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From the close of the eighth century, fierce warriors from Scandinavia descended on the undefended coasts of northern Britain. At first they contented themselves with intermittent raids on monasteries – with arson, murder and kidnap; but then, in 865, they came to stay. A ‘Great Heathen Host’ landed in East Anglia, reduced that kingdom to vassalage, established a Norse presence in the southern part of Northumbria, and precipitated a series of wars with the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex that would last until the 950s.
Max Adams traces the heroic efforts of Ælfred of Wessex, his successors and his fellow kings in Britain to adapt and survive in the face of a new and terrifying threat. He explores the accommodations made between native and incomer, and the forces that led to cultural assimilation and integration among the Scandinavian populations who settled in Britain.
Convention has it that Ælfred of Wessex, Constantín of Alba and the grandsons of Rhodri the Great are the founding fathers of England, Scotland and Wales, nations forged in the chaos of an age of terror; but Ælfred’s Britain reveals a kaleidoscope of continuing regional diversity, in which the old kingdoms – from Kent to Wessex, from Mercia to Lindsey, from Gwynedd to Strathclyde – express a patchwork of ineradicable local identities.
Weighing the evidence of chronicle, coinage, excavation, landscape and place name, Max Adams plots a clear path through the shape-shifting complexities of Britain’s Viking Age.