A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  The Wessex front

  King Beorhtric of Wessex (786–802), who, it will be remembered, had been married to the notorious Eadburh of Mercia and was almost certainly a client king to her father Offa, was followed on the throne by King Ecgberht, described as the eighth bretwalda by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. By 830 he had extended the sway of Wessex northwards to the Humber and eastwards into Essex. The triumph was brief. Not only did Wiglaf of Mercia claw back his position but in mid-decade Ecgberht (who died in 839) confronted a new danger – a seaborne attack by Viking raiders on the Isle of Sheppey in the Thames, the first such since the death of Beohrtric’s reeve at Portland some forty years before. After Sheppey, thirty-five shiploads descended on the coast of Somerset; the king ‘held the place of slaughter’. Two years later a great pirate ‘ship army’ came to Cornwall and found eager allies among the local British. Once again the West Saxons were victorious under their king, crushing the combined force at Hingston Down on the Cornish side of the Tamar river. For the next thirty years Ecgberht’s son and grandsons faced almost annual fire-fights against such coastal incursions from what the Chronicles variously call ‘heathen men’ and Danes. Southampton, Winchester, London were just some of the places to suffer.

  In 851 a force of 350 ships sailed into the Thames estuary, sacked London and put to flight a Mercian army under King Beorhtwulf. He was succeeded by Burgred. The same year Æthelwulf of Wessex and his two eldest sons won their famous victory over the Danes at Aclea, possibly in Surrey, and then a great sea victory off Sandwich. This raised the king’s stock on the Continent and two years later, in alliance with Burgred of Mercia, he won a great victory over the Welsh. But the Viking threat was relentless. Before Æthelwulf’s death in January 858 the raiders had over-wintered on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent and pillaged at will in East Anglia. Over the next two decades, in the words of Richard Abels, to whom much of this account is indebted, the struggles of his sons ‘were to be ceaseless, heroic, and largely futile’.

  In 860 raiders sacked Winchester before moving northwards to the Berkshire Downs, trawling the countryside with fire and sword for plunder. The men of Dorset and Berkshire under the command of their ealdormen were ready for them as they headed back to their ships, slowed down by loot-laden pack animals. Those raiders who stood their ground were cut to pieces; the rest, according to Asser, ‘fled the place of slaughter like women’. Wessex had been the victim of an overspill from Viking activity in the basin of the River Seine. A major pirate expedition had set up its headquarters on the Isle d’Oissel, dangerously near to Paris. Charles the Bald had come to a deal with another company of pirates operating along the Somme to pay them well if they would turn gamekeeper and deal with the Oissel company. Having taken hostages, the Somme Vikings took time off across the Channel while he raised the cash from his hapless subjects.

  The Battle for England

  In 865 the men of Kent promised money to a force that had landed on the Isle of Thanet, but the enemy exploited the truce to overrun the entire eastern part of the kingdom. In that same year a number of Danish sea armies led by Ivar the Boneless and his brothers Halfdan and Ubba, joined forces seemingly for a massed campaign against England. They wintered in East Anglia ‘and were provided with horses’, the Chronicle records. It dubbed this new force the ‘micel hæðen here’, ‘great heathen army’ or ‘raiding army’. Sir Frank Stenton, the doyen of twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon studies, saw 865 as a turning point: a time when what had been uncoordinated bands of raiders coalesced into an army in the formal sense of the word with a thought-out strategy of conquest. For more than a decade major forces ravaged the country from York to Wessex.

  During this period two of the great historic kingdoms of the Angles, Mercia and Northumbria, were removed from the map as independent Anglo-Saxon states to be replaced by the Viking territory or ‘kingdom’ of York and a region of effectively autonomous communities subject to Danish law in the eastern half of England. For this region of ‘Danelaw’, the depredations of the raiders were such that virtually no charters survive from the pre-Scandinavian invasion era. Only in the kingdom of Wessex and the Lordship of Bamburgh in the extreme north did Anglo-Saxon sway hold. It hardly seems too much to describe the late ninth century as the age of ‘the battle for England’. The winning of this battle would occupy most of the reign of Alfred the Great of Wessex, at this time a serious-minded but warlike teenager, who was to become king in six years time.

  In the spring of 866 the great army headed first for York. We do not know why they made this rather surprising switch of target away from the heartlands of England. Scandinavian legend was to claim that it was to avenge the memory of Ivar’s father, the legendary Ragnar Lothbrok, tortured to death at York some years earlier. Though why, if that were so, the army did not sail direct to the city and its emporium the previous year is left unexplained. It may be relevant that Northumbria’s neighbour, the British kingdom of Strathclyde, was at this time coming under attack from the Norsemen of Dublin and Man.9

  At all events the army was tidying up the old Roman defences of York by November 866 and the following spring faced an English force, led by the two current contenders in Northumbria’s seemingly interminable civil conflict, momentarily united against the common foe. There followed a bloody and protracted battle among the ruinous structures of Roman York. The Northumbrians, we are told by the Peterborough Chronicle, did great slaughter there but when their two ‘kings’ fell, surrounded in death by loyal companions, the rest came to terms. The English kingdom of Northumbria was, bar a couple of puppet reigns, at an end.

  That autumn the army marched south into Mercia where they prepared to winter in Nottingham. The Mercian king Burgred appealed to his brother-in-law Æthelred of Wessex for help but the combined English forces were unable to force the issue and the army was able to retreat on York and winter there. The following year, 869, the army marched south from York, following a Roman road for part of the route to make winter camp at Thetford in East Anglia. In November the men of East Anglia under their king, Edmund, went out to Hoxne to fight the heathen. But the Danes had the victory, killed the king and conquered the land. In such bald words the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it seems, would mean to tell us that Edmund died in battle. Alfred’s biographer Asser, writing some twenty years after the event, took that to be the case. King Edmund of the East Angles, he wrote, died fighting fiercely with a great part of his army. This was the fitting death for a Christian hero king in the tradition of St Oswald and many another. Edmund’s hagiographer, writing more than a century later, has it otherwise – as does tradition.

  From the evidence of his coinage Edmund had reigned for some years. A generation after his death, commemorative coins were being struck to ‘Saint’ Edmund. A further fifty years on, during his stay at Ramsey Abbey (985–7), the Franco-Flemish monk Abbo of Fleury wrote his ‘Passion of St Edmund’. He had the story from St Dunstan, who in turn had heard it from Edmund’s armour-bearer, ‘a very old man’. According to him, rather than be the cause of the shedding of Christian blood by giving battle, Edmund chose martyrdom. Like Jesus Christ he was mocked by the Danish soldiery; like St Sebastian he was shot full of arrows. John Blair tells us in The Church in Anglo-Saxon England (2005) that by the early eleventh century Europe’s kings were being urged to emulate the suffering Christ, not Christ in majesty.

  Alfred:Warlord against the Danes

  After Hoxne the army laid waste the country round about and utterly destroyed the abbey of Medeshamstede/Peterborough, killing the abbot and all its monks and bringing ‘to nought what had once been mighty’.10 The site would remain a wilderness landscape for the best part of a century. The following year, led by Halfdan, Ivar’s brother, the army crossed over into Wessex and made its base at Reading, a well-provisioned and strategically placed royal vill. King Æthelred and his brother Prince Alfred raised an army and marched on Reading, while Æthelwulf the ealdorman of Berkshire led the shire levies against a Viking foraging pa
rty and defeated it. But a few days later the main Viking army defeated the full West Saxon force and Ealdorman Æthelwulf was killed. A native of Mercia, his body was rescued from the battlefield and taken back to his home town for burial. The two royal brothers barely escaped with their lives – and yet they rallied their forces again. In January 871 on the chalk ridge at Ashdown on the Berkshire downs, possibly near Streatley, they avenged the humiliation with a resounding victory. The West Saxons attacked in two forces, Alfred leading the first charge up the hill, ‘like a wild boar’, at the enemy shield wall; his brother King Æthelred had remained to hear the end of mass in his tent, before coming up with the main body to deliver the decisive blow. Halfdan’s brother ‘King’ Bagsecg and five Viking jarls (earls) were among the dead. Yet two weeks later Alfred and Æthelred were defeated ‘in open battle by the Danes at Basing’.

  Alfred came to the throne with the death of his brother Æthelred in April 871. He had reason to be apprehensive. Recurring warfare was sapping the kingdom’s manpower; the enemy by contrast could expect reinforcement with every new fleet. Early in May he was in action near the royal vill of Wilton, in the heart of historic Wessex. Towards the end of a hard-fought day, the enemy turned as if in rout. It was a feint. The English broke ranks in pursuit and were defeated. The young king had failed to win victory in his first general command. As in their dealings with Frankish rulers, the Danes were able to enforce a cash payment as the price of peace. They pulled back to winter in London in Mercian territory.

  In 875 Halfdan with a part of the raiding army went north from Repton and wintered on the River Tyne. The other part of the army under ‘King’ Guthrum and two others marched from Repton to Cambridge. (That summer the Chronicle records a sea victory against seven ships’ companies.) At this period the defence of Wessex depended on land forces called to the king’s service in response to an actual threat, and the muster took time. The Danes, being in an almost permanent state of war-readiness, could strike without warning. In early autumn 875 they were able to march virtually unopposed halfway across West Saxon territory to occupy the royal burh of Wareham in Dorset. Bounded by rivers and with its halls and outbuildings protected by palisaded defence works proper to such a site, it was an ideal base for Viking operations against the surrounding countryside, and its capture was a telling demonstration of the kingdom’s vulnerability. Such sites were hardly castles in the Norman sense, but rather a kind of fortified premises against outlaws and robbers; any attempt to breach them attracted a scale of penalty or burgbryce in the law code of King Ine.

  Alfred assembled his army and laid siege. The Danes gave their pledge, sworn on a ring sacred to the god Thor, to abandon hostilities; Alfred gave hostages as surety for his good faith. Evidently Thor did not hold his devotees bound by any oath sworn to unbelievers. Breaking the oath and slaughtering the hostages, the enemy made good their escape from Wareham and struck south to Exeter. They evidently anticipated the arrival of reinforcements from a fleet coasting down the Channel. When it was wrecked by storms off the Dorset coast, they found themselves encircled at Exeter with no escape. Again the Vikings swore oaths, but this time they kept them – for the time being. They crossed back into Mercia, where they made Gloucester their base and where their client king Ceolwulf made over part of the kingdom to them.

  Wessex was still under dire threat. Guthrum ruled in East Anglia and controlled Mercia. No help could be expected from the distant north where the Anglian royal houses were split by now meaningless rivalries and the Vikings of York dominated the old kingdom of Deira. After decades as raiders, the Scandinavian invaders were settling in as colonialists. And Guthrum, now the sole commander of Viking forces operating south of the Humber, still had Wessex in his sights.

  Soon after Twelfth Night and the Feast of the Epiphany, 6 January 878, and taking advantage of the long Christmas holiday, he led a large army into Wessex and, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘rode over [the kingdom] and occupied it’. Specifically, the Viking army seized the heartland royal vill and estate of Chippenham. The mead hall where King Alfred had but lately caroused with his courtiers, his ealdormen and household thegns was now the property of such of those Viking war bands who were not harrying the English population. Many of those, we are told, ‘fled across the sea’. Many also, among the landowners, submitted to Guthrum as their lord. The situation was dire indeed. If Alfred could be caught and killed the Vikings would have little difficulty in finding a puppet as they had in Mercia and the age of the independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in England would be over.

  In these dark days the heroes were not at first Alfred the king and his companions, but men of Devon, king’s thegns and their households, under the local ealdorman, who routed an attack by a force of some twenty-three ships launched from a winter base in Dyfed in south Wales. The defenders were able to fall back on the earthwork of Countisbury Hill, a former British hill-fort. They slaughtered more than 800 of the enemy, killed their leader and captured the fabled ‘Raven Banner’ of Ragnar Lothbrok.

  At this time Alfred, his family and a little party of retainers and household thegns were on the run among the marshes and woodland wastes. While Guthrum lived in his halls and off his food rents, the king lived more the life of an outlaw and marauder – to the Vikings, little better than a terrorist. In the spring he established his base of operations on the Isle of Athelney in Somerset, a low eminence above the surrounding marshlands, little more than 350 yards (320 m) long and barely 50 yards (46 m) wide, and accessible only by punt and hidden paths. The name, literally ‘nobles’ island’, suggests a favourite haunt for hunters and wild fowlers, and no doubt for the king himself in his youth. With approaches camouflaged and fortified as best as possible, it offered a precarious refuge from which he and his men could sally out, raiding for supplies, harassing the enemy, reconnoitring his positions and keeping in touch, one supposes, with a network of partisans. At least one other West Saxon notable followed his lord’s example, for we are told that Æthelnoth, the ealdorman of Somerset, headed a group of resistance fighters in the wooded country of Somerset and helped with the defences of Athelney. Here, about 880, Alfred would found a monastery as part of the fortified complex defended at its approach by ‘a very strong fort . . . of most beautiful workmanship’, built most probably under his direction.

  For all involved this must have been a time of intense planning, logistical preparation and coordination of effort. In view of the triumphant victory with which the year was to be capped, it is testimony to the deeply motivational leadership of which King Alfred was capable. It was also the time of national myth and legend. Three stories, all reported generations later and each calculated to trigger useful responses, either suggest PR of conspiratorial genius or embody a genuine national sentiment. In one, the fugitive king snatches a roadside lunch with a poor beggar, who turns out to be St Cuthbert. The anecdote associates the West Saxon leader with Northumbrian tradition. In another the king and his assistant, disguised as wandering minstrel and jongleur, entertain the Danish camp with fooling and songs and in the process overhear essential military intelligence. Minstrel perhaps, but the harp as an emblem of monarchy reaches back to King David and the Bible. Significantly we are told two generations later that Olaf Sihtricson, Norse king of York, seeking intelligence before the battle of Brunanburh, spied upon the camp of Alfred’s grandson Æthelstan disguised as a minstrel and indeed received largesse for his singing from his unwitting enemy.

  Finally, the most famous of all: the story of the cakes. Mentioned in the tenth century, it was only fully recorded in the twelfth-century Annals of St Neot’s. Nevertheless, it has the ring of truth. We find the king seated by the fire in a swineherd’s hut ‘preparing his bows and arrows and other instruments of war’. The housewife has set some loaves, or griddle-cakes, to rise by the fire and comes in to find them burning while her visitor sits by, day-dreaming, unaware. The wretched woman berates him, ‘little thinking that this was the king, Alfred, wh
o had waged so many wars against the pagans’, and who was now pondering the country’s drastic plight. A king on the run always makes good copy and, because there is no mention of his great sword, a badge of high birth and the emblem of the hero, his anonymity is believable. It is also one of the few reports about Alfred that does not reach us through a document written by him or a member of his circle.

  In the seventh week after Easter 878, Alfred and his followers rode to ‘Ecgberht’s Stone’ (probably a traditional rendezvous point) on the edge of Salisbury Plain and Selwood Forest; here he was joined by ‘all Wiltshire and Somerset and that part of Hampshire this side of the sea’. The term may have been meant to exclude, as Asser believed, those men of Hampshire who had fled overseas ‘for fear of the pagans’, but there seem to have been deserters from other parts of Wessex. Perhaps ‘the sea’ referred to was not the English Channel but Southampton Water, which divides coastal Hampshire between east and west. Presumably only forces and their leaders contactable by agents operating out of Athelney would have had news of the muster. After just one day at the assembly point Alfred led his army northwards and just two days later they were facing the ‘whole army’. Guthrum occupied a defensive position, probably on the Iron Age hill-fort of Bratton near the village of Edington. The West Saxons advanced with the morning light, shield to shield.