RAGNARÖK AND THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT—THE ANTAGONISTS—TORKSEY AND REPTON—THE CONQUEST OF YORK—INCOMERS—THE ATTACK ON WESSEX—ATHELNEY—EDINGTON—
And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth...
...And, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood...
...And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains...
...For the Great Day of His wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand.1
Thus the New Testament revelation of the Day of Judgement. The Norse poem Völuspá, or the Seeress’s Prophecy, is scarcely less apocalyptic on the subject of Ragnarök, the last battle of the gods. The god Heimdallr blows his great horn and Yggdrasil, the world tree, shudders and groans. The Midgard serpent writhes in anger and, in the churning of the seas that follows, the ship Naglfar, constructed from the fingernails and toenails of the dead, breaks free from its moorings; the eagle shrieks its anticipation of doom. The giants advance into battle; the armies of Muspelheim, the land of fire, are unleashed. One by one the gods of the Norse pantheon engage in deadly combat: Oðin fights the wolf, Fenrir, and is swallowed whole; his son Thor does battle with Jörmungandr, the Midgard serpent, and dies from exhaustion and his wounds, before:
15. RAGNARÖK: the end of days. Cross shaft fragment from St Andrew’s church, Andreas, Isle of Man.
The sun turns black, land sinks into the sea
The bright stars vanish from the sky;
Steam rises up from the conflagration,
Hot flame plays against heaven itself.2
In the decade and a half after the arrival of the mycel here in 865, when all but two* of the Anglo-Saxon dynasties were extinguished, it must have seemed that the end of days was come. Kings were martyred, deposed or, through civil war, failed to protect their people; houses of God were destroyed, their monks enslaved by pagans; the wealth of the land was taken overseas, treasures and heirlooms stolen. The forces of heathenism advanced inexorably. The rules by which Christian states maintained order—the bonds of lordly patronage, of oath-swearing and loyalty which held society, religious and secular, in its delicate equipoise of reciprocity—seemed cast aside. The trading settlements that underpinned an explosion in wealth in the eighth century no longer functioned; many minsters were abandoned or barely survived; royal estates were plundered.
Intolerable burdens were imposed on the free men of the shires: to fight seemingly from one end of the year to the other in the king’s host, to repair fortifications and build bridges. Even the institutional might of the church was threatened. Wærferth, Bishop of Worcester, forced to rent his lands out to pay his share of tribute to the raiders in London, bemoaned ‘the pressing affliction and immense tribute of the barbarians’.† King Ælfred later lamented that south of the River Humber there was scarcely a literate priest left.3 Scholarship and literacy, already in decline in the ninth century, plumbed such depths that at Canterbury the single active scribe had gone blind and could barely copy out a line correctly.4
Northumbria, once the greatest power in the north of Britain, languished in a state of apparent anarchy comparable to that which Bede, referring to the apostate year of 633, described as having been deleted by ‘those who compute the dates of kings’. Hoards of coins and hacksilver‡ were buried and never retrieved, just as they had been during the dark days at the end of the Roman Empire. Coldingham Abbey, founded in the seventh century by Æbbe, sister of that King Oswald who had brought the Irish mission to Lindisfarne, was destroyed in a raid in 870.5
Further north, in that same year, the ancestral fortress of the Northern Britons, Alclud on Dumbarton Rock, was captured by Dublin Norse chiefs Óláfr and Ívarr after a four-month siege.6 A year later, according to the Annals of Ulster, those armies returned to Dublin in 200 ships laden with immense booty and ‘a great prey of Angles and Britons and Picts’. Arthal ap Dyfnwal, Dumbarton’s king, was assassinated in a plot by Constantín mac Cináed the following year.7 Gwgon ap Meurig, the last attested king of Ceredigion, was drowned, perhaps while fighting Norse raiders.8 In 872 the mycel here, joined from the Continent by another supporting army, stood poised to conquer all. Six years later almost the last Anglo-Saxon king standing, Ælfred, was left ruling no more than a few acres of fetid marsh in the Somerset levels.
This apocalyptic scenario, which conveniently sets up Ælfred as the hero of a pervasive English nationalist narrative, deserves to be balanced by the scrutiny that modern textual critique and sober archaeological witness bring to bear. If the future looked grim in 871, as it must have done, there is no evidence that Scandinavian raiders and would-be conquerors wilfully set about destroying the apparatus of the state, embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing, the proscription of Christian worship or, indeed, the obliteration of Insular culture. Far from it. They set no precedent for their Norman descendant William, whose Harrying of the North in 1069–70 laid waste great swathes of territory, inducing famine and economic destruction. Like earlier (and later) would-be invaders, much of their interest in the Insular kingdoms was fostered by admiration for their wealth, their administrative sophistication and cultural confidence. What they wanted was a share.
The pope in Rome may have demanded that heathens be destroyed but the spiritual antipathy felt by many Christians towards the ‘gentiles’, as the chroniclers called them, was not necessarily reciprocated. Scandinavians, seeing much to envy and many similarities with their own beliefs, were curious, sometimes bemused—amused, even—by Christian worship, by the swearing of oaths on holy relics and by the rites of baptism practised in Christian kingdoms. In the eschatology of the heathen North, death and the afterlife were much greater preoccupations than the beginnings of life or religious induction. They also thought it very odd, not that Christians followed the sayings of the prophet of Judea, but that they had use for only a single God, presumed to be able to control all the forces of nature and of human destiny everywhere, at once and exclusively.
British, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon and Irish élites shared many cultural affinities with Scandinavian societies in their love of martial valour and their pursuit of glory, in some cases sharing even mythological heroes like Wayland the Smith. The Irish epic tale Táin Bó Cúailnge (The cattle raid of Cooley), with its teenage hero Cú Chulainn, was a poetic legend with themes and motifs that any Viking could admire: a great cattle raid, proven valour in single combat, a campaign of guerrilla warfare; an animist transformation into monstrous form. And of crucial importance for the nature of their interaction over the next two centuries was that Anglo-Saxon, Dane and Norseman were, for the most part, mutually intelligible on some functional level.§ Above all, the leaders of the mycel here came to appreciate that native respect for the institutions and offices of church and state, and the fundamental rationality of that relationship, might be turned to their advantage.
There is no evidence either that, whatever their seafaring genius, Scandinavian armies were inherently superior to those of their Insular antagonists. It is true that they were highly effective raiders, veterans of campaigns in Francia, in Ireland and at home. Their weaponry—spear, axe, shield and sword—may often have been of a very high quality. Their martial culture and the bonds which held ships’ crews together as fighting units in pursuit of glory and treasure made them justly feared. Their tactical knowledge of coastal, riverine and overland routes gave them significant advantages against a slow territorial opponent, as did their fast, shallow-draughted ships. Once they had constructed bridgeheads, and seized or bought sufficient horses to create mobile mounted forces, they were capable of striking with apparent impunity across large swathes of territory and retreating laden with booty and prisoners.
However, even if the military organization of the Insular kingdoms was flawed by its reliance on the regional muster, its part-time field capabilities and its slowness to respond to the lightning raiding tactics of the Scandinavian marine assault, there is no suggestion that the ninth-century armies of the Anglo-Saxons, Britons and Scots were poorly led, unskilled or ill equipped. In open-field encounters with the enemy they were often successful. Their ealdormen were tied by strong historical bonds of lordship and tenurial obligation downwards to the men in their fyrð and upwards to their own lords, the kings. Their loyalties might have been regional rather than ‘national’; but that did not mean that they failed to recognize the value of mutual defence.
Inter-dynastic warfare was rife in Early Medieval Britain; no generation had forgotten how to fight. Tactical flexibility is shown in the Chronicle account of the battle of Ashdown and by reports of local militias taking on Viking raiders and defeating them. Indigenous forces were even able to tackle marauding fleets, although the surviving details of such encounters are negligible. Above all, perhaps, Insular armies were supported by the wealth of agricultural surplus that these fertile lands produced. If that wealth had been targeted by raiders over several decades, it had by no means been exhausted—yet.
The Insular military response was, even so, hampered by significant disadvantages. As Ryan Lavelle points out in his survey of Alfred’s campaigns, generals are always guilty of fighting their last war.9 In the days of Ecgberht and even Æðelwulf, opponents had played by the same rules. Kings’ retinues met at the sorts of places where battles had traditionally been fought: river crossings on ancient routes, on borders, or sites with a bit of elbow room. Shield walls formed, pressing for advantage; skirmishes and duels were fought; the army that held the field claimed the victory. The victors claimed tribute and bragging rights. Superiority over neighbouring territory was affirmed by raiding, by exchange of hostages and by dynastic marriage, sealing a tributary alliance. Viking armies, increasingly large, battle hardened and effective, brought a new set of hit-and-run tactics. They came, initially, for cash and slaves, and proved perfidious in negotiations even if, on the Continent, they periodically acted as allies or auxiliaries of one or other Frankish faction.
And then, the opportunity afforded by Viking raids for Insular warlords to press their own historical claims, to kick old enemies while they were down, sometimes prevented the sort of co-operation that would have made a Christian alliance (for want of a better phrase) more initially effective. The combined Mercian–West Saxon offensive against the Host in 868, before the freshly turfed ramparts of Nottingham, may have failed in its objective but it demonstrated that a united show of strength could halt the Danish advance.
More compromising was the tradition by which the men of the mustered fyrð, in a world overwhelmingly dominated by the cycles of the farming season, left the field of battle and returned to their land when need arose: at harvest time, in autumn to turn their pigs into the woods and slaughter beasts; in spring to sow their corn and weed their fields. An enemy that increasingly overwintered on British soil, that raided and fought throughout the year, posed a significant economic and military threat, to which Insular military leaders were, at first, painfully slow to respond.
The system of ‘common burdens’, first attested at a synod held by King Æðelbald of Mercia at Gumley in 749 and re-affirmed in Offan charters from the 790s, by which free men# were obliged to serve in the fyrð and assist in the repair and construction of bridges and fortifications was, in Wessex and elsewhere in Britain, in its infancy. As Bede had warned early in the eighth century, the extensive and increasingly secularist acquisition of land by minsters meant that estates once held of the king in return for military service were now largely held without such obligations and were prone to be retained by the abbot’s or abbess’s family: that is the overwhelming testimony of the charters. The events of the decade 870–880 show that attempts to impose the Mercian idea of the common burdens on the shires of Wessex, Sussex, Kent and Devon were by no means met with enthusiasm. It is ironic that the minsters, the most successful centres of production and consumption, should have disproportionately attracted the interest of the raiders. For a while, kings might have felt grim satisfaction that the church should be forced to give up so much of the wealth that had once belonged to them.
*
In 872, after the fall of Northumbria, East Anglia and parts of Mercia, the colonization of Shetland and Orkney, the Hebrides, the Western Isles and Man, the destruction of the old Gaelic overlordship of Dál Riata and of the British kingdom of Strathclyde, fortunes lay finely balanced between foes of contrasting motivations and capabilities but broadly equal in strength.
Ælfred made peace with the Host (for an undisclosed amount of silver—perhaps several thousand pounds of it) after a year in the field had exhausted both sides. In 872 the mycel here left London and moved north, constructing a camp on a natural rise, often cut off by flood waters, overlooking the River Trent at Torksey in Lindsey, a few miles north-west of Lincoln.∫ Here they overwintered. Thousands of finds, located during a collaborative project between archaeologists and metal detector-users, have shown that the camp covered well over 100 acres, defended by the waters of the Trent to the west and marshes to the east. Clear evidence of trading, coin striking, smithing, textile production (and plenty of after-hours gaming) show that the Host was no mere army but a complete community on the move, numbering comfortably in the thousands. A thriving pottery industry grew up here from the period of Scandinavian occupation onwards, capitalizing on its excellent trading links and on the bounty of cash that the victorious raiders carried with them.
Torksey’s brilliant strategic location shows the army to have planned their move with careful consideration: the village lies at the confluence of the Trent and the Fossdyke, the Roman canal that connected it with the former colonia at Lincoln. It controlled access upriver to Nottingham and the Trent headwaters, and along the main road between Lindsey and the Humber. Its pivotal role was valued and remembered for generations: at the time of the Domesday survey the inhabitants of Torksey bore special responsibility for accompanying royal messengers to York ‘with their ships and their means of navigation’.10
16. THE LOCK AT TORKSEY, Lincolnshire, where the Roman Fossdyke meets the River Trent, and where the mycel here set up camp in 872.
Until this point the status of Northumbria is unclear. The Host seems initially to have appointed a puppet administration. But the thirteenth-century chronicler Roger of Wendover, apparently drawing on earlier sources now lost, recorded that in 872 the Northumbrians ‘expelled from the kingdom their king, the Bernician Ecgberht, and Archbishop Wulfhere, who thereupon took themselves to Burghred, king of the Mercians, by whom they were honourably entertained’.11 In his place, it seems, the Northumbrians chose one Ricsige as their king. This internal coup may have prompted the Host’s move north from London; but there is no evidence that they came to York or that an engagement was fought. Roger’s account suggests that the Mercians, for their part, made peace with the Host; he adds that Ecgberht died in the same year, but that Archbishop Wulfhere was restored to his see. However one tries to bring these undercurrents into focus, they remain defiantly obscure: we might surmise that Ricsige was a Deiran rival of Ecgberht; but we do not know what the Host’s leaders thought of the new king or the flitting of the archbishop. The lack of recorded military campaigns in 872 suggests that all sides were considering their options. The marvellous French phrase reculer pour mieux sauter, ‘to draw back in order to take a better jump’, which has no adequate English counterpart, about sums it up.
The decisive move came late in 873 when the Host, perhaps leaving a significant section of their camp followers behind at Torksey, and for the moment ignoring events further north, took to their ships once more and sailed upriver along the Trent to Repton (Hreopedun) in the heart of ancient Mercia. Here they established another fortified camp and, in the bald statement of the West Saxon chroniclers, ‘took winter quarters, and drove king Burghred overseas... and conquered the entire kingdom’.12 It was a stunning military coup. All the chroniclers agree that Burghred cut his losses and travelled to Rome, where he died and was buried in St Mary’s church in the Schola Saxonum, the English quarter. His queen, Æðelswið, King Ælfred’s sister, is said to have died at Pavia in 888. In Burghred’s place the Host ‘gave the government of the kingdom of Mercia into the hands of Ceolwulf, a foolish king’s thegn’13—that is to say, to a compliant native.
St Wystan’s church at Repton, perched on the south side of the Trent overlooking its flood plain, and in the Viking Age directly fronting onto the river, was a royal cult centre of the so-called ‘W’ dynasty of Mercian kings from the time of Æðelbald in the eighth century, and the crypt miraculously survives.Ω The site, part of a probable royal minster complex, was excavated by pioneering urban archaeologists Martin Biddle and the late Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle.14 The camp here is the only Viking fort in England to have been systematically excavated. The mycel here may or may not have destroyed the minster as a functioning religious and economic unit; what is certain is that they did not destroy the church, but improvised brilliantly, incorporating it into a defensive rampart of the classic Viking D-shape, so that its north and south doors became the fort’s impregnable gateway; the church itself their military HQ.
17. THE CRYPT at St Wystan’s church, Repton: ‘earthy arboreal elegance and candy twist columns’.
Early antiquarian investigations in the area around the church encountered ancient graves and recovered two swords and a ‘bearded axe’ of Viking type. The massive ditch dug to create the defended enclosure was first located in 1974, much of its course later traced by geophysical survey. When first constructed it enclosed an area of more than 3½ acres (1.4 hectares: tiny by comparison to the camp at Torksey); not remotely large enough to accommodate the entire Host. Within the enclosure several burials were recovered accompanied by weapons—including one exhibiting unhealed battle injuries and another buried with a Thor’s hammer pendant around his neck and a boar’s tusk placed between his thighs.
In the 1980s excavation of a mound lying to the west of the church, which had been reported and investigated on several occasions over the centuries, dramatically revealed the remains of another 249 bodies interred in the ruins of a stone building. The bones seem once to have been grouped around a single individual in a stone coffin. There can be little doubt, from the coin and weapon evidence, that several of the bodies were those of warriors, the fallen dead of the Host’s campaign—perhaps those slain in the assault on Repton itself. The identity of the individual around whom they clustered has been the subject of much speculation: was it one of the kings of the mycel here—perhaps the remains of Bacseg, who had died gloriously at Ashdown? The archaeologist Julian Richards has suggested that the other bodies were those of monks and nuns belonging to the minster: an example of submission to the conquerors in death?15
Today the scene of this extraordinary episode, through which the church survived and survives, is a quiet grassy corner of the north Midlands, graced with tombstones and immense lime trees and overlooked by the buildings of Repton’s famous, very English public school. The intimate, almost claustrophobic crypt, with its narrow staircase, its quiet dank air and the earthy arboreal elegance of its candy twist columns, is perhaps the most evocative contemporary space in which one can contemplate the clash of alien worlds: sacred and profane, martial and monastic, exclusive and intrusive.
Less than 3 miles (5 km) away, in a forestry plantation from the edge of which the spire of Repton’s church can clearly be seen, lies a unique monument to the Host. Heath Wood in the Viking Age was, as its name suggests, open heathland looking down across the Trent valley. At some time in the late ninth century fifty-nine mounds were thrown up over the cremated remains of warriors (some accompanied by swords and, occasionally, shields) and their wives.16 In some cases, perhaps the founding deposits, the mound covered the site of a cremation pyre, complete with animal parts: horses, dogs (as guides to take them to Valhalla?), cows and sheep—possibly the remains of funeral feasting. In others, the cremation must have taken place elsewhere, with a portion of the remains brought to this sacred spot for burial among an élite group: those who would not assimilate with the native Christians and who wished to maintain a distinct identity in death, as in life. Heath Wood is the only Viking cremation cemetery in the British Isles: some small corner of a foreign field that is forever Scandinavia.≈
The Host’s relations with their new Mercian client, Ceolwulf, have excited some debate. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, with its West Saxon perspective, called him a foolish thegn, but his poor historical reputation is mitigated by several factors. The name suggests that he may have belonged to a branch of the ‘C’ dynasty of the ancient Hwicce and that he might, therefore, have been a descendant of Ceolwulf I (821–823), brother of Coenwulf (796–821). He managed to survive, it is thought, until 879; there is no evidence of any attempt to depose him before that.17 The Annales Cambriae record that in 878 Rhodri Mawr, the powerful king of Gwynedd, was defeated in battle and killed, along with his son, by the Saxons (that is to say, the Mercians) so Ceolwulf II evidently felt sufficiently confident to take on his old enemy and win.∂ No mere foolish thegn, then.
More significantly, a hoard of coins and hacksilver discovered by James Mather in Watlington, Oxfordshire in 2015,π consisting of 186 coins, seven items of jewellery and fifteen ingots, includes silver pennies minted jointly by Ceolwulf and Ælfred during the 870s.18 Some of these show the two kings side by side: the so-called ‘Two emperors’ style, in imitation of late Roman issues. The alliance forged at Nottingham and sealed by marriage had survived the fall of East Mercia and Burghred’s exile; was thriving, even. One might even go so far as to suggest that Burghred’s ‘retirement’ and Ceolwulf’s elevation were acceptable to all parties, Mercian, West Saxon and Viking, at least for the time being. On Ælfred’s part, the quality of the coinage, up to more than 90 per cent pure silver from an earlier, very debased 15–20 per cent, implies that he had already begun to undertake economic reforms and understood the value (in every sense) of a trusted currency.19 It may also be significant that many of the coins in the Watlington hoard were minted in London, that oft-disputed location on the Wessex–Mercian border.
*
After a year encamped at Repton the mycel here seems to have split into its two component parts. That under Hálfdan, which had been on the move for nearly a decade, moved to Northumbria to pick up the reins of overlordship. The so-called Summer Host, which had arrived to reinforce it at Reading in 871, went from Repton to Cambridge (Grantebrycge) and stayed there for a year. The Chronicle reports that it was led by three kings: Guðrum, Oscytel and Anund.
Hálfdan’s arrival in Northumbria with the original mycel here was no mere overwintering. The Host ‘overran that land, and made frequent raids against the Picts and against the Strathclyde Britons’.20 The Annals of Ulster record that during this campaign, which may have lasted the whole year, Hálfdan killed a son of Óláfr, a Dublin Viking; that there was a great battle between the Dubhgaill∆ and the Picts. This may be the battle at Dollar (Dolaír) recorded by the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, in which the Pictavian army was annihilated. Constantín mac Cináeda was killed, perhaps in the same battle.21
18. ‘HÁLFDAN SHARED OUT the lands of the Northumbrians.’ The dales of the North York Moors abound in Scandinavian place names.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 875 is just as momentous:
7 þy geare Healfdene Norþanhymbra lond gedælde 7 ergende wæron 7 hiera tilgende.
In this year Hálfdan shared out the lands of the Northumbrians, and they were engaged in ploughing and making a living for themselves.
Two significant details are added to this bald account by the chronicler of St Cuthbert’s community, then in exile from its island home on Lindisfarne. First, he recorded that ‘Hálfdan, king of the Danes, entered the Tyne and sailed as far as Wircesforda, devastating and sinning cruelly against St Cuthbert’. Second, in a later chapter of the Historia, he recorded that one part of the Host ‘rebuilt York, cultivated the surrounding land and settled there’.22 Wircesforda cannot now be identified, although the topography of the Tyne suggests that Newburn, regarded as having been close to the tidal reach of the river and the site of its lowest ford, fits the bill: it may have been a royal estate from as early as the seventh century, when a famous marriage took place at a site called by Bede Ad Muram, 12 miles (20 km) inland from the coast.23
As for the sharing out of land, this episode has provoked considerable debate: did the Danish army dispossess the inhabitants of the Vale of York, driving them off their estates into exile; did they find land that had been vacated during the civil wars of the previous decade and claim it; or did they, perhaps, purchase estates from native lords with the hard cash weighing so heavily in their treasure chests?
Assumptions about the behaviour of invading armies underlie most attempts to resolve this question. The Historia’s ‘sinning cruelly against St Cuthbert’ may be taken to imply theft of property; but as we have seen there are virtually no Scandinavian names north of the Tees: northern Northumbria, ancient Bernicia, was not settled by Viking veterans. There is a certain military logic in the idea of planting one’s veterans on land surrounding the military headquarters if, as it seems, York’s wall were refortified at this time—the Romans provide a precise precedent with their coloniae. That the militarization of southern Northumbria was materially destructive, there is little doubt: virtually nothing survives of York’s great Anglo-Saxon library.24
The intentions of the Host and its surviving king seem clear: they decided to make York their home, rather than return to their Scandinavian homeland. The best prospects for their survival and wealth lay north of the Humber and south of the Tyne, in a land where opposition was weak or non-existent. One of the principal drivers for the Scandinavian exodus in the ninth and tenth centuries seems to have been the poor economic prospects of its young male nobility, with critically limited supplies of fertile agricultural lands and few opportunities to acquire them. The lands between Tyne and Humber, long tamed by the plough or cleared of trees for pasture, and with excellent communications, would do very nicely.**
The place-name evidence, which tells of a Bernicia un-settled by Norse speakers, is just as eloquent for their arrival in substantial numbers south of the River Tees; not just as lords but as free farmers. Telltale suffixes like –by and –thorpe, and the merging of Scandinavian personal names with the Old English suffix –tun (the so-called ‘Grimston hybrids’) testify to the presence of Norse speakers whose founding of new settlements and acquisition of existing farms and estates has left a permanent mark on the Yorkshire landscape.†† Large estates surviving north of the Tyne as ‘shires’ well into the medieval period show that the essential structure of land-holding evident in Bede’s day was fundamentally unaffected by Scandinavian settlement, as we might expect from the absence of Norse names; the opposite argument applies in Yorkshire and the northern counties of the Midlands, where such large landholdings seem to have become fragmented during this period. Smaller estates passed into the ownership of larger numbers of farmers.
Many of the forty-two ‘Grimston-type’ names occurring in Yorkshire, generally on good fertile land that must already have been farmed for centuries, are probably best interpreted as new holdings carved out of originally larger estates by a first wave of settlers: the veterans themselves.25 Perhaps not just any veterans, but the wealthier or more senior members of the mycel here. Place names ending in the suffix –by, meaning farmstead, are more numerous—more than 200 of them in Yorkshire survived to the time of the Domesday survey of the 1080s. I have already suggested elsewhere that Danby Dale, a valley which cuts deep into the north edge of the North York Moors, with its regular layout of identikit farm holdings, might represent the settling of a self-contained war band.26
The –bys tend to lie on slightly less favourable land than their Grimston counterparts (one thinks of a Viking equivalent of NCOs: tough, practical, well-organized men capable of turning their skills to hard graft and mutual co-operation; of turning mediocre land into something productive). The –thorpe names, of which 150 were recorded in the Domesday survey, seem to be settlements on the least fertile land; they show a high incidence of desertion and failure in the later medieval period. So it looks as though there was a stratification among the immigrant population reflecting the social orders of the Host and its affiliates. We might, too, be seeing some chronological dilation, with the least attractive land being left over for the late arrivers. And it would be wrong to suppose that all the land settled by Scandinavians involved displacement. A complex pattern of fragmentation, piecemeal acquisition and gradual purchase (the spending of all that ready cash) or inheritance through marriage into local families, has the ring of truth.
That women formed, or came to form, a substantial stratum of the immigrant population is attested by finds of jewellery, especially brooches, of distinctive Scandinavian or Anglo-Scandinavian style. To date no genetic study has been able to detect a distinct Scandinavian presence in the areas settled by Vikings; but then, the genetic difference between a Jutland Viking and an Englishman or woman whose ancestors had come originally from Angeln or Saxony is not very great. Although many scholars now accept numbers for the immigrant population of the late ninth and tenth centuries in the tens or scores of thousands there are still those who argue for many fewer.
Some immigrants may have taken the opportunity afforded by the settlement of the mycel here in Northumbria to escape the chaos of civil war in Norway. After a great battle on Hafrsfjord, near modern Stavanger, in 872, Haraldr Hárfagri, Harald ‘Fairhair’, seems to have imposed his rule on the whole of Norway: he is regarded as its first true king. The first wave of Icelandic settlements dates from these decades and we must suppose that such large dislocations of communities, induced by the civil strife that followed Harald’s battle for supremacy, propelled others to seek their fortunes further south and west.
A striking feature of the ninth-century Scandinavian settlements is the dog that did not bark in the night-time: that is, we do not hear of any form of local uprising either by or against the newcomers. There must have been local conflicts, when a farmer was ejected from his family holding or when disputes over boundaries boiled over into violence. Theft, homicide, rape and especially livestock rustling seem to have been endemic in Early Medieval society. But there is no record of concerted rebellion against Danish rule by a militia; no pitched battle between native and foreign villagers. All the evidence, documentary and archaeological, suggests that after the raiding and conquest came peace and integration, and that the integration was rapid. There is mounting evidence that native and incomer could understand one another.‡‡ This comes, partly, from cognate substitution: an Anglo-Saxon place name substituted by a Norse version which retained the original meaning; partly from words being loaned both ways between Old English and Old Norse; and partly from names that survived side by side in both languages.27 The historian of these developments, Matthew Townend, argues that much of the North was bilingual during the late ninth and tenth centuries and that, crucially, there seems to have been no social prejudice between the two groups, as there was later between Old English and Norman French.28 As for the veteran warlord Hálfdan, the Historia records enthusiastically that after his insults to St Cuthbert on the River Tyne he began to ‘rave and reek so badly that his whole army drove him from its midst’.29 More prosaically, the Annals of Ulster record his death in 877 in a skirmish with the Finngaill on Loch Cuan—Strangford Lough.
*
If the military and cultural fate of southern Northumbria was sealed by the events of 875, a much more fluid situation was developing in the south. The so-called Summer Host, under its three commanders, lay camped at Cambridge, presumably living off tribute exacted from East Anglian bishops, thegns and their tenants and implementing some sort of administration over that kingless realm through its own jarls or compliant indigenous ealdormen. After 870 two generations of East Anglians had no bishop: the institutional church was relieved of most of its assets and, effectively, dismantled.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded under 875§§ that King Ælfred took to the seas and defeated seven ships’ companies, capturing one and putting the others to flight. This small fleet may have been a reconnoitring party or a feint, for later in the same year the Host that had been encamped at Cambridge, or a part of it, was able to sail around the south coast and land at Wareham in what is now Dorset, building or restoring a fortification there before local militias could respond. Wareham occupied a key location at the head of Poole harbour: the site an existing convent and royal estate naturally defended by the Rivers Frome and Piddle.
Ælfred was unable to take Wareham, just as the combined forces of Mercia and Wessex had been confounded before the ramparts of Nottingham. He must then have offered tribute in return for a promise to leave Wessex. The treaty was reinforced, if we are to believe Asser, by the swearing of oaths on Christian relics and the exchange of high-ranking hostages. But the Chronicle is specific in its description of the use of a sacred ring during the swearing ceremony. Ælfred, aware that Christian relics were not held in great esteem by his opponents, invited them, it seems, to swear on their own holy ring (such an object is attested in Eyrbyggia Saga30 and in the Historia of St Cuthbert), to which they had never agreed before. The tenth-century chronicler Æðelweard specifically uses the term armilia sacra, a sacred arm-ring.31
The Host duly left Wareham in 876; but not, in the event, in great ceremony: they departed secretly, at night, under the noses of the militia, having murdered their West Saxon hostages. They split into two, a mounted party and a fleet of several hundred ships, with the aim of making a rendezvous some 70 miles (110 km) to the west at Exeter. The former Roman town had been the centre for West Saxon control of Devon for more than a century; St Boniface was educated at the abbey there. But it lay at the distant limit of Ælfred’s reach and uncomfortably close to the antipathetic British kingdom of the West Wealas: Cornwall, where Danish forces might expect to recruit allies.
Fortune initially favoured the Host: their mounted force outpaced its West Saxon pursuers and, by the time Ælfred caught up with them, they had fortified themselves within the old Roman walls on the banks of the navigable River Exe. But a storm destroyed 120 of their fleet’s ships and Ælfred was able to impose his terms on the remainder. More oaths were sworn; more hostages exchanged. By now the mycel here seems to have been under the sole command of Guðrum; the fate of the other members of the triumvirate, Anund and Oscytel, is utterly obscure.
After the stalemate of 871 and the retreat from Reading to London, the Host’s ambitions for Wessex had been thwarted; now they must give up a second time in the face of unattractive odds. In 877 they moved from Exeter back into Mercia, where they called in their marker with King Ceolwulf, and ‘some of it they shared out and some they gave to Ceolwulf’.32 Ceolwulf was to rule the western half, while a Scandinavian régime which later became known as the Danelaw was established in the east, based perhaps on the old kingdom of Lindsey and the lower Trent valley. It is not clear from either Asser or the Chronicle where the border, if any, was drawn or where they established their base—at Nottingham, perhaps, or further east and south in Cambridge.
The desire to settle appeared, in the first instance, to have overcome the thirst for battle. But if that was the hope of the West Saxons it was illusory:
Her hiene bestæl se here on midne winter ofer tuelfan niht to Cippanhamme, 7 geridon Wesseaxna lond 7 gesæton [7 ] micel þæs folces [7 ] ofer sæ adræfdon, 7 þæs oþres þone mæstan dæl hie geridon, 7 him to gecirdon buton þam cyninge Ælfrede. 7 he lytle werede unieþelice æfter wudum for, 7 on morfæstenum.
In this year the Host went secretly in midwinter after Twelfth night to Chippenham and rode over Wessex and occupied it, and drove a great part of the inhabitants overseas, and of the rest the greater part they reduced to submission, except Ælfred the king; and he with a small company moved under difficulties through woods and into inaccessible places in marshes.33
In this way the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, closely echoed by Asser, sets the scene for Ælfred’s near-nemesis and improbable fightback. Chippenham lies on a defensible inverted U-shaped promontory on the east bank of the Somerset Avon, which issues into the Severn just west of Bristol. The Avon was probably navigable as far as Bath, and it is possible that the standard modus operandi of the Scandinavian armies was employed in this devastating and wholly unexpected attack on the heart of Wessex, with their fleet sailing around the south coast and disembarking at the former Roman Spa town. But it was late in the year for those dangerous winter waters. More significant, perhaps, is Chippenham’s proximity to the Fosse Way, the direct cross-country Roman road linking Bath with Lincoln, which would allow a mounted force based at, say, Leicester, to achieve its object in two or three days.## Chippenham was a royal estate centre, and Ælfred’s sister Æðelswið had been married to King Burghred here: its choice as a target can hardly have been fortuitous, militarily or psychologically. Its capture was a decisive blow struck at a vital organ of the West Saxon state.
We have a good idea of what royal townships like Chippenham might have looked like in the ninth century from the palace and royal hunting lodge excavated at Cheddar in Somerset under Philip Rahtz’s direction in the early 1960s.∫∫ Like most royal townships of the period, its great hall, 78 feet (24 m) in length, worthy of Beowulf, was undefended apart from a fence and gate, and lay at the heart of a coaxially aligned complex of prestigious wooden buildings (including a chapel and what the excavator interpreted, from its foundation, as a windmill) intended to demonstrate kingly wealth, power and influence. Built at the highest navigable point of the River Axe, Cheddar was mentioned in Ælfred’s own will, and hosted a great council or Witangemot, three times during the tenth century.34
Ælfred’s apparent failure to fight the invading force is, on the face of it, inexplicable. His activity in the field since the invasion of 871 shows that he could deploy substantial forces, that he was an active, enterprising commander; and there is no hint in the Chronicle that he had, up to that point, lost the support of his closest ealdormen. His alliance with Burghred and then Ceolwulf II had seemed secure. But he had not yet conceived of the unified defence system on which his military and administrative reputation justly rests. Such was the impact of the Host’s arrival en masse in north-west Wessex that many of the shires seem to have immediately capitulated, submitting to Guðrum and offering him tribute; many of the nobility, we are told, sailed overseas ‘through poverty and fear’.35
There is a hint of naïvety in Ælfred’s repeated attempts to treat the Host as though it was another Anglo-Saxon army, playing by the old rules. The mycel here played its own game, and the Insular states seem to have suffered a collective failure of imagination in countering its threat. Ælfred may simply not have anticipated this third, midwinter invasion; if so, he was also guilty of complacency. But there is another possibility: that he was himself at Chippenham, celebrating Christmas with the royal household; if so, he was the target of a bold attempt to literally decapitate the regime. In the chaos of a winter assault, with no army in the field and no means of raising one, there was nothing to be done but flee.
One small clue suggests that a key to the instant fall of Wessex lay in the disloyalty of senior figures among Ælfred’s fighting élite. Those of his ealdormen who deserted the king, breaking the fundamental bond of lordship that demanded loyalty in exile, or death, were not forgotten. A charter of 901, a rare survival from the reign of Ælfred’s son Eadweard, recalled the forfeiture of an estate in Wiltshire by Ealdorman Wulfhere ‘when he deserted without permission both his lord King Ælfred and his country in spite of the oath which he had sworn’.36 The land in question comprised a smallish holding of ten hides at Wylye—the site of one of the engagements of 871. Wulfhere, it seems, had been ealdorman of Wiltshire during that eventful campaigning year. Did he flee overseas after the assault on Chippenham? Were there others, as the lamenting Asser suggests, including perhaps the disempowered sons of Ælfred’s older brothers?ΩΩ Did one or more of them offer up the intelligence of the king’s festive location?
Other events of that winter suggest that the assault on Wessex was co-ordinated, and that we are only seeing a part of the overall picture. The Chronicle records the arrival in Devon of a brother of Ívarr and Hálfdan with twenty-three ships and that he was killed along with 800 of his men. Several versions of the Chronicle add that the famous raven banner of the Norse armies was captured. If the kingdom of Wessex was on its knees, it was not yet dead.
19. RECONSTRUCTION of a Viking period hall at Fyrkat, near Hobro, Denmark.
Asser fills in some of the detail. The brother, whom we might suggest was Ubba, unheard of since the campaign of 871, had overwintered in Dyfed, across the estuary of the River Severn, ‘slaughtering many Christians there’. Asser names the fortress which the Norse attacked as Cynuit (Countisbury in English), just east of the port at Lynmouth. Drawing, presumably, on knowledge from his own Welsh correspondents and from personal acquaintance with the geography, the Welsh bishop describes how the invaders besieged the naturally defensible position; how the garrison broke out of their hastily prepared defences and ‘by virtue of their aggressiveness, from the very outset they overwhelmed the enemy’.37
Ælfred’s winter in the remote fastnesses of the Somerset levels has become a legendary hero-in-exile tale, like Robert Bruce and the spider or Julius Caesar and the Cilician pirates. For Asser, it is likely to have echoed his belief that Ælfred was a latter-day King David, the biblical exemplar for youngest sons and righteous giant-slayers. The Chronicle is terse in the extreme; but the drama needs no embellishment.
7 þæs on Eastron worhte Ælfred cyning lytle werede geweorc æt Æþelingaeigge, 7 of þam geweorce was winnende wiþ þone here, 7 Sumursætna se dæl, se þær niehst wæs.
And the Easter≈≈ after, King Ælfred with a small company built a fortification at Athelney, and from that fortification, with the men of that part of Somerset nearest to it, he continued fighting against the Host.38
Athelney is a small prominence in the Somerset levels, still an island in the ninth century and periodically surrounded by floodwaters into recent times. At its highest point it rises no more than 40 feet (12 m) above sea level. It was connected westwards to the small village of Lyng by a causeway, and less than a mile away to the south, on a long spit of higher ground, perches the small village of Stoke St Gregory. It is a landscape of few trees, apart from the ubiquitous pollarded willows that line the innumerable drains and narrow, canalized rivers of the peatlands. Athelney farm, an elegant red brick structure framed by sky and Scots pines, bears a nineteenth-century monument to Ælfred’s stay there. From it, on a bleak late winter’s morning, the mind’s eye allows the flat grassy fields around, drained by innumerable grid lines of catchwater, lode and rhyne fringed with sedge and willows, to disappear beneath dark waters reflecting only matt clouds, and a bleaker aspect for a king without a kingdom can scarcely be imagined.
Æðelweard’s Chronicle masterfully understates the position: ‘King Ælfred, indeed, was then in greater straits than was befitting.’39 But he adds a significant detail: that the beleaguered king was accompanied by a new ealdorman of Somerset, Æðelnoth, with a ‘small force’.40 Somerset, then, remained loyal. Asser, with the benefit of more direct knowledge, describes frequent raiding parties sent out from Athelney to forage and to gather intelligence, not just from the Host but from those who had submitted to the invaders. If, as we understand it, Wiltshire and Hampshire had fallen and only Somerset, Devon and perhaps Dorset remained loyal to Ælfred, his circumstances were straitened indeed.
Remote places, like the haunts of robbers and wild beasts on the moors of Yorkshire41 or the marshy fenlands of East Anglia, the Vale of York and the Somerset levels, were profitable sources of fear and wonder in the Early Medieval imagination, inhabited by faeries, devils and unspeakable demons. The peaty levels that drained into the Wash—‘a dismal fen of immense size’ with its ‘black waters, overhung by fog’42—attracted pilgrims like St Guthlac, seekers after isolation, privation and risk. The great hall at Heorot, villa regalis of Beowulf’s legendary king Hrothgar, was beset by the abysmal monster Grendel, ‘ill-famed haunter of the marches of the land, who kept the moors, the fastness of the fens’.43
It is not beyond the realms of possibility, I think, that Grendel is the animal personification of that real killer of the marshes, the malarial mosquito, creeping up on unsuspecting warriors and carrying them off in their fighting prime, deprived of the glory of death in battle, to his grisly underworld. Recent research has shown a potentially very high level of mortality from malarial fever in Early Medieval fenlands.44 In mythologizing Ælfred’s sojourn in these lonely and unhealthy landscapes his hagiographers were not just preparing the ground for his miraculous survival and improbable final triumph; they were also tapping the dark recesses of the Early Medieval psyche.
Within half a day’s ride (or punt) of Athelney, settlements at Taunton and Somerton, from which the county derives its name, were Ælfred’s nearest sources for news and provisions. Landing stages at Stathe, below the spit on which Stoke St Gregory stands, and Langport, a little further up the River Parrett, gave navigable access to the Severn estuary from Bridgewater Bay. The king’s personal retinue, his comites, and members of the shire thegnage, made up a meagre force. He was now forced to learn the same tactics of guerrilla warfare so adeptly practised by his enemies. Asser, recording the foundation of a monastery there in later years, describes Ælfred’s construction of a fortress at the western end of the causeway at Lyng, with a smaller redoubt on Athelney itself. A natural prominence, Burrow Mump, lay just across the river, and it is often suggested that Ælfred was able to maintain a lookout here. To be sure, it offers a splendid prospect of the countryside for many miles around; the remains of a small chapel stand on its summit, looking like a miniature copy of the famous tor at Glastonbury.
The Historia of St Cuthbert’s community, suffering its own travails hundreds of miles to the north, maintained a story that their saint appeared to Ælfred during those desperate days. The king, we are told, sent his men out fishing one day, leaving behind his wife Ælswið and a servant. A stranger appeared and asked the king for food. Being a good Christian, Ælfred shared with the man his last loaf and the little wine which he had left. The stranger subsequently disappeared; the servant came back to find the loaf whole again. Later, the king’s men returned with three boats full of fish—an appropriate haul, perhaps, for an Easter miracle. That night, while the rest of the household was asleep, a great light shone like the sun on the troubled king and an old priest appeared in the apparel of a bishop. Introducing himself as Cuthbert, a soldier of Christ, the visitor confirmed that he was the stranger whom Ælfred had seen earlier. He promised to be the king’s shield and sword in the fight to come; that the West Saxons would be victorious; that, in fact, Ælfred, his sons and their sons would be kings of all Britain.45 Like King David, his throne would be established forever.
Those acquainted with Bede’s eighth-century account of a visionary appearance by Bishop Paulinus before the exiled ætheling Edwin Yffing in his great hour of need at the court of King Rædwald, and with Adomnán’s miracle concerning Oswald’s vision the night before battle at Heavenfield in 634,46 will recognize in the Cuthbert tale a hagiographic trope which cannot be taken at face value, evocative and appealing as it is. For the fascinating solution to the question of why Cuthbert should appear to Ælfred, one has to look at the career of his grandson, Æðelstan.∂∂
There is another, more familiar tale relating to the Athelney exile: it involves cakes, the scolding wife of a swineherd and an admonishment by a Cornish saint, better known from the town that bears his name in Huntingdonshire and to which his relics would one day be transferred. The story is found in the late tenth- or early eleventh-century Vita Prima Sancti Neoti (First life of St Neot). Like Cuthbert, St Neot appears to Ælfred during his stay on Athelney and promises victory in return for his future patronage. The tale has no credence except insofar as the Æthelney episode became and remained a suitable legend for including in great stories from the past, and as a retrospective means of linking royal fortunes with saintly virtues.ππ Ælfred’s humility when confronted with his baking faux pas fits nicely with his elevation, many centuries later, as England’s only king worthy of the epithet ‘Great’. As historian Barbara Yorke and my colleague Joy Rutter have both pointed out, Ælfred’s failure to earn the status of a Christian saint (by virtue of avoiding martyrdom in battle against the heathen) allowed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Protestants to co-opt him as a virtuous prototype, to which they attached all sorts of libertarian and republican values entirely inappropriate to the ninth century. His alleged common touch, so perfectly expressed by his humility in the cake-burning episode, suited their purpose very well.47After Easter 878, then, Ælfred built a small fortification at Athelney, from where he seems to have sent out a stream of intelligence-gathering and ambassadorial messengers as well as raiding parties intended as much, one imagines, to raise morale among his household troops and those who had submitted to the Host, as to actually engage their forces. Abandoned by many of his ealdormen and, on the face of it, by impotent Mercian allies, cut off from eastern Wessex, from London and from the sub-kingdoms of Kent and Sussex, one imagines that Ælfred’s primary concern was to find out who might rise with him against the Host. A story preserved in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum has the king himself, disguised as a jongleur and minstrel (another biblical echo of King David), spying on the enemy in their camp at Chippenham. It is probably wishful thinking on William’s part; and yet, that sort of escapade cannot be ruled out—later wars inspired many such acts of derring-do.48
In the second week of May 878, with spring’s greenery bursting everywhere and roads and fords now passable, Ælfred made a rendezvous, with those shire forces on whose support he could still rely, at a place called Ecgberht’s stone (Ecgbryhtes stane), in the eastern part of Selwood, a great expanse of woodland. The consensus seems to be that the stone lay (possibly lies) in the proximity of the three-shire boundary between Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire just north of Bourton.∆∆ The name Ecgbryhtes stane suggests that it had been a muster site in the days of Ælfred’s grandfather. The distance from Athelney is about 31 miles (50 km): two days’ march or a day’s hard ride almost dead east, using ancient roads through Selwood and perhaps passing beneath the magnificent ramparts of South Cadbury hillfort, gathering recruits and precious news of the enemy’s movements along the way. Shire boundaries were very often used as meeting places; and the additional advantage of Bourton is its discreet setting in a narrow vale on the south-west corner of a broad expanse of downland. Here Ælfred must have nervously counted numbers; Asser, with the benefit of triumphalist hindsight, says that when those forces who had come to the muster saw the king, receiving him (not surprisingly) as if one restored to life after such great tribulations, they were filled with immense joy.49
Ælfred now moved decisively in the knowledge that his intelligence was sound; that he had sufficient forces to strike back against the Host. The day after the muster, the whole army marched north-east across country to a place that Asser identifies as Iley Oak: Eastleigh wood, just north-west of the village of Sutton Veny, overlooking the River Wylye. From Bourton to Wylye, the same river on which the engagement at Wilton had taken place in 871, is about 12 miles (20 km) over downs that rise to 800 feet (245 m) above Kingston Deverill. It is a wold landscape of plateaux dissected by mostly dry valleys and peppered with the remains of Neolithic long barrows and Bronze Age tumuli. The River Wylye runs north through those downs until, at Warminster, it executes a smart right turn, opens out into a broader flood plain, and flows south-east towards Wilton, the sometime shire town and battle site of 871. On a wooded hill overlooking the crook of the river’s bend lies the site of the Iley Oak, an ancient meeting place where one can imagine the last of Ælfred’s forces joining his army, and where news of the Host’s position must have been obtained.***
7 þæs ymb ane to Eþandune, 7 þær gefeaht wiþ alne þone here, 7 hiene gefliemde, 7 him æfter rad oþ þæt geweorc.
And one day later [he went] to Edington and there he fought against the entire Host and put it to flight; and pursued it up to the fortification.50
Thus runs the infuriatingly brief account of Ælfred’s greatest battle in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Edington is the generally recognized location for Eþandune, 6 miles (10 km) north-east of the site of the Iley Oak, Ælfred’s pre-battle camp. It lies at the foot of a north-facing scarp on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Edington Hill, a plausible site for the actual battle, lies at about 650 feet (200 m) overlooking, to the north, the broad vale of the River Avon. A long, deeply incised hollow way leads up from the village onto the plateau, evidence of its ancient use as a cattle droveway. Chippenham, the Host’s base, lay 16 miles (25 km) further north, quite visible from the breast of the scarp across the broad valley of the Avon. The broad, open country of the downs was the preferred terrain of the Anglo-Saxon armies, able to survey the whole field at once and deploy the long interlocking line of their shield wall. It is hard to say whether armies agreed the sites for their set-piece showdowns or whether the Host, anticipating Ælfred’s advance from its own intelligence, intercepted him before he could march on Chippenham.
My sense is that the two armies agreed to meet, each willing to gamble all for the highest possible stakes as they had at Ashdown in 871. But apart from Asser’s unhelpful description of the king ‘fighting fiercely with a compact shield wall’51 we know nothing of the progress of the battle for Wessex, except that the West Saxons prevailed and were able to pursue the Host back to their fortification—either a hilltop summer camp close by, or Chippenham itself. If the former, then Bratton camp, an impressive Iron Age enclosure with substantial ramparts, overlooking the vale from the same escarpment a mile and a half (2 km) to the south-west of Edington, suggests itself.†††
Ælfred’s advantages lay in his command of an army defending its homeland and in the tactical superiority of Anglo-Saxon open-field warfare against a marine assault force honed to perfection in the art of raiding. With them he achieved the ultimate objective of freeing Wessex from Danish domination and military peril. Such was the disarray of the Host that many of them were cut down during the retreat. Their horses and cattle were seized and West Saxon forces laid siege to their defences; the Host was unable to acquire reinforcements or escape. After fourteen days during which, Asser says, the Host was worn down by fear, cold and hunger, they capitulated. Ælfred took hostages, forced on them a promise to leave Wessex for good and imposed on their king, Guðrum, a personal commitment to submit to baptism at the king’s own hand, as his sponsor and godfather.52
There is potentially a significant hole in the West Saxon accounts of Edington. The historian Janet Nelson has offered the intriguing possibility that those coins issued jointly by Ælfred and Ceolwulf as co-emperors might have been a special issue, struck in the aftermath of Edington’s triumph. In that case, it might be necessary to allow for West Mercian participation in the battle, and a considerable adjustment of the traditional Ælfredan narrative which insists on the West Saxon king standing alone against a pagan foe.53 Ceolwulf’s death, soon after, allowed his role as the joint saviour of Wessex to be written out of history.
Everything about Asser’s account suggests to me that the Host were not able to retreat as far as Chippenham. To begin with, a rout of 16 miles (25 km) after a desperate battle seems unfeasibly long. And then, the circumstances of the siege suggest that the Vikings were poorly provisioned inside their fortress: no garrison to support them and counterattack; no access to boats. Chippenham, one imagines, after a five-month occupation, would have been set up as a major fortification with stores, access routes in and out and efficient intelligence-gathering: it was, after all, a royal township designed to receive goods and people from a wide surrounding territory. And, if Ceolwulf’s Mercian forces were present, they must have overrun the defences before the Host could retire there. A short siege and capitulation after two weeks suggests an ill-prepared redoubt, not the headquarters of a battle-hardened, highly experienced army. The Iron Age fortress on Bratton Hill fits Asser’s account.
20. ISLAND FORTRESSES in the Somerset levels: the monument at Athelney Farm, with Burrow Mump in the distance.
The defeated Host was allowed, in due course, to return to Chippenham, one imagines under a very tight escort. A month after the battle Guðrum and thirty of his retinue came to Aller, east across the Parrett from Athelney, where he was baptized and took the Christian name Æðelstan. The ceremony ended eight days later at Wedmore, no more than a few miles to the north and close to the royal palace at Cheddar, after which twelve days of feasting consolidated the outbreak of peace, and the senior commanders of the Host were given treasures. This was an education, for Scandinavian warrior raiders, of how Anglo-Saxon kingship worked: the bonds of Christendom, the giving of lavish gifts and the eternal obligation of the servant to his lord; magnanimity in victory; legitimacy. The divinity of the king’s appointment and the strength of the Christian oath were messages swallowed with copious mead, celebratory songs and the mutual respect of veteran heroes of the fight.
Guðrum was now being brought into the fold of the universal church and the family of European Christian kings as one of their own. His baptismal name, too, is significant. Ælfred had an older brother of the same name, and a grandson too. If Guðrum was submitting to the West Saxon king as his overlord, then Ælfred, equally, recognized the reborn Æðelstan as a king in his own right. But king of what?
* Historians are wont to ignore the survival of the House of Bamburgh, former kings of Bernicia and Northumbria.
† A charter surviving from 872 records the lease by Bishop Wærferth of Worcester of lands for 20 mancuses of gold, to be paid as wergeld. A gold mancus weighed about a sixth of an ounce (4.25 g), equivalent to about 30 pence of silver. Charter S1278, of 872, translated by Whitelock 1979, 532.
‡ Literally, items of silver cut into scrap for reworking or as currency.
§ The evidence that Old Norse and Old English could be mutually comprehensible comes from analysis of the way in which place names and other vocabulary hybridized during later periods of assimilation in the tenth and eleventh centuries, especially in what is now Yorkshire. See Townend 2014.
# It is not entirely clear just what constituted ‘free men’ in this period: ceorls, freemen and sokemen are terms that imply various levels of dependence on a lord.
∫ Originally Turcesige, Turoc’s island. A new article by Dawn Hadley and Julian Richards (2016) outlines the recent work there.
Ω Lost but rediscovered in 1779 when the ground gave way beneath a gravedigger. Stroud 1999, 6.
≈ It must be one of the most poorly curated of our national monuments: when I visited in the late winter of 2016–17 part of the site was being used for feeding pheasants; quad bike tracks wove in and out between the barely visible bracken-covered mounds; there was no signage at all.
∂ Rhodri, according to the Annals of Ulster, had briefly been in exile in Ireland during that year, ‘in flight from the Dark Foreigners’—that is to say, from Ceolwulf’s Viking overlords, the mycel here.
π The hoard was—admirably—reported to the authorities and subsequently block-lifted for laboratory excavation.
∆ The Dubhgaill, or ‘Dark foreigners’, seem to have been so labelled to distinguish them from the Finngaill, or ‘Fair foreigners’ by the Irish. It is dangerous to make too many assumptions about the precise connotations of the words, but the Finngaill are generally associated with the original invaders who had established Dublin in the 840s; the Dubhgaill with the Host which had crossed from the Continent to England in the 860s. This, incidentally, is the last contemporary mention of the Picts or Pictavia as a people or kingdom.
** The low-lying Vale of York itself remained a largely uncultivable zone, prone to frequent flooding; but the climate of the ninth century was warming and drying, opening it up to enterprising farmers.
†† For a more nuanced and detailed discussion, see Townend 2014, 101ff.
‡‡ At least two Scandinavian language traditions arrived in the British Isles in the ninth century: Old West Norse (from Norway) and Old East Norse (from Denmark).
§§ Asser records the same event under 876.
## Leicester is not mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle before 914; but by then it was an established Scandinavian town and stronghold, one of the so-called Five Boroughs. Æðelweard’s information was that the Host had set up camp at Gloucester in the heart of West Mercia, much closer to the borders of Wessex and more menacing. The route from Gloucester to Chippenham would involve a journey of some 40 miles (65 km) along two Roman roads: a hard day’s ride. Campbell 1962, 42.
∫∫ See below, Chapter 11.
ΩΩ For evidence that this was the case, see below, Chapter 6.
≈≈ In 878 Easter fell on 23 March.
∂∂ See below, Chapter 10.
ππ The story is discussed fully in Keynes and Lapidge 1983, Appendix 1. The widespread early acceptance of the story as a ‘real’ event came about through its shameless copying by Matthew Parker into his original edition of Asser’s Life in 1574.
∆∆ By chance, I encountered the owner of the land on which a small undistinguished stone, no more than 3 feet (1 m) tall, stands by a running brook, the nascent River Stour, in the hamlet of Penselwood. Peter Fitzgerald very kindly told me what he knows of the site called Ecgberht’s stone, and pointed out to me a small artificial mound close by, which might serve very well for a muster point. A more discreet location is hard to imagine.
*** Now an undistinguished plantation whose northern edge is truncated by a cutting carrying the A36 trunk road.
††† The great white horse carved into the chalk of its steep west flank is no earlier than the seventeenth or eighteenth century.