The surviving 325-line fragment of an Anglo-Saxon poem, composed around 1000 by an unknown person, gives us an exceptionally close glimpse of a Dark Age battle and the people who fought in it. No one knows what the original poem was called, but since 1846 it has been called The Battle of Maldon.1 Vivid, straightforward and realistic, the poem tells of the death of Byrhtnoth and his men in battle against the Viking invaders at Maldon. The poem was plainly intended to inspire its audience with the same heroic spirit. It celebrates the martial qualities of the warrior, with his physical strength and indomitable courage, sense of honour and pride in his ancestry. Byrhtnoth and several of his companions make exemplary speeches, all to the same purpose: that no one shall reproach them for running away; they will go forward and conquer or die. The poet is showing his audience how men ought to behave in battle. Of course, since everyone who was with Byrhtnoth died at Maldon, a modern audience might wonder how the poet was able to record their last moments so faithfully. The speeches attributed to them were, of course, made up by the poet. It has been called a sort of ‘medieval journalism’.2 All the same, it is not at all unlikely that the simple martial virtues extolled by the Maldon poet were indeed shared by Byrhtnoth and his men. The purpose of the poem was to praise the brave Byrhtnoth and set an example of how to behave when facing death on the battlefield.
There are several other contemporary sources for the battle. There is the usual brief passage in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,3 and a longer one in the Vita Oswaldi (Life of St Oswald),4 both of which provide a broader context for the battle and its aftermath. The account in the Vita Oswaldi, composed by a monk of Ramsey, Cambridgeshire, around the year 1000, is generalized but not incompatible with the poem, though it omits all details of the battlefield. The twelfth-century Liber Eliensis (Book of Ely) gives a different account of the battle5 – or rather battles, since it presents two battles at Maldon separated by four years (see below). The Viking sagas are surprisingly silent, and the Norman chroniclers have little to add to what we already know. It is a measure of how lop-sided our knowledge is even of this exceptionally well-recorded battle that we do not even know for sure who the Viking leader was.
State of ealdorman Byrhtnoth ar Ely Cathedral. (© The Battlefields Trust, www.Battledieldstrust.com)
The Battle of Maldon was fought at the start of the time of the notorious Danegelds of Aethelred the Unready. Before 980, England had experienced no Viking raids for a generation. There was still a large Danish-speaking population in parts of eastern and northern England, but they were farmers and traders, not raiders, and had become assimilated under the peaceful rule of Alfred's great-grandson, King Eadgar. Then, four years after Eadgar's death, the raids began. Out of the blue, in 980, seven longships appeared at Hamtun (Southampton) and they slew or took prisoner most of the population. The same year Viking marauders harried Thanet ‘ in Kent, while another ‘pirate host from the north’ plundered the town of Chester. In 981 the longboats destroyed Padstow and all down the coast of Devon and Cornwall. Then it was the turn of Dorset, when Portland was ravaged by ‘three pirate crews’. After a lull, the raids stepped up. In 988, the Vikings attacked at Watchet. There was time for organized resistance led by a local thegn, Goda, ‘but Goda was slain and many with him’.
The chroniclers reported the raids without suggesting a cause. The most likely reason for the growth of ‘pirate’ activity is events in Denmark. Since the time of Alfred and Athelstan, Denmark had become Christianized under King Harald Bluetooth. As in England, Christianity brought more than a change of gods. The Church created an exalted form of kingship and smiled on the conquests of the likes of Harald Bluetooth so long as that in doing so he also converted the heathen. Hence warriors and missionaries went to war together. The result was that, as Harald's authority extended into larger and larger parts of Scandinavia, so local leaders who preferred the old anarchic ways felt tempted to try their luck overseas. Unlike the men who fought Alfred, these marauders were not in search of land so much as portable wealth, especially money. With enough of it, they could re-establish their fortunes at home, or at least retire wealthy.
Two political factors may have influenced events. First, in 986 Harald Bluetooth was overthrown in favour of his son, Sweyn Forkbeard. Sweyn's ambitions, as things turned out, extended beyond Scandinavia to England. And England was more vulnerable than for many years past, following the untimely death of King Eadgar in 975. The new king, Aethelred, was a youngster who did not enjoy the same easy authority as his father. Worse, he did not improve with age: Aethelred was weak, indecisive and, on occasion, treacherous. To later generations he was to become Aethelred Unraed, that is, Aethelred the Unwise. Later still, he was immortalized as Ethelred the Unready, our ‘first Bad King’.
This was the background against which the most dangerous raid so far took place. In 991a large fleet of93 ships appeared at Folkestone and harried the lands around the town. It moved on to pillage Sandwich, and thence across the Thames estuary and north along the Essex coast to Ipswich, the attackers ‘over-running all the countryside’ and sacking the town. Who led this expedition, the largest to trouble England's shores for nearly fifty years? The ‘A’ or Parker Chronicle names one ‘Anlaf, that is, Olaf Tryggvason of Norway. This Olaf was a descendant of the Norse King Harald Finehair, and four years after the Battle of Maldon he succeeded in making himself king of that country. That he was certainly among the raiders of 991is proven by the text of a treaty made later that year which names him. However, three years later, in 994, Olaf had joined forces with Sweyn Forkbeard in an attack on London. This expedition disposed of 94 ships, around the same number as at Maldon, suggesting that the 991raid was on a similar scale, and may therefore have been led by Sweyn himself. A third possibility, based on brief but apparently independent accounts in the Book of Ely and the chronicle of Florence of Worcester, names the Viking leaders as Justin and Guthmund, son of Stectan. Perhaps, at the time, no one knew who the leaders were.
Aerial view of the Maldon battlefield. (© The Battlefields Trust.)
‘And so on to Maldon’, writes the Parker chronicler. What attracted the Vikings to Maldon, a small Saxon burh situated on a low hill at the landward end of the sheltered Blackwater estuary? The most likely explanation is that Maldon possessed a royal mint, that is, it was one of sixty-odd places which supplied the hammer-struck silver pennies of King Aethelred. Ipswich was another, and so was Watchet, a town that had been comprehensively sacked by Viking pirates three years earlier. There were likely to be a lot of silver pennies in Maldon. Moreover itwas a coastal town by broad and sheltered waters, and so vulnerable to attack from the sea.
The Saxon leader at Maldon was Byrhtnoth, son of Byrhthelm (his name is some-times mercifully Anglicized as Britnoth, though it is now considered ‘historically correct’ to preserve the original spelling of Dark Age names: it is pronounced ‘boorch-noth’). What little is known of him indicates he was a nobleman of advanced age and great authority. He appears on a charter as ealdorman of Essex as early as 956, and so was probably over sixty at the time of the battle; the Vita Oswaldi refers to his ‘swan-white hair’. Byrhtnoth was also unusually tall, towering over his men in the battle-line, and still strong. He may have been the senior nobleman in England at the time. Given the heroic circumstances of his death, this might explain why Maldon became such a famous battle.
Maldon is one of the few Dark Age battles of whose location we can be reasonably certain. There is no doubt that the Saxon Maeldun is the modern town of Maldon at the landward end of the Blackwater estuary in Essex. The ancient town, which lay on the low hill overlooking the estuary, had been fortified as a burh at the time of King Alfred. It was important enough to have been attacked at least twice, in 921and again in991.Onthe first occasion, Danish raiders, assisted by’ pirates’, ‘went to Maldon and surrounded the fortress’. However, they were unable to prevent reinforcements from entering the town, and eventually gave up the siege. As the Danes retired, they were harried by the garrison who ‘slew many hundreds’. This was an encouraging model for the defence of the town. Unfortunately, on the second occasion things did not go so well.
The battlefield of 991was always assumed to be close to the town, but the first to investigate its whereabouts was E A Freeman in his monumental book, The Norman Conquest. Freeman believed that the battle took place around a road bridge, which, he concluded, must have been at Heybridge just to the north of the Saxon town where the tidal rivers Blackwater and Chelmer unite. In Freeman's view, the Vikings crossed over the Blackwater by this bridge, and so approached the town from the north. The battle would therefore have taken place on the lat land north of the river on what are now suburban housing estates.6 But, as Burne pointed out in More Battlefields of England, this was not one of Freeman's better reconstructions and several factors made his idea wildly improbable. This scenario would result in the Vikings becoming sandwiched between the Saxon army approaching from the north and the garrison of the town, and with no obvious line of retreat. Moreover there is no record of a Saxon bridge there, and any bridge that gets covered over at high tide, would, as Burne put it, ‘beaqueer one’.7 Finally the poem explicitly states that Vikings crossed the water from the west yet Freeman makes them move northwards.
Similar considerations apply to another proposed site at Langford, a mile upstream from Maldon where the Rivers Chelmer and Blackwater almost merge. Again, the Vikings would have risked their retreat being cut off and their boats burned if they had strayed so far inland. The main problem with a third possible site, at Osea Island in the middle of the estuary, is the distance of the island from the shore – nearly a mile – rendering it impossible for the shouted exchanges between the Saxon leader, Byrhtnoth, and the Viking herald to be heard. Nor is there any obvious causeway or record of a bridge across the wide channel separating the island from either shore.
This leaves Northey Island, in the estuary a mile and a half east of the town, as by far the most likely location for the Viking base. It was first proposed by E D Laborde in 1925 as the one place where the channel is narrow enough to shout across but where the tides still act. He argued that the word bricg in the poem need not mean a bridge, since the word ford (forda) is also used. It could apply equally well to a causeway, submerged by the tides but dry at low tide. And there, linking the island to the mainland nearest the town, and facing west, is a perfect candidate, some two hundred yards long and twelve feet wide. As the tide comes in, the water floods towards the causeway from both directions, meeting and joining at just that spot, thus illuminating the passage in the poem referring to ‘the loop-currents locking together’ that had puzzled historians. The oozy mud of the estuary makes the causeway the only way of reaching the island even at low tide – the Blackwater is aptly named! Hence the Vikings had chosen a secure base for their ships. All they had to do to avoid battle was to sail away on the tide. The actual battle was fought near the south shore, somewhere close to the causeway but on dry ground, most likely between the present-day South House Farm and the estuary.8
But coastal land can change a lot over a thousand years. Did the causeway exist in 991? And would the nearby ground have been dry enough to fight a battle on? Evidently so. In 1973, George and Susan Petty took core samples of sediment from the causeway and concluded that it did indeed exist at the time of the Battle of Maldon, except that the causeway was then somewhat narrower and, at about 120 yards, only half the length of the present one. Byrhtnoth would not have had to shout as loud as we would today!9 The sea level in this area has risen by five or six feet since the battle. Hence the marshes have since encroached much further. In 991the area between the sea-wall and the estuary would have been dry land. Moreover, just as the sea has risen, so the land in this area has subsided (the higher ground between the town and the estuary today is recent land-fill). At the time of the battle the shore of the estuary was comparatively high and dry, and probably capable of growing crops (we can imagine this August battle being fought amid ripening wheat). The Pettys’ findings, which have since been supported by radiocarbon-dated sediment from the estuary, indicate that the Vikings would have crossed from dry land to dry land, and that the marshes were then of very limited extent. Part of the Maldon battlefield probably now lies beneath the mud below the sea-wall.
The causeway at Northey Island. (© The Battlefields Trust.)
Low tide on the Blackwater as seen from the causeway. In Saxon times there was less mud and the river was less wide. (© The Battlefields Trust.)
How large were the armies at Maldon? The ship figures carefully recorded by the Anglo-Saxon chronicler during the 990s seem accurate. Longships varied in their carrying capacity, but assuming an average of around thirty fighting men per ship, the fleet of ninety-odd ships indicates an army of nearly 3,000 men. Given that this fleet was only one boat short of the one that burned London and reduced Aethelred's government to its knees, it would be surprising if the number was much fewer.
As for Byrhtnoth's army, much depends on its catchment area. Levies at this time were raised on the basis of one armed man per five hides of land. In the document known as the Tribal Hidage,Essex (East Sexena) disposes of 7,000 hides, making a theoretical levy of about 1,400 men.10 If one adds the burh levies, which were based on the lengths of walls surrounding the town, plus the hearth-troops of thegns and other noblemen, and assuming some help from surrounding counties, the English would have been able to scrape together a sufficiently large force to challenge the Vikings. It is hard to imagine Byrhtnoth being foolish enough to challenge them to battle with an inferior force. The Battle of Maldon and the Vita Oswaldi imply roughly equal numbers, though the less reliable Book of Ely presents the English as greatly outnumbered.
The surviving fragment of The Battle of Maldon begins with Byrhtnoth riding along the lines, ‘showing the recruits how to be placed and hold position, their round shields held right firm in fist; to feel no fear’. Later in the poem we learn that the men of Essex had met at the ‘moot-place’ to decide what to do, and that many there had spoken manfully ‘who when there was need would not match their words’. Once his men were in place, the aged ealdorman dismounted and took up his prominent command position ‘where he most wanted to be, with his house-troops (heorthwerod) he knew wholly loyal’. The English would have lined up on the shore near the causeway to Northey Island where the Vikings were encamped. Assuming an army of 2,000 to 3,000 men lined six deep, their frontage would have stretched for about 500 yards. All accounts suggest that the English fought in a single large mass, though each nobleman was probably among his own household men.
The lane to Northey Island, possible following Byrhtnoth's route to battle. (© The Battlefields Trust.)
The Viking’s ‘herald’ (Wicinga ar) hailed the English from across the causeway:
The brave seamen sent me to you, and told me to say this. Send us silver for safety; it would be sensible of you to buy off trouble with tribute rather than have us harshly deal out havoc. We needn’t be reduced to war if you’re rich enough. We for gold will give you our guarantee ... Give us treasure for a truce, accept our treaty, and we’ll be on our way.
Byrhtnoth gave his famous reply, shaking his spear over his board-shield:
Can you hear, seamen, what we say on our side? Indeed we have something to send you – spears, deadly darts and hard swords; these make the war-tax you are welcome to collect! Messenger, make your way back, tell your people that here unafraid stands the earl with his army who will guard this country well – Aethelred’s land, my liege’s folk and fields ... It would be humiliating for you to be of with our shillings to your ships without a fight, now that you’ve entered so far into our country. You will not so easily earn our money but spear and sword will settle it first!
At this point the poem describes the curious tidal effects that have been so useful in locating the battlefield. With the flood tide two currents locked together over the causeway. The armies waited for the tide to change in a prolonged stand-off: ‘Too long it seemed till in war they could join weapons’. Neither side ‘could damage the other except in arrow-flight’. Eventually the tide began to ebb and reveal the causeway. Byrhtnoth thereupon chose three brave champions to hold the ‘ford’, rather in the manner of Horatius at the bridge (and also reminiscent of the lone Viking swordsman at Stamford Bridge). Their names were Wulfstan, Aelfere and Maccus. Wulfstan killed the first Viking to venture onto the causeway. Then the ‘contemptible’ Vikings made Byrhtnoth an offer: let us cross the water and fight us on the land.
Surprisingly perhaps, the ‘overconfident’ earl agreed: ‘There’s space for you now’, he called across the cold water, ‘Straightway come to grips with us – God himself alone knows who’ll hold sway over this field of struggle.’ Was this mere folly on Byrhtnoth’s part? Or was he so anxious to prevent the Vikings from sailing away to pillage another day that he was willing to relinquish his advantage and gamble on winning a plain fight within sight of the walls of Maldon?
How long would it take up to 3,000 Vikings to cross a causeway about eight feet wide? If they filed across two by two it would have been several hours. But evidently they simply waded through the shallow water, which, according to geological evidence, was less muddy than now. The Vikings, sang the poet, came on through the shining wet like ‘blood-wolves’. By the time battle was finally joined on the dry flats beside the estuary, Byrhtnoth’s men had been waiting for many hours.
The earl had them form a ‘war-wall’ (wihagan – literally, war-hedge). At this point the poet falls back on an impressionistic description of ‘the occasion when fated men must fall in battle’. There was uproar:
Men sent from their hands hard spears; sharp-pointed, the shafts flew. Bows were busy, board took sword, and wild was the war-urge, warriors falling on both sides the wounded fell. The sturdy men stood their ground.
Byrhtnoth was probably killed early on. He was a prominent target, standing beneath his personal banner and visible from a distance by his great height. According to the Vita Oswaldi he ‘towered over others; the power of his hand neither Aaron nor Hur [two companions] supported, but manifold piety towards God gave him strength, and he was worthy of it’. The poem presents a blow-by-blow account of Byrhtnoth’s last moments. An ordinary Viking soldier, a ‘churl’, hurled ‘a south-made spear’ at the tall ealdorman, wounding him above his shield. ‘Shoving with his shield until the shaft broke, and banging at the spear till it sprang away’, the angry Byrhtnoth hurled his own spear clear through his opponent’s throat. A second spear he threw, ‘bursting through some man’s armour, through the hard rings of mail; in the heart lodged the deadly spear-end. The earl laughed, mighty and brave, giving his Maker thanks for the day’s work.’ But as he laughed, a second Viking javelin struck him. A young companion, Wulfmaer, Wulfstan’s son, drew the weapon and hurled it back. A fight developed around the fallen earl as the Vikings closed in, attempting ‘to loot him as he lay of raiment and rings, and [his] richly-worked sword’. Byrhtnoth managed to draw his sword, but a Viking struck and shattered his shoulder. Now defenceless, the earl still found the strength to address his men one last time, appealing to them to stand firm and praying that his soul may speed to heaven, that ‘no hell-hound may ever defile it’. Meanwhile earthly hell-hounds closed in, killing Aelfnoth and Wulmaer and finally hacking of Byrhtnoth’s head.
The death of the leader normally decided the outcome of a battle. Some of Byrhtnoth’s men elected to flee (‘they ran from battle who had no wish to be there’). Among the first to take to his heels was Godric, ‘the coward son of Odda’. He leapt on Byrhtnoth’s own steed, and, with his brothers Godwine and Godwig, ‘turned from the war-strife, made for the woods, fled for refuge, saved their wretched lives’. Many others, including perhaps most of the local militia, fled also – ‘more people than was in any way proper’. The Vita Oswaldi confirms that most of the Saxons led after Byrhtnoth fell, although it places the earl’s death at the end of the battle, just as the English seemed to be winning it.
By contrast, true to their oaths, Byrhtnoth’s loyal retainers, his ‘hearth-men’ fought on: ‘they wanted one of two things, to avenge their lord or lay down their lives’. A young Mercian warrior, Aelfwine, son of Aelfric, reminded them of their boasts at the mead-bench, ‘heroes in the hall’, about what hard fighters they were. ‘Now we can discover who really has courage’. For his own part, Aelfwine went on, no one would be able to reproach him for leaving the field now that his lord lay dead. Others voiced similar sentiments. Gadd’s son, Offa, had promised Byrhtnoth that the two of them would ride back to Maldon or perish as one in the field of war. They were joined by other named warriors: Aetheric, Leofsanu, Dunnere, Edward the tall, Wistan son of Thurstan, the brothers Oswald and Eadwold, and Ashferth, son of Ecglaf, intriguingly described as a hostage from Northumbria. All of them fought to the death:
They shattered blanked shields, boldly defended themselves. Shield-rim snapped and chain-mail sang out its gruesome hymn ... The seamen came on, raging in war. Weapons transfixed some fated body ... War-men fell, on the ground, cut-weary, collapsed lifeless.
The last and most famous words of the battle are given by an older warrior called Byrhtwold, perhaps of Byrhtnoth’s kin. ‘Full of courage’, he addressed his remaining comrades as follows:
Minds must be the firmer, hearts the bolder, soul’s strength the greater, as our resources lessen. Here lies our lord, lethally wounded, good man on the ground. May he grieve for ever who from this war-work would consider withdrawing. I am old in age, away I won’t, but myself by my master, by so beloved a man, would finally lie.
True to his word, he went forward fighting to his last breath.
And there the poem fragment ends.
Like the battles in the Iliad, the Maldon poet focuses on the speeches and actions of his heroes without telling us much about how the battle was fought. The Book of Ely mentions the Vikings forming into a wedge ‘and hurling themselves forward like one man’. The casualties on both sides were heavy. ‘An incalculable number fell’, says the Vita Oswaldi, and the Vikings were so heavily mauled that ‘they could barely manage to man their boats’. There is no mention anywhere of the town being taken or sacked, so maybe the Vikings were in no state to continue with their raid. The Battle of Maldon is normally considered a Viking victory, since the English led the field. Perhaps, given the afterglow that settled on the heroic stand of Byrhtnoth and his men, it should be reassessed as a Pyrrhic victory and a moral defeat.
How much of the poem is true? It is, of course, a poem, not a historical record, and uses literary art to heighten the heroism of the defenders of Maldon. Michael Wood suggested that its purpose was not to narrate ‘another brutal struggle ending in ignominious defeat’ but to elevate the sacrifice to a timeless ritual of service, loyalty and honour.11 The names of the earl’s retainers would have been well-remembered and honoured when the poem was written, within a few years, or at most a few decades, of the battle. And the description of the causeway and its peculiar tides suggests that the poet knew the Blackwater estuary, and perhaps even lived in Maldon. Little details, like the unexplained ‘hostage’ from Northumbria or Offa’s son releasing a beloved hawk, are unlikely to have been invented since they serve no obvious literary purpose.
There is a bare possibility, however, that the Maldon poem has telescoped two separate events. In the Book of Ely, there are two battles of Maldon, one preceding the other by four years. In the first, Byrhtnoth pounced on and defeated the Vikings as they were crossing the bridge or causeway. The Vikings swore revenge and descended on Maldon a second time, sending word to the earl that they should hold him a coward if he refused to face them in battle. Byrhtnoth, ‘inflamed to a pitch of daring’ by this message, arrived at the field with an inadequate force. Even so, he is supposed to have fought with the enemy for an improbable fourteen days and well-nigh put them to flight until one last attack by the Vikings in wedge formation broke through to cut off the earl’s head as he fought.12
Without taking the details too seriously, is it possible that this account contains a grain of truth? The Book of Ely goes on to say that Byrhtnoth’s widow had a tapestry made and presented to Ely Abbey. Assuming that the tapestry had a section showing the victory at the bridge and another showing the earl’s death in battle, could it be that the poet, perhaps basing his narrative on the tapestry, dovetailed the two events for dramatic purposes? Certainly, when reading The Battle of Maldon, the causeway episode seems self-contained, and the link between it and the succeeding battle rather weak. It also offers a solution to Byrhtnoth’s inexplicable rashness in accepting the Viking’s offer of battle on the grounds that it never happened! Moreever, revenge was a powerful motivation in Dark Age England, as any reader of Richard Fletcher’s book Blood-Feud, will know.13
The site of the Battle of Maldon is owned by the National Trust, and is a historic battlefield registered by English Heritage. A leaflet about the battlefield with a recommended walk is available from the Tourist Information Centre in Maldon. Access is by way of the riverside footpath from the town or from a private road leading to South House Farm which ends in a small car-park. The National Trust has recently erected a plaque by the lane leading to the Causeway, noting that the battle took place ‘on and around this spot’. From there it is only a short walk to the causeway. Try to time a visit so that you can witness the meeting of the waters about an hour-and-a-half before high tide. The battlefield itself, on lat grassland and crop-fields, needs imagination, which isn’t helped by the newly built sports and leisure centre between it and the town. The easy circular walk on footpaths and pavements takes about an hour. Maldon Museum in the town has information about the town and its times.14 Northey Island is normally closed to avoid disturbance to breeding bird colonies; for admission contact the National Trust’s warden (normally twenty-four hours’ notice needed) or the Tourist Information Centre in Maldon.
Plaque to the battle in the National Trust car-park. Essex County Council’s symbol of three Saxon seax, an all-purpose blade, is more than usually appropriate here. The seax was doubtless put to good use at Maldon. (© The Battlefields Trust.)
Byrhtnoth’s headless body was sought out by monks from Ely Abbey, with whom the earl was in some way connected, and given honourable burial there. What may have been his bones were uncovered during building works there in 1769; at any rate they belonged to a headless man estimated to be six feet nine inches tall. The Vikings are said to have carried back the severed head to their homeland as a trophy.
The Vikings continued to raid the English coast and compelled the less Churchillian local rulers of Kent, Hampshire and Wessex to buy peace from them. By the end of the year a treaty was arranged, brokered by Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury and two ealdormen. The text still survives. The baptism of Olaf, and a series of rules governing trade and the settlement of disputes between Englishmen and Vikings, does little to mollify the payment of 22,000 pounds of gold and silver to the raiders as the price of peace. And all to no avail for, three years later, Olaf Tryggvasson was back as an open enemy, this time accompanied by King Sweyn of Denmark.
This time they were bought off with 16,000 pounds. Aethelred did at least succeed in getting rid of Olaf this time, for the now rich Viking sought a new career in Norway. He eventually became Norway’s king, only to be killed by his erstwhile ally, Sweyn, in 999. Unfortunately, Byrhtnoth’s martial offer of ‘spears for tribute’ did not set the pattern for future dealings with the Vikings. The dismal period of the danegeld had begun when money was used instead of arms. As Rudyard Kipling remembered, giving in to blackmail merely ensures more of the same:
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation
To puff and look important and to say: –
‘Though we know we should defeat you,
we have not the time to meet you,
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.’
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.