Ealdor Byrhtnoth carries out a misguided act of chivalry

Walk across the short but well-defined causeway to Northey Island and you’re travelling over a strip of land that has arguably had a greater and longer-lasting impact on the history of Britain than almost any other portion of the nation. Furthermore, the ill-advised act of chivalry that took place here has few rivals when it comes to the magnitude and scope of the consequences it produced. Not only did it result in one of the most extortionate and prolonged cases of blackmail the world has ever seen, but it determined who ruled the nation 75 years later, the very language that Britons would speak, and even had an impact on their ability to tell jokes.

None of this, however, could be guessed at on arriving at the scene today. Less than two miles away from the fishermen’s cottages and weatherboarded terraces of Maldon in Essex, Northey Island is a low, marshy, unprepossessing place speckled with trees. Its narrow causeway – probably built by the Romans – is just a few hundred yards long, threading itself out across marshland and then over the deep black mud of the river bed which, when the sun and tide are both out, shines like molten jet. It is the slenderness of this causeway that played a significant part in the events that unravelled there.

It was in the year 991 that a fleet of 93 ships led by the Norwegian Olaf Tryggvason sailed up the River Blackwater and landed on the 300-acre Northey Island, apparently having mistaken it for the mainland in the mist. Warned of the invasion, a small militia was hastily assembled by a Saxon ealdor (local leader) called Byrhtnoth. When the murk eventually cleared, Tryggvason shouted over that he and his horde would go away if they were given gold, an offer the 60-year-old ealdor rejected. Both sides then patiently waited for the tide to go out so that they could settle the matter by force of arms. Not having read their ‘Horatio at the Bridge’, the Vikings were surprised to find that the extreme narrowness of the causeway meant that a mere three of Byrhtnoth’s soldiers – Wulfstan, Aelfere and Maccus – were able to hold back their 3,000-strong army. Or so goes the tale at least. In reality, one imagines that all of Byrhtnoth’s small force was employed in keeping the Norsemen bottled up on the island.

Tryggvason soon tired of this and complained to Byrhtnoth that having his troops cooped up in this manner was not playing the game. The Saxon ealdor, chivalrous to a fault, agreed. He fatally allowed the Vikings to come across the causeway unmolested so that the opposing forces might fight on equal terms on an adjacent field. In doing this, he somehow overlooked the fact that his band of peasant warriors was rather seriously outnumbered. The Vikings thanked their hosts, before taking great care to butcher them almost to a man. According to an epic poem about the battle written four years later by an anonymous hand, Byrhtnoth himself was killed in the mêlée, pierced by a poisoned Viking spear before being hacked to pieces.

So began that inglorious chapter of Anglo-Saxon history that saw the country bled dry by the payment of the so-called Danegeld – the Danes having taken note of how easy it was for their Norwegian brethren to exact money from the English. Naturally enough, each time the hapless king – take a bow, Æthelred II (the Unready) – paid the Danes off with boatloads of money (the initial payment in 991 was an eye-watering 3,300kg of silver), he found that they returned not long afterwards to ask for more. Then the Swedes got in on the act and proved themselves even more adroit at it. Such was the success of these extortion rackets that archaeologists have excavated far more English coinage from this period in Scandinavia than they have in England. It’s estimated that in total the Anglo-Saxons gave over more than six million silver coins, collectively weighing in at over 100 tonnes.

However, it needn’t have been that way at all. Had Byrhtnoth simply kept Tryggvason’s forces on Northey Island until an army large enough to defeat it had been assembled, England would not have needed to buy its way out of trouble. As a result, the nation would almost certainly not have found itself visited seventy-five years later by Harald Hardrada. The Norwegian thought to go one better than his Nordic countrymen and cousins: rather than merely extort money out of the English – who were understandably seen throughout Scandinavia as a soft touch – he aspired to their throne.

Had Hardrada not landed his army on the Yorkshire coast in 1066, King Harold II of England would not have had to march his soldiers at full speed from London to defeat the invaders at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Consequently, the Saxon king’s army would not have been so exhausted and depleted in numbers when, just 19 days and a heroic 240-mile southward march later, it had to face William, the Duke of Normandy’s troops near Hastings. Since, even under these circumstances, Harold’s forces came close to winning the battle, it’s not stretching credibility to claim that had they been at full strength – both physically and numerically – they would indeed have done so.

William was crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. In an eerie echo of the events of 991, on his way to claim the throne he, too, had found his army held back (albeit temporarily) by a much smaller force: on this occasion one defending London Bridge. Once crowned, he swiftly set about the Normanisation of his new territory. This included the introduction of Norman French as the official tongue. Thus the English language experienced a great sea change as its Germanic Saxon words started to be eased out in favour of the more sensuous-sounding Norman French vocabulary. Thus, for example, when an English speaker today wishes to get across the idea that something is bendy, they will say that it is ‘malleable’ or ‘pliable’ rather than that it is ‘schwank’, as might be the case if Byrhtnoth (and thus Harold) had won. Many may say that that is no bad thing.

Furthermore, the change in language meant that rather than habitually ending sentences with a verb (as is the case with German today), the English are more likely to finish them with a noun or an adjective. Since there are far more nouns and adjectives than there are verbs, this makes it much easier to tell the sort of joke known as a ‘switch’. This works by substituting the word the hearer is expecting at the end of a sentence for one that changes the entire meaning of it. As a result, being funny in English is arguably less challenging than it is in German. This is a good thing to keep in mind next time you hear someone ribbing the Germans for their apparent lack of humour.

And all this occurred simply because of a single rash decision made by an obscure local leader on the banks of a minor Essex river over a thousand years ago.