The Dark Ages were, in Neville Chamberlain's notorious words, ‘a far away place about which we know little’. Yet they seem to have shadowed my life, partly in my imagination but also, unexpectedly, in everyday life. As a son of an officer in the RAF I had an itinerant boyhood moving from one place to the next every two years or so. And, it seemed, wherever I went there was a local battlefield, often one so remote in time and so poorly known that it was less an actual place and more of a kind of haunting, a historical shadow where folklore reigned over fact. This gave the Dark Ages a special appeal, a distant time when the land was wild and dangerous, where wolves and eagles hovered around the places of slaughter and when the very names of people and places sounded strange and foreign. At least to my ten-year-old mind it was a magical place unbothered by the boring bits of history like laws, charters and economics.
My oldest memory is living at Riccall in Yorkshire when I think I was dimly aware of some local conflict with the Vikings that had taken place near the village a thousand years earlier (I remember being pretty amazed that a place like Riccall could be that old). Later, I was at RAF Andover at the time when archaeologists were digging up near by Danebury Ring, the hill-fort by which an Arthurian battle was supposed to have taken place, named after a village with the splendid name of Nether Wallop. Later, when I got a job with the Nature Conservancy, I was struck by how many nature reserves had battlefields on them (a fact about which I was reminded when I was wandering over the field of Ashdown and put up a very rare stone curlew).Where I now live, in Wiltshire, you cannot walk far on the open downs before coming across ancient dykes and rings clearly designed to keep someone out. Liddington Hill, which welcomes me home whenever I return from the north or west mayor may not be the real Mount Badon, Wiltshire's equivalent of Camelot. But it is certainly my Mount Badon, so much so that I never call this swelling green whaleback of deep history by any other name.
I first became seriously interested in ancient battlefields after reading the works of that great battlefield detective Colonel Alfred Burne. The chapters he devoted to Ellandun, Deorham, Brunanburh and other pre-Conquest battles were of a different kind to the rest of his books. Rather than refight these dimly remembered, though important, conflicts, he devoted his energies to finding out where they were. And that remains the essential art of the Dark Age battling – not so much refighting the battles as refinding them. Of course one can have a try at reconstructing the battles themselves – and I hope this book will be of interest to war-gamers and re-enactors refighting them – but history offers only limited help. One gamer’s Ellandun will not be another's (and in this particular case, if war games prove anything it is that the wrong side won!).
Finding Dark Age battlefields has involved the ingenuity of historians, antiquarians and archaeologists for at least four hundred years. They needed to be found because nearly all of them had been lost. Even the greatest of all pre-Conquest battles, the battle of Brunanburh, is no more than a name. There is nowhere on the map by this name, and none even in the Domesday Book. As a result we do not even know whether it was fought in the east or the west (the sources say one thing, geography and commonsense quite another). Persuasive and well-argued cases have been made for Brunanburhs as far apart as Rotherham, Huntingdon and the Wirral. What a pity they cannot all be right! Not that I am in any position to throw stones. I regarded myself as a great expert on the battle of Nechtansmere, now known as the battle of Dunnichen. That was until I read James Fraser’s new book on this subject and realized, most reluctantly, that his site was better than mine. To some extent this ambiguity is true of nearly all battles fought between 410 and 1065. For each one you seem to have at least a pair of possible battlefields (and many others have no known battlefield at all!). And that is why, with the lonely exception of the battle of Maldon, no pre-Conquest battlefield has found its way onto the registers kept by English Heritage and its Celtic sister organizations. Un certainty hovers over nearly everyone of them. Whether Brunanburh was fought on land that is now a golf course, or a cokeworks and railway marshalling yard, or featureless arable fields somewhere near Huntingdon we can argue about. The exact disposition of the armies we shall probably never know.
The lack of the certainty that enables us to stand in Wellington’s boots at Waterloo or Chard’s at Rorke’s Drift may mean that pre-Conquest battles are not everyone's cup of tea. Most books on British battlefields have neglected the Dark Ages. Yet these ancient conflicts have a strange romantic appeal. In a way, the fuzzier the past, the greater is the ‘tingle-factor’. Standing even in the approximate footsteps of King Alfred or other Dark Age heroes (even their possible footsteps) is to dip into that bran-tub of thrilling history that can lie beneath the surface of the most ordinary-looking countryside. And although the actual battlefields are elusive, the wider military strategy of ancient conflicts is still visible in the mysterious earth walls and ditches that criss-cross the landscape on the downs and moors. Dark Age battle-finding takes you to nice, hidden places tucked away in the landscape. Since the heritage industry has ignored them you are free to use your imagination and have somewhere to park the car. And, as I have repeatedly discovered, Dark Age armies liked a good view or, if not a view, then a pleasant river.
Apart from describing the best-documented battlefields in England, Scotland and Wales, my aim has been to tell a story. By profession I am a writer and journalist, and battles are one of the things I write about. I am the author of two books on the subject, Grampian Battlefields, which is about the Scottish north-east and has been in print for fifteen years, and 1066: The Battles of York, Stamford Bridge and Hastings, published by Pen & Sword in 2004. I have also written articles about Dark Age and medieval battlefields, mainly for Battlefields Review, and conducted field research for the Battlefields Trust on the threatened battlefield of Tewkesbury.
This book describes nearly thirty battles in detail, almost all of those where some reconstruction of events is possible. I have also listed all the battles of the period – some 130 of them – which are at least dignified by a name. Along the way I have tried to find space for all the principal contenders in the Dark Age epic: British (and, as they became, the Welsh), Saxon, Irish, the Picts and Scots and the various Scandinavian factions grouped together as the Vikings. All the famous names are here: Arthur, Hengest, Oswald, Alfred, Edmund Ironside and Canute, as well as names that deserve to be better known, like Athelstan, Ecgbert, Penda and Urien. In a long introduction I have also tried to provide a sense of what it was like to be in a Dark Age battle, and your chances of surviving one (quite good, I would say, so long as you won).
I take this opportunity to thank Rupert Harding and Jane Robson for helping to bring this book to fruition and for making the task as painless as possible. I also thank my old friends in the Battlefields Trust for their help, notably Michael Rayner, Christopher Scott and Tony Spicer. I have benefited from the work of several recent historians of whom I would like to single out James Fraser and Graeme Cruickshank (Dunnichen), Professor Stephen Harding and Michael Wood (Brunanburh), and Alfred Smyth (King Alfred and northern history generally). I also thank Michael Rayner and Stephen Harding for permission to use copyright photographs, and Professor Guy Halsall for permission to quote from his youthful pieces, written a quarter-century ago, in Miniature Wargames.
One of the problems of Dark Age history is the plethora of unfamiliar and similar–sounding names – those notoriously ‘unmemorable’ ‘Egg kings’ of 1066 And All That! The Saxons normally possessed only one name (though some seem to have had nicknames). Other cultures added a surname meaning ‘son of’, as in Bruide macBile or Olaf Tryggvason. Unlike modern Christian names, Saxon names were bestowed with great care and had a particular meaning. The ‘egg’ (actually Ecg-) name meant ‘edge’ or ‘blade’, which, combined with a suitable noun, gave names like ‘Ecgbert’ or ‘sharp blade’ or Ecgfrith, meaning ‘edge-peace’ in the sense of security.
Commoner than the ‘egg’ name was ‘Ethel’ or, more correctly, Aethel–, which means ‘noble’. Hence, combined with a suitable word, we have Aethelwulf, noble wolf, Aethelgiva, noble gift, or Aethedreda, noble strength (the Saxon precursor of the Normanized ‘Audrey’). Other famous Saxons names include Alfred (elf-council), Edgar (fortune-spear), Edmund (fortune-protecter) and Edward (fortune-guardian). The names were disposed individually, and were not passed from generation to generation. For example, the great king Ecgbert called his son Aethelwulf, who called his Aelfred (Alfred). However some names were more popular than others; for example, there are several Athelstans (precious stone) and Aethelreds (wise council) among Alfred’s descendants.
Although the names were apparently bestowed when the child was baptized, they were definitely names to live up to. Most of the Dark Age men and women we know by name were members of the ruling class. There would be little point in calling a peasant ‘noble wolf ‘; this was obviouslya more suitable name for a warrior-prince. Someone with a name like ‘Bright Blade’ would be exposed to mockery if he turned out as a coward. That unlucky king Aethelred or ‘Good Advice’ did indeed become the object of satire, and was remembered as Athelred Unraed, that is ‘Good Advice, Bad Advice’.
Most Saxon names are pronounced as spelt. The vowels are rolled together so that ‘Aethel’ sounds like ethel and Eadward as Edward. Ecg- names were pronounced as ‘etch’, or maybe ‘edge’, whilst names beginning with Ce- are pronounced as ch-, for example, Ceolwulf (ship-wolf) is Cheolwulf. The -ig in names like Tostig is silent; hence the Saxon word ‘blodig’ meaning ‘bloody’ is also pronounced that way. Names ending in -sc are pronounced -sh, so Aescesdune, the old name for the Berkshire downs, is Ash-dun, that is, ashdown. The Old English name Deorham is pronounced the same way as the modern village of Dyrham: that is, Dyur-ham, or, if you like, ‘Durham’ with a West Country burr. In this book I have used the familiar names of well-known historical characters: Arthur not Artorius, Alfred not Aelfred, Edmund not Eadmund and Canute instead of the more historicallycorrect Knut. I have also avoided unfamiliar Saxon letters and diphthongs – which, in any case, my twenty-first-century PC seems unable to reproduce.