The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great

by Benjamin R. Merkle

  After the Anglo-Saxon royal party arrived back at the court of Charles the Bald in Verberie-sur-Oise, Æthelwulf announced his intention to take a new bride—Judith, Charles’s twelve-year-old daughter. A marriage to the great-granddaughter of Charlemagne would ally Wessex with the most powerful family on the continent, shoring up his own authority and legitimacy throughout the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England.

  Charles demanded that his daughter be received not only as the wife of Æthelwulf, but also as the queen of Wessex. Though it might seem to go without saying that the wife of the king would naturally be the queen, this was not the case in Anglo-Saxon Britain. Not since the infamous Queen Eadburh, wife of the Wessex king Beorhtric, had there been a queen of Wessex. Eadburh, in an attempt to control her husband, had worked to drive off the noblemen and advisors who surrounded him with her slanderous worm tongue. When defamation and gossip didn’t work, she turned to murdering them with poison. One day she filled a poisonous cup for one of her intended victims and had it mistakenly given to her husband, King Beorhtric. After his death, Eadburh was driven from the kingdom.

  The cautionary tale of Eadburh gave the later kings of Wessex cause for hesitation in crowning their wives as queen. Thus the kings of Wessex took wives but shared no royal authority with them and did not call them queens. The Wessex crown was meant to be passed on the “spear-side” and not on the “spindle-side,” meaning the power was to be passed through male heirs and not through female heirs. But Charles insisted that Judith be anointed as queen, and Æthelwulf, desperate for the political alliance, consented.

  From the raiding of Lindisfarne in AD 793 until well into the ninth century, the Viking raids continued to grow in intensity and regularity. Additionally, in the ninth century, the nature of the raiding parties began to shift. At first, a Viking band might be filled with an assortment of farmers and craftsmen—men who saw joining a raiding band as a two-month diversion from their regular work, a diversion that offered a bit of wealth and adventure. By the middle of the ninth century, however, the Viking ships were filled with professional warriors, men who considered plundering and pillaging as their life’s calling. It is difficult to determine what caused this shift. Many suspect that the Scandinavian regions experienced a shortage of available farmland during this time due to either an overly abundant population (polygamy was common in Viking tribes) or changes in the weather patterns that rendered some of the Viking farmland unusable.

  Regardless of the cause, the year AD 865 was setting up to be a formidable one for Alfred’s father, King Æthelwulf, and his new bride.

  1 The Vikings were Scandinavian men who traveled on expeditions mostly in the North Atlantic acquiring wealth for their respective homelands in the territories known today as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. It was the Danish Vikings, sometimes called the “Northmen,” who were particularly active during the ninth and tenth centuries in the British Isles. Having already conquered the Picts in the area that would become Scotland a century later, the Vikings used the men as mercenaries against the Anglo-Saxons.

  2 At Alfred’s birth, the island of Britain was divided into a number of different nations. In addition to the division between the Celtic tribes that ruled Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall, the area of modern-day England was divided up between a number of different Anglo-Saxon nations— Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Wessex, and the several subkingdoms of Essex, Kent, Sussex, and others. Over the course of the reigns of Alfred, his son Edward, and his grandson Æthelstan, these various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were gradually united into one great kingdom of the English people. And though we might anachronistically refer to the people Alfred ruled as the “English,” this was a concept that was introduced by Alfred, halfway through his reign. And it was not until the end of the reign of Æthelstan, and his victory at the battle of Brunanburh, that one could really speak of one English people.

  3 The four preceding sons had each been named with variations on their father’s name—Æthelstan, Æthelbald, Æthelberht, and Æthelred. Even the Wessex king’s one daughter, Æthelswith, carried this element in her name. The Anglo-Saxon word “Æthel” meant “princely” or “noble.” But the “Æthel” element was dropped for his fifth son, Alfred, meaning “Elf wisdom.”

  4 The Anglo-Saxon poet was called the scop, pronounced as “shope.” He was the “shaper” or “creator.” The poet was 6 the closest thing to God himself, who was the shaper of all of history. And the scop imitated the divine as he retold this history.

  5 Contrary to many perceptions of this period in history, dragon stories were actually quite rare in Anglo-Saxon literature. The only significant account of a dragon to appear in the Old English stories was the story of the dragon in the poem Beowolf. And that dragon was not in England, but in Sweden.

  6 From AD 43 until AD 410, England was under the control of the Roman Empire and known by the name Britannia. But as Rome became weakened by barbarian attacks through the end of the fourth century and into the beginning of the fifth, the Roman legions were pulled out of the island and returned to defend Rome. In the fifth century, migrating Anglo-Saxon tribes began to fill the power vacuum left by the Romans and, by the end of the sixth century, had conquered and settled the area that is now known as England.

  7 During their stay, the Anglo-Saxon pilgrims would have stayed in the Schola Saxonum, which lay just within the new defensive walls. The Schola had been established by an earlier king of Wessex, Ine, who had traveled to Rome over a century before to atone for his wicked reign. The Schola Saxonum was a large community of Anglo-Saxons living and working in Rome. It provided a hostel for Anglo-Saxon pilgrims and an Anglo-Saxon church, Saint Maria. The community of the Schola was large enough that during the recent Saracen assault on Rome, the Saxon troops mustered from the Schola constituted a significant portion of the city’s defensive force.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Blood Eagle

  Then King Edmund, the brave man that he was, said “I do not desire nor wish that I alone survive after my beloved thegns have been fiercely slain by these pirates in their beds, along with their children and wives. I never was the sort to take flight, and I would rather, if necessary, die for my own nation. God almighty knows that I will never falter from his service, nor from loving his truth. If I die, I live.”

  —FROM ÆLFRIC’S Life of Saint Edmund

  In AD 865, a Viking army invaded Britain— an army unlike any of the preceding raiding bands, an army that was uninterested in quick plunder, an army set on long-term conquest. Three Viking brothers commanded this great army: Ivar the Boneless, Halfdan, and Ubbe. According to some later legends, these three warriors had come to avenge the death of their father, Ragnar Lothbrok (or Ragnar “Hairy Breeches”), who was said to have failed in an earlier invasion of Northumbria. The Northumbrian King Ælle had captured Ragnar and had him thrown into a pit of poisonous snakes. As Ragnar died, he cried out: “How the little pigs would grunt if they knew what was happening to the old boar!”

  Before his failed attack on Northumbria, Ragnar had led a raiding party up the Seine River, into the heart of Charles the Bald’s West Francia. Ragnar’s Vikings encountered a minimal amount of resistance from the retreating Francian military as they plundered their way to Paris. The Francian forces retreated behind the fortified walls of monasteries, such as the monastery of Saint Denis, and watched in horror as the Vikings tortured and barbarically executed the captured Francian forces to the delight of the pagan raiding army. Ragnar and his men were eventually turned back, though it wasn’t a fear of the Francian army that prompted the Viking’s departure. Charles paid a hefty sum of seven thousand pounds in silver and gold to Ragnar, as danegeld, a bribe to convince the Vikings to leave. Usually the paying of the danegeld only guaranteed a much longer visit from the Danes, but at the same time that the payment was negotiated, the Viking forces were plagued by a severe epidemic of dysentery. The disease was so severe that Ragnar’s forces were more than satisfied with the danegeld and imme
diately returned to their homes, hoping to recover in peace.

  But they did not find peace at home. When Ragnar returned to Denmark, the king of the Danes, Horik, ordered all of Ragnar’s forces to be executed as a punishment for their lawless raiding. Whether Horik was really bothered by the lawlessness of their raiding or by the competition that Ragnar’s raiding posed to the crown is a question worth asking. Ragnar and his sons, however, managed to slip away from King Horik unharmed and began to focus their 27 raiding away from the continent and onto the islands of Britain and Ireland.

  Many years later, Ragnar’s “little pigs” landed on the shores of East Anglia, on the southeast coast of modern England. The East Anglian king, King Edmund, quickly sought peace for his kingdom from the Vikings and found it could be purchased, though its cost would be far greater than Edmund bargained for. Ragnar’s sons restrained their armies from pillaging the East Anglian kingdom, as long as the East Anglians supplied food and all other necessary provisions to the Viking camps, which began to swell daily with newcomers from other Viking armies hearing of this new life of ease. When the winter months arrived, a time when the Viking armies normally returned across the North Sea and left the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to recover, the great army gave no hint of leaving.

  Throughout the long winter, the East Anglians served the appetites of the Viking army, supplying them with food, drink, and other gifts. Then, in addition to these provisions, the Vikings demanded horses for the entire army. Though the Vikings never fought on horseback, they had learned that a mounted army had the ability to strike even deeper and more swiftly into the British countryside, where rivers did not always provide an easy path.

  This last demand having been met, the Vikings finally marched on in the autumn of AD 866, leaving the East Anglians wishing they had been so lucky as to have only had their villages plundered and burned. From here, the great army, now more than five thousand strong, not counting the innumerable noncombatant members of their camp, rode north to the kingdom of Northumbria.

  Whether there was truth to the legend of the death of Ragnar 28 and the burden of revenge placed on his sons, or whether the wealth of the Northumbrian kings had caught their attention, the Danes were determined that their conquest of England was to begin with the Northumbrian capital of York.

  The target was well selected. A commercial center that was advantageously connected to the network of roads and rivers of Northumbria, York offered quick wealth and a strategic base for further conquests. But even more strategic was the date chosen for the attack. First, Ivar and Halfdan arrived in Northumbria when the kingdom was divided by a cruel civil war between King Ælle and his rival, King Osberht. Second, the Vikings launched their surprise attack on York on November 1, All Saints’ Day, a feast day the Anglo-Saxon church observed in great earnest. This meant that the attack came when the city was packed with the wealth of those who had come to observe the feast, as well as when the city was least prepared to defend itself because the two warring factions were absent from the city. And the city itself, busy with preparing for the feast, was entirely distracted from thinking of its own defenses.

  Undefended, York quickly fell to the Viking attack. Upon hearing the news, Ælle and Osberht, recognizing how dire the situation was, quickly made peace with each other, joined their forces into one large Anglo-Saxon army, and returned to prepare for their own assault on the now Viking-held York. Their attack came several months later, on March 23, Palm Sunday. Initially the battle favored the Northumbrian forces, who broke through the walls of York and engaged the Viking warriors on the narrow streets of the city. But the tide of the battle suddenly turned, and the forces of Ælle and Osberht were cut down both inside the city walls and outside as they fled.

  Though both Ælle and Osberht fell that day, the death of Ælle would be particularly immortalized by later Viking sagas, eager to emphasize the revenge Ragnar’s sons were able to exact from the man who had executed their father. Ivar and Halfdan captured Ælle and ordered him to be ritually sacrificed to the Norse god Odin, the Viking war god who had given the victory to the Norse raiders. The particular method of sacrifice chosen for Ælle was the grisly ceremony of the Blood Eagle. Ælle was held face down on the ground while a sword chopped two gaping holes into the back of his ribcage, one on each side of his spine. Then to the cheers of the Vikings crowded around the floundering victim, his ribs were pulled back and his still-inflating lungs were seized and pulled out through the bloody holes, heaving and gurgling through the last few painful gasps of the shrieking sacrifice.1

  Shortly after Æthelwulf married Judith, but before the royal family returned to Wessex, Alfred’s brother, Prince Æthelbald, had attempted to usurp the throne. The prince had announced that he refused to let his father back into Wessex and intended to rule as king in his place. Æthelwulf apparently did not take much notice of this attempted coup and returned to Wessex. Æthelbald, his bluff called, was given several shires in the west of Wessex to rule in exchange for his peaceful submission to his father.

  With his mother, Osburh, dead and his father more and more distracted, Alfred found it increasingly easier to slip through the cracks in his father’s courts. Though he maintained the fondness for Anglo-Saxon poetry his mother had instilled in him, far less effort was put into his studies. In fact, it was not until the age of twelve that Alfred learned to read in his native tongue, but he was still not able to understand anything in Latin, the language in which most literary works of the time were available.

  In January 858, within two years of his return home, King Æthelwulf died, leaving the throne to his grasping son Æthelbald. Unfortunately, Æthelbald was not satisfied with just the throne. Shortly after he was made king of Wessex, Æthelbald took his stepmother, the fourteen-year-old Queen Judith, as his wife. Thinking that his marriage to Judith would bring all the Carolingian legitimacy that his father had received from having married the girl, Æthelbald was surprised to find that he had merely invoked disgust and not respect in the hearts of his subjects. Taking his father’s bride for his own wife was a violation of canon law and nature itself. The rash move could have endangered his reign had he not died of disease not long after the wedding. Judith soon returned to her father in West Francia, and the power of Wessex was once again reserved for the spear-side.

  After the death of Æthelbald in AD 860, Æthelberht, the 31 next son in line, took the throne. Æthelberht now ruled over all of Wessex, as well as the northern shire of Berkshire, and the eastern subkingdoms of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Essex. But as was his older brother’s, Æthelberht’s reign was brief. By AD 865, Æthelberht was dead as well, leaving the fourth son, Æthelred, as king and Alfred as the next in line.

  With the conquest of the Northumbrian capital of York, Danish rule had been thoroughly established in the north, and it was time for the Viking forces to begin expanding their empire. In AD 867 Ivar and Ubbe led the army south to Nottingham—the capital of the kingdom of Mercia, the northern neighbors of Wessex.2 The city was quickly captured by the Viking army, who refortified it against any attempts to retake the city. The Mercian king, Burgred, appealed to Wessex for aid in ending the Danish occupation of Nottingham. The Mercian kingdom was closely allied to Wessex after King Æthelwulf ’s daughter, Æthelswith, married the king of Mercia in the spring of 853 in an attempt to forge a military alliance between these two kingdoms. Thus Burgred and the new king of Wessex, Æthelred, were brothers-in-law.

  Æthelred quickly consented and set about raising the army of Wessex to go and battle the Danish invaders. When Æthelred and his younger brother Alfred finally arrived at Nottingham leading the battle-ready men of Wessex, however, they were frustrated to find that the Danes had withdrawn behind the city walls of Nottingham and refused to come out and fight. Many years of raiding and running had taught the Viking forces the advantage of avoiding all combat except when they were sure to be the victors. And now, even though the goal of the Vikings was no longer simply plundering but all-out con
quest, they continued to use many of these old tactics.

  The forces of Wessex were not prepared to break through Nottingham’s old Roman ramparts and its city walls. They had no choice but to settle in for a lengthy siege of the city. Unfortunately, unlike Ivar and Ubbe’s army, the men of Wessex were not professional soldiers. This meant that though they could be counted on for fierce fighting during short and intense battles, they could not be counted on for long, protracted campaigns. These men were farmers who had to return home to tend to their crops and livestock and could not spare months of waiting for the Viking troops to be starved into submission by a dwindling food supply. After a very short time, the Wessex forces began to steal out of the camp secretly in order to return home. Burgred, realizing he would not be able to wait the Vikings out, reluctantly won peace for his city by bribing the raiding army to leave.

  This was Alfred’s disappointing introduction to the bitter frustration of doing battle with the Viking raiders. Though the reputation of the Danes for ferocity in battle was well deserved, the true skill of the Viking forces was the ability to maximize their raping, pillaging, and plundering, while minimizing the chances of facing another 33 army on the open field of battle. Ivar and Ubbe led their troops past Æthelred, Alfred, and Burgred, completely unscathed, with the plundered wealth of the city on their backs. The Mercian king, Burgred, though he had won back the city, had ultimately lost his authority to rule. During the following years, the kingdom of Mercia became a thoroughfare for Viking armies, with the Mercians incapable of putting up any resistance.