The battle, known by the English as Brunanburh and by the Welsh and Irish annalists as bellum Brune, is one of the most famous in Dark Age history. It is also well known as the battlefield that has been ‘lost’: finding Brunanburh is the battlefield detective’s ultimate challenge. Brunanburh was fought in the year 937, probably in August or September. Remembered as the greatest battle since the Saxons first set foot in Britain five centuries before, it was a classic confrontation between north and south, with a confederation of Vikings, Scots and Celts pitted against the English Saxons, now more or less united under the rule of Alfred’s grandson, King Athelstan.
The northern half of Britain was by now a patchwork of Viking, British and Gaelic-speaking kingdoms. There were Norse rulers in York, Dublin and the Hebrides. Strathclyde, the old British kingdom in south-west Scotland and Cumbria was a melting-pot of peoples of Irish, British and Norse ancestry. ‘Scotia’, the old name for the kingdom of Scotland, was a rather vaguely defined area covering the central lowlands and much of the old Pictish kingdoms in the east. Its king, Constantine II of the house of McAlpin, was to play an important part in creating the alliance to confront Alfred’s grandson, Athelstan.
Athelstan’s ambition was to unite the island of Britain under the rule of the house of Alfred, and to at least contain if not defeat the menace of the Vikings. His power-play involved evicting the Viking king of York, and isolating the king of Dublin by wooing the ‘native’ kings of Scotland and Strathclyde under pledges of friendship. When Constantine of Scotland proved an unreliable friend, Athelstan enforced his will, rather as King Henry VIII did 600 years later, by invading Scotland by land and sea. He received the submission of the princes of Wales and made them pay him an annual tribute. The proud Rex Totius Britanniae emblazoned on his silver pennies said it all.
The Celtic and Scandinavian kings of the north and west were naturally unhappy at this turn of events. Constantine of Scotland sealed an alliance with Olaf Gothfrithsson, the Viking king of Dublin, by marriage to his daughter, a union condemned by English writers as idolatrous since Olaf was a pagan.1 Athelstan showed his displeasure by burning and pillaging in the north, and taking Constantine’s son as hostage back to England. But by exploiting widespread resentment of the power of the southern Saxons, and promising rich pickings once Athelstan was overthrown, Olaf and Constantine brokered an impressive northern alliance. It included another Olaf, the son of the ousted king of York, as well as Constantine’s nephew, Owen of Strathclyde, and the wild Gall-Gaels of the Western Isles, renegade Christians who had come to ‘out-Viking’ the Vikings. The whole ambitious enterprise was probably stage-managed by Constantine, although Olaf of Dublin seems to have been the military leader. The plan, it seems, was to turn Athelstan out of the north and the Danelaw (as the Danish-settled Midlands were now called), and if possible to dethrone or kill him. In a royal grant made shortly afterwards, Athelstan referred to Olaf s attempt ‘to deprive me of both life and realm’. For the rank and file, and no doubt some of the leaders too, the promise of plunder may have been a greater motivation.
The tomb of Athelstan in Malmesbury Abbey.
Attracted to the cause were many great men with large followings, including at least five Irish kinglets of Viking descent. The men who served the grand alliance of 937 must have numbered in their thousands, although of course the exact size of Olaf s nd Constantine’s army at Brunanburh is unknowable. Led by many kings, some of whom had been bitter enemies in the past, the force was potentially unwieldy. It seems that the various war-bands fought in separate units; one source refers to the ‘conflict of banners’ floating above the great northern army.2 Whether everyone involved made it to the climactic battle is also uncertain. Much depends on where the battlefield was. On this, as in much else in the Brunanburh campaign, the sources are contradictory and none are wholly to be trusted.
Against this horde, Athelstan summoned what was effectively a national English army. With the king was his half-brother Edmund, who later succeeded him, and two royal cousins, Aelfwine and Aethelwine. The clergy were well represented, with at least three bishops, including Waerstan of Sherborne and Theodred of London. According to a later narrative called Egil’s Saga, Athelstan was also served by a force of Vikings under Egil and his brother Thorolf.3 With all England south of the Trent to draw on, Athelstan’s army could perhaps have numbered as many as 7,000 or 8,000 armed men. The chronicler, William of Malmesbury, writing 200 years later, claims that Athelstan led 100,000 men into battle, which does at least mean that William considered it to be a very large force indeed.4
The convergence of the coalition northern army at Brunanburh is one of the most remarkable feats of arms in the Dark Ages. Had Athelstan been defeated northern Britain might have become a federation of English, Norse, Welsh and Celtic kingdoms. Perhaps Yorkshire would have become part of an enlarged northern Celtic state, or even a separate entity. Birmingham might have been a border town. As it was, the fruits of Athelstan’s victory lasted only as long as Athelstan himself. When he died, two years later, aged only about 40, Olaf took the opportunity to launch another, more successful, if less ambitious, large-scale raid that took him far into the English Midlands.
Unfortunately, the reign of Athelstan was poorly recorded by contemporaries and we are forced back onto later documents of doubtful value, notably a thirteenth-century Icelandic saga and the twelfth-century chronicle of William of Malmesbury. The one truly contemporary source is a famous Old English war-poem included in full in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.5 It has been translated by, among others, Alfred Tennyson, who loved its ‘rush of alliterative verse’ and war-song spirit. It is indeed a fine piece of rhythmic Old English, but for the battlefield-seeker it has the disadvantages of being a poem, long on martial energy and short on information. The following is a prose summary of what it tells us.
In the year 937, King Athelstan and his half-brother Edmund fought a coalition of Scots and Vikings (‘the host from the ships’) at Brunanburh. It was ‘instinctive’ in the royal leaders, the poem reminds us, ‘to defend their land, their treasure and their homes in frequent battle against the enemy’. The great battle began at dawn and lasted until sunset, by which time the field was dark with the blood of men ‘where standards clashed and spear met spear’. By its close, many a northern invader lay in their gore, ‘torn by spears, shot over his shield’. The victorious West Saxons pursued the enemy ‘in troops’, cutting down the fugitives ‘cruelly, with blades whetted on grindstones’. Their Mercian allies, too, fought hard against the ship-borne warriors of ‘Anlaf’ (Anlaf is the Irish form of Olaf, that is, Olaf Gothfrithson, king of Dublin) who ‘invaded our land across the tossing waters’. Among the heaps of slain lay five kings and seven earls.
Olaf himself fled back to his ships with what was left of his following. Likewise his ally, the aged Constantine, king of Scots, that ‘hoary-headed traitor’, abandoned the field, leaving his son among the dead, ‘mangled by wounds’. Many martial deeds were done that day. The Norsemen returned to Dublin in their ships upon Dinges mere, ‘ashamed and shameless back to Ireland’. Triumphant in war, Athelstan and Edmund returned to Wessex, leaving the dead as carrion for wolves, ravens and eagles. ‘Never before in this island’, the poem concludes, ‘was an army put to greater slaughter by the sword since the time when the Angles and Saxons landed and won for themselves a kingdom.’
The battle poem confirms the importance of the battle as a deliverance from an unprecedented ‘Celtic alliance’ of Vikings, Britons and Scots. It shows the men of Wessex and Mercia fighting side by side in what was probably a key moment in the emergence of an English nation-state. Its rugged verse and gloating tone take one about as close as any document can to the spirit of the time. But the document is, after all, a poem. It celebrates the valour of the men of England but it is not the purpose of the poet to go into the whys and wherefores, nor to fix the battle in time and space. Perhaps everyone at the time knew where Brunanburh was, or maybe the exact site was neither here nor there.
From the Irish perspective, the Annals of Ulster confirm that the struggle was ‘immense, lamentable and horrible, and desperately fought’. ‘Several thousands of Norsemen, who are uncounted, fell’, but ‘a large number of Saxons fell on the other side’. Even so, Athelstan ‘enjoyed a great victory’. Another Irish source, the Annals of Clonmacnoise, tell us that the dead of Brunanburh included Cellach, son of King Constantine, Gebeachan, the Norse king of the Western Isles, Owen, the king of Strathclyde and two sons of Sihtric, the erstwhile king of York. But Athelstan also suffered heavy casualties, including the two royal cousins, Aelfwine and Aethelwine, two bishops, including Waerstan of Sherborne, two unnamed ealdormen and ‘a multitude of lesser men’. William of Malmesbury refers to the ‘pitiable slaughter polluting the air with a foul stench’. A German cleric based at Canterbury compared Athelstan with Joshua, as the ‘leader of God’s earthly armies so that the king, mighty in war, might conquer other fierce kings and crush their proud necks’.6 The same antagonism between Celt and Saxon is reflected in a contemporary note by a Welsh poet: ‘Now we will pay them back for the 404 years ... We will drive them out at Aber Santwic’ (i.e. Sandwich in Kent).7
For more information about the battle one is obliged to fall back on the most detailed but at the same time most controversial source, the account of the Battle of Vinheath in Egil’s Saga. This is an Icelandic text which tells of the wandering life of the Viking hero and warrior-poet Egil Skallagrimsson. First written down 300 years after the events it describes, it is clearly a romanticized tale of a hero whose exploits had doubtless grown in the telling. Its account of the battle assumed to be Brunanburh is garbled, but some scholars believe, or at least hope, that it contains a kernel of fact. The problem lies in telling fact from fiction or, as Alfred Burne put it, in sifting the good grain from the chaff. The following is a summary of the battle as told in the saga.
A Scottish king by the name of Olafr Rauthi (Olaf the Red) had invaded England with a large force of Vikings, Briton and Scots, and defeated two northern English earls whose names he gives in Norse form as Alfgeir and Gothrekr (in English, Alfgar and Godric). Hearing of this, two Welsh earls also bearing the Norse-sounding names of Hring and Adils (or Athils) deserted Athelstan and defected to Olaf with their men. Athelstan (spelt ‘Athelsteinn’ in the saga), faced by overwhelming enemy force and desertions in his own ranks, was advised to wait for reinforcements before fighting Olaf. Fortunately, and unlikely as it may seem, the Viking Egil and his brother Thorolf joined Athelstan with their own following of 300 warriors.
On Egil’s advice, Athelstan sent a messenger to Olaf proposing to fight him at ‘Vinheath’ in one week’s time. As was the custom, the battlefield, large enough to hold both armies, would be marked and enclosed with hazel rods (‘enhazeled’), and Olaf would in the mean time be honour-bound to desist from raiding until the issue was decided by battle. ‘Heath’ (heathr) in this context means open ground, but not necessarily moorland.
The chosen battlefield was a level plain with ‘a great wood’ (‘Vin-wood’) on one side and a river on the other. To the north and south lay borgs or well-fortiied settlements. Olaf’s men pitched their tents on a hillside by the northern borg, which some have taken to be Brunanburh itself. Meanwhile Athelstan deployed his army at the southern end where the gap between the forest and the river was narrowest. The English king cunningly disguised his lack of numbers by pitching empty tents (‘no man in every third tent and few in any one’). Moreover, the tents were ‘so high that no one could see over them to find out whether they were many or a few rows deep’. This implies that the line of tents was situated on the crest of a southward slope.
To play for time, Athelstan made Olaf a generous, indeed impossible, offer. He promised to pay him geld of one silver shilling for every plough of land in his kingdom. When Olaf held out for even more, a three-day truce was held while, out of sight, reinforcements quietly arrived to Athelstan’s camp by day and by night. At the close of the truce the English king repeated his offer of peace and friendship, but on the third and final parley he sent Olaf a different answer: Olaf should agree to become Athelstan’s vassal, repay all the loot he had stolen and then double back to where he came from. ‘Go back now’, he told his messenger, ‘and tell him this is the way things are’.
Realizing he had been tricked, Olaf prepared for battle. At the suggestion of the treacherous Welsh earl Adils, Olaf agreed that a mounted company led by Adils and his fellow earl Hring should attempt to take the Saxons by surprise by attacking at daybreak. This ruse was initially successful. Pressed by Adils’s division, Alfgeir gave ground and fled the field. Next the Welsh earls turned on the division led by Egil and his brother.The two Vikings, needless to say, proved a much more formidable foe. Using the forest as cover, Thorolf cleared a path to Hring’s standard. He thrust his spear through the earl’s coat of mail and, thus transfixing his body, ‘lifted him up on it above his own head and thrust the end into the ground’. With his men falling around him, Adils threw down his own standard and fled to the safety of the forest.
By now night seems to have fallen, and Egil rejoined Athelstan’s main force which had now arrived on the field. Athelstan put his best fighters in the front rank under his own, and Egil’s, command. A second body under Thorolf was detached to take on the Scots, who ‘tend to break ranks, run back and forth and appear in different places’. ‘They often prove dangerous if you do not keep on the alert’, counselled the king, ‘but will retreat if you confront them’. Athelstan’s and Egil’s division fought on the side nearest the river, with Thorolf’s men to their left on the forest side. Olaf, too, formed his army into two columns, the Scots facing Thorolf and the Norsemen Egil and Athelstan. ‘Both armies were so big that it was impossible to tell which was the larger’.
The armies crashed together and a great battle ensued. Thorolf’s men advanced towards the Scots holding their shields in front of them. But Thorolf himself, advancing too far, was ambushed by Adils’s men hidden in the forest and fell pierced by many spears. Seeing his brother’s standard being withdrawn, Egil ran over and rallied Thorolf’s men, then drove through the enemy ‘chopping either side’ with his sword, Adder. He eventually caught up with earl Adils and, after exchanging a few blows, killed him. They pursued the fleeing Scots, cutting them down as they ran, ‘for it was pointless for anyone to ask for his life to be spared’.
Both English divisions now turned on the Vikings who were holding firm on the side nearest the river. After a great struggle, the now outnumbered and out-flanked Vikings began to crumble and Olaf was killed. There, too, no mercy was shown. Athelstan, with Egil’s help, won a great victory. Thorolf was buried with battle honours nearby, while the king took of one of his arm rings and presented it to Egil, who was additionally rewarded with two chests of silver. Thus was the Battle of Vinheath concluded, according to Egil’s Saga.
There are aspects of this tale that are plausible and which may be more or less historical. It is likely that both sides fought in two divisions. It is quite possible that the Scots broke first, and that the experienced Viking warriors put up the hardest resistance. But the saga story, like other sagas, is obviously garbled and fictionalized, as well as containing statements that are demonstrably wrong. It conflates the historical Olaf and Constantine, who both survived the battle, into one character, Olaf the Red. The four named earls are otherwise unknown to history, and although ‘Adils’ could be a corruption of Idwal, a contemporary prince of Gwynedd, there is no evidence that the latter was present at the battle. While hazelling was used, at least in the sagas, to surround the site of a duel rather like a boxing ring, it is most unlikely that whole armies would agree to meet on a certain date at a neatly enclosed ground to slug it out. And, needless to say, Athelstan is not likely to have entrusted command to an unknown Viking, though he may well have had Viking mercenaries in his ranks.
There are other suspicious signs. In the saga things tend to come in threes -Athelstan’s threefold offer of peace, the three-day truce and the three-day rides of the messengers, to say nothing of Egil’s 300 men. There is the suspicious match of the two ‘good’ earls and the two ‘bad’ ones, and the likewise chessboard symmetry of the battlefield. Ian McDougal has pointed out that Athelstan’s ruse de guerre in hoodwinking Olaf is a stock story based on classical models.8 Another saga, possibly by the same bard, has Harald Hardrada firing an impregnable fortress in Sicily by tying laming brands to the backs of birds. It is not even absolutely certain that the saga’s Vinheath is Brunanburh. In the saga the battle takes place near the beginning of Athelstan’s reign, not near its end. The latest editors of the saga regard them as separate events, dating Vinheath or ‘Wen Heath’ to the year 925, twelve years before Brunanburh.9
Despite its limitations as a source, Egil’s Saga has been taken seriously by those attempting to locate the battle. Maybe it is a matter of clutching at straws. There is some corroboration of the saga’s description of the field in William of Malmesbury’s brief mention of the ‘evenness of the green plain’ on which the battle was fought.10 Likewise the chronicle of Symeon of Durham mentions a fort he calls Brunanwerk to the north of the battlefield standing on a hill called Wendun, evidently confirming at least one of the saga’s borgs, assuming that his is an independent account.11
William claims he drew his information from a now lost poem praising the deeds of Athelstan. In this version, the king was criticized for his ‘long leisure hours’ of delay while the enemy ravaged his countrymen’s lands. The Norsemen and their Scots allies had descended on Northumbria with barbarian savagery, ‘driving out the people, setting fire to the fields... The green corn withered in the fields, the blighted cornfield mocked the husbandman’s prayers.’12 Scholarly opinion has on the whole rejected this lost poem of Athelstan’s deeds on the grounds that its language sounds more like William’s own time than that of the tenth century. However, the historian Michael Wood has made what I find a compelling case for reopening the issue.13 William was an honest chronicler who had a special interest in Athelstan. His monastery at Malmesbury had even been chosen by Athelstan as his burial place (an empty tomb-chest in the surviving nave of the abbey is said to be his, though its effigy seems to have been ‘borrowed’ from another grave). It was also the burial place of the king’s cousins Aelfwine and Aethelwine slain in the battle. Perhaps William discovered his ‘ancient book’ in the monastic library at Malmesbury. And, if so, could this lost book, with its bad Latin and ‘excessive and bombastic style’, have been a genuine document from the time of the great king? Wood argued that a forger would have been unlikely to include criticism of the king for delay while his subjects were slaughtered, and the account does ring true.
One other chronicle of the twelfth century adds an important crumb of information about the battle. Florence, also known, perhaps more correctly, as ‘John’, of Worcester, followed by several slightly later chroniclers, claims that the Norse ships had sailed into the Humber.14 Symeon adds that Olaf commanded a fleet of 615(!) ships. The Scots too seem to have used ships. These claims have been seized on as indicating that the battle took place not far from the Humber, perhaps in Holderness or somewhere further south along the long road to London. But what evidence did Florence have to support his statement? Did he have some source unknown to us? As for Symeon and the rest, they may well have copied Florence, but, as Alfred Burne points out, ‘they found nothing incredible in the statement; they had no difficulty accepting it’.15
A final snippet of information from a charter shows that Olaf was still in Dublin in mid-August, having been busy for much of that year fighting a minor war in Limerick. This indicates that Brunanburh was fought late in the season, probably in September. Assuming Olaf took the short way across the Irish Sea, as the war-poem certainly implies, where does that leave Constantine and his allies? The implication, surely, is that Constantine began his march south much earlier in the year. Even unopposed it would have taken him the best part of seven weeks to march from Scone, in modern Perthshire, to York, longer still if Brunanburh was on the Irish Sea coast. This could explain Athelstan’s delay. He was waiting to see what Olaf would do. Olaf’s arrival was the cue for the showdown. Until then, the north would have to do the best it could unaided.
Finding the lost battlefield of Brunanburh has kept antiquarians and historians busy for a long time. Some forty sites have been proposed, ranging from Axminster in Devon to Dunbar near Edinburgh.16 Some of these are based on little more than wishful thinking and a fancied resemblance of place-names: Bromfield in Somerset, for example, or Brumford in Northumberland. Such a multiplicity of locations is possible only because there is remarkably little to go on. Nowhere today is there a place called Brunanburh. Even the early chroniclers refer to the battle under a variety of spellings – sometimes in the same document! Apart from the battle poem’s Brunanburh, there is the Brunandune in the chronicle of Aethelweard, followed by Henry of Huntingdon’s Brunesburh, Roger of Hovedon’s Brunnanbyrg or Bruneberih, the Brunnanburch of the Chronicles of Melrose, and the Brumford or Brunfort of Ralph Higden of Chester! The chronicler Gaimer had got hold of the name Bruneswerce, perhaps a variation of Symeon of Durham’s Brunanwerc. The sense in each case is something like ‘Bruna’s fort’ or ‘Bruna’s stronghold’, which might be rendered in modern English as ‘Brown’s town’. ‘Dune’ as in Brunandune means ‘open land’ and has the same basic meaning as William of Malmesbury’s Brunanfeld (‘Bruna’s ield’) or the Norse word hethr as in Vin-heath. Brunanburh, then, was evidently open, possibly cultivated land, with some sort of stronghold a little way to the north, possibly situated on a hill.
Battle of Brunanburh as imagined by Guy Halsall
So where was it? Four candidates stand out. The first in chronological order is Burnswark Hill between Lockerbie and Ecclefechan in Annandale in the old county of Dumfries. This location was put forward with great conviction by George Neilson in 1909.17 He based his argument on the medieval Scottish chronicler Fordun, who describes the invading fleet landing in the Solway Firth, and on the similarity of the name Burnswark to the Bruneswerce of Geoffrey Gaimer. On the basis of the description in the saga, and especially Athelstan’s ruse de guerre with the tents, Neilson considered that Olaf and the Scots must have camped in a Roman earthwork just north of Burnswark Hill, with Athelstan’s army a quarter of a mile to the south. A nearby farm called The Whins might be an echo of Symeon’s Wendun, while three miles to the south is a place called Brown Moor which could be the saga’s Vin-heath. Neilson sited the battle itself on the elevated flat-top of Burnswark Hill – which would certainly have made a dramatic piece of military theatre.
Neilson’s theory was criticized in the same journal by Alice Law.18 She pointed out that his battlefield measures only about 350 by 200 metres – hardly room for up to 20,000 men. The site nevertheless received the weighty support of Sir Charles Oman, the authority on medieval warfare. But Alfred Burne gave it a resounding thumbs-down:
The imagination boggles at the idea of 40,000 soldiers milling on a polo ground on top of a mountain. It would resemble a monstrous Rugger ‘scrum’ ... This is to reduce the battle to an affair of boy scouts or schoolchildren on Tom Tiddler’s ground.19
Nearly thirty years on, W S Angus accepted Neilson’s general thesis, but moved the battlefield two miles south-east to Middlebie Hill. Like Neilson, he placed an absolute faith in the truth of Athelstan’s trick with the tents, arguing that, ‘if the English wished to conceal the weakness of their advanced guard, they would seek a position visible by their enemies but not under close observation’.20 Angus claimed to have found such a position on the knoll of Middlebie Hill where the enemy would spot the tents but fail to notice Athelstan’s main camp beyond the hill in some old earthworks known as the Birrens.
But this sort of rationalizing from topographical features misses the point. If Egil’s Saga is to be taken at its face value, Athelstan challenged the northerners to battle at a named spot. Is it likely, asked Burne, that he would have named so remote a spot within the kingdom of the Britons of Strathclyde of which he could have had little knowledge? And, if so, would Olaf and Constantine then oblige him by retreating back into their own lands? ‘The idea is nonsensical.’21 In short, the Burnswark site relies on selective evidence from unreliable sources, ignores considerations of military probability and places its reliance on a fictionalized and discredited account. Wherever else it may have been, the battle was not, it seems pretty certain, fought at Burnswark.
Alfred Burne’s own favoured site was Brinsworth, near Rotherham in the West Riding of Yorkshire. This site had first been suggested by J H Cockburn in 1930, largely on the grounds of what he considered to be place-name evidence.22 Cockburn’s book on the subject has been described as ‘a tissue of implausibles, false etymologies and wrong-headed history, stitched together with all the zeal of a local enthusiast’,23 but others have come to broadly the same conclusion, if by a different route. Like Cockburn, Alfred Burne accepted Florence of Worcester’s statement that the invading fleet first sailed into the Humber, and that the battle must therefore have been fought somewhere east of the Pennines and south of the Humber. On the grounds of ‘inherent military probability’ Burne reasoned that the northerners must have concentrated at Tadcaster where the River Ouse crosses the great north road. If so, it must have been near here that they defeated the northern earls as related in the saga, much as Harald Hardrada did to a similar force of local levies in 1066.
Deducing from a charter reference to his earlier invasion of Scotland that Athelstan would have chosen to advance the same way in 937, Burne has Athelstan concentrating his own force at Derby. The two armies, he reckoned, would make contact somewhere on Ryknild Street, the Roman road that links Derby and Tadcaster. A natural defensive position lies just south of the old Roman town of Templeborough where a bottleneck is formed by the River Rother. On the grounds of its relationship to the description in the saga, as well as the ‘village bearing the suggestive name of Brinsworth’, Burne placed the battle along an east–west ridgemeasuring1,800metres just west of the Rother between Brinsworth and Catliffe. This, he was conident, satisfied both Egil’s Saga and military probability. Furthermore, and purely by chance, Burne heard of a local tradition of a big battle that took place in this area long ago, which, he reasoned, could only be Brunanburh. Burne dismissed the arguments in favour of Burnswark on the reasonable grounds already made. More brusquely, he dismissed the claims of Bromborough in the Wirral, to which we will return in a moment. The philological evidence in the latter’s favour, he claimed, was simply irrelevant. ‘Apart from the similarity of name, Bromborough has nothing in common with either Egil’s Saga or I.M.P.’ (i.e. ‘Inherent Military Probability’): QE.D. Burne’s is still perhaps the best-known account of the battle, owing to the continued popularity of his books. His case is well-argued and persuasive, and his careful selection of the evidence to suit his case is easy to overlook.24
Thirty years on, Michael Wood came to broadly the same conclusion as Burne, but as the result of an independent investigation. Like Burne, he drew attention to
the striking correspondence between the Brinsworth site and the famous description of Vinheath ... with its forts north and south of the field, its gentle slopes north and south, the steep slope to the river, and the narrow gap to the south where the river and the forest come close together.25
Only scraps of the forest, now called Tinsley Wood, remain, but Wood showed that at the time of the Domesday Book it had been much larger, measuring about a mile by a mile and a half. He also discovered that the nearby, apparently insignificant, Tinsley Chapel used to receive a royal stipend for a special chantry service. Could this have been a service for the dead of Brunanburh? The place where, according to local tradition, a great battle had been fought, was White Hill, near Tinsley. Could this have been the Weondun of Symeon of Durham?
There are two main problems with Brinsworth. First, the Old English name for Brinsworth as set out in the Domesday Book is Brynesford, which on linguistic grounds cannot be Brunanburh. And it is hard to square with the clear statement in the battle poem that Olaf sailed ‘shameless and ashamed’ back to Dublin from whence he had come. Dublin is a long way from the Humber by sea, even if Olaf was able to transport his boats overland from the Forth to the Clyde. Burne gets around that problem by explaining that there were in fact two Olafs, and that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle simply made a mistake by merging them into one. The Olaf who actually sailed back to Dublin was, he argued, a different Olaf, the son of Sihtric the One-eyed, the sometime king of York. Confusingly this second Olaf later became king of Dublin in his turn. Perhaps, therefore, the task of this second Olaf was to make a diversionary raid from Ireland on the west coast. But asserting that our best contemporary source simply got it wrong might seem to some observers to be skating on very thin ice.
A case for a more southern location for Brunanburh was made by Alfred Smyth.26 Smyth used the saga to support his own idea that the battle was fought by the Forest of Bromswold between the Nene and the Welland in Northamptonshire. Bromswold is a good match for William of Malmesbury’s Bruneswald, and Smyth found other similarities to the landscape described in the saga. In his view, the battle must have taken place in the territory of the southern Danelaw in the East Midlands, the centre of activity in Olaf’s subsequent invasions in 940 and 943. But, it could be argued, a battlefield so close to the great abbey at Peterborough, where one of the Anglo-Saxon chronicles was compiled, would never have been ‘lost’. And while Olaf’s band did indeed manage to take advantage of the death of Athelstan to ravage the Midlands, would the mighty coalition of Brunanburh have held together so far from home? And would the Saxon king have allowed them to come so far?
The fourth plausible location for the battle is at Bromborough on the Wirral, close by the Mersey between Birkenhead and Ellesmere Port. Bromborough has at least one thing massively in its favour: as A H Smith demonstrated from a close study of thirteenth-century charters, Bromborough was the medieval Brunburh, of which Brunanburh would be a logical Old English form. 27 Bromborough, scholars agree, could have been Brunanburh. But is it our Brunanburh? The location is perfect as a landing ground for a fleet from Dublin. As Stephen Harding has demonstrated using place-name evidence and a surviving fragment of a document known as Ingimund’s Saga, the Wirral had been settled by a party of Norsemen from Ireland early in the tenth century. It had trading links with other Norse settlements around the Irish Sea and political contact with the mighty neighbouring kingdom of Mercia. The problem for Brunanburh seekers was that the Wirral seemed to lack place-names and topographical features that tied it to the battle. Another problem is the battle poem’s reference to an all-day pursuit of the Vikings which implied a location further from the sea. However the wording is ambiguous, and isn’t easy to square with the poem’s assertion that the battle also lasted all day. Another objection is that, while Bromborough is a convenient enough location for Olaf, it would have involved a long and roundabout journey for the Scots and Gall-Gaels, whether by land or sea. And there is no other instance in the whole of the Dark Ages of Scots armies operating so far from home.
Is this Brunanburh? Bebington Heath is a haven of green between the River Dibben and Storeton Woods (in the distance). ‘Bruna’s Fort’ is probably the modern Poulton Hall, on the site of a Norman castle. (© Stephen Harding.)
New evidence pieced together by Stephen Harding and his colleagues at Nottingham University may answer at least some of these objections. The Wirral has in fact no fewer than three place-names that could derive from ‘Bruna’ – three ‘Brown’s towns’: Bromborough, Brimstage and the lost village of Brimston. Bruna, whoever he was, must have been a person of consequence locally. Moreover, Harding, with some help from Judith Jesch, Professor of Viking Studies at Nottingham University, and place-name expert Paul Cavill, has come up with a plausible explanation for that puzzling place mentioned in the poem: Dinges mere.He argues that the ding refers to a Viking assembly or thing, which survives in the modern Wirral town of Thingwall. ‘Ding’ is simply thing said in a Celtic Irish accent (‘dat ting, the Ding’) – which no doubt the Dublin Vikings would by now have acquired. The site of this particular thing is believed to be Cross Hill, near the present A551. Thus Dinges mere would have meant ‘thing-marsh’, perhaps the tenth century name for the treacherous tidal marshes of the Dee.28
Harding suggests that the Vikings retreated from the battlefield somewhere near Bromborough, across the spine of the Wirral and down to the Dee marshes where their ships were drawn up. He proposes that the battle was fought at Bebington Heath, with the Vikings occupying a slight ridge just above the woods on Storeton Hill. ‘Bruna’s fort’ may have been a precursor of the present-day Poulton Hall, ‘home since 1093 of the Lancelyn-Green family’. If so, the battlefield certainly justifies William of Malmesbury’s description of Athelstan’s strategy as ‘a thunderbolt’. Choosing to crush the enemy on his landing-grounds is reminiscent of King Harold’s rapid response to news of invasion before Stamford Bridge, and again before Hastings. Perhaps Harold had Athelstan’s example in mind.
The Dee estuary near Heswall on the Wirral, probably the site of Dinges mere or ‘Thing Marsh’, the harbour to which Olafs Vikings fled after the battle. (© Stephen Harding.)
Stephen Harding’s case for basing the battle in the Wirral made the headlines.
The Harding battlefield, like the Burne one, lies in a heavily built-up area. Bebington is now a suburb of Bromborough, and the M53 motorway bisects its western flank. In the distance lie the belching towers of the Stanlow oil refinery. The only part of the field still open is Brackenwood golf course. As the Independent’s reporter put it, ‘the English began their pursuit, chasing their quarry up what is now the fairway of the par 11th hole’.
The claim that the lost battlefield of Brunanburh had at long last been found received widespread press and TV coverage in December 2004. ‘For the cradle of English civilization, go to the Wirral’, suggested the Independent. This will be happy news to the Wirral’s tourist enterprise, which is working up the area’s Viking antecedents. However battlefield-seekers tend to be chary of claims made on linguistic evidence alone. Investigators plan to make a geophysical survey of the site, but Professor Harding believes that the thin soils of the area are unlikely to preserve any substantial military remains. The most that can be said is that Bromborough is far and away the most likely site on place-name grounds but that a plausible military explanation that would unite the Vikings, Scots and their allies at the Wirral is still lacking.
The location of Brunanburh has challenged battlefield enthusiasts for centuries, and much ink has been spilled over it. In his edition of the battle poem published in 1937, Alistair Campbell famously concluded that ‘all hope of localizing Brunanburh is lost’.29 His reason for ‘this depressing conclusion’, as Burne referred to it, was Campbell’s dismissal of Egil’s Saga as a factual source for the battle. If, as Campbell argued, this part of the saga is a romantic fiction – a medieval version of a Barbara Cartland novel – then the materials for identifying the lost battlefield simply don’t exist.
If one chooses to follow Florence of Worcester – and many later chroniclers did –then a location somewhere south of the Humber and east of the Pennines is indicated. If one places more reliance on the near-contemporary battle poem, the battle was more likely fought by the Irish Sea, probably at Bromborough. Alfred Smyth presents a closely argued case for a site in the East Midlands, while Kevin Halloran has, I understand, made a detailed case for a site near Burnley which has yet to be published. If one placed a special weight on medieval Scottish sources, there might even be something to be said for Burnswark. They cannot of course all be right, and it is quite possible that none of them are! For my own part, though my heart is in the Tinsley-Brinsworth site championed by Alfred Burne and Michael Wood, Stephen Harding’s case for a site on the Wirral looks more convincing – at least for the moment!