The Anglo Saxons at War 800-1066

by Paul Hill

  There was Æthelwulf slain,

  The great man of whom I just spoke,

  And Æthelred and Ælfred

  Were driven to Wiscelet [Whistley].

  This is a ford towards Windsor,

  Near a lake in a marsh.

  Thither the one host came pursuing,

  And did not know the ford over the river [Loddon].

  Twyford has ever been the name of the ford,

  At which the Danes turned back,

  And the English escaped.

  It is this knowledge of topography that would prove crucial in the days and weeks to come, especially the knowledge of fordable points across the rivers. Streatley, Moulsford and of course the strategically important Wallingford would all play a part in what was to come. But why had the attempted siege at Reading failed so badly? Was it because the encounter at Englefield had only really been a mere skirmish and the Danish losses had not been so great after all? Or was it because the Danish tactic of a surprise rush from the gates of their own camp had brought about the desired effect of scattering their enemy? Perhaps the Danes were not such a small force after all. They had at their rear a ‘friendly’ River Thames. It is not inconceivable that the force at Reading had been swollen by the arrival of new Danish reinforcements in the days leading up to the siege there.

  Whatever the size of Halfdan’s force after Reading, it was clear to the leadership that they could not stay there. The West Saxon brothers would come again soon and when they did, they may have learned something about how to conduct a siege properly. The Danes must now push out into the countryside to search for more resources and to occupy strategically important locations. It would seem that Wallingford was just one such place. It took only four days for the royal brothers of Wessex to reorganise themselves. They may have gone to Abingdon. Perhaps the Danes were seeking them out, trying to bring about a conclusion to decide once and for all the fate of Wessex, despite the risks that might pose for them. Whatever the reasons, the West Saxons were ready for the Danes. Halfdan had left Reading on the morning of 8 January 871 and when he had got about 12 miles from his base as he climbed the hill at Moulsford he saw across from him a huge English army, which had positioned itself on Kingstanding Hill across the Icknield Way awaiting its enemy. It was a well-chosen position for the English. They had blocked the Danish advance and left Halfdan pondering his next move. He could try a quick slip to his right into the inviting but small gap the English had left between themselves and the river, risking being driven into it, or he could try to slip round to the left of the English army as he saw it, in the knowledge that they had put themselves there with a far superior understanding of the local roadways and would surely be upon him before he could get round them.

  Halfdan divided his force into two divisions, one comprising ‘kings’ and the other of ‘jarls’ and it became clear to a watchful Alfred that the jarls’ division was making a move for the gap. With history famously recording King Æthelred’s devotion to prayers at this time, it was Alfred who crossed the valley and rose up the hill to smash into the Danes and press them towards the river. The young prince would win his spurs here at the Battle of Ashdown, as it became known. Æthelred would soon join in the fray against Halfdan’s division. The outcome was a resounding victory for the Anglo-Saxons, a brilliantly engineered pitched battle on a ground more or less of their own choosing. The chase went on long into the night. Among the dead lay Bagsecg. With him had perished Jarl Sidroc the Old, Jarl Sidroc the Younger, Jarl Osbern, Jarl Fræna and Jarl Harold. Many of these names seem to have belonged to the jarls’ division that had been pounced upon by Alfred. The Danes returned to Reading and began to wonder how they could fight their way out of this corner. Wessex was proving stronger than they had imagined.

  Around 22 January 871 the Danes opened the gates at Reading once again, this time with a view to marching on the Royal vill at Basing. It was just 18 miles from their camp and situated in Hackwood Park, east of Basingstoke. Nobody knows why after two weeks of contemplation the Danish leadership switched the focus of their campaign in the Wessex landscape. Previously, they had been attacking the north-east corner of Wessex in the hope that the Thames would open up for them and their allies and that they would be able to navigate all the way up to Cricklade and beyond. But now the Danes headed south and further into the heart of the kingdom. Perhaps Basing was the target after all, with its rich supplies. With Basing fallen, the road to Winchester lay wide open and despite there being a victorious English army in the field the taking of Winchester might be the telling blow against Wessex.

  It would be the fourth battle in the space of a month. Many of the men on the Anglo-Saxon side would not have fought at Englefield as this was conducted by the men of Æthelwulf. However, many were under lordship obligations to continue to fight for Æthelred and Alfred, and by now they must have been feeling the pressure. The two royal brothers arrived at Basing and found the Danes there. What followed was another hard-fought and bloody encounter which resulted in the more traditional form of victory in that the Danes held the place of slaughter and the West Saxons took to flight to re-group yet again. But Winchester was not sacked or taken. One can only speculate as to why this was. Perhaps the cost of their strategy was proving as much for the Danes as it was for the English. Perhaps they needed re-enforcements to continue their campaign in Wessex. If that was the case, they would come soon.

  Some time passed and there seems to have been a stalemate in the landscape. The brothers, it is suggested, had retreated to Walbury Camp, with its ancient protective ramparts and fine commanding views of the countryside. There was time even for the brothers to make an agreement as to the inheritance of the West Saxon kingdom should one of them die. But it was not until 22 March 871 that the Danes stirred again. The next battle was at a place called Merton, the location of which people have argued over for centuries. One of the most sensible candidates, given the previous movements of the armies, is Marten, 20 miles north of Wilton. Here the Inkpen Ridgeway would provide the means of travel for the combined fyrds of Berkshire and Hampshire. Why Merton was fought is not clear. And what happened there is only a little clearer and is mentioned if not by Asser, by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in a cryptic and sweeping entry:

  And two months later, King Æthelred and Alfred, his brother, fought against the raiding army at Merton and they were in two bands, and they put both to flight and for long in the day had the victory, and there was great slaughter on either side, and the Danish had possession of the place of slaughter; and Bishop Heahmund [of Sherborne] was killed there and many good men.

  It is an infuriating account. Why had the Danes formed into two divisions again? Had Halfdan been joined by another leader or should this command represent a promotion for someone already in his force? The chronicler follows up this passage by saying that only after Merton were the Danes joined by others. So the question remains, why did the English lose this close-fought battle? The answer probably lies in what happened to the king of Wessex a month later: Æthelred I, king of Wessex was dead. In his place was elevated Alfred, son of Æthelwulf of Wessex. This new king of Wessex, whose baptism of fire soon commenced, would make historians write his name a million times.

  If King Æthelred had been mortally wounded at Merton, this might explain the English withdrawal from the conflict at this stage. Alfred went about the business of burying his royal brother at Wimbourne, the royal spiritual home of the West Saxon kings. But as he did, he realised that his kingdom was in dire trouble. He heard news that yet another battle was being fought, this time back in the north-east corner of kingdom. The chronicler Æthelweard–usually reliable–gives us the one and only account of it:

  An innumerable summer army (Sumarliði) arrived at Reading and opened hostilities vigorously against the army of the West Saxons. And the ones who had long been ravaging in that area were at hand to help them. The army of the English was then small, owing to the absence of the king, who at the time was attend
ing to the obsequies of his brother. Although the ranks were not at full strength, high courage was in their breasts, and rejoicing in battle they repel the enemy some distance. However, overcome with weariness, they desist from fighting, and the barbarians won a degree of victory which one might call fruitless.

  If Æthelweard is correct, then the reinforcements had well and truly arrived. The tired West Saxons, without their king had at least managed to stand up to them, but now they were exhausted. If Alfred had not already stared into the faces of these new Danish leaders Oscetel, Anwend and Guthrum, then he soon would. Of these, the last named would haunt the West Saxon king for years. But for now, Alfred must reluctantly face the fact that a newly invigorated Danish force had moved once again into the Wessex heartland after defeating local armies. Its predictable target was another royal manor, Wilton. Another attempt to seize supplies and rob the king of an estate, perhaps even a terminal blow for the brand new monarch.

  However weary, however depleted in manpower, Alfred stole himself for another encounter. It was a remarkable engagement fought on the banks of the River Wylie. The tactical dispositions are not known, but with his small force Alfred seems to have spotted something similar to what he saw on the field of Ashdown. Some sort of tactical evolution in Danish deployment, some small chance to capitalise on the enemy’s vulnerability. Alfred smashed into the Danes with such ferocity that they are described as not being able to withstand his onslaught. What seemed like a recoil became a retreat. But the English, small in number and war weary, were unable to follow up the success. The Danes displayed an ability to somehow turn on their heels and swamp their pursuers. This may have been because the English were literally too small in number for their chase to be anything other than plain dangerous, or it may have been because the Danes had initiated a flight intending to turn again on their foe. If it was the latter, it would be of some considerable note. This was a tactical ploy much vaunted in the age of the mounted knight and is very difficult if not impossible to effect with an infantry warband.

  And so at Wilton, the new king of Wessex watched his brave men get swamped by Vikings in what seemed now to be a hopeless war of attrition. He was literally running out of men. Alfred decided to switch tactics completely and chose not men, but money with which to purchase an effective end to the hostilities. It must have seemed to the Danes under their new combined leadership, that although Wessex was still vulnerable and depleted, it nevertheless stood as a kingdom and they had not yet managed to destroy its line or break the spirit of the men. Somehow, even when the odds were against them, the leaders of Wessex kept turning up to fight. In the end it was just enough to save the kingdom from its first brutal encounter with the Great Heathen Army. As the peace was agreed and Alfred bought himself time to think, the Danes left their Reading camp and sat on London, then a trading settlement on the outskirts of the old Roman city. What lessons Alfred had learned from the year 871 only history would tell. He would be slow to understand it fully. He would not be free of the Danes until after 878 when he defeated them at Edington, but he was an intelligent and educated man. The measures he later took to fortify his kingdom would eventually bring this exhausting and attritional style of campaigning to an end, but it remains the case that the year 871 was an example of a type of warfare the English could not afford to fight against a well-organised and constantly replenishing Danish enemy.

  900–5: The Revolt of Æthelwold–an Unlikely Apostate

  Much mystery surrounds the career of Æthelwold, son of Æthelred I of Wessex. The campaign he led against King Edward the Elder (900–24) was motivated by Æthelwold’s persistent and understandable claim to the throne of Wessex. By this time, the kingdom was a much expanded polity created by Alfred the Great and it would soon be further expanded by his son and grandsons. Æthelwold’s story, however, demonstrates a certain trait in Anglo-Saxon warfare. The politics of dynastic struggles were never far away from the heart of warfare during our period. In 899, when Alfred, the ‘unshakable pillar of the Western peoples’, was laid to rest at the Old Minster at Winchester, one man would try to stake his own claim to the throne and would go to surprising lengths to achieve it.

  Æthelwold was aggrieved at the terms of King Alfred’s will. He was the son of Alfred’s brother Æthelred I, who had been king himself and who had died at the height of the Viking struggles in 871 (p. 99). Æthelwold expected to be king of Wessex, no matter what Alfred had arranged for his own sons. It was, in effect, as simple as that. But not to Edward, son of Alfred, however. Alfred’s will had said something entirely different. Edward had already shown himself to be a remarkable commander in the final years of Alfred’s reign and it was clear to most contemporaries that Edward’s right to rule was quite legitimate. Edward had been made a co-ruler of the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons in the last two years of Alfred’s reign. Edward’s young son Athelstan was born in 895 and quickly became a favourite of King Alfred, who had bestowed upon him gifts given to him by the Pope himself. It is even possible–if later Medieval historians are to be believed–that the young boy Athelstan was ‘inaugurated’ at a very early age. One can only imagine how Æthelwold fumed and plotted during the opening months of Edward’s reign. He was–to coin a phrase–being royally stitched-up.

  Men of Æthelwold’s standing have their own retinues, their own supporters and followers tied to their lord by unbreakable bonds. Unsurprisingly, it was not long before Æthelwold made his move. He gathered those loyal to him and marched with them to the royal estates at Wimborne and Christchurch (then known as Twinham). The Danes themselves had executed a similar (and devastating) move at Repton, the seat of the Mercian Royal dynasty in order to crush psychologically King Burgred in 874. But here, Æthelwold was occupying the very place where his father had been buried all those years ago, the place where West Saxon legitimacy was marked by tomb after tomb. The pretender to Edward’s throne announced to the world that having taken Wimborne with his force he would ‘live and die there’. It was a challenge no son of Alfred the Great could ignore, so ignore it he did not.

  Edward responded by bringing his own army to Badbury Rings, not far from Wimborne. The sheer size of the king’s army alone must have been enough to make Æthelwold consider his next move carefully. Edward knew of the nature of the threat. He will have been concerned that Æthelwold would gather more supporters by having brought off such an audacious move, but what surely concerned him the most was the nightmare scenario of a man of royal blood gathering support not from the Wessex heartlands where he would struggle for numbers, but from the power-hungry Scandinavians of the north of Britain. In the event, Æthelwold was ahead of his rival by a night’s march.

  One night, during this uneasy stand-off Æthelwold took a horse and stole away under cover of darkness avoiding the scouts of Edward’s army. He left behind him a nun whom he had abducted in defiance of the king and the bishop, a deliberate act. He fled to the north and into the arms of the Northumbrian Danes. Edward’s riders could not catch him, so stealthy was his move. Æthelwold began a most remarkable relationship with the Danes which he backed up by some extraordinary promises. They accepted him as their king, but what price had he paid for their allegiance? The chronicler Æthelweard tells us there was in Northumbria that year ‘a very great disturbance among the English, that is the bands who were then settled in the territories of the Northumbrians’. Could it be that Æthelwold had revoked Christianity to entice an army big enough to challenge the king of the Anglo-Saxons? It would not be the first time in European history something like this had happened. Pepin II, a great grandson of Charlemagne, during a dispute with the Frankish King Charles the Bald had taken the Danes to his bosom in a similar way. The Annals of St Neots even describe Æthelwold as ‘king of the Danes’ and subsequently as ‘king of the pagans’ when he later made his return to the stage of English politics. Our great pretender, however, goes missing from the historical record for a year before his fateful re-appearance. There is speculation tha
t he went to Denmark to gather a fleet and other reinforcements. He is next recorded bringing a fleet to Essex and gaining the submission of the local population there. Soon, he would lead his swollen forces into East Anglia and strike a deal there too. With the Scandinavian-dominated army of East Anglia, his own men and those of Essex, Æthelwold was a force to be reckoned with and Edward knew it.

  The allies raided across Mercia from their East Anglian bases and came eventually to Cricklade, where they crossed the Thames. They took what they could from nearby settlements such as Braydon and turned east to go home. Edward went after them as quickly as he could and launched a punitive campaign across their own heartlands between the Devil’s Dyke and Fleam Dyke and the River ‘’Wissey’ (possibly the Ouse). Edward’s campaign stretched as far as the Fens. His Kentish contingent failed to answer his call to return home and was caught by the enemy. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records it thus:

  Then they were surrounded there by the raiding-army, and they fought there. And there were killed Ealdorman Sigewulf, and Ealdorman Sigehelm, and Eadwold the king’s thegn, and Abbot Cenwulf, and Sigeberht, son of Sigewulf, and Eadwold, son of Acca, and many others in addition to them though I have named the most distinguished. And on the Danish side were killed King Eohric [the Danish ruler of East Anglia] and the Ætheling Æthelwold, whom they had chosen as their king, and Beorhtsige, son of the Ætheling Beorthnoth, and Hold [a minor nobleman] Ysopa and Hold Oscytel, and very many others in addition to them whom we cannot name now; and on either hand there was great slaughter made, and there were more of the Danish killed although they had possession of the place of slaughter . . .