoat being taken off. As is
suggested by depictions on the Bayeux
Tapestry, mailcoats were taken off over
the head. Here, a demonstration reveals
the padded armour beneath, which is
not always evident on the Bayeux
Tapestry. (Author’s collection)
11. The malfosse? A famous incident at
the end of the Battle of Hastings is
reported by many chroniclers. The
Norman cavalry, while chasing the
fleeing English, met their doom in a
giant chasm concealed by long grasses.
It is possible this huge cleft in the
Sussex landscape known as Oakwood
Gill is in fact what the Anglo-Norman
accounts termed the ‘malfosse’, or ‘evil
ditch’. (Author’s collection)
12. Old Sarum, outside
Salisbury. During Æthelred II’s
reign (979–1016) some more
ancient earthworks were
utili
sed as emergency burhs,
such as the giant Iron Age fort
at Old Sarum. The defences of
some Alfredian forts of the
previous century had become a
victim of increasing urban
expansion, according to some.
(Author’s collection)
13. Wayland’s Smithy,
Berkshire. Prehistoric
monuments such as Wayland’s
Smithy still played a vital role
in the psyche of the Anglo-
Saxons, sometimes providing
rallying points for military
forces. Here, folklore suggested,
passing travellers would have
their mounts shoed by
Wayland the Smith.
(Author’s collection)
14. The Coppergate Helmet. Found in 1982 in
York, this helmet represents an ancient
tradition in north European crested helms.
Dating from c. 775, it has a mail curtain as a
neck guard, the most complete surviving
piece of Anglo-Saxon mail. By the tenth
century this style of helmet was being
replaced by the conical or nasal helm familiar
from the Bayeux Tapestry. (Courtesy of York
Museums Trust)
15. (Left) Replica conical nasal helm. Helmets such as these predominate on the Bayeux Tapestry. They were developed out of the spangenhelm tradition involving riveted plates forming the cone, attached to a band and with nasal protection. The use of this type of helmet appears to last well into the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. (Author’s collection)
16. (Right) Fabric hood or coif. Some of the scenes of warriors on the Bayeux Tapestry show what appears to be soft or fabric head protection. This recently made linen hood may be similar to such garments. (Author’s collection)
17. Replica seax and scabbard. This seax has an antler handle and the scabbard is leather. It is slung from a leather belt by two straps as is evidenced in the pictorial representations. The knife hangs upside down in its sheath. (Author’s collection)
18. Tothill Street, London. A
modern street name reminds us
that an artificial mound once
stood at the edge of Tothill
Field and Horseferry Road. Tot
sites, or look-out sites, were
linked series of warning towers
stretching all the way to the
coast. The western and
southern approaches to London
may have been covered by
look-out sites at Brixton Hill
and Tooting. (Author’s collection)
19. A Viking burial pit at Weymouth.
This extraordinary discovery of fifty-
one headless Vikings thrown into a
burial pit on Ridgeway Hill in
Weymouth was made in 2009 by
Oxford Archaeology. The skulls of
these young men were neatly
stacked, while their bodies were
discarded elsewhere in the pit.
Ongoing work shows that these men
were all from Scandinavian areas and
that they were killed sometime
between 910 and 1030. It would seem
that a heavy price was paid for a
broken agreement at the dawn of the
second Viking age.
(© Oxford Archaeology. By kind permission)
20. The Gilling Sword. Found by a 9-year-old boy in
1976 near a bridge over the Gilling Beck in
Yorkshire, the Gilling Sword is one of the finest
examples of a typically later period Anglo-Saxon
sword. With a tapering fullered blade and opposing
curved upper and lower hilt guards, this sword
represents Petersen’s Type L sword. It was probably
made in England, but the type is also common
among sword finds in Scandinavia.
(Courtesy of York Museums Trust)
Chapter 4
Fortifications and Earthworks
Early Earthworks and Fortifications
The Anglo-Saxons were no strangers to fortified places. As early as 477 King Ælle of Sussex had a noticeable success in besieging the Romano-British occupants of Pevensey Castle. There were also those who built their own strongholds, such as Ida of Northumbria, who according to the carefully inserted Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 547 ‘built Bamburgh which was first enclosed with a stockade and thereafter a wall’. But fortified places as a general rule were not in the psyche of the early Anglo-Saxons. The reasons for this are numerous. In the first instance, the Saxon immigrants came to a country in which they found themselves as the invader and not the defender. The decaying, but once grand Roman and Iron Age defensive structures they saw around them had little meaning to their leaders. There was no tradition among the Germanic settlers of an urban lifestyle and many towns that might have been settled by the newcomers were studiously avoided, except for the appearance in the archaeological record of a few sunken-floored huts and some corn-drying kilns built among the Roman ruins. The story of the development of Anglo-Saxon fortifications is one that is inextricably linked with the rise of external threats to the English kings, the increase in royal power and organisation and the gradual return of urbanisation to lowland Britain which began to occur from the late ninth century. At the apogee of the Anglo-Saxon period in the tenth century the king would be making use of Iron Age and Roman fortifications, combining them with new types of structures in an astonishing network of carefully placed strongholds in order to defend his kingdom and launch campaigns into hostile territory.
Apart from the Iron Age hillforts that were re-used by indigenous Britons during the period of the first Saxon invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries, the main form of major fortifications in lowland Britain in the Dark Ages seems to have been that of the linear defence system often comprising ditch and palisade. Examples include the Wansdyke and Bokerley Dyke in Wessex and Devil’s Dyke in East Anglia. Of course, the grandest monument to this kind of linear boundary comes in the form of Offa’s Dyke, dating to the late eighth century (Plate 1), running from beneath the Wirral Peninsula to the Severn Estuary and marking the division between the Mercian and Welsh kingdoms. Offa’s Dyke is the largest archaeological monument in Britain. Sir Cyril Fox in 1955 was one of the few archaeologists to look at it closely, until Professor David Hill began a series of excavations in 1972. The frontier is around 140 miles long and about 80 miles of it survives. It has a ditch on the Welsh side about 6ft deep and a rampart rising 25ft above it to the east, the whole structure is about 60ft across. It commands an impressive view to the west. There is, however, no visible sign of it for 37 miles in the south. There are also many gaps in the structure which may now be explained by years of modern farming practices, particularly up the Severn from Buttington to Welshpool and in the middle section to the north of Hereford.
The exact function of these linear defences is still disputed. They clearly mark the boundaries of competing kingdoms and may have been constructed to regulate trade, prevent large-scale cattle rustling and to provide early warning systems of impending military attack. Archaeologists are still analysing the structure and function of these monuments, which unfortunately are notoriously difficult to date due to the scarcity of material culture within them.
There are also references to non-linear defences in the early period. These refer to individual strongholds that were defended well enough to be equipped with gates (see below, pp. 93–4). This should not surprise us given what we know of the role of the warrior leader as protector of his hall. The building of fortifications was a duty that was bundled together with the two other military necessities that became known as the ‘common burdens’, or ‘trinoda necessitas’, which mention fortress building and maintenance. This duty was imposed as early as 749. The phrase comes from just one sin
gle charter, a forged land book of the late seventh century King Cædwalla created in the tenth century. The phrase mentions Bridgework (‘brycggeweorc’), Fortress Work (‘burhbot’) and Army Work (‘fyrdfæreld’) as being incumbent upon Bookland.
During the next century the mention of duties for maintaining fortresses occurs more frequently. In Mercia the reigns of Æthelbald (716–57) and Offa (757–96) saw an increasing royal organisational capability in terms of the building of great public works, of which Offa’s Dyke is a prime example. Although it is clear from some scant evidence that King Offa was well aware of the threat to coastal ports and communities from the raiding Scandinavians of the later eighth century, it is not until the reign of Alfred the Great (871–99) that a centrally organised system of fortifications in the landscape came properly into being. These fortifications have become known as the burhs of Anglo-Saxon England and their organisation has fascinated historians for centuries.
The Burhs of Anglo-Saxon England
And what of the cities and towns to be rebuilt and of others to be constructed where previously there were none?’
Asser
It was the nature of the overseas threat to the shoreline of England in the ninth century that accounted for the greatest change in defensive organisation in Anglo-Saxon history. It was, however, a long time coming. The kings and leading thegns of Wessex continued their struggles against well-organised Viking armies throughout the 840s and 850s with some notable successes. It is in Alfred’s reign, however (and then only towards the end of it), that we see the complete strategic change in military thinking. Alfred had fought for many years against the Danish invaders, sometimes winning and sometimes losing. His early wars were open battles in which the attrition rate was unbearably high (pp. 95–101). It was only after the Battle of Edington in 878 that Alfred seems to have got down to the business of re-organising his defences in a move that contrasted sharply with the military response he undertook in the earlier part of his reign.