King Ecgbert was founder of the dynasty that produced Alfred and all the later Saxon kings of England, and hence is the ultimate patriarch of our present royal family. His name should be pronounced ‘Edge-bert’, though in older histories he is ‘Egbert’, one of Sellers and Yateman’s ‘wave of egg-kings’ who helped to make the Dark Ages so unmemorable. Ecgbert was Alfred the Great's grandfather. Hence his fame, such as it is, is mainly retrospective, but in his day Ecgbert was one of the great bretwaldas who ruled, at least for a while, large parts of England. He was the first great king of Wessex and at the height of his power his imperium stretched from Cornwall to Northumbria. Fortunate in war, he won most of his many battles, reigned for thirty-eight years, and died in his bed aged well over 60. Ecgbert lived up to his name which means ‘bright-edge’, or, more loosely translated, ‘sword of destiny’.
The events of Ecgbert’s reign are known to us only in outline. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions events and battles but provides no context, no causation and, needless to say, no detail. Like several other Dark Age patriarchs, Ecgbert came to the throne by means of a coup. His father Eahlmund was king of Kent, but also had some sort of claim to Wessex as well. In the days of the great Mercian King Offa, Ecgbert found it advisable to go into exile in France. After Offa’s death, he returned in triumph as king of Wessex in 802. On the very day of his accession there was ‘a great battle’ at Kempsford in Gloucestershire between the men of Wiltshire under their ealdorman Weohstan and the men of the Mercian province of Hwicce (roughly present-day Worcestershire) under theirs.1 Both leaders lost their lives, but Ecgbert’s Wiltshire men were victorious.
Although the issue is not spelt out in the sources, it is likely that the battle was the result of Egbert’s accession and his removal of Wessex from the confederation of kingdoms under Mercia’s control. What the Battle of Kempsford seems to have decided was that north Wiltshire and Somerset, long-disputed between Wessex and Hwicce, would henceforth become part of Wessex. The sour relations between Ecgbert’s Wessex and Mercia continued. A lost annal transcribed by the antiquarian John Leland in Henry VIII’s reign records a battle between Ecgbert and the then Mercian King Ceolwulf in about 820 at Cherrenhul between Abingdon and Oxford. Ceolwulf lost the battle, and, shortly afterwards, his throne. The more famous Battle of Ellandun in 825 may in part have been the new King Beornwulf’s desire to overturn the verdict at Cherrenhul.
Meanwhile Ecgbert had trouble on his far western border. In the Dark Ages Cornwall was known as West Wales. Its history is largely unrecorded, but the county remained an isolated but independent enclave of ancient Britain, Celtic in language and culture. Cornwall makes a rare entry into the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the early ninth century. Perhaps as punishment for raids into Devon and beyond, Ecgbert made war on the Britons of West Wales. In 815 he ravaged Cornwall ‘from east to west’. Ten years later, in summer 825, there was a pitched battle between the West Welsh and the Englishmen of Devon at Gafulford (Galford Down, near Lydford on the western boundary of Dartmoor). We do not know whether Ecgbert was present, but he was certainly in the area that summer, for he witnessed a charter at Crediton on 19 August. Alfred Burne had a theory that Ecgbert was able to make war in the far west safe in the knowledge that his northern boundary with Mercia was guarded by the linear earthwork known as the Wansdyke.2 Since then archaeological opinion has moved its likely date backwards to the time of the Saxon Conquest. It was already known as the ‘Old Dyke’ (Ealden Dic) in Ecgbert’s time.However,the most recent work on the Wansdyke assigns it to a mid-Saxon date, around the seventh century.
That Ecgbert did in fact risk attack from the north was borne out by the later events of summer 825.While he was dealing with the emergency in Devon, Ecgbert received the unwelcome news that King Beornwulf of Mercia had mobilized a large army in the Cotswolds. Beornwulf had chosen that moment to confront the expansionist tendencies of Ecgbert’s Wessex and reassert the century-old pre-eminence of Mercia. Ecgbert’s submission was demanded, though Beornwulf probably expected him to fight. The death in battle of Ecgbert and his son Aethelwulf would be the simplest and perhaps the most desirable solution to WessexMercian relations.
But Beornwulf was no Offa. He had become king in 823 after the deposition of his predecessor. He was evidently not of the direct royal line and ten years earlier had been a mere ealdorman. Although he could call on the men of Kent, Essex and Middlesex, as well as Mercia, for support, Beornwulf may nonetheless have lacked regal authority. In other words, although he might have led an impressive looking army, some of its members were probably not wholehearted about serving Beornwulf, especially when faced by an opponent like Ecgbert. At any rate, Ecgbert’s response was swift. With his mounted troops he returned east, and within weeks of witnessing the charter at Crediton he was back in Wiltshire and ready to settle scores with Beornwulf.
Ellandunn (or Ellendun) was one of history ‘s showdowns .It was fought on a hot day, probably in September 825. The only detailed source is in the Winchester Annals (Annales de Wintonia). The battle was of special interest to Winchester Abbey because it was fought on abbey land. Though it is long on rhetoric and short on fact, the part of the chronicle devoted to the battle is best read in full. I have drawn on the translation from the original Latin by Tony Spicer:
Beornwulf, king of the Mercians, deriding the ability of king Ecgbert, and believing that his experience was worth more than Ecgbert’s, wanted to play him at the game of war. He invited and provoked the latter’s army to battle in order to make him pay homage. Ecgbert consulted his noblemen, and the choice was taken to drive off shame with the sword. It was more honourable to be slain than to submit their freedom to the yoke. The battle took place in the summer season at Ellandune,now in the manor of the priory of Winchester (nunc manerium Prioris Wintoniensis). The kings came together to fight with unequal forces, both in number and quality. Against each hundred soldiers of Ecgbert, who were pale and thin, Beornwulf had a thousand, ruddy and well-fed, as behoves the soldiers of St Mary. They clashed together valiantly, each man giving of his best. The Mercians were put to the sword without mercy, but as much as they were conquered, so they excelled themselves with valour, and threw themselves back into the conflict regardless of the danger. They fell more copiously than hailstones, with more of them overcome from sweating than from battle. The ground was covered with the bodies of men and horses. Beornwulf himself, no longer king of the Mercia but the Moribunds, lest he shared the fate of his soldiers, sought flight for himself, and he would not have wished to lose his spurs for three ha’pence.3
The other main source, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, merely notes that Ecgbert and Beornwulf fought at Ellandun, that Ecgbert was victorious ‘and a great slaughter was made’. Henry of Huntingdon’s Norman chronicle adds that ‘the brook (rivus)of Ellandune [sic] ran redwith gore, stood dammedwith battle-wreck, and grew foul with mouldering corpses’,4 which at least indicates that heavy fighting took place around a stream. All these sources have a second-hand air. If, as the Winchester annal insists, Ecgbert really had been outnumbered by ten to one, with his own troops tired and starving, he would most assuredly have lost the battle! As Alfred Burne put it, they were ‘thin perhaps, but certainly fit, whereas the Mercians were probably soft and fat in comparison’.5 It is not even clear who attacked who. Beornwulf was undoubtedly ready for war, but he seems to have hung around the border without invading the Wessex heartland.
As for the fighting, the Winchester annal makes an interesting reference to dead ‘men and horses’, implying that cavalry as well as the more usual shield-walls of infantry were used by both sides. The battle was evidently long and bloody, and the Mercians did not give up easily but repeatedly charged at Ecgbert’s disciplined line. Where was Ellandun? The battlefield was obviously known to the Abbey of Winchester, but there is no reference to a memorial church, and its site was eventually forgotten. When antiquarians became interested in battlefields again 900 years later, there were two candidates: Wroughton near Swindon, which used to be called Ellingdon (or, in the Domesday Book, Elandun), and Allington near Amesbury. The latter location would indicate that Beornwulf had struck deep into Wessex, while the former suggests that he was massed defensively on the border. The matter was settled in 1900 by a Mrs Story Maskelyne who used medieval charters to prove that the manor of Ellingdon had been owned by Winchester Abbey, while Allington was not. Ellandun was undoubtedly Ellingdon and not Allington. It suggests that Ecgbert had ridden from Exeter along the Fosse Way, and thence along the road from Bath either to Chippenham or to the Kennet valley. Assuming he advanced straight to Ellandun, his march would have taken him over downland tracks to reach the battlefield from the south.
The size of Ecgbert’s army is unknown; all we know is that it was large enough. With the king was Aethelwulf his eldest son, Ealhstan the bishop of Sherborne and the ealdormen Wulfheard and Hun of Somerset. After the battle, we are told that the first three (Hun was apparently killed in the battle) were dispatched to Kent with ‘a great force’ of shire levies or fyrd, presumably part of the force that had fought at Ellandun. On the assumption that Ecgbert had abandoned most of his western army in Devon but had summoned every man he could from Somerset and Wiltshire, Halsall calculated that he might have commandedupto3,000 men, but probably not more.6
Beornwulf’s army could have been much larger. A charter from October the previous year had been witnessed by the Mercian king and nine ealdormen, named Sigered, Eadwulf, Eadberht, Ealheard, Egberht, Beornoth, Uhtred, Mucel and Ludeca (the last named later became king in his turn). Some or all of these could have followed their king to war, as could the king’s brother, Bynna. A suspect medieval source claims that Beornwulf led ‘one thousand knights’, which we could take to mean menofpropertywiththeirownmounts.7 Assuming that they were accompanied by their retinues, and adding a levy from the three tribal territories nearest to Ellandun, Halsall computes that Beornwulf could have commanded around 5,000 fighting men, although the uncertainties are very large.
Battle of Ellandun as imagined by Guy Halsall
Lydiard House may stand on the Mercian position at Ellandum, with Egbert of Wessex forming up on the ridge 800 yards to the south. The house is an Elizabethan manor later rebuilt as a Palladian mansion. Its park was landscaped with trees, lawns and lakes in the eighteenth century.
There is little more one can say about the battle itself. It is presented to us as a gruelling struggle in which more died from exhaustion and suffocation than from wounds. It is tempting to suggest that the fittest side won. In war-games, assuming that the Mercians outnumber Ecgbert by 5 to 3, the outcome is unpredictable. Ecgbert wins only if his men are given a higher rating by their battle-hardiness andëlan in attack. On equal terms, ‘Ecgbert had better say his prayers’.8 The battlefield might offer clues if only we could locate it. The ninth-century geography of the Wroughton area was reconstructed from charter evidence by Dr G B Grundy.9 He showed that Saxon Ellandun covered a large area west of modern Swindon, including not only Wroughton but the parishes of Lydiard Millicent and Lydiard Tregoze. The battle probably took place not on the downs but on the gentler slopes of the valley of the River Ray to the north-west of Wroughton. Grundy identified ancient trackways that would have led the two armies to converge a little way west of the two Lydiards. The ‘brook of Ellandune’ might have been the Ray or one of two small streams that flow into it from the Lydiards.
Alfred Burne accepted Grundy’s broad conclusions, but found what he considered to be a better battlefield about three-quarters of a mile to the east.10 He placed the opposing forces on two parallel east–west ridges astride the ancient road which ran from Wroughton to Cricklade. According to his theory of ‘Inherent Military Probability’ the two armies would have instinctively looked for a ridge within sight of one another but out of missile range. The ridges are low with a dip in the middle, where one of the streams runs from south-west to north-east. The lie of the land, as well as its scale, reminded Burne of Waterloo.
Unfortunately Burne’s battlefield has since been obscured by housing and roads. Spicer identified Beornwulf’s position, to the north, as the prominent ridge occupied at the western end by the grand sixteenth-century mansion of Lydiard House and its church. A stream runs across the battlefield through broad reedbeds. Could this be Henry Huntingdon’s gory rivus of Ellandune? The southern ridge is now completely obscured but Spicer discerned a slight rise along walkways between the houses and gardens, and at a business park at the western end. Another, more prominent ridge lies just beyond Park House Farm about 500 yards to the south.11
Lydiard Park and its environs are open land with public access. ‘Grundy’s Ellandun’ is centred on a large field to the immediate west of the park run as an ‘Events Field’. Lydiard House and its park are now owned by the Borough of Swindon which manages it as a popular amenity (referred to in the brochures as ‘a Swindon surprise’). The park itself is a creation of the eighteenth century and involved planting trees and damming the stream to form lakes. Before the peasants were evicted to make room for the park, there was an ancient settlement here which may well have existed in Saxon times. We can imagine Ellandun being fought over a mixture of pasture and ploughland at the height of the harvest, with half-built stooks of hay scattered about, and with a length of still-wet marsh, soon to redden with blood, running along the length of the battlefield.
Old road past Park Farm: the ridge in the distance extends from the now built-up Windmill Hill where Burne placed Ecgbert’s men at Ellandun.
A Mercian view of Ecgbert’s initial position on the rise in the distance. In this scenario he advanced over the ground now occupied by Park Farm and engaged the Mercians somewhere near the stream skirting Lydiard Park.
Sketchmap of battlefield of Ellandun (after Spicer, 2001)
There is a small exhibition, including archaeological finds, in the cafe by the car-park. But there is as yet no mention of Ecgbert or the Battle of Ellandun.
What makes a battle decisive is what happens afterwards. After Ellandun, Ecgbert sent an army under his son Aethelwulf into Kent to recover the king’s patrimony there. Beornwulf’s client-king, Baldred, was sent packing across the Thames. Not only Kent, but also the failing kingdoms of Sussex and Essex submitted to Ecgbert ‘because they had been wrongly forced away from his kinsmen’. By the end of the year, Beornwulf had been killed by the East Anglians, who, seeing the way the tide was running, also ‘turned to king Ecgbert as their protector and guardian against fear of Mercian aggression’. In 829, Ecgbert conquered Mercia itself ‘and all that was south of the Humber’. He took his army as far as the River Dore near Sheffield, where the Northumbrians ‘offered him submission and peace; thereupon they parted’. In the following year, Ecgbert’s all-conquering army of Wessex marched into Wales, and that too ‘he reduced to humble submission’.
Wind-carting in the ‘activities field’ west of Lydiard House. This is Grundy’s battlefield, a mile west of Burne’s proposed site.
Four triumphant years of war made Ecgbert one of the most powerful of all Saxon kings up to that time. However his hold on Mercia was only temporary. In 830, perhaps while Ecgbert was otherwise engaged in Wales, the deposed Mercian king, Wiglaf, ‘obtained the Mercian kingdom again’. But Ecgbert was at least able to hang on to Kent and Sussex, and, on his death, hand them on to his son. The legacy of Ellandun was a strong, internally cohesive kingdom of Wessex which, under Ecgbert’s grandson Alfred, withstood the Danes and unified England under the rule of Ecgbert’s house.
In the mean time Saxon England faced a new and terrible enemy. Ship-borne raiders had been attacking British coastal settlements and monasteries since the end of the eighth century. They were variously known as ‘northmen’, ‘pirates’ or ‘strangers’ (gaill). In England they were better known as the Vikings, which is probably based on the Norse word vik and meant ‘fjord-dweller’. The sudden appearance of the longships has been attributed to over-population in the Scandinavian countries, obliging adventurers to try their luck in the lands beyond the sea. Equally they may have begun to raid foreign coasts simply because they could developments in shipbuilding and navigation had provided the Viking with the means to cross the seas and loot the rich lands beyond. The first incursions were acts of mere piracy. The treasures of the Church were obvious ‘soft’ targets. As pagans, the Vikings had no compunction about pillaging the house of God. They probably despised Christianity with its doctrine of turning the other cheek. Their Odin was a war-god, who embodied the virtues of bravery, bloodthirstiness and cunning. Christian meekness was not something they respected.
The first recorded Viking raid on Saxon England was at Lindisfarne in the dead of winter in 793. The looting of the famous monastery was accompanied by scenes of rape and slaughter that shocked the Western world. Three years later they were back, raiding along the Northumbrian coast, including Bede’s monastery at Jarrow. This time events did not go all the Vikings’ way; ‘one of their leaders was slain, and some of their ships besides were shattered by storms: and many of them were drowned there, and some came ashore alive and were at once slain at the river mouth [i.e. of the Tyne]’. This and subsequent quotations are from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle unless otherwise stated.
For years after this setback, the Vikings confined their raids to less well-defended targets in western Scotland, including the monastery of Iona, and in Ireland. But from c.835, when ‘the heathen devastated Sheppey’, the raiders returned to England. In 836, Ecgbert’s men ‘fought against twenty-five ship’s companies at Carrum’ (Carhampton, on the Somerset coast between Minehead and Watchet). ‘Great slaughter was made there’, but the English were driven off. Carhampton was a royal estate, as we know from King Alfred’s will. Evidently it was well worth looting because the Vikings returned there in 843, once again beating off the defenders before going on an orgy of ‘plundering, looting [and] slaughtering everywhere’, as the Frankish annals record. With a relatively small force ‘they wielded power over the land at will’.
Two years later, the war in Cornwall was renewed. The West Welsh united with ‘a great pirate host’, probably on the basis that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. The ageing Ecgbert ‘made an expedition against them’. The resulting battle was fought at Hengestesdune (‘Stallion’s Down’, now Hingston Down, just west of the Tamar near Callington). Hingston Down is a bowl-shaped granite hill and local landmark, bearing many intriguing tumuli and earthworks. It lies six miles from the nearest tidal river, suggesting that the Vikings were already well-established in West Wales, and not merely passing through.
The hill forms a strong defensive position dominating the lowest crossing of the Tamar between Tavistock and the settlement of Callwic, modern Callington. Its location suggests that the West Welsh and their Viking allies occupied the hill to resist Ecgbert’s invasion. There are numerous ancient earthworks there which might have been enlisted as entrenchments. Unfortunately there is no detailed account of the battle.The forces involved may not have been large; theViking bands were from a fleet of thirty ships, implying a crew muster of perhaps 1,000 men or less. All we know is that in his last battle Ecgbert ‘put to flight’ both Britons and Vikings. Hingston Down was a decisive battle which ensured that West Wales or Cornwall would henceforth be part of England, not Wales or a Viking Irish Sea dominion. The native Cornish were in large measure dispossessed, much of the county becoming part of the king’s estate or being given to the Church. In the following year, the founder of Alfred’s line died, having reigned with conspicuous success for thirty-seven years and seven months. He was buried in the old church at Winchester where his bones still remain, in a wooden box high above the choir of the Cathedral.
The Vikings, however, did not go away.
The first raiders were a rootless mixture of Norwegian adventurers and settlers. The raid on Lindisfarne in 793 was probably made by a splinter group from a larger fleet that was already settling the Northern Isles and the Hebrides. Judging by the predominantly Norse names there today, the native population must have been displaced, driven out or enslaved. The very name of Orkney changed from Inse Orc or ‘Boar Isle’ to the Norse Orkneyjar. By the early 800s,Vikings were looting the defenceless Irish monisteries from firm bases in the isles and later in Ireland itself. In 841 a permanent Viking war-camp and trading settlement was established at Dublin that was henceforth to dominate the Irish Sea. They had also sent expeditions into the territory of the Picts and Scots, slaying ‘men without number’ at an unknown battlefield in 839.12
The Norse Vikings seem to have sought out places similar to home in the islands and along the mountainous Irish coast. What strikes a different note is the devastation of Sheppey in 835, which was only the start of intensified raids on the south English coast from Kent to Cornwall. Who were they? While the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers to all the earlier raiders as ‘pirates’ or ‘shipmen’, these later foes it usually calls ‘Danes’. These shipmen were equally adept seamen and no less savage, but they came from modern Denmark, a lowland country of fertile farmland. A westward wind across the North Sea would take them straight towards East Anglia, the Thames estuary and the English Channel. There they would find not only portable wealth but settled farmland as good as anything at home. A Dane could feel very much at home in Norfolk.
The Irish annals distinguish the ‘fair-haired’ Vikings, or ‘gentiles’ from the ‘dark’ sort. The fair ones were the early Norse pirates and settlers, whilst the ‘dark gentiles’ were Danes. For example, in 851 ‘the dark heathen came to Ath Cliath and made a great slaughter of the fair-haired foreigners, and plundered the encampment, both people and property’.13 Ath Cliath was the old name for Dublin, whose harbour the fair-haired Norse had fortified as a trading post. Now they in turn were war-prey. The climactic naval battle between the Norse and the Danes took place on Strangford Lough and was said to have lasted three days and nights. But ‘the dark foreigners got the upper hand and the [fair-haired ones] abandoned their ships to them’.14
The names of the Danish leaders were long remembered: Ragnar Lodbrok (‘Long-breeches’) and his reputed son, Ivar the Boneless. Viking nicknames were usually candid. ‘Boneless’ is still used in Norway to describe a crafty, sly character ‘No bones you can’t hear him coming’. Theories that Ivar was a cripple and had to be carried about in a litter are the result of English literalism. The result of the Viking war in Ireland was that Ivar and another leader called Olaf the White were made co-kings of Dublin and the effective rulers of the new Viking empire in Ireland and the Isles. But this was to be only the start of their adventures.
In the south, the raids increased. Twelve separate raids are recorded by the AngloSaxon Chronicle between 835 and 860, and these may beonly the larger ones.In840, ealdorman Wulfheard won a victory against thirty-three ship’s companies at Hamwic (Southampton), but in the same year his fellow ealdorman Aethelhelm of Dorset was killed fighting ‘the Danes’ at Portland. Three years later there was another battle at Carrum or Carhampton in Somerset, and, as before, the Vikings were victorious, beating King Aethelwulf, who was apparently there in person. More battles followed: at the mouth of the River Parrett in Somerset in 845, and at Wiceganbeorg, possibly Wigborough, also in Somerset, in 850.
In the same year, King Aethelwulf’s brother or son, Athelstan, assisted by ealdorman Ealhhere, destroyed ‘a great host’ at Sandwic (Sandwich, then a coastal town). One account says that Athelstan and Ealhhere ‘fought in their ships’, which implies that they took a leaf out of the Vikings’ own book and fought the first reported naval battle in English history against them. They ‘captured nine ships and drove off the rest’. This may have been the main Viking fleet beached close to the place at Ebbsfleet where Hengist and Horsa had landed in 449 .Alfred’s biographer, Bishop Asser, dates this successful attack to the following year, and, if so, it could have followed the defeat of the Viking land army at the Battle of Acleah.15 However it seems safer to follow the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s order of events.
Unfortunately the fleet was not driven very far. Ominously, that year the Danes established a winter-camp on Thanet, indicating that a major invasion was imminent. In 851, the Danish Vikings mustered what was said to be a fleet of 350 ships. This figure takes some swallowing. Assuming the excavated Gokstad and Oseburg ships to be average-sized longboats, with fifteen or sixteen pairs of oars, a fleet this large could in theory carry up to 10,000 men greater than the likely population of London. If the force was anything like this large, it must have represented a full-scale invasion, perhaps led by Ragnar and Ivar in person. This was an army capable of operating in the countryside far from its base, and of storming the largest towns. It marked a new phase in Viking activity in which the warriors left their ships in fortified bases and swept across country on horse or foot, pillaging as they went.
From its base in Thanet, the great army stormed the walled city of Canterbury, with its church treasures and wealthy halls. Then, entering the mouth of the Thames, the fleet rowed upriver and assailed London. The army of Burgred, king of Mercia, ‘who had come to do battle against them’ was ignominiously put to flight. Left undefended, London, already England’s largest city, capitulated. From London the host turned southwards into Surrey. Somewhere, at a place called Acleah (or Aclea), the showdown battle between Englishmen and Danish Vikings was fought. The former were led by the doughty Aethelwulf of Wessex and his eldest son, Aethelbald, the ruler of Kent. News that Aethelwulf was on the way may have dictated the Vikings’ move into Surrey. Perhaps after the feeble performance of the Mercians, they were expecting an easy victory.
However, Aethelwulf was made of sterner stuff. The best description of the Battle of Acleah is Bishop Asser’s, written some forty years later, although it may only be a gloss on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s single sentence.
Aethelwulf and Aethelbald with the whole army fought for a very long time at the place called Aclea (that is, ‘oak field’), and there, when battle had been waged fiercely and vigorously on both sides for a long time, a great part of the Viking horde was utterly destroyed and killed, so much so that we have never heard of a greater slaughter of them, in any region, on any day, before or since; the Christians honourably gained the victory and were masters of the battlefield.16
The last sonorous phrase was borrowed almost word for word from the Chronicle. The composition of Aethelwulf’s army is unknown, but we can be sure it was a large one, and probably included levies from Kent, Hampshire and Berkshire, as well as Surrey, all fighting under the banners of their respective ealdormen.
The Battle of Acleah savedsouthernEngland from conquest much as Ethandun did twenty-five years later. The main reason so important a battle is so little-known is that we do not know where Acleah was. The Chronicle specifically mentions Surrey, and the only place in the county with a similar name is the village of Ockley, a few miles south-west of Dorking. Ockley lies on the arrow-straight Roman road of Stane Street, which linked Chichester with London and existed in Saxon times, so it is a plausible place for the battle. We can imagine Aethelwulf rendezvousing with his son Aethelbaldat the head of the Kentish levy and then heading towards the capital by the fastest way. Local tradition places the battle on Ockley’s village green, the largest in the county, though historians have preferred the slopes of Leith Hill to the north of the village.
The trouble is that the early name for Ockley was not Acleah but Okele or Okalee, and meant not ‘oak field’ but ‘Ock’s’ or ‘Occa’s field’. The appropriate modern name for Acleah is not Ockley but Oakley. There are several Oakleys in Hampshire, Oxfordshire and beyond, but none, unfortunately, in Surrey. The nearest Oakleys are East Oakley, now a dormitory town west of Basingstoke, and Oakley Green near the Thames between Windsor and Bray. For either we have to assume that the Vikings continued to march through Surrey and then turned east into Hampshire. There is also an Oakleigh on the Thames marshes near Higham in Kent, a few miles east of Gravesend. If Oakleigh was the place, the battle suggests a successful counter-offensive by Aethelwulf, driving the Vikings back to their ships. Without more evidence, Acleah will remain an elusive battlefield (and how helpful it would have been had the chronicler told us a bit more about it instead of wandering off into Aethelwulf’s mythical ancestry from Adam, via various Eoppas, Baldegs, Finns and Wigs!).
Despite their defeat at Acleah, two years later the Vikings were back at their usual staging-post on Thanet in 853. The stout-hearted ealdorman Eahlhere of Kent, joined by ealdorman Huda with the men of Surrey, attacked them at their base in Pegwell Bay, and another battle ensued along the shore where the ships were beached. With the advantage of surprise, the English had at first the upper hand, but ‘the battle there lasted a long time and many men on both sides fell or were drowned in the water’. Both Eahlhere and Huda were killed, and, reading between the lines, it is likely that their deaths resulted in the flight of the county levies, as was to happen in similar circumstances many years later at the Battle of Maldon.
Never the less , the desperate defensive struggle of 8503 brought We s sex a breathing space. Old King Aethelwulf went off to Rome with his youngest son Alfred. Burgred of Mercia found he had the leisure to ravage Wales again, while England enjoyed one of the first royal scandals in English history when the new King Aethelbald carried off and married his father’s teen-bride, Judith. But the lull did not last. In 860’agreat pirate host’ landed at Southampton and marched on Winchester. Despite its stout walls, the city was successfully stormed. The men of Berkshire and Hampshire under ealdormen Aethelwulf and Osric marched to the relief of the town and a battle was fought outside the walls. After a bitter struggle the Viking host was put to flight. This was probably the same Viking force that was active on the Seine in the following year, under a leader called Weland.17 According to Frankish sources, they had assembled a fleet of 200 ships on the River Somme, later joined by eighty more. The Battle of Winchester in 860 could have been a victory to rank with Acleah.Atany rate, the Chronicle describes the next five years as a time of ‘good peace and great tranquillity’ though, if so, it was the last such time for many years to come.
It was in 865 that the trouble really started. A ‘heathen host’ landed once more at Thanet, and this time the Kentishmen bought peace with money. Not that it did them much good, because ‘under cover of the peace, the host went secretly inland by night and devastated all the eastern part of Kent’. But this army, though formidable enough to overawe the men of Kent, was only the forerunner of what became known as ‘the Great Army’ (micel here). A huge fleet led by Ivar the Boneless sailed from the north and descended on the fertile plains of East Anglia. They established a winter-camp and came to an understanding with the East Anglian king, Edmund, who, in return for relative restraint on their part, provided the host with what they needed, including horses. Ivar had not come just to raid. This was a conquest army in search of territory and farmland. It probably drew ship’s companies from France as well as Ireland, and Ivar may well have commanded between three and four hundred ships and a land army of up to 5,000 men.18
Their preparations made, the land army rode north towards York, while the longboats sailed along the Lincolnshire coast and into the Humber. The plan must have been to take York in a pincer movement between land and water. According to a Life of St Edmund written a century later, Ivar (known as ‘Hinguar’ in the source) chose to lead the fleet, and he took the city by surprise.19 The host occupied York on All Saints Day, 1 November 866. It is said that the city walls had been allowed to fall into disrepair; if so, this was culpable negligence amounting to a death wish.
Ivar had timed his invasion well. Northumbria was in a state of civil war between rival kings, Osberht and Aelle (Ella), the former rejected by the people, the latter ‘not of royal birth’. According to a legend eagerly pounced on by the makers of the 1958 film, The Vikings, this Aelle was a cruel and capricious tyrant who murdered Ivar’s father Ragnar Lodbrok by throwing him into a pit of snakes. The real Aelle was new to the throne when the Vikings attacked, and commanded only a faction of his countrymen. It took several months for Aelle and Osberht to patch up their differences, but in March the following year the rival kings gathered ‘great levies’ andbesieged the city.Some oftheir menforcedtheir wayinto the streets ofYork and there was a bloody conflict inside and outside the walls. But the English were no match for Ivar’s force. Both kings perished in the fighting, along with no fewer than eight of their ealdormen. Later accounts claim that the unfortunate Aelle was captured and then sacrificed to Odin in a gruesome ritual known as the blood-eagle in which the victim’s lungs were torn out and spread like wings on his back. The earliest written source is a lament for Canute composed c.1035, in which ‘Ivarr’
who ruled at Jorvik
Cut an eagle
on the back of Aella.20
Aelle’s unpleasant fate was evidently a well-known story, and is not at all unlikely.
The Viking’s capture of York, the city of Edwin, effectively brought the curtain down on the northern Anglo-Saxon kingdom. Henceforth the old kingdom of Deira became the Viking kingdom of Yorvik, while an isolated and diminished Bernicia continued a notional independence north of the Tyne. In the fertile vale of York there was a wholesale redistribution of land in favour of the Viking settlers; the leaders ‘shared out the land of the Northumbrians and they proceeded to plough and support themselves’, as the Chronicle puts it.
By 868, Ivar could move on to the next phase of his plan: the invasion of Mercia. Following the same tactic as in 866, the Great Army seized a defensible site, this time the town of Nottingham (Snotingaham) clustered around its high rock by the River Trent. They established winter-quarters there while the leaders raided the surrounding countryside, robbing churches, seizing horses, cattle and stored food, and collecting protection money. Once again, Burgred, king of Mercia, appealed for aid to his brother-in-law Aethelred, king of Wessex. Since the great raid of 851, Wessex and Mercia had become allies in the face of the common threat. The two kingdoms had acted in unison in 851, and two years later Aethelwulf lent troops to Burgred against the Welsh, after which Burgred received Aethelwulf’s daughter in marriage. The army of Wessex marched north, led by the young king himself, accompanied by his brother Alfred in the latter’s first military campaign. There was a stand-off at Nottingham. The Vikings, safe inside their impregnable position on Nottingham Rock, declined to risk a general engagement. In the end ‘peace was made’ between them. This probably means that the Great Army was bought off. If treaties made with Viking armies across the Channel are any guide, this would have been a huge sum – chests of gold and silver as well as corn and livestock. After that, the Great Army returned to York and Alfred and Aethelred went home.
Mercia’s reprieve was East Anglia’s downfall. In 869 Ivar descended for the second time on East Anglia, establishing his winter-quarters at Thetford. This important town in the centre of East Anglia controlled the main roads, and was then much closer to the sea-lanes of the Wash than today. Whoever controlled Thetford effectively controlled East Anglia. This time, King Edmund chose to fight. Probably outnumbered, Edmund was killed in a fierce battle on 20 November 869 and his kingdom over-run. The traditional site of the battle is at Hoxne, near Diss in Suffolk, about twenty miles east of Thetford. However, according to Abbo of Fleury, who wrote a life of the sainted king a century later, the king was killed near a wood at Haegelisdun, which Dr Stanley West has identified with an old field name, Hellesdun, at Sutton Hall near Bradfield St Clare, six miles south-east of Bury St Edmunds.21 The site is close to a Roman road and also to the place where the king was buried. Nearby place-names such as Kingshall Farm and Kingshall Green indicate a folk-memory of a king who could well be Edmund. Putting it all together, Bradfield St Clare see msa more likely site for the battle.
A different and seemingly incompatible tradition claims that Edmund did not fight at all, but died meekly as befits a Christian martyr. The monk Abbo, who wrote the Vita Sanctis Edmundi at the request of the monks of Ramsey Abbey, claimed to have received some of the details from Archbishop Dunstan, who in turn had heard them from Edmund’s own armour-bearer (this is just about possible). Abbo claimed that ‘Hinguar’ (Ivar) had come from the north by sea, and came secretly to ‘a city’, presumably Thetford, which the Vikings surprised and then burnt, slaughtering the inhabitants. Ivar sent word to Edmund that he would allow him ‘to reign in future under him’ so long as Edmund agreed to share his ‘ancient treasures’ and royal estates with the conquerors. No English king could honourably accept such conditions, but Abbo has Edmund doing just that but on one condition: that Ivar should accept baptism and become a Christian. However, Ivar was not interested in becoming a Christian. The king was seized in his own hall and taken before the terrible Viking leader. Then he was beaten, tied to a tree and shot with arrows ‘until he bristled with them like a hedgehog or thistle’. Finally they chopped off his head and threw it into a bramble thicket.22 The king’s body and head were recovered, and buried locally in a small chapel built for the purpose. Around the year 906, his remains were exhumed and buried at Bedricesworth, soon to become known as Bury St Edmund.
Another version of the tale was preserved by the well-informed twelfth-century Lincolnshire historian Geoffrey Gaimar. According to him, King Edmund did indeed fight the Vikings, and afterwards escaped to a ‘castle’. He was taken prisoner, and revealed his identity in a riddle. When asked who he was, he replied: ‘When I was in flight, Edmund was there and I with him; when I turned to flee he turned too.’ He was held until ‘Ywar’ and ‘Ube’ (Ivar’s brother, Ubba) came. Then he was martyred in much the same way.23
That Edmund was in fact captured and ritually sacrificed to Odin in some horrible wayis all toolikely. Coins struckto commemorate the martyred king were being circulated within a generation of his death, and his cult was firmly established by the ninth century. Perhaps, as Smyth suggests, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle did not want to make too much of this in case it detracted from its hero-king Alfred.24 King Edmund’s death marked the passing of the old kingdom of East Anglia. The Vikings looted and destroyed the rich East Anglian abbeys, Crowland, Huntingdon, Ely and, above all, the great abbey at Medeshamstede (Peterborough), whose monks and abbot were all slaughtered. King Alfred himself recollected a few years later how ‘churches throughout England stood filled with treasure and books – before everything was ransacked and burned’.25 By burning the abbeys, the Vikings managed to wipe out independent East Anglia’s entire history, literature and culture. Thus did East Anglia become a Viking province, the new Denmark.
The map was also being redrawn in the far north. Danish, Irish and Norwegian Vikings contended for control of the isles. In 866, Olaf the White, ‘the greatest warrior-king of the western seas’ sailed from Dublin with a formidable fleet. He led a campaign into the central lowlands of Scotland and ‘plundered all the territories of the Picts and took their hostages’. In 870, he was joined by Ivar, fresh from his rape of East Anglia, to beseige Alt Cluith, the stronghold of the Britons of Strathclyde on Dumbarton Rock which controlled access to the Clyde. The fortress surrendered when the well ran dry after a siege of four months. It was comprehensively plundered and then destroyed. Ivar and Olaf returned to Dublin with a fleet of 200 ships, ‘bringing away with them into captivity in Ireland a great prey of Angles and Britons and Picts’, among them Artgal, king of Strathclyde.26 ‘A great prey’ the misery of the survivors, packed into the freezing, reeking hulls of the long ships, with no future beyond a lifetime of slavery and abuse, is hard to imagine. King Artgal was executed by Ivar in Dublin at the request of Constantine, king of the Scots. The campaigns of Olaf and Ivar in the north effectively eliminated the independent British and Pictish kingdoms and set the stage for a unified Scottish kingdom to emerge. Meanwhile the erstwhile Viking warriors and pirates became farmers, landlords and fishermen, and, in some areas at least, even began to speak Gaelic.
As for the fearful ‘Hinguar’, otherwise known as Ivar the Boneless, ‘king of the Norsemen of all Ireland and Britain’, he died, apparently in his bed, in 873. The whereabouts of whatever bones he possessed are unknown.