ST FINDAN—PICTLAND—WALES—THE FIRST —OVERWINTERING—THE WEST SAXON KINGS—THE GREAT HOST—THE CONQUEST OF YORK—ÆLFRED ÆTHELING—A YEAR OF NINE ENGAGEMENTS
While æðelstan, æðelwulf’s regent in Kent, was considering how to deal with unwel- come winter visitors, the coastal communities of the Irish Sea and the Western Isles counted the human cost of Viking raids. Our most assiduous informants for these events are the monks whose accounts of the lives of saints, in an age when the first flush of monastic fervour had faded, came alive again with the threat of apocalypse and the promise of eternal glory. Martyrdom, the End of Days, miraculous deliverance from the evil heathen, divine punishment for sins: these themes resonate through contemporary literature, from Alcuin’s letters admonishing his peers to the annals of the senior Irish monastic houses. The hagiographers, experiencing the horrors of piracy and destruction at second hand, deployed a full palette of literary and theological imagery to enrich the portraits of their holy men.
St Findan was a famous ascetic of Rheinau Abbey, founded on an island in the upper reaches of the Rhine, who died around 879 having voluntarily spent the last twenty-odd years of his life as a walled-in hermit under circumstances of extreme privation.1 His improbable life was told prosaically, and with absolute conviction, by those who had known him. He was born in Ireland, in the province of Leinster, in a generation whose parents had become accustomed to the predations of Scandinavian raiders and slave-traders and were hardened to the violence of feud and raiding among rival kindreds.
10. MENACE ON THE HORIZON: the annals record a litany of attacks on coastal communities.
This man’s sister, among other women, became a captive of the foreigners who go by the name of Norðmanni, in the course of destructive raids which they made on many parts of the Irish island which is also known as Hibernia. Then the father instructed his son Findan to take a sum of money, ransom his sister and bring her back to him. Accordingly, taking with him some followers and an interpreter he sought eagerly to carry out a father’s instructions and obey the urgings of a brother’s affectionate heart. But early in the course of this mission, he was waylaid by the foreigners, cast into chains and, as was to be expected, brought straight away to their ships which were moored off the nearby shore.2
11. NORSE RUNES carved into the walls of the Neolithic passage grave at Maes Howe, Mainland, Orkney.
Findan was bound in chains and left without food or drink. So far his story is conventional: a tale of the indiscriminate inhumanity of terrorism. But his captors, discussing his fate, decided that it was unreasonable to enslave a man who had brought ransom. They let him go, although, we surmise, they kept his money and his sister.
For a second time, fate conspired against the Irishman. His father’s clan became embroiled in the sort of blood feud that dogged the small kingdoms of Ireland just as it did the disparate tribes of Scandinavia. Its prevalence in Early Medieval society is told in the law codes that proscribe feuding (often in vain, one suspects) and define the values of all classes of men so that their families might claim blood price from the families of perpetrators, instead of perpetuating cycles of violence. In Findan’s case, his father killed a warrior belonging to a rival clan. The chief of his enemies sent a war band to exact revenge, surrounding Findan’s father’s hall, setting fire to it and murdering him as he fled. Findan’s brother was also slaughtered; Findan, enjoying the divine protection which had favoured him before, escaped.
Peace was eventually restored; compensation paid. But such feuds were not easily laid to rest. Findan’s enemies now conspired to lure him to a feast from which, by prior arrangement, a band of Norse slave-traders kidnapped him. Like common merchandise he was passed from one trader to another before finding himself on board a vessel heading north in company with other raiding parties: north beyond Ireland towards the Minch and Cape Wrath: the cape of storms.
The western seaways must have bristled with ships during the ninth and tenth centuries. The Hebrides were in the process of being settled by significant numbers of Norse; traders, raiders and fishermen plied the seas during the summer months between Ireland and Norway in increasingly large fleets, raiding for slaves and church relics, fishing, sealing and whaling in the rich waters and trading with settlers in furs, antler, steatite (soapstone) and wool. The sheltered east coasts of Uist, Harris and Lewis provided harbours in which to establish longphuirt; the machair* of the west offered fertile, frost-free farming; perhaps also freedom from stifling overlordship.
The convoy carrying Findan and his fellow slaves now encountered another fleet of Norse. They parleyed; a fight broke out and became deadly serious. Findan, shackled, nevertheless acquitted himself with distinction in the ensuing pandemonium and was rewarded by having his shackles removed. So it came about that when the fleet reached Orkney the pirates went ashore to rest and take on fresh water and Findan was given his parole until such time as favourable winds might carry them eastwards, and home.
In an episode reminiscent of David Balfour’s Hebridean adventure in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Highland novel Kidnapped, Findan found a boulder by the shore beneath which he might hide. Between the tide-washed rock and his Norse captors, he chose exposure, hunger and the risk of drowning; after two days the pirates sailed away, having failed to discover his cave. Like David Balfour, on exploring his new world he found that he was marooned on an island—Hoy, probably—with no human habitation and with no food to sustain him. Eventually, near starving and casting his lot in with sea monsters and dolphins, he leapt into the perilous waters of Hoy Sound and was miraculously carried by the tides (the tidal races around Orkney are among the fiercest in the world) to Mainland, where he found sanctuary with a Christian bishop who happened to speak the Irish language.†
12. ‘A FOREIGN ARMY sat in York’s crumbling ruins’: the fourth-century remains of the emperor Constantine’s tower.
The Annals of Ulster offer a more laconic but chilling account of events: a litany of destruction. Under the year 825, for example, are listed Mag Bile (Movilla in Co. Down), burning with its oratories; the plundering of Inis Daimle and Dún Lethglaise; a great pestilence across Ireland; and a rout inflicted by the Ulaid‡ on the heathen—they did not always have it their own way. The last entry for that year, written as if in bland disgust at such a comprehensive butcher’s bill, recounts ‘the violent death of Blamac son of Flann at the hands of the heathen in Í Coluim Cille’: Iona. Walafrid Strabo, Carolingian court scholar and abbot of the island monastery of Reichenau on Lake Constance, must have felt a special affinity with his brothers far away on Iona, most celebrated of the western monasteries. A fascinating, if grisly, story of Viking predation is contained in a poem he composed about Abbot Blamac (or Blathmac), who, he wrote, had come to Iona ‘wishing to endure Christ’s scars, because there many a pagan horde of Danes is wont to land, armed with malignant greed’.3
Blathmac was blessed, if that is the right word, with foresight of an impending attack, sensing that ‘the approaching wolves were hastening’ towards the island. Many of the brethren scattered, taking footpaths to the remotest parts of Iona where they might hide; but Blathmac stayed behind, praying in Colm Cille’s church. The pirates (historians generally agree that they were probably Norwegians rather than Danes) burst into the abbey buildings, slaying those who had remained to celebrate mass with their abbot.§ The intruders now demanded that Blathmac surrender the shrine of Colm Cille, with its precious relics. Many of Iona’s treasures must already have been plundered or taken to safety at Kells in Ireland; what remained on the island had been buried by the monks in a barrow beneath a pile of turfs, according to Strabo. Blathmac’s refusal to give up the shrine ensured his martyrdom, ‘torn limb from limb’ by the impious barbarians, and he became a glorious exemplar for the faithful of those troubled times, his story travelling the length and breadth of Christian Europe.
*
The fortunes of the secular Scottish kingdoms in the ninth century,# and of the vast bulk of small, rural settlements whose labour supported them, are more difficult to track than the fates of the martyrs. Few indigenous annals survive: there is no remotely contemporary Pictish text nor any from the kingdom of Strathclyde, and only one from Dál Riata.∫ Partial genealogies of kings, surviving in later material, allow historians to reconstruct a few fragments of a lost narrative. For the most part, Scottish kingdoms feature only when Irish or Northumbrian interests there drew the attention of their annalists, or when much later Norse sagas wrote down the creation myths of their own kind. But the enigmatic art of Pictland is still a very active focus for research and, now and then, a ‘new’ sculpture turns up. Historical geography yields fresh perspectives on landscape, territory and political developments from the analysis of existing material. Only archaeology can produce substantial new material, and its wheels grind slowly, if sometimes spectacularly.
Early Scottish history is a flimsy bridge constructed between the two banks of a river: projecting tentatively forward from the Roman period (rebellious, half-seen tribes partially subdued by Roman generals but ultimately left to their own devices and never a full part of the Imperial project) and back from the medieval (steeped in nationalist myth and cultural smoked glass). Studies of Scottish history were, for a long time, diverted from the sorts of questions being asked of contemporary kingdoms further south and west by both a lack of secular sources and the apparent enigma of the Picts, evident from the distinct and opaque symbolism of their stone sculpture and odd references apparently implying that they were an archaic race, unrelated to the so-called Celts.
Scholarship has moved on. The Pictish kingdoms are now recognized as having belonged culturally and linguistically to the greater indigenous group to which the Irish and Welsh belong. Their language was a form of ‘Q’ Celtic, with similarities to Irish, Manx and Scots Gaelic. The ideology of their social and political élites is harder to reconstruct, except insofar as they shared affinities with other Christian tribal states. But the wonderfully carved symbols of their self-conscious psyches—bulls, fabulous marine monsters, hunting parties, hounds, mirrors, birds of prey—pictured with or without crosses, saints and apostles, shows their élite to have enjoyed a rich cultural hinterland somewhat obsessed with expressions of rank, with animist totems, warfare, noble pursuits and religious symbolism. Portmahomack, as nowhere else, shows the Picts to have been proficient farmers, engineers and craftspeople.
By the end of the seventh century much of what is now Scotland south of the Forth–Clyde isthmus lay under Northumbrian influence. Argyll and the southern Hebrides were the Gaelic-speaking lands of Dál Riata, with strong historic ties to Ulster. Looming over the River Clyde, Dumbarton Rock, more properly Alclud, was the fortress capital of Strathclyde: British in language and culture, periodically powerful and, in later centuries, resurgent, able to rule over south-west Scotland and Cumbria.
The distribution of so-called Pictish art, of early churches, of fortresses, suggests that two kingdoms dominated the east of what would become Scotland: Atholl, centred on Strathearn and the watershed of the River Tay, with a capital at Forteviot and a sacral ‘hill of destiny’ at Scone; and Fortriu, centred on the equally fertile lands around the Moray Firth and north Aberdeenshire.Ω North of the Great Glen there seems to have been a separate entity called Cait, which became Caithness, and it is possible that Fib, or Fife, retained a status as an independent kingdom; but these are murky waters.
The political geography of these kingdoms can be mapped in terms of what are known as cultural core lands, after the phrase proposed by the eminent historical geographer Brian Roberts.4 In the Early Medieval period fertile lowland plains, the drainage basins of navigable rivers, offered both rich lands for exploitation and coherent territorial units, often ruled over by chieftains whose descendants became their kings. The land of the Hwicce around the Severn and Warwickshire Avon was one; the Bernicia of the River Tyne another, each one offering a range of riverine, arable, pastoral and other natural resources, the river its unifying thread. The name Strathclyde, meaning the broad valley of the River Clyde, neatly encapsulates the type.
Significant features of such core lands include royal palaces: Craig Phadraig, perhaps, near Inverness, and Forteviot in Strathearn; inauguration sites like Scone; fringe zones of less favourable land where grants of estates were made to establish ‘royal’ minsters. These latter are usually identified by the frequent occurrence of sophisticated, decorative sculpture, such as one finds at Meigle in Strathmore and on the Tarbat peninsula, displays of élite patronage of important cult sites. Secular settlements characterized by specialized production and large-scale consumption, which ought to go with such core lands, have not yet been found in eastern Scotland: do they lie in wait, or were these lands simply not sufficiently productive or developed for them to exist? Archaeology will eventually have its say; and the smart money says they will be found.
Pictish settlements have still not been excavated in sufficient numbers to construct a robust economic and social narrative for them. The classic type-site of the so-called Pictish longhouse, a timber and turf dwelling whose walls have distinctively rounded corners, is Pitcarmick in north-east Perthshire; another small complex has recently been excavated in Glenshee in the same county. Frustratingly, the latter has produced Pitcarmick-type structures that, perversely, did not contain hearths; and without a hearth, what is a dwelling? The longhouses at Lairn in Glenshee sit in a landscape of roundhouses which are often assumed, on thin grounds, to be ‘prehistoric’ in date. Archaeologists continue to scratch their heads. Other Pictish sites are associated with souterrains, the enigmatic underground structures also found in Ireland, which look as though they were food storage complexes (not the dwellings of hobbit-like Picts, as popular fancy would have it).
On many Scottish lochs, crannogs (pile-built circular dwellings lying just offshore, reached by wooden causeways) seem to have belonged to transhumant≈ élites, perhaps the summer residences of chiefs and petty kings. It remains to be seen if the bulk of the northern post-Roman peoples lived in as yet unidentified settlements not visible to archaeology (perhaps lying beneath contemporary farms and villages); or if they were still living at sites traditionally identified with the late Iron Age; hillforts and brochs, for example. A comprehensive programme of Early Medieval field archaeology, especially excavation, is required in mainland Scotland. Portmahomack proves that the evidence is there, even if acidic upland soils have often degraded it severely.∂
Alex Woolf, author of the most authoritative recent history of Scotland in this period,5 in unpicking the complexities of its early dynasties, proposes that in the early ninth century the northern kingdoms were dominated by King Constantín, son of Wrguist, ruling Fortriu and Atholl together for thirty years and probably, by the end of his life in 820, overlord of all the lands north of the Forth; then by his brother Onuist, who succeeded him for fourteen years until 834; and by Constantín’s son Domnall, who ruled Dál Riata in the west for twenty-four years until 835. The deaths of two powerful kings in such a short space of time unsurprisingly left the northern kingdoms vulnerable. Scandinavian entrepreneurs had keen eyes and ears, their sensitivity to the weakness of their potential prey as acute as stalking tigers. Four years later a Norse invasion triggered the series of events that would lead to the emergence of a kingdom of Alba.
Under the year 839 (the year in which King Ecgberht of Wessex died) the Annals of Ulster record that ‘the heathens won a battle against the men of Fortriu, and Eóganán son of Aengus, Bran son of Óengus, Aed son of Boanta, and others almost innumerable fell there’. These were the short-lived successors to the dynast Constantín. Historians used to make much of an entry, in the Irish Annals of the Four Masters under the year 835 (but corrected to 839, the same year as the devastating raid on Fortriu), in which an Irish chief went to Dál Riata with a war band in support of one Cináed, son of Ailpín. From such trivial entries are national myths born. Kenneth McAlpin, Cináed mac Ailpín, has become Scotland’s Ælfred, its royal dynastic founder and unifier. He sits at the head of a genealogy preserved in a work known as the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba (CKA) whose credibility for this period is seriously in doubt and whose complexity makes it very difficult to interpret with confidence.6 In the Chronicle, essentially an expanded king list, Cináed is credited with conquering and then absorbing Pictavia from a base in his Dál Riatan homeland; with founding Alba as a single entity, just as Ælfred is frequently credited with seeing off the Vikings single-handed and creating a kingdom called England.
The chronicler of the CKA would have us believe that Cináed ruled Dál Riata and Pictavia for the next sixteen years before dying at a date calculated as 858; that he attacked Dunbar and the monastery of Melrose in north Northumbria and transferred the relics of Colm Cille from Ionaπ to a new church (assumed to be Dunkeld in Strathtay: Dún Chaillean, the Fort of the Caledonii). During his reign, the chronicler records, Danari (a generic for Norse) wasted Pictavia as far east as Clunie and Dunkeld.
Cináed, then, was later remembered to have ruled over both Picts and Dál Riatan Scots. He was not the first; and we cannot even be sure of his geographical origins, so from those points of view his career is noteworthy rather than spectacular. From his reign, it is true, Pictavia and Dál Riata lost their individual identities so far as the chroniclers were concerned; they are simply not mentioned again after the middle of the ninth century. But as a founding dynast Cináed must be demoted; only in the reign of his grandson, Constantín mac Áeda, can we confidently begin to describe the emergence of a coherent kingdom of all Scotland outside Strathclyde and the Scandinavian settlements: of a state called Alba.
No more detailed history of this key period in northern history is ever likely to be drawn. But if we cannot identify the reign of Cináed as the founding event of Alba, we can at least say that the intervention of Norsemen, and their future domination of the western part of Scotland, had forced a decisive shift in the orientation of Scottish politics towards the east.
The kingdoms of Early Medieval Scotland had been Christian, at least nominally, since the seventh century. In common with other early kingdoms their economies were coinless (coins were circulated as bullion, but not minted north of York) and based on food and service renders; their social structures hierarchical, with slaves at the base and kings at the top. Warrior élites were supported by groupings of households whose economic geographies cannot have looked much different from the shires of Northumbria or the small territorial kingdoms and cantrefi∆ of Ireland and Wales: miniature cultural core lands, if you like. The sophistication of the monastic settlement at Portmahomack and the overwhelming evidence of surviving Pictish art reveal a highly politicized, self-conscious culture, actively connected to its neighbours by linguistic, historical and intellectual ties. Had the works of its scholars and genealogists survived, as they did in Northumbria, we would be able to paint every bit as rich a picture of Pictavia and the other Scottish kingdoms.
In the lands north of the Forth and Clyde the impact of Viking raids and settlement was felt earlier and more profoundly than in the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons and Welsh. Rival dynasties took advantage of the instability caused by this new, third-party intruder, to make war on their neighbours and ancient rivals, to annex, render tribute, even conquer. If Cináed is to fit credibly into Scottish history, it is as one of many opportunists of the Viking Age, one whose dynastic legacy assured him a permanent place in history as a nation’s progenitor.
While history and archaeology let us down in the Early Medieval North, at least the latter has been much more productive in the island communities of Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles. This is itself a matter of historical and geographical chance. Many coastal island sites, buried by windblown sand over the millennia, have been revealed by the same sorts of storms that buried them; in sand their structural integrity and material culture—drystone walling, domestic utensils, hearths, bed-settings, decorative items and containers—have been preserved. They are treasure chests.
In the isles, the distinctive forms of so-called Pictish wheelhouse and Norse longhouse, with their dramatic and tightly-managed internal layouts, beautifully constructed walls and wide distribution, have allowed archaeologists to map the settlement of Scandinavian communities from the late eighth and ninth centuries onwards, far into the medieval period when the Lords of the Isles were overtly Norse in culture, language and affiliation; to map, also, the crucial period when native populations co-existed with or were driven out, enslaved or oppressed by the incomers.
Attention was first drawn to the possibility of such cultural conflict by the romantic re-emergence of the Shetland site that became known as Jarlshof (christened by Walter Scott on a visit there in 1814). Excavated between the 1930s and the 1950s, it revealed a sequence of occupation that stretched as far back as the Neolithic (roughly 4000 BCE to 2000 BCE ) and was represented in all subsequent periods. Its Norse longhouses, the first to be excavated in Britain, were found to have been continuously occupied until the fourteenth century.
In Orkney substantial excavation campaigns have allowed archaeologists to reconstruct highly detailed sequences of settlements at Brough of Birsay on the west coast of Mainland, and elsewhere. Burials of Scandinavian appearance, including boat burials, now have distribution maps all their own, and a number of settlements of the Norse period are currently under excavation in the Western Isles. The material clues to a century and more of human contact, tension and survival, of clashes of religion, belief and language, are slowly being teased from the sands of the Atlantic shores.
Like Western Scotland, Wales shared affinities and vulnerabilities with the coastal communities of Ireland; its land borders were zones of periodic tension and conflict with ambitious Anglo-Saxon neighbours; its mountainous heart gave Welsh political geography a regional, north–south axis. But its history and archaeology in the early part of the Viking Age is frustratingly obscure.
In earlier periods kings of Powys and Gwynedd dominated the north and the border zone with Mercia. At the beginning of the ninth century a new dynasty, perhaps originating in the Isle of Man and apparently seeking new horizons under pressure from Scandinavian piracy and settlement, came to control the ancient kingdom of Gwynedd from its heartland in Anglesey, or Môn. In 825, that tumultuous year recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Annals of Ulster, Merfyn Frych acquired the crown of Gwynedd from the supposed last king of the line of Cunedda, Hywel ap Rhodri Molwynog. His son Rhodri Mawr (the ‘Great’) annexed Powys sometime around 856 and the southern kingdom of Seisyllwg** in about 871. In 876 he was defeated in a battle on Môn by a Viking force; he died in 878, killed by a king of Mercia after having won mastery of most of modern Wales. His sons, like those of Cináed and of Æðelwulf of Wessex, were rulers of successful houses themselves; the dynasty would produce a celebrated overlord, law-maker and friend of the West Saxons, Hywel Dda, the ‘Good’.
Just as Northumbria had its precious Cuthbert and Dál Riata its Colm Cille, so the Welsh church had as its cult hero St David, a tough, uncompromising sixth-century bishop and monastic entrepreneur whose relics were said to be held in the cathedral of the city that bears his name.7 The Annales Cambriae or Welsh Annals, preserved in the historical miscellany known as ‘Nennius’, seem to have been compiled here in the middle of the ninth century. Uniquely, David’s shrine was not despoiled by Viking pirates during the ninth or tenth centuries, despite several raids on the community; indeed Wales as a whole, Anglesey apart, seems to have been affected more by the tides of the Viking Age than by direct attack.††
The geography of Wales, as its engineers know only too well, does not favour communications. Only the Rivers Dee, Severn, Wye and Cleddau offer substantial navigable waterways, mostly along its eastern borders (and each of them was penetrated by raids during the ninth century). The legacy of Roman roads is unimpressive: routes through the valleys have been hard won. Its great natural harbours are confined to the south-west, on Milford Haven, and the south coast and Severn estuary. The features that most hinder its economic development are precisely those that protected it from the worst attentions of the Vikings.
*
The first overwintering of a Scandinavian fleet, on Sheppey in 850, was followed by the arrival of an immense naval force at the mouth of the Thames in the spring or summer of 851. A fleet of 350 ships, if true, is a step-change in ambition: this was not raiding but state-sponsored invasion. The hæðnum herige or ‘heathen army’ attacked Canterbury, perhaps the closest thing to a town in any of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and vulnerable to marine assault by virtue of the River Stour. In the ninth century the river may have been navigable as far inland as the trading settlement at Fordwich, just 2 miles (3 km) from the Roman civitas‡‡ capital of the Cantiaci and from Christ Church. It is far from clear whether the Scandinavian forces had a coherent plan or whether, on arriving in the Thames estuary in convoy, they split up to pursue their own predatory ambitions. Coin production in Canterbury and London seems to have been disrupted for some time afterwards and no Kentish charters survive from the years immediately after the great raid.
Part of the fleet, at least, penetrated the Thames valley: King Beorhtwulf of Mercia was put to flight, his levies defeated, his fate unrecorded. The heathen army crossed the Thames into Surrey, where they faced stiffer resistance. Æðelwulf, king of Wessex, with the levies of his second son Æðelbald, met the invading force at an unidentified place called Acleah and ‘there made the greatest slaughter of a heathen host that we have heard tell of up to the present day, and there won the victory’.8 In spite of their very evident vulnerability to coastal attacks, the kings of the Anglo-Saxons, fighting on their own territory with experienced shire musters and a well-trained and armed warrior élite, were more than a match for a Viking force reliant on raiding for supplies and isolated from its ships. In 851 the economic and social machinery of the Anglo-Saxon states may have been bruised, but their existence was not yet threatened.
Mercia’s new king, Burghred,§§ now sought to establish himself and revive the waning fortunes of a once-great kingdom. In 853 he won support from Æðelwulf in pressing historical claims against Powys, his western neighbour. He married Æðelwulf’s daughter Æðelswið in a ceremony at the royal West Saxon township of Chippenham (Cippanhamme: Cippa’s promontory’) in Wiltshire: a seal of both alliance and submission. By 857 he was able to issue a charter granting a house and commercial rights in Lundenwic to the bishop of Winchester.9
The shuffling pack of Insular dynastic succession produced new cards in this decade. Cyngen, the Powysian king who built the famous Pillar of Eliseg in memory of a great ancestor, perhaps under pressure from both Mercian ambitions to the east and a newly aggressive kingdom of Gwynedd in the north, abdicated and travelled to Rome, where he died in 854. The following years saw Viking raids deep into the Welsh marches among the dwellers of the Wrekin and on Môn.10 In 856 Powys was annexed by Rhodri Mawr (who impressed the Irish annalists by killing a Viking chieftain called Orm in the same year) and absorbed into a greater Gwynedd.11 King Æðelweard of East Anglia, an obscure figure, died and was succeeded by the more famous Eadmund. In Northumbria, the death of a King Eanred was followed by a number of short reigns and depositions, the fruits of ancient rivalries, and the once-great kingdom descended into factional warfare. In Pictavia, in 858, Cináed died and was succeeded by his brother Domnall.
Æðelwulf, whose father, Ecgberht, had ruled from 802 to 839, had five sons (Æðelstan, Æðelbald, Æðelberht, Æðelred and Ælfred) and may have felt sufficiently secure—or old—by 855 to undertake his own pilgrimage to Rome, taking with him his youngest child Ælfred and, on his return a year later, bringing home a new bride: Judith, the daughter of Charles the Bald. The king of the West Saxons now enjoyed sufficient prestige to dine at Europe’s high table.
The king’s eldest son, Æðelstan, his regent in Kent, must by now have died. Like Charlemagne in Francia, Æðelwulf tried by agreement and treaty to ensure a peaceful succession by the division of the kingdom in his will. At least one of his sons now pre-empted that will, perhaps fearing that his new, very young Frankish stepmother might produce rival heirs. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is diplomatically silent on the matter; but Ælfred’s Welsh biographer, Bishop Asser, recorded that on Æðelwulf’s return from Rome and Francia in 855–856, Æðelbald relegated him to the subordinate throne of Kent and Sussex. After his father’s death in 858 Æðelbald married his stepmother Judith, much to the disgust of the church.12 As Æðelstan had ruled in Kent as a subregulus, so Æðelbald deployed his next brother Æðelberht in the same role; but after Æðelbald’s own untimely death in 860 Æðelberht came to rule over all the southern kingdoms.
A disputed succession that might have metastasized into dynastic war, as it had in Francia, was resolved by Æðelbald’s death and by that of his brother Æðelberht five years later in 865. The fourth son, Æðelred, succeeded to a united Wessex, Kent and Sussex. His only surviving brother, Ælfred, was just sixteen.## Æðelred could not have chosen a more unpropitious time. The leaders of a fleet laid up menacingly on Thanet through the winter of 864–865 negotiated a large tribute from the Kentishmen and then, in secret and by night, left their camp and plundered eastern Kent. Worse was to come:
þy ilcan geare cuom micel here on Angelcynnes lond.
The same year a great host came to the land of the Angles.
The year 865 marks a pivotal moment in the Viking Age: when raiders became conquerors. From this year, Scandinavian kings ruled parts of Britain, through fluctuating fortunes, for almost a century. The arrival of the mycel hæþen here,∫∫ the Great Heathen Host, shocked contemporaries. It may have been no more than a great raid that morphed into a longer campaign, with no initial strategy other than the winning of booty and slaves. But it altered British history irrevocably and, in a connected world, it has a political and geographical context that requires some explaining. South-eastern Britain, facing the Continent and familiar to generations of Scandinavian traders and raiders, was a soft target; even so, it would help if we knew where the Great Host had been before it arrived on the shores of East Anglia.
One might see, in the death of King Horik in Denmark a dozen years previously, the collapse of Danish royal authority and in its aftermath the sort of political chaos that propels ambitious rivals to try their hand abroad. Here the evidence of the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto offers a clue: the invaders of 865 were, it says, led by one Ubba, leader of a Frisian contingent, and Hálfdan, a Danish king; and together the Host is referred to as Scaldingi.13 The Scaldingi might be the Scyldings of Beowulf, as argued by Colin Chase: that is to say, Danes, for whom this is a generic term.14 Alex Woolf has suggested, however, that they were identified as Scaldingi because they had recently crossed the Channel from the mouth of the River Scheldt, where they had established a longphort and trading centre on the island of Walcheren. In the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the term Deniscan,ΩΩ Danes, was later used to denote Scandinavians who had crossed from Continental Europe, as opposed to the Norðmannum, ‘Northmen’, who came from either Norway or Ireland.
To add to the possible confusion, the absence of a great Norse chief, the celebrated Ívarr, from Irish annals at this time might suggest that he was seeking new territorial conquests: he is named as a leader of the Great Host by the late tenth-century chronicler Æðelweard≈≈ and in the Norse saga Knutsdrápa.15 In the Irish records he appears, fighting with and against Irish kings, alongside Óláfr and Ásl from a base in Dublin, and one source describes them as brothers.16 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that he was a brother of Hálfdan.17 Ívarr, sometimes called Ivar ‘the Boneless’, is much discussed by historians because he spawned three generations of formidable leaders—the so-called Uí Ímair—among the kingdoms of Ireland and Britain. If so, he stands alongside the Ailpín dynasty of Alba, the Ecgberhtings of Wessex and the descendants of Merfyn Frych in Wales as a founding dynast of medieval Britain.
It is quite plausible that several sons of a powerful family might seek their fortunes beyond the seas and, at some point, agree to combine in a grand expedition of conquest; or that they should fix on the Insular kingdoms, weakened by internal rivalries, to try their hand. The Annals of Ulster record that Óláfr and Ásl plundered Fortriu in 866,∂∂ initiating a series of campaigns in the North with profound implications for the future of Alba.
To understand the timing of the Great Host’s arrival in East Anglia it is worth looking across the Channel again, to events in Francia. Charles the Bald may have been seeking allies to assist in his defence against Viking raids when he gave his daughter Judith to Æðelwulf in 855. Western Francia, an enormous territory with a very long and exposed coastline, had been subject to many damaging raids during previous decades. Pippin of Aquitaine, another grandson of Charlemagne, went so far as to conspire with Viking raiders on the River Loire after escaping from enforced monastic retirement and together, in 857, they sacked Poitiers in Aquitaine. A year later Charles’s brother Louis the German invaded West Francia and Charles was forced to flee to Burgundy. In 859, according to the Annals of St Bertin, the Danes ‘ravaged the places beyond the Scheldt’—that is to say, the Frisian coastline. The monastery at St Valery sur Somme in Picardy was laid waste, as were the civitas of Amiens and the island of Betuwe in the River Rhine. In Paris, the monks of St Denis removed the relics of their great saint to a safe place, as previously the community of Colm Cille had taken their saint’s shrine to safety.
Charles’s restoration in 860 signalled an outbreak of fragile internal peace in Francia; even so, large and numerous bands of increasingly confident pirates were able to penetrate the great waterways of northern and eastern Francia at will. Like an unquenchable forest fire, the extinguishing or paying off of one band simply invited the arrival or return of another. In 861 a Viking fleet attacked and burned Paris. Another fleet, lately returned from an attack on England (an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the sacking of Winchester in that year), sailed up the Seine with 200 ships, besieging a ‘Norse’ fortification on the island of Oissel, south of present-day Rouen.
In 862 Charles won a small but significant victory in his attempt to frustrate the pirates. They had penetrated his defences along the River Marne, burning a bridge at a place called Trilbardou. Charles responded rapidly, following ‘indispensable advice’, as the chronicler of St Bertin put it, rebuilding the bridge while the pirate vessels were upstream and trapping them. The raiders were forced to come to terms. Charles, seizing the moment, called a great assembly at Pîtres on the Seine in Normandy, just upstream from Rouen, and ordered defensive bridges to be built all along the Seine, reasoning that physical barriers across rivers might act as both a disincentive to piracy and as a means of concentrating and manoeuvring his own forces in rapid response to intelligence.ππ
Two years later, in 864, Charles reconvened the assembly at Pîtres and issued thirty-seven edicts which have taken their place in French history as Magna Carta has in England. Like that charter, his edicts’ role as founding documents of French statehood might be overstated. What we can say is that they represented an attempt by Charles, following in the footsteps of the late Roman codices, to impose universal military burdens, to revalue and reform coinage, to reorganize the army and create a rapid-response cavalry unit; to ban the sale of weapons to ‘foreigners’ and expand the provision of strategic bridges. In strengthening the economic and military defences of West Francia, Charles cannily increased both his personal power and that of the state. In adversity lay opportunity.18 The mycel here landed in East Anglia a year after the edicts issued at Pîtres; it is not certain that invasion was a direct reaction to the frustration of their Frankish ambitions, but it seems very likely. They overwintered there, perhaps in the secure, watery fastnesses of Flegg, north of Great Yarmouth.∆∆ King Eadmund sued for peace and gave them horses. From this point onwards, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle follows their fortunes in detail:
Her for se here of Eastenglum ofer Humbre muþan to Eoforwicceastre on Norþhymbre...
In this year the host went over the mouth of the Humber to York in Northumbria... and there was great dissension of the people among themselves; and they had repudiated their king Osberht and accepted Ælle, a king not of royal birth; and it was late in the year when they set about making war against the host.19
At the end of 866, then, Northumbria appears to have been in a state of civil war, and lay fatally exposed. If the Historia of St Cuthbert is right in saying that the two kings were brothers, they must have been rivals from an ancient Deiran dynasty, its ancestral heartlands in East Yorkshire, from which King Edwin had risen in the seventh century to the heights of imperium over almost all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Edwin had built his first church in the ruins of the Emperor Constantine’s city of Eboracum: Eoforwicceastre to the Anglo-Saxons; Jorvik to the Vikings, modern York. We should not be surprised if the leaders of the Scandinavian Host were aware of the military potential for decapitating the brittle ruling house of southern Northumbria and seizing the weakened kingdom for themselves. All the evidence suggests that their intelligence-gathering was effective. But they did not, to begin with, have it all their own way.
The various sources recording Northumbria’s conquest combine to paint a vivid picture of swinging fortunes and much spilt blood.20 In November the mycel here captured the ancient Roman legionary fortress at York and wasted the surrounding area.21 The bulk of the invading army may have travelled by ship from East Anglia along the coast of Lindsey and thence into the Humber, past its confluence with the Trent and followed the Ouse north. But the Host had acquired horses in East Anglia, so it seems more likely that fleet and land army agreed a rendezvous; and two points suggest themselves. If the fleet sailed up the Yorkshire Ouse to its confluence with the River Wharfe and thence to Tadcaster, where it bisects the Roman road, they could have met a rapidly moving mounted force arriving there overland. With the support of the main force in ships, the Host might then advance on York, lying exposed a mere 5 miles (8 km) away.
The military risk attached to this route was its necessarily passing through the heart of Mercia, where an attempt to engage it on home territory by King Burghred posed dangers. More likely, I think, the fleet first met and ferried the army across the Humber, where Ermine Street runs north from Lincoln; then the mounted force continued to York by road through territory lacking organized military control, while the fleet arrived on the Ouse in support shortly afterwards.
Early in 867 the two Northumbrian rivals put aside their differences and combined to attack the Danish Host, who retreated behind what was left of the Roman walls of the city, on the north-east bank of the only-too-navigable River Ouse. But the attack on the Host besieged in the city failed. In a bloody pitched battle inside the walls both sides suffered heavy casualties; but the Northumbrian army was destroyed, the two rival kings killed, and ‘the remnant’ made peace with the invaders.*** Recalling those events the community of Cuthbert regarded Osberht’s and Ælle’s fate as divine punishment for having ‘stolen’ between them six vills from St Cuthbert and for having ‘hated’ the saint.22 No chronicler recorded the devastating and permanent loss of York’s great library and monastic school, where Alcuin had acquired his scholarship in the previous century. The city’s subsequent flowering under Scandinavian influence would be industrial and commercial, rather than intellectual. Coin evidence suggests a vacuum in political control in the immediate aftermath of the battle for York; and the trading centre that lay at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss beneath medieval Fishergate, excavated in the 1980s, all but ceased to function. We do not know under whose direct administration York, or the kingdom, fell. The twelfth-century chronicler Symeon of Durham understood that one Ecgberht was set up as a puppet king north of the River Tyne, in Bernicia.
A foreign army sat in York’s crumbling ruins, feeding off its hinterland by whatever direct form of taxation it saw fit to impose and dispensing justice by right of arms. Northumbria, it seems, split into its ancient components, Bernicia and Deira. It is a salutary fact that north of the River Tees, perhaps an ancient boundary between the two Northumbrian kingdoms, there are virtually no Scandinavian place names, so common in Yorkshire. The descendants of the great seventh-century Bernician overlords may not have been able to expel the foreigners from the lands south of the Tees; but the dynasty that emerges as the Reeves of Bamburgh and later Earls of Northumbria does seem to have been able to halt the mycel here on the line of the Tyne.
The Host did not stay long in York to rule it directly. Towards the middle or end of 867 they turned south and, again, their destination suggests a co-ordination of land and water forces, this time at a point where Roman road and navigable river met on the River Trent in Mercia. They took winter quarters at Nottingham, if nothing else a statement of intent that could not be ignored by King Burghred. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 867 records that the Mercians ‘begged’ for help from King Æðelred and his young brother Ælfred, a partisan entry that can be read, more neutrally, as a formal request for military alliance against a common enemy. One might speculate that the Mercian queen, Æðelswið, was the intermediary between her husband and her brothers in Wessex.
Wessex responded, and the combined army came on the mycel here in their newly fortified river-front camp early in 868. The Chronicle records that despite a siege there was ‘no serious engagement’ and that the Mercians ‘made peace with the Host’. They were, it seems, given money to go away. Confronted with a large, if not superior, enemy and an apparently united front the Host returned to York and stayed there for a year, more or less secure in the knowledge that no Northumbrian force could engage them on equal terms.
If nothing else this early encounter between an invading Scandinavian force and the combined armies of two Anglo-Saxon kingdoms shows that the Host, from long practice on the Continent, could rapidly construct a defensive camp capable of withstanding a siege; and that the latter had no means of breaching such defences. Siege warfare was in its infancy; the initiative lay with the invaders: mobile, battle hardened and alive to every opportunity to divide and rule, or raid and vanish.
*
The seriousness of the threat posed by the mycel here to the southern kingdoms was by no means underestimated, even in its earliest phases. The impromptu alliance of 868 was cemented in the same year by the marriage of a Mercian ealdorman’s daughter, one Ælswið, to the ætheling of Wessex, Ælfred. Ælfred was nineteen years old. He had been born on a royal estate at Wantage, now in Berkshire, in the year 849, the youngest of five brothers.††† Stories recorded by Bishop Asser from Ælfred’s childhood—of illness, of his eagerness to learn his letters, of his comely appearance and piety, of his two journeys to Rome (one in company with his father in 855)—belong to the irreducible canon of English legend. He can have grown up with little or no expectation of becoming king after his father Æðewulf and four older brothers.
Ælfred has played a central role in narratives of the Viking Age in England for three perfectly good reasons. Firstly, his gifts in military strategy, administration, learning and Christian philosophy were considerable, perhaps unrivalled in his age; secondly, because he is the first Englishman whose life we know in the sort of detail that allows biographers to write convincingly, and at length, about his character, achievements and failures; and, lastly, because his heirs and successors cemented his legacy and constructed a superbly powerful state on the foundations that he and his forbears laid. Part of that legacy was the retrospective creation of what we might call the grand unification project—an idea of ‘England’.
The detail of Ælfred’s life comes, to begin with, from a species of contemporary biography, Bishop Asser’s Life of King Ælfred. Asser came from south-west Wales to Ælfred’s court in 885 during a period of relative political calm. Just as Charlemagne had brought scholars into his imperial court, so Ælfred picked men of intellect and vision to help him with his grand educational and institutional ambitions. The Life was composed, or finished, in about 893, a year which was anything but calm in the realm of Wessex. Whatever its historical and literary merits, it opens a dramatic window on the machinery of the West Saxon court, on the legacy that Ælfred wished to build, and on many of his personal and political struggles. It must, naturally, be read with caution.
One of Ælfred’s most significant historical achievements was the compilation at his instigation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which supplies a parallel, and sometimes identical, account of the wars of his reign and much more besides. Like the Royal Frankish Annals it is partisan, sometimes blatantly so; but in its various versions it offers historians sufficient shades of grey to unpick some of its claims; to look back at earlier material incorporated into it, and to hear voices from outside the West Saxon court which found their way into Mercian and Northern variants. As the battle for Britain enters its first phase in the late 860s, the historian takes up arms: Asser, the Irish Annals, the Historia and the Chronicle in one hand; archaeology, coins and charter evidence in the other. The game is afoot.
The year that the mycel here spent unmolested in York allowed them to set up some sort of administrative framework for ruling by proxy; to plan their next campaign and to draw supplies from York’s dependent settlements. A Viking camp, recently identified by fieldwork, lying some 14 miles (23 km) upstream from York at Aldwark, may yet tell us much about the make-up and activities of the mycel here at this time.23 How many of their countrymen joined them at this stage to settle, fabricate, trade and farm, is impossible to say. What we can say is that possession of York was not enough to satisfy their ambitions; not by a long shot. During 869 they returned, this time moving unchallenged across Mercia, to East Anglia: to Ðeodford (Thetford), where they overwintered.
A day’s journey downstream from Thetford on the River Little Ouse, at Brandon, lay a thriving settlement on a sand island in the river, looking out onto the vast peatlands of the fens to the west. Probably the lowest natural crossing point of the river, it had grown from seventh-century origins as a sort of miniature trading settlement and industrial complex. In the twenty-first century, lying on the edge of Thetford forest in Breckland, many miles from the sea, it is no more than a modest town, the odd pleasure boat moored on the river and a small railway station to connect it to the outside world. Excavations immediately west of the town during the 1980s revealed that in its eighth-century heyday the inhabitants manufactured textiles, dyeing and bleaching flax in buildings along the riverside.24 They built earth-fast houses and workshops of upright timber posts clad with planks or, perhaps, the weatherboard so distinctive of the region. They were buried in two cemeteries, one either side of a three-cell church, also built in wood. A causeway joined the island to dry land. One wonders if, like some of the Continental trading communities, Brandon was rather exclusive, perhaps even founded by Frisian artisans or traders whose presence is known at York and elsewhere.
13. GRIM’S DITCH near Ashampstead, Berkshire.
The people of Brandon were profligate in their accumulation of rubbish, discarding large quantities of pottery (more than 24,000 sherds of Ipswich ware and of Frankish imports) and animal bone. They lost, or discarded, an incomparably rich inventory of finds indicating that they were literate, wealthy and connected to international trading networks. They imported window glass and glass vessels for drinking; they had acquired a Coptic bowl and a gold plaque of St John the Evangelist. They ate rye bread, beans and plums, mutton and beef and large quantities of fish and oysters. The presence of writing styli alongside evidence of conspicuous consumption inclines the archaeologist to believe that Brandon was a minster complex, increasingly shedding its austere monastic traditions in favour of production and the enjoyment of the fruits of its wealth. Brandon did not survive the third quarter of the ninth century in its original form, although it was eventually rebuilt on the site of the present town. Whether its demise and relocation can be laid at the door of the Host of 868 is impossible to say.
In 869 King Eadmund of the East Angles summoned his levies and came to fight the mycel here at an unknown location. One version of the Chronicle records that the Host’s leaders, Kings Ubba and ‘Ingwar’ (the latter better known from his Norse name Ívarr) were directly responsible for Eadmund’s death.25 Later tradition has it that Eadmund was shot with arrows and beheaded at a place called Hægelisdun after he refused to renounce Christ—but the episode is conventional in form and bears suspicious resemblance to the deaths of earlier martyrs like St Sebastian; one is sceptical.26 It is true, though, that later Viking rulers of East Anglia, who converted to Christianity, expressed penitence over his killing and that a cult centre developed at the Suffolk town that bears his name. For twenty years after 895 coins were minted in East Anglia (and perhaps in Eastern Mercia) bearing the legend SCE EADMVNDE REX—‘O St Eadmund the King’.27 But in the immediate aftermath of Eadmund’s fall, according to the Chronicle, the mycel here overran East Anglia, destroying all the monasteries they found. They slew the abbot of the great minster at Medehamstede, burned it down, killed the monks and ‘reduced it to nothing’.28 Now they were ready to turn their attentions to Wessex.
Asser’s description of the arrival of the mycel here in West Saxon territory early in 871 contains the sort of detail that suggests he had access to first-hand accounts from someone who had fought there—possibly Ælfred himself or one of his veteran commanders—which eventually found their way into the Chronicle. In the middle of that winter the Viking army left East Anglia and came to a villa regia at Reading on the south bank of the River Thames, where it runs east to west for a few miles just before a sharp turn to the north, cutting a gorge between the Berkshire Downs and the Chiltern hills at Goring. The Thames here, some 60 miles (95 km) upstream from the now terminally-in-decline trading settlement at Lundenwic, was the frontier between Wessex and Mercia.
The location strongly suggests, once again, a rendezvous between overland force and supporting fleet. The overland army would travel by way of the Roman road network to London and march or ride west towards what is now Staines (Stána: ‘the Stones’), where a crossing of the Thames took it onto the Silchester road a little south of Reading.‡‡‡ The precision with which the invaders seem to have been able to identify and meet at such targets demonstrates the sophistication of their knowledge of river and road systems in lowland Britain: that mental Tube map again. The river is broad and strong here, and in the Anglo-Saxon period it was not merely the boundary between Wessex and Mercia but also a great trading artery of the southern kingdoms: barges plied up and down to and from Lundenwic and the Kentish ports, as far upstream at least as Lechlade in Gloucestershire. Any fleet venturing this far inland must negotiate fish traps and flash weirs§§§ by the score, water mills tapping the river’s power; riverside minsters, farms, hamlets and ancient ferry crossings. With the open sea and a homeward passage left further and further behind, penetration of the soft underbelly of the south was a risky game played for high rewards. Rowing upstream on these waters, whose moody gods can quickly switch between the benign and the vengeful, and passing through the densely wooded gorge at Goring with the hills tumbling down on either side, one can easily believe oneself to be venturing into England’s own heart of darkness.
That Reading was a royal estate, where food renders were collected from the townships all around, implies that the Host’s leaders were already aware of its potential for re-supplying them. It lay open to attack. We know of no villae regiae in this period defended by substantial earthworks or palisades, although there is some evidence that King Offa instituted a number of fortified settlements in Mercia in the eighth century. That may have changed in the years leading up to 871; but in any case the Host had no difficulty in taking Reading. Asser’s informant told him that on the third day after their arrival, they rode out to plunder the district under two of their jarls. The remainder threw up a defensive rampart between the Rivers Kennet and Thames, where they converge on the east edge of the modern town.### The occupation of defended confluences, and the D-shaped enclosure on a river bank, were to become the classic modi operandi of the Viking armies, allowing them to break out into open country in fighting or foraging formations and to retreat to their boats if necessary, or be re-supplied by river.
Five miles (8 km) to the west the ealdorman of Berkshire, Æðelwulf, caught up with the foraging party at Englefield (Englafelda) and engaged them, killing one of their jarls; the rest retired to the new defensive position on the Thames. It took four days for King Æðelred and his young brother to muster their main forces and invest the fort. On their arrival some of the Host’s soldiers were caught unprepared outside the gates of their new camp and cut down; but those inside burst out ‘like wolves’, according to Asser, and fought with all their might. The West Saxon force was repulsed with serious casualties, including a fatally wounded Ealdorman Æðelwulf.
Four days later the two armies met again, this time in open country on the Berkshire Downs, which rise to about 600 feet (185 m) above sea level. Despite the combined efforts of academics and enthusiastic investigators, Æscesdune (Ashdown), the site of the battle, cannot be identified: place-name scholars have shown that the name applied to the whole eastern expanse of the downs at this period. The battlefield archaeologist can reconstruct many plausible scenarios, none of them particularly convincing, but the landscape offers a few hints. Close to Ashampstead, a day’s march north-west of Reading, parts of a great earthwork complex called Grim’s Ditch might have been constructed, or re-used, by either army. The downlands are open and gently rolling here, long given over to summer pasturing for sheep and cattle; the ancient, long-distance Ridgeway passes close by to the north.
It seems significant that the Host chose to leave its defensive position at Reading, either because its commanders believed themselves to have already struck a decisive blow and needed only to deliver the coup de grâce; perhaps because they had been sent an embassy demanding a showdown; or because they believed they could outflank Æðelred’s army and penetrate deep into Wessex further upstream along the Thames. We cannot say.
The mycel here split into two forces, one commanded by its kings, the other by its jarls. They had, it seems, been in a position to choose the field of battle. The West Saxon force, responding, similarly divided itself in two. The king led one shield wall; Ælfred the other.∫∫∫ Asser, keen to establish Ælfred’s military credentials at an early stage in his narrative, writes that the young prince arrived first on the battlefield, his brother late at prayers in his tent, and fronted the force led by the jarls—a mark, presumably, of his and their junior status. Ælfred attacked ‘like a wild boar’, divinely inspired and protected, according to Asser.
Battle joined, the fiercest fighting took place around a solitary thorn tree. This was no ritual testing of enemy strength: the third engagement in less than a fortnight, Ashdown was a bloody and serious affair. The West Saxons drove the Host from the field of battle, inflicting heavy casualties: a King Bacseg was killed, along with his jarls Sidroc the Older and Younger, Osbern, Fraena and Harald.ΩΩΩ The Host retreated behind its rampart at Reading and licked its wounds.
14. ‘ASHDOWN was a bloody and serious affair’: the Ridgeway.
King Æðelred’s commanders may have believed that they had decisively repulsed the army that had overwhelmed Northumbria and East Anglia. But two weeks later the Host had regrouped and, at a place called Baseng, most obviously identifiable with the village of Old Basing just east of Basingstoke in Hampshire, they in turn drove the West Saxons from the field. The Chronicle claimed that ‘thousands’ lost their lives. Ominously, Asser recalled that ‘when the battle was over, another Viking army came from overseas and attached itself to the land’.29 Oddly, in the litany of battles, skirmishes, retreats and cross-country campaigns of the year 871, which came to be known as the year of nine engagements, Asser fails to record a battle at the unidentified Meretun, which the Chronicle places two months after the defeat at Baseng. The result is in some doubt: the Chronicle claimed a West Saxon victory but allowed that the Host held the field: a score-draw, perhaps. Shortly afterwards, at Easter, King Æðelred died, perhaps of wounds received there. Ælfred, aged twenty-two, succeeded to the kingship of Wessex in the most perilous circumstances.
A month later he was forced to fight again, this time at Wiltun, with what the Chronicle describes as a small force. Again, he is said to have won the victory but ceded the field of battle. Wiltun can, at least, be positively identified as Wilton on the south bank of the River Wylye, a little north and west of Salisbury, whence the partially navigable River Avon runs south towards the coast of Dorset. We know from the Chronicle that the engagements of that year were all fought south of the Thames. If Meretun, Baseng, and the other, unnamed, battlefields lay in the lands between Reading and Wilton, they cover a large swathe of the heartlands of Wessex. This was a campaign of conquest and of desperate defence, fought sometimes in the open in pitched battle, army against army; more often, perhaps, in skirmishes between reconnaissance parties, foragers and smaller war bands.
The enemy might appear anywhere where a river penetrated deep into the shires of Wessex; their mobility, their professionalism and long experience of raiding gave them decisive advantages over a cumbersome system of farmer-militias led by a warrior élite whose loyalties were often local, familial and agricultural. Ælfred’s kingship was new, untested. The sheer pace and geographical span of the 871 campaign is breathtaking. How could a land of farms and farmers survive the onslaught of a veteran, battle-hardened raiding force able to appear and disappear at will, spawning like mushrooms in the night and evaporating like the morning mist, ghosting along inshore coasts and estuaries, ever probing, exploiting the network of major rivers and ancient roads, the legacy of Rome, to deploy at great speed? The Chronicle dourly draws a line under a tumultuous year:
7 þy geare namon Westseaxe friþ wiþ þone here
And in this year the West Saxons made peace with the Host.
The new West Saxon king was forced to pay off the mycel here, to allow his warriors and followers to return to their farms and homes, to consider how he might counter the Viking threat in the months to come. The Host moved to London (the Chronicle uses Lundenbyrig, suggesting the old walled city of Londinium rather than the trading settlement at Lundenwic) where they obtained tribute from the Mercian King Burghred and overwintered. They too had cause to reconsider their plans and count the cost of war.
* Machair: low-lying grassy coastal plains formed by the wind-borne accumulation of sand and shells.
† Some historians have argued that there could have been no bishop in Orkney in the mid-ninth century and that, therefore, the whole story is incredible. I find the detail convincing; and that the Orkneys should have a Gaelic-speaking Christian community at this time seems to be gaining credence. See Woolf 2009 for a précis of the argument.
‡ A historic tribal confederation of north-eastern Ireland covering roughly the modern counties of Antrim and Down.
§ Blathmac seems to have been, as was the custom with Ionan abbots, a descendant of the same branch of the Úi Neill dynasty as its founder, Colm Cille.
# ‘Scottish’ and ‘Scotland’ are anachronistic terms; I adopt them here, where convenient, to refer to the kingdoms later absorbed into the medieval state.
∫ The Senchus Fer nAlban, an apparent census of military service, among other things. See Bannerman 1974 for the text.
Ω Historians have argued for decades about the locations and existence of these two kingdoms, but a seminal paper by the Early Medieval historian Alex Woolf seems definitively to have sorted out the mess; see Woolf 2006.
≈ Transhumant: seasonal migration between lowland or coastal winter settlements and high summer pastures.
∂ Metalwork, bone, even pottery, are susceptible to destruction in soils that go through severe wet-dry and freeze-thaw cycles, and are acidic. Exceptionally, and this is often the case with crannogs, waterlogged sites such as those covered by peat or submerged on lake beds provide anaerobic conditions offering very high levels of preservation of material culture and what is flippantly known as bio-swag: seeds, charred wood, micro-fossils and industrial waste, of the highest value to the archaeologist.
π In a contrasting narrative, the Annals of Ulster record, under 849, that relics of the saint were taken to Ireland. Many members of Colm Cille’s community had fled to Kells on the Irish mainland as far back as 807.
∆ The cantref, literally ‘a hundred townships’, is a very rough equivalent of the Northumbrian shire. See below, Chapter 12.
** Comprising roughly Ceredigion and Ystrad Tywi.
†† But see below in Chapter 7 for a treatment of excavations at Llanbedrgoch.
‡‡ Civitates were tribal entities recognized by the Romans and maintained as administrative units through the Empire and beyond. Their capitals, including Canterbury, Carlisle and Exeter, often emerged in later centuries as shire towns.
§§ The name suggests alliteratively that he was related to Beorhtwulf, who must by now have died, perhaps of wounds sustained in battle.
## Æðelred first witnessed one of his father’s charters in 864.
∫∫ From the ‘B’ version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under 867.
ΩΩ Pronounced ‘Denishan’.
≈≈ Æðelweard was a descendant of Ælfred’s immediately older brother Æðelred. His Chronicle, written in a style archaic even for his own time, occasionally includes material derived from otherwise unknown sources, perhaps even orally transmitted to him at court. The manuscript survives in a single, fire-damaged copy. The best modern edition is that of Campbell (1962).
∂∂ The route into Fortriu from the Atlantic seems to have been that used by earlier generations of missionaries like Colm Cille: by boat and overland portage along the Great Glen; further south, it is arguable whether portages existed between the Rivers Forth and Clyde, allowing passage between the Irish Sea and the North Sea.
ππ The historian Simon Coupland argues that only two bridges were actually fortified, one each on the Seine and Loire. Coupland 1991.
∆∆ See below, p. 193.
*** Lurid stories about a blood feud between Ívarr and Ælle, recorded in a late Scandinavian poem, resulting in Ælle’s ritual evisceration, might just be true; but most historians treat the story, and the punishment, with scepticism.
††† Ælfred also had an older sister, Æðelswið. See above pp. 93 and 102 and below, p. 125.
‡‡‡ John Peddie, who has made a study of military tactics in this period, suggests the possibility that they came south-west along the ancient Icknield Way and crossed the Thames at Goring, a few miles north of Reading. Peddie 1999, 79.
§§§ Flash weir: an arrangement of vertical planks slotted through a beam. The planks could be temporarily removed to allow passage of boats up and down river.
### John Peddie quotes John Man, a nineteenth-century Reading historian, who identified the remnants of the earthwork as late as 1816 on land now occupied by Reading railway station. Peddie 1999, 84.
∫∫∫ Caution must be exercised by those wishing to read into Asser’s account an eye-witness record of battle-dispositions and tactics. The shield wall had become something of a poetic trope by Asser’s day.
ΩΩΩ The surviving king is named by the Chronicle as Hálfdan. One wonders if Ubba had been left behind in East Anglia with part of the army, or whether he remained at York.