Chapter 5

Campaigns, Battles and Sieges

Campaigns

871: Wessex Takes on the Great Heathen Army–a War of Attrition?

The nature of the campaigning against the Great Heathen Army and its detachments prior to the watershed Battle of Edington in 878 was characterised by closely fought battles which brought Alfred the Great’s Wessex almost to its knees. Here, we shall look at the campaigns of 871 which represented the most desperate fighting seen in England since the fall of Roman Britain many centuries before.

The Danish army ‘of hateful memory’ was led by Halfdan, son of Ragnar Lothbrok, and at least one other Danish leader for whom we have a name, Bagsecg. We cannot be sure how big it was, perhaps only 1,000 men or maybe more, but its activities had already devastated those ancient kingdoms it had passed through. In the autumn of 870 it decided to leave its East Anglian base and headed to Reading, a royal estate in Berkshire. At the confluence of the rivers Kennet and Thames, the Danes set themselves inside a remarkably well-defended fortification, which comprised one long ditch cut from one river to another, probably moated and palisaded with gates at intervals. The route the Danish army took to Reading is not known. It is likely Halfdan began his journey from Thetford in East Anglia on the Icknield Way. If he had chosen to avoid London, where there may well have been another Danish attachment, then he will have followed this ancient roadway to Royston, Wilbury Camp, Offley, around Dunstable, finally crossing the Thames at Goring. Whichever way he got there, Halfdan arrived at Reading and began his fortification unmolested while he waited for a naval contingent to join him.

Reading was a wise choice for Halfdan. Like any royal estate, it had resources at hand. Such places were the centres for the food rents and dues owed to the Crown. In the winter the estate will have been well stocked for the oncoming months. Nearby, there was the abbey at Abingdon, itself a huge repository of food, wine and portable wealth. And so Halfdan sat there, hovering menacingly above Wessex, preparing to do to Æthelred I’s kingdom exactly what his Danes had done to East Anglia.

It was now deep into winter. It was Christmas time, and the Danes were quickly set in their camp with Halfdan presumably predicting a lack of activity against him from the West Saxon brothers over this period. But if this was true, one man had been keeping a close eye on the invaders and he would soon spring into action. Halfdan and Bagsecg had only three days to think about their strategy before having to reassess the situation. Nobody knows quite why Jarl Sidroc sallied out of the gates at the Reading camp on New Year’s Eve, but it reports like a foraging or scouting party, perhaps even a reconnaissance-in-force to examine the local route ways and options for his master. Around the north of the Great Windsor Forest he travelled, clinging to the banks of the Kennet, coming out onto the ‘plain of the Angles’ at Englefield through which a Roman road passes. He was already around 10 miles from camp.

The Danish detachment was pounced upon by Ealdorman Æthelwulf of Berkshire, a man who had undertaken a similar surprise attack on Weland, the great Viking raider, in 860 after the burning of Winchester. Æthelwulf, a shadowy figure, seems to have been widely revered. Clearly, he carried a reputation of sorts for military prowess and he would not fail to impress here. Caught in the open country, Jarl Sidroc and another leading Dane paid for their reconnoitre with their lives as they were cut down in the plain. As the survivors fell back to the camp and the gates were opened to the sorry wounded, Halfdan and Bagsecg will have been surprised that Wessex had such a loyal friend patrolling Berkshire. But for all his guile, Æthelwulf’s strategy seems to have been to teach a detachment a lesson in the landscape, and not to besiege or defeat the Great Heathen Army itself. For this to happen, he would have to send news of his victory to Æthelred and Alfred in Wessex with a plea for aid. Just four days later the West Saxons arrived at the gates of the Reading camp fully equipped for war.

Some Danes working outside the gates of the camp were cut down by the arriving English army. At some stage the Danish leadership made a quick–and as it turned out–decisive choice of action. The Danes from within the camp burst out of their own gates with an overwhelming ferocity which saw a hard-fought pitched battle commence. During this battle Æthelwulf, the loyal ealdorman, perished and the West Saxon brothers had to call a retreat. It was an ignominious defeat for a force that should have been capable of managing an effective siege. The extent of the defeat and the disorganisation of the Wessex men in the rout is captured by Gaimar, a later (twelfth-century) writer, who gives us a clue that the English, despite their panic, not surprisingly had the better knowledge of the local topography:

There was Æthelwulf slain,
The great man of whom I just spoke,
And Æthelred and Ælfred
Were driven to Wiscelet [Whistley].
This is a ford towards Windsor,
Near a lake in a marsh.
Thither the one host came pursuing,
And did not know the ford over the river [Loddon].
Twyford has ever been the name of the ford,
At which the Danes turned back,
And the English escaped.

It is this knowledge of topography that would prove crucial in the days and weeks to come, especially the knowledge of fordable points across the rivers. Streatley, Moulsford and of course the strategically important Wallingford would all play a part in what was to come. But why had the attempted siege at Reading failed so badly? Was it because the encounter at Englefield had only really been a mere skirmish and the Danish losses had not been so great after all? Or was it because the Danish tactic of a surprise rush from the gates of their own camp had brought about the desired effect of scattering their enemy? Perhaps the Danes were not such a small force after all. They had at their rear a ‘friendly’ River Thames. It is not inconceivable that the force at Reading had been swollen by the arrival of new Danish reinforcements in the days leading up to the siege there.

Whatever the size of Halfdan’s force after Reading, it was clear to the leadership that they could not stay there. The West Saxon brothers would come again soon and when they did, they may have learned something about how to conduct a siege properly. The Danes must now push out into the countryside to search for more resources and to occupy strategically important locations. It would seem that Wallingford was just one such place. It took only four days for the royal brothers of Wessex to reorganise themselves. They may have gone to Abingdon. Perhaps the Danes were seeking them out, trying to bring about a conclusion to decide once and for all the fate of Wessex, despite the risks that might pose for them. Whatever the reasons, the West Saxons were ready for the Danes. Halfdan had left Reading on the morning of 8 January 871 and when he had got about 12 miles from his base as he climbed the hill at Moulsford he saw across from him a huge English army, which had positioned itself on Kingstanding Hill across the Icknield Way awaiting its enemy. It was a well-chosen position for the English. They had blocked the Danish advance and left Halfdan pondering his next move. He could try a quick slip to his right into the inviting but small gap the English had left between themselves and the river, risking being driven into it, or he could try to slip round to the left of the English army as he saw it, in the knowledge that they had put themselves there with a far superior understanding of the local roadways and would surely be upon him before he could get round them.

Halfdan divided his force into two divisions, one comprising ‘kings’ and the other of ‘jarls’ and it became clear to a watchful Alfred that the jarls’ division was making a move for the gap. With history famously recording King Æthelred’s devotion to prayers at this time, it was Alfred who crossed the valley and rose up the hill to smash into the Danes and press them towards the river. The young prince would win his spurs here at the Battle of Ashdown, as it became known. Æthelred would soon join in the fray against Halfdan’s division. The outcome was a resounding victory for the Anglo-Saxons, a brilliantly engineered pitched battle on a ground more or less of their own choosing. The chase went on long into the night. Among the dead lay Bagsecg. With him had perished Jarl Sidroc the Old, Jarl Sidroc the Younger, Jarl Osbern, Jarl Fræna and Jarl Harold. Many of these names seem to have belonged to the jarls’ division that had been pounced upon by Alfred. The Danes returned to Reading and began to wonder how they could fight their way out of this corner. Wessex was proving stronger than they had imagined.

Around 22 January 871 the Danes opened the gates at Reading once again, this time with a view to marching on the Royal vill at Basing. It was just 18 miles from their camp and situated in Hackwood Park, east of Basingstoke. Nobody knows why after two weeks of contemplation the Danish leadership switched the focus of their campaign in the Wessex landscape. Previously, they had been attacking the north-east corner of Wessex in the hope that the Thames would open up for them and their allies and that they would be able to navigate all the way up to Cricklade and beyond. But now the Danes headed south and further into the heart of the kingdom. Perhaps Basing was the target after all, with its rich supplies. With Basing fallen, the road to Winchester lay wide open and despite there being a victorious English army in the field the taking of Winchester might be the telling blow against Wessex.

It would be the fourth battle in the space of a month. Many of the men on the Anglo-Saxon side would not have fought at Englefield as this was conducted by the men of Æthelwulf. However, many were under lordship obligations to continue to fight for Æthelred and Alfred, and by now they must have been feeling the pressure. The two royal brothers arrived at Basing and found the Danes there. What followed was another hard-fought and bloody encounter which resulted in the more traditional form of victory in that the Danes held the place of slaughter and the West Saxons took to flight to re-group yet again. But Winchester was not sacked or taken. One can only speculate as to why this was. Perhaps the cost of their strategy was proving as much for the Danes as it was for the English. Perhaps they needed re-enforcements to continue their campaign in Wessex. If that was the case, they would come soon.

Some time passed and there seems to have been a stalemate in the landscape. The brothers, it is suggested, had retreated to Walbury Camp, with its ancient protective ramparts and fine commanding views of the countryside. There was time even for the brothers to make an agreement as to the inheritance of the West Saxon kingdom should one of them die. But it was not until 22 March 871 that the Danes stirred again. The next battle was at a place called Merton, the location of which people have argued over for centuries. One of the most sensible candidates, given the previous movements of the armies, is Marten, 20 miles north of Wilton. Here the Inkpen Ridgeway would provide the means of travel for the combined fyrds of Berkshire and Hampshire. Why Merton was fought is not clear. And what happened there is only a little clearer and is mentioned if not by Asser, by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in a cryptic and sweeping entry:

And two months later, King Æthelred and Alfred, his brother, fought against the raiding army at Merton and they were in two bands, and they put both to flight and for long in the day had the victory, and there was great slaughter on either side, and the Danish had possession of the place of slaughter; and Bishop Heahmund [of Sherborne] was killed there and many good men.

It is an infuriating account. Why had the Danes formed into two divisions again? Had Halfdan been joined by another leader or should this command represent a promotion for someone already in his force? The chronicler follows up this passage by saying that only after Merton were the Danes joined by others. So the question remains, why did the English lose this close-fought battle? The answer probably lies in what happened to the king of Wessex a month later: Æthelred I, king of Wessex was dead. In his place was elevated Alfred, son of Æthelwulf of Wessex. This new king of Wessex, whose baptism of fire soon commenced, would make historians write his name a million times.

If King Æthelred had been mortally wounded at Merton, this might explain the English withdrawal from the conflict at this stage. Alfred went about the business of burying his royal brother at Wimbourne, the royal spiritual home of the West Saxon kings. But as he did, he realised that his kingdom was in dire trouble. He heard news that yet another battle was being fought, this time back in the north-east corner of kingdom. The chronicler Æthelweard–usually reliable–gives us the one and only account of it:

An innumerable summer army (Sumarliði) arrived at Reading and opened hostilities vigorously against the army of the West Saxons. And the ones who had long been ravaging in that area were at hand to help them. The army of the English was then small, owing to the absence of the king, who at the time was attending to the obsequies of his brother. Although the ranks were not at full strength, high courage was in their breasts, and rejoicing in battle they repel the enemy some distance. However, overcome with weariness, they desist from fighting, and the barbarians won a degree of victory which one might call fruitless.

If Æthelweard is correct, then the reinforcements had well and truly arrived. The tired West Saxons, without their king had at least managed to stand up to them, but now they were exhausted. If Alfred had not already stared into the faces of these new Danish leaders Oscetel, Anwend and Guthrum, then he soon would. Of these, the last named would haunt the West Saxon king for years. But for now, Alfred must reluctantly face the fact that a newly invigorated Danish force had moved once again into the Wessex heartland after defeating local armies. Its predictable target was another royal manor, Wilton. Another attempt to seize supplies and rob the king of an estate, perhaps even a terminal blow for the brand new monarch.

However weary, however depleted in manpower, Alfred stole himself for another encounter. It was a remarkable engagement fought on the banks of the River Wylie. The tactical dispositions are not known, but with his small force Alfred seems to have spotted something similar to what he saw on the field of Ashdown. Some sort of tactical evolution in Danish deployment, some small chance to capitalise on the enemy’s vulnerability. Alfred smashed into the Danes with such ferocity that they are described as not being able to withstand his onslaught. What seemed like a recoil became a retreat. But the English, small in number and war weary, were unable to follow up the success. The Danes displayed an ability to somehow turn on their heels and swamp their pursuers. This may have been because the English were literally too small in number for their chase to be anything other than plain dangerous, or it may have been because the Danes had initiated a flight intending to turn again on their foe. If it was the latter, it would be of some considerable note. This was a tactical ploy much vaunted in the age of the mounted knight and is very difficult if not impossible to effect with an infantry warband.

And so at Wilton, the new king of Wessex watched his brave men get swamped by Vikings in what seemed now to be a hopeless war of attrition. He was literally running out of men. Alfred decided to switch tactics completely and chose not men, but money with which to purchase an effective end to the hostilities. It must have seemed to the Danes under their new combined leadership, that although Wessex was still vulnerable and depleted, it nevertheless stood as a kingdom and they had not yet managed to destroy its line or break the spirit of the men. Somehow, even when the odds were against them, the leaders of Wessex kept turning up to fight. In the end it was just enough to save the kingdom from its first brutal encounter with the Great Heathen Army. As the peace was agreed and Alfred bought himself time to think, the Danes left their Reading camp and sat on London, then a trading settlement on the outskirts of the old Roman city. What lessons Alfred had learned from the year 871 only history would tell. He would be slow to understand it fully. He would not be free of the Danes until after 878 when he defeated them at Edington, but he was an intelligent and educated man. The measures he later took to fortify his kingdom would eventually bring this exhausting and attritional style of campaigning to an end, but it remains the case that the year 871 was an example of a type of warfare the English could not afford to fight against a well-organised and constantly replenishing Danish enemy.

900–5: The Revolt of Æthelwold–an Unlikely Apostate

Much mystery surrounds the career of Æthelwold, son of Æthelred I of Wessex. The campaign he led against King Edward the Elder (900–24) was motivated by Æthelwold’s persistent and understandable claim to the throne of Wessex. By this time, the kingdom was a much expanded polity created by Alfred the Great and it would soon be further expanded by his son and grandsons. Æthelwold’s story, however, demonstrates a certain trait in Anglo-Saxon warfare. The politics of dynastic struggles were never far away from the heart of warfare during our period. In 899, when Alfred, the ‘unshakable pillar of the Western peoples’, was laid to rest at the Old Minster at Winchester, one man would try to stake his own claim to the throne and would go to surprising lengths to achieve it.

Æthelwold was aggrieved at the terms of King Alfred’s will. He was the son of Alfred’s brother Æthelred I, who had been king himself and who had died at the height of the Viking struggles in 871 (p. 99). Æthelwold expected to be king of Wessex, no matter what Alfred had arranged for his own sons. It was, in effect, as simple as that. But not to Edward, son of Alfred, however. Alfred’s will had said something entirely different. Edward had already shown himself to be a remarkable commander in the final years of Alfred’s reign and it was clear to most contemporaries that Edward’s right to rule was quite legitimate. Edward had been made a co-ruler of the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons in the last two years of Alfred’s reign. Edward’s young son Athelstan was born in 895 and quickly became a favourite of King Alfred, who had bestowed upon him gifts given to him by the Pope himself. It is even possible–if later Medieval historians are to be believed–that the young boy Athelstan was ‘inaugurated’ at a very early age. One can only imagine how Æthelwold fumed and plotted during the opening months of Edward’s reign. He was–to coin a phrase–being royally stitched-up.

Men of Æthelwold’s standing have their own retinues, their own supporters and followers tied to their lord by unbreakable bonds. Unsurprisingly, it was not long before Æthelwold made his move. He gathered those loyal to him and marched with them to the royal estates at Wimborne and Christchurch (then known as Twinham). The Danes themselves had executed a similar (and devastating) move at Repton, the seat of the Mercian Royal dynasty in order to crush psychologically King Burgred in 874. But here, Æthelwold was occupying the very place where his father had been buried all those years ago, the place where West Saxon legitimacy was marked by tomb after tomb. The pretender to Edward’s throne announced to the world that having taken Wimborne with his force he would ‘live and die there’. It was a challenge no son of Alfred the Great could ignore, so ignore it he did not.

Edward responded by bringing his own army to Badbury Rings, not far from Wimborne. The sheer size of the king’s army alone must have been enough to make Æthelwold consider his next move carefully. Edward knew of the nature of the threat. He will have been concerned that Æthelwold would gather more supporters by having brought off such an audacious move, but what surely concerned him the most was the nightmare scenario of a man of royal blood gathering support not from the Wessex heartlands where he would struggle for numbers, but from the power-hungry Scandinavians of the north of Britain. In the event, Æthelwold was ahead of his rival by a night’s march.

One night, during this uneasy stand-off Æthelwold took a horse and stole away under cover of darkness avoiding the scouts of Edward’s army. He left behind him a nun whom he had abducted in defiance of the king and the bishop, a deliberate act. He fled to the north and into the arms of the Northumbrian Danes. Edward’s riders could not catch him, so stealthy was his move. Æthelwold began a most remarkable relationship with the Danes which he backed up by some extraordinary promises. They accepted him as their king, but what price had he paid for their allegiance? The chronicler Æthelweard tells us there was in Northumbria that year ‘a very great disturbance among the English, that is the bands who were then settled in the territories of the Northumbrians’. Could it be that Æthelwold had revoked Christianity to entice an army big enough to challenge the king of the Anglo-Saxons? It would not be the first time in European history something like this had happened. Pepin II, a great grandson of Charlemagne, during a dispute with the Frankish King Charles the Bald had taken the Danes to his bosom in a similar way. The Annals of St Neots even describe Æthelwold as ‘king of the Danes’ and subsequently as ‘king of the pagans’ when he later made his return to the stage of English politics. Our great pretender, however, goes missing from the historical record for a year before his fateful re-appearance. There is speculation that he went to Denmark to gather a fleet and other reinforcements. He is next recorded bringing a fleet to Essex and gaining the submission of the local population there. Soon, he would lead his swollen forces into East Anglia and strike a deal there too. With the Scandinavian-dominated army of East Anglia, his own men and those of Essex, Æthelwold was a force to be reckoned with and Edward knew it.

The allies raided across Mercia from their East Anglian bases and came eventually to Cricklade, where they crossed the Thames. They took what they could from nearby settlements such as Braydon and turned east to go home. Edward went after them as quickly as he could and launched a punitive campaign across their own heartlands between the Devil’s Dyke and Fleam Dyke and the River ‘’Wissey’ (possibly the Ouse). Edward’s campaign stretched as far as the Fens. His Kentish contingent failed to answer his call to return home and was caught by the enemy. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records it thus:

Then they were surrounded there by the raiding-army, and they fought there. And there were killed Ealdorman Sigewulf, and Ealdorman Sigehelm, and Eadwold the king’s thegn, and Abbot Cenwulf, and Sigeberht, son of Sigewulf, and Eadwold, son of Acca, and many others in addition to them though I have named the most distinguished. And on the Danish side were killed King Eohric [the Danish ruler of East Anglia] and the Ætheling Æthelwold, whom they had chosen as their king, and Beorhtsige, son of the Ætheling Beorthnoth, and Hold [a minor nobleman] Ysopa and Hold Oscytel, and very many others in addition to them whom we cannot name now; and on either hand there was great slaughter made, and there were more of the Danish killed although they had possession of the place of slaughter . . .

The Kentish refusal to obey the king had nearly cost him dear. Despite his Kentish contingent losing the Battle of the Holme, as it became known, Edward had managed to rid himself of his fiercest rival and the East Anglian ruler to boot. It had been a salutary lesson for King Edward in the problems of command and control in the field on such a wide-ranging campaign, but it had also been a period that outlined the lengths to which competitors for the throne of the ever expanding kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons were prepared to go to prosecute their claim. For Æthelwold, however, despite the open hostility and bitter hand-to-hand fighting, he was only able to persuade perhaps just one moneyer to produce a coin for him, an issue still debated today. The sole surviving coin struck in the name of ALVVARDU may be testimony to the political failure of an Anglo-Saxon king who might have been.

900–21: The Re-Capture of the Danelaw–Grand Strategy in the Landscape

The situation across the midlands and the north of England in the early part of Edward the Elder’s reign was extremely colourful. It took almost a generation for King Edward and his redoubtable sister Æthelflæd of Mercia to re-conquer the Danish midland strongholds and gather allegiance from these communities to the king of the English. The way in which this was achieved was a matter of long-term strategy representing one of Medieval Europe’s most remarkable and sustained military come-backs. There will always be unanswered questions about how it was all done, and inevitably we are missing some important fine-grained detail.

After the Battle of the Holme and the defeat of Æthelwold King Edward appears to have struck up a treaty agreement with the Danes. Simeon of Durham records that in 906 an agreement was reached at a place called Yttingford (on the River Ousel near Leighton Buzzard). This was frontier territory between the English and Danish-controlled areas. We do not know the terms of the treaty, but Edward’s policy towards the Danes between 906 and 909 seems to take on a certain characteristic. Land in the Danish-controlled areas was being purchased from the Danes by the king and was subsequently given to Englishmen of rank. This policy was enforced from Derbyshire in the north to Bedfordshire in the south. Combining these islands of English interest into something more tangible in the landscape, however, would take systematic campaigning and strategically sensitive fortress building.

The first instance of a concerted campaign in the north took place in Northumbria. Edward brought his forces to the Danes on their doorstep in 909. It was a five-week campaign of reduction, of harrying the land. It led to a swift peace negotiation by the Danish leadership. But the next year, the men of the north were back with vengeance. They led a punitive campaign deep into the heart of English Mercia, into the patrimony of Lord Æthelred and his wife Æthelflæd. Edward was in Kent putting together a fleet for an eastern seaboard coastal campaign. The Danish raid went all the way down to the Avon near Bristol and along the banks of the Severn. Edward raised a force to take on the raiders, but we do not know how long it took him. We do know, however, that it was drawn from both Mercia and Wessex and that it is described as finally ‘overtaking’ the Danish force at Wednesfield near Tettenhall on 5 August 910. The Danes had just crossed a river and were laden with booty. The subsequent Battle of Tettenhall was a resounding victory for Edward, so much so that the leaders who perished on the Danish Northumbrian side left behind them a political vacuum as a result of their annihilation. There began a period of history where other Scandinavians, particularly those based in Ireland, would see their own opportunities in Northumbria.

As for the Mercians, Ealdorman Æthelred had long been unwell and much of his policy making was carried out by his wife Æthelflæd. In fact, Æthelred died in 911 and Æthelflæd seems to have already begun her great fortress-building campaign in the midlands, starting with the unidentified fort of Bremesburh in 910. To this were added the forts at Scergeat and Bridgnorth (912), then Tamworth and Stafford (913), Eddisbury and Warwick (914) and Chirbury, Weardburh and Runcorn (915). Some of these forts were situated along the traditional Mercian borders with the northern kingdoms. And so by 915 the military landscape of the central and northern midlands of England represented a patchwork of estates and fortifications, each of them strategically positioned. Edward, for his part, had begun his strategic campaigning again in 911.

Edward took over London and Oxford and began to build a burh on the north bank of the Lea at Hertford placed between the rivers Maran, Beane and the Lea. In 912 he took a group of men into Essex to challenge the Danish force there. He camped at Maldon and had probably taken a naval force to support him. While there, Edward’s fortress builders set to work at Witham, building another burh on the line of the Roman road from Colchester to London, thus preventing westward advance for the enemy. The people of the countryside who were under Danish control came to the king to give him their support and seek his protection. Meanwhile, some of Edward’s men were finishing a second, more southerly burh at Hertford on the Lea, clearly designed to work in conjunction with the first to control river traffic.

The sequence of events that followed is difficult to interpret since even the entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle differ from each other by one or two years. However, it is clear that at some stage, perhaps in 913, two mounted forces from Danish Northampton and Leicester ‘broke the peace’ and killed many men around the Hook Norton area. Another mounted Danish force rode against Luton and was resoundingly beaten by the English thereabouts. In fact, they took their horses and weapons as a victory prize. The next year, this new English pride was put to the test by a Viking force that sailed up the Severn, raiding into Wales and Mercia as far as Archenfield. A garrison force assembled from the forts at Hereford and Gloucester was called out along with the men from ‘the nearest strongholds’ and the Vikings were driven into a place were they could not give battle. Their leader Hroald had perished in battle and his followers tried in vain to harass the north Somerset coast before leaving for Wales and then Ireland. The English under Edward were proving just as organised as they had been in the latter years of Alfred’s reign.

For Edward, it was time to return to the problems not of visiting Vikings, but of the continual threat from the Danes living in England. The king took a force to Buckingham and within four weeks his men had erected a twin fortress either side of the Ouse, thereby denying the Danes of Bedford any room for manoeuvre. The effects of Edward’s remarkable energy in fortress building were profound. This latest effort brought him a visit from Thurketyl, a leading Dane, who offered his submission to the king. Also, the men of Bedford and many of the Danes of Northampton came to him. The following year, 918, saw Edward repeat his building exercise at Bedford itself, enhancing its defence by building a twin to the existing fortification on the other side of the river.

Events are difficult to sequence after this, but it is clear that an English army took up quarters at Towcester, an old Roman fort on the River Tove. This was at the southern end of the Northampton Danes’ territory. The same force was ordered by the king to build another fort at Wigingamere, a site that is unidentified but which may well be Wigmore in Herefordshire on the Roman Road near to Offa’s Dyke. With the setting up of an English garrison at Towcester, the Danes at Leicester and Northampton took the opportunity to attack it. It was a siege that lasted all day and yet the Danes failed to break it. In the end, English reinforcements arrived and the besieging forces withdrew. There followed a punitive campaign by the Danes of the reduction of an area of land described as ‘between Burn Wood and Aylesbury’. Predatory bands took what they could in terms of men and property, capturing the population by surprise. It was a deliberate policy in that the Danes knew this area belonged to the king himself. It seems the Danish-led forces of the midlands and East Anglia were now acting if not in unison, but according to a planned grand strategy. Next, the Danes of Huntingdon and East Anglia went from their homes to build a fortress at Tempsford, a site that controlled the confluence of the Iver and Ouse. From here it would be possible to launch attacks against the areas of Bedfordshire that Edward had re-claimed in the previous years. They soon tried just this, heading for Bedford itself. However, its English garrison had out-scouted their enemy and met them in the field outside Bedford and won a victory that saw large casualties on the Danish side.

While the wars were being fought in the hotly debated areas of Bedfordshire, Æthelflæd was at work in the north of Mercia. She took Derby, the most westerly and most isolated of the Danish Five Boroughs of the north midlands, which included Leicester, Nottingham, Stamford and Lincoln. Æthelflæd is recorded as having lost four thegns dear to her at the gates of the city, but it was becoming clear that her part in a strategic pincer movement was being successfully carried out.

The next move was led by the Danish East Anglians with assistance from the Danes of Essex and other areas of the Danelaw. They headed all the way over to Wigingamere and besieged it for a day, but once again they were unsuccessful in breaking it down and turned instead to cattle rustling. It was becoming clear that Alfred’s system of fyrd rotation and the tripartite division of military burdens was working very well in the wide landscape of the midlands where everything was politically fluid.

The forces of the stronghold on the English side near to Tempsford were called out by the king and led to the new Danish fortification. Here, a successful siege was carried out and the place was broken down. It cost Jarl Toglos and his ‘king’ their lives, along with many others. Being a Danish king of East Anglia in the early tenth century was clearly not good for one’s health. All those who put up a fight were killed. Edward was on something of a roll now and headed soon to Colchester where he conducted another successful siege and broke the old Roman fortification killing many of its defenders, save those who managed to scale the old Roman walls from inside and flee. Clearly now, the march of the Anglo-Saxons was looking inexorable, particularly in what had seemed safe East Anglian Danish territory. With a hint of desperation on the part of the Danish leadership, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that at harvest time the East Anglians summoned up an army from their own bases (and from a force of Viking ‘pirates’ they had enticed to join them) and travelled to the English fortification of Maldon in Essex intent on a revenge attack. Maldon withstood the siege and was relieved by another mobile English force. If this was not enough ignominy for the Danes, they were caught and defeated by the garrison force itself in open battle.

Map 2. Forts involved in the re-conquest of Danish held territories c. 910–918.

It was harvest time of the same year when Edward moved again. This time, he took an army to Passenham, which controls the point where the Roman road out of Towcester fords the road across the Tove. From here, a detachment strengthened the defences with stone walling at Towcester. It seems to have been enough to gain the submission of Jarl Thurferth and the Northampton Danes. In fact, the submission of Jarl Thurferth included an area of land as far north as the River Welland, the inhabitants of which sought Edward as their lord and protector. The tour of duty for the Passenham fyrdsmen had come to an end and they were quickly replaced by a new English army which set out to Huntington to repair its defences. More people were coming to Edward from the surrounding countryside. It was a triumph of royal organisation and military discipline. The combination of King Alfred’s fyrd rotation system and the building of strategic fortifications in the landscape across the heartlands of England was proving to be invincible. Edward would even have coins minted showing a reverse with a tower or fortification on it, much in the style of Constantine the Great’s coinage, the legendary Roman emperor (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5. Silver penny of Edward the Elder, Tower Type.

Some more repair work was ordered at the damaged fort of Colchester and to Edward came the people of East Anglia and Essex, some of whom had been under direct Danish rule for thirty years. The fighting men of East Anglia even agreed to ally themselves with Edward and assist him by both land and sea. The Vikings of Cambridge, a long-established force, also came to Edward. The Kingdom of the English was growing rapidly. The Anglo-Saxon king was taking control of a great part of the midlands on both sides of Watling Street. There would, however, be battles to fight with a new Norse power that had just established itself in York. However, the remaining towns of the Danish Five Boroughs, whose leaders may have had one eye on developments in York, were the next to receive Edward’s attention. Edward took an army to one of them, Stamford in Lincolnshire. Here, at a point where Rutland, Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire meet on the River Nene, Edward built a fortification on the south side of the river and the Danes in the fort on the north side submitted to him. The king then must have heard the news that his sister Æthelflæd had died while at Tamworth, having just recently peaceably taken control over Danish Leicester. He set out there with a force and seized control of the town and of all Mercia and its subject Welsh patrimonies which his sister had achieved lordship over.

Only Nottingham and Lincoln remained disloyal to Edward of the traditional Danish Five Boroughs. He went next to Nottingham where he captured the place and ordered it to be improved and occupied by both Danes and Anglo-Saxons. There is evidence that the town at this stage had an additional encircling ditch and bank built around it. Soon the Mercian frontier would be restored to what it had been in the glory days of the middle English kingdom under King Offa. Edward’s visit to Thelwall (commanding the crossing of the Mersey at Latchford) and the repair of the Roman fort at Manchester can be seen as a strengthening of Mercia’s northern territories. The focus would now shift to a battle in the next generation between the Kingdom of the English, complete with its dynamic and multi-cultural Mercia, and the Norse kingdom of York, the political and military activity of which would dominate the tenth century in the north. Before his death in 924 Edward would again visit Nottingham and had a bridge built over the Trent linking both fortifications there. From here he went to Bakewell to oversee the building of yet another fortification. His reign was marked near to its end by the submission to him of the king of the Scots, of Strathclyde and of York and the English enclave at Bamburgh in the far north. The strength of the northern leaders’ commitment to this agreement would be tested in the years to come and its meaning has been debated down the centuries. One thing is certain, however, the campaigns of Edward the Elder and his sister Æthelflæd must be regarded as the most sustained and successful in Anglo-Saxon history.

1063: Harold Godwinson in Wales–the Making of a Leader

Harold Godwinson’s rise to power in 1066 was not a matter of accident. Many writers attribute Harold’s mastery of the late Anglo-Saxon political landscape to familial ties and the respect with which he was held on the eve of Edward the Confessor’s death, even by the ailing king himself. But it has been put forward that the defining moment in Harold’s career was not in fact the assuming of the English throne in 1066, but his devastatingly effective campaigns in Wales in 1063. It was here that the reputation of the man changed from one-time rebellious member of the Godwin family to that of an effective military commander and ‘statesman’.

Harold’s opponent during his Welsh wars was Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, who began his reign in the Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd in 1039. Gruffydd was an acquirer–an expansionist warlord, ready to play all the games available to him at the expense of his Welsh neighbours and very often at the expense of the Mercian English, into whose territory he launched frequent raids. For the Welsh, however, he had soon begun to develop something of a personality cult. Gruffydd’s main target area across the border was rural Herefordshire. It is because of such raids into this marcher territory that King Edward the Confessor had entrusted the defence of it to Earl Swein Godwinson, Harold’s brother, in around 1043. Swein’s approach was to ally himself with Gruffydd and in doing so pose a problem for Gruffydd’s enemy Gruffydd ap Rhydderch of Deheubarth. The two even went on campaign together, resulting in the handing to Swein of several Welsh hostages. But on his return from this very campaign Swein took something of a personal shine to the abbess of Leominster and held her for a year. It was a serious enough crime to cost Swein his earldom and exile. Into the vacuum over the next few years stepped King Edward’s Normans, whose presence in their first marcher castles seemed not to deter Gruffydd from further raids.

Harold, as the new earl of Wessex, became directly involved in Welsh affairs in 1055. His family had handsomely recovered from the political crisis of the early 1050s, which saw them return from exile in overwhelming force. The Godwinsons were in the ascendancy now, with Harold playing an increasingly leading role. This year saw a great turn around in the ruling of England’s earldoms, from which Harold and his brothers benefited. Ælfgar, earl of East Anglia, found himself exiled, accused by some people of treason. His response was to go to Ireland and fetch himself eighteen ships’ companies of mercenaries, and then head to Wales and into the welcoming arms of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn. The two of them led their forces to Hereford where they were met by the Norman Earl Ralph, whose lack of success in getting his fyrdsmen to fight mounted is well documented but possibly misunderstood (p. 61). The subsequent allied sacking of Hereford was too much for King Edward to bear, so he sent Harold to the area. Harold had come from Gloucester with a huge force. It was enough to ensure the allies fled back into Wales for the time being. Harold then turned his attention to the town of Hereford, so pitifully mauled by Gruffydd ap Llywelyn and Ælfgar. He had built a broad, deep ditch and ‘fortified it with gates and bars’. High politics then seems to have played its part, as Harold sought peace with the allies and King Edward restored to Ælfgar his lost earldom.

In June 1056, however, Gruffydd ap Llywelyn was back again. This time he would be opposed by the local forces of the brand new Bishop Leofgar of Hereford (formerly Harold’s personal chaplain). The militant Leofgar took with him a contingent led by the shire-reeve Ælfnoth, but they got as far as Glasbury-on-Wye before both being slaughtered by the Welsh in a miserable campaign seemingly designed to recover the lost territory of Archenfield. Earls Harold and Leofric along with Bishop Ealdred came to shore up the situation. They brought with them another huge force, but once again decided to resort to diplomatic agreements with Gruffydd ap Llywelyn. The Welsh king, now recognised by Edward as ruler of all Wales, gained further territorial advances in this agreement, which included the fortification of Rhuddlan, a place where he would soon relocate his court.

After the death of the Norman Earl Ralph of Herefordshire, Harold took direct control of the region. This would be the springboard for his later operations. Ælfgar had won the earldom of Mercia after the death of his father Leofric, but, yet again, this turbulent earl found himself exiled by the king for reasons not recorded. Once more, he ran to Gruffydd ap Llywelyn who had by now married Ælfgar’s daughter, so strong was their alliance. Between them, Ælfgar and Gruffydd accompanied by a mysterious Norwegian fleet forcibly restored the Mercian earl to his patrimony. Regrettably, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes it all as ‘too tedious to tell’. It is a frustrating entry in the sense that we are unable successfully to piece together how the campaigns of 1063 came into being, suffice it to say that this time Harold Godwinson took on a distinctively offensive posture and was aided by his brother Tostig of Northumbria in a joint venture designed to rid Edward of the menace of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn for good. Tostig’s Northumbrian coastline may well have been targeted by this enigmatic Norwegian force, thus driving him into the arms of his brother for vengeance. Also, Ælfgar’s recent death may have had something to do with Gruffydd perceiving his peace with the English to be at an end. It is possible he resorted once again to raiding into English territory, finally compelling King Edward to order his destruction.

Just after Christmas in 1062 Harold led a force north-west of Gloucester and into the region around Rhuddlan. It almost achieved complete surprise and may well have been entirely mounted. The stronghold at Rhuddlan was sacked and burnt along with Welsh ships and their equipment. Gruffydd, however, just managed to sail away in time. But the destruction was widespread and had a profound effect on Welsh minds, having been directed with such daring against a citadel that many Welshmen may have thought unchallengeable from England.

Map 3. Places mentioned in Harold Godwinson’s campaigns in Wales.

With Gruffydd still alive, Harold returned to England to put together a plan with the king’s backing that would involve his brother Tostig providing one arm of a two-pronged and wide-ranging attack on Wales. Harold would sail a fleet from Bristol around the north of Wales, while Tostig would lead an entirely mounted force into Gwynedd, the home kingdom of Gruffydd. The naval force harried the coastline and killed people or took hostages wherever it went. When they went on foot Harold’s troops were especially prepared for the difficulty of the terrain by wearing much lighter body armour than normal, according to the twelfth-century writer John of Salisbury:

He [Harold] decided . . . to campaign with a light armament shod with boots, their chests protected with straps of very tough hide, carrying small round shields to ward off missiles, and using as offensive weapons javelins and a pointed sword. Thus he was able to cling to their heels as they fled and pressed them so hard that ‘foot repulsed foot and spear repulsed spear’, and the boss of one shield that of another.

At each point in the campaign the Welsh people were told to withdraw their support for Gruffydd and it seemed ultimately to have an effect. As Gruffydd withdrew into the mountains of Snowdonia, he began to lose the support of his people, who were still at the receiving end of punitive English hostility. In August 1063 Gruffydd was finally betrayed by one of his own. Cynan, son of Iago, killed the legendary Welsh king and brought his head to Harold, who subsequently took it to his own king. With Gruffydd’s half brothers Bleddyn and Rhiwallon now given joint control of North Wales by Edward and hostages and promises of tribute and service extracted, Welsh expansionism at the expense of the English was severely–and some might argue–permanently checked.

Gerald of Wales, a famous Medieval Welsh historian, tells of the measure of Harold’s success. He says that ‘erected by entitlement according to ancient tradition’, the Englishman left a trail of inscribed stones across Wales to commemorate his victories. Many he said, simply read ‘HIC FUIT VICTOR HAROLDUS’–‘Harold was the victor here’. Harold was clearly at the top of his game after the Welsh campaigns. Within two short years, however, he would face another great test as the new and controversial king of England in desperately troubling times. Had he won the Battle of Hastings in 1066, history would have spoken very differently of Harold, son of Godwin. His status would have jumped to that of a national legend. It was certainly heading that way after the Welsh campaigns. One man with a vaulting ambition far greater than that of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn would see to it that the Englishman’s reputation would collapse into a stormy sea of desperate but effective propaganda, and that man would become the first Norman king of England.

Battles

896: Alfred’s Navy in Action–the New Ships are Tested

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives us a curious account of a naval battle that took place on the south coast of England in 896. By now, Alfred’s struggles with the Danes were not exactly over, but he had proved himself to be a master of strategy on land.

The Danes had fled England after a series of brutal campaigns that saw them half starved to death by Alfred and his followers in encounters of speed and sophistication which had never left them alone in the English landscape for long. But, as the last of the enemy ships sailed off to the shores of northern Europe to terrorise the folk of Francia, there remained untested King Alfred’s naval response to the attentions of raiders on his shores.

The test came in 896 when the south coast of England had been repeatedly harassed by ships’ companies from the Danish-controlled areas of Northumbria and East Anglia. Most of the ships of the Danes, which are describes as ‘askrs’ (a Scandinavian term) in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, were still the very same vessels they had used years ago. We have seen above how the king had organised his ship-building programme, how he had studied Viking ships captured by the Londoners at Hertford and other ships taken years before. But how would the allegedly taller and faster Anglo-Saxon ships of sixty oars (twice as long as the Danes’ vessels) fare when put to the test? The new ship type was built, as we have observed, ‘as it seemed to himself [Alfred] they might be most useful’.

Six ships came to the Isle of Wight ‘and did great harm there, both in Devon and everywhere along the sea-coast’. We are not told where they had come from but the Northumbrian or East Anglian centres present the most likely source for these Danes. The king then ordered nine of his new ships ‘to go there’ and we are told that Alfred’s ships ‘got in front of them at the river mouth towards the open sea’. The Danes came out to the English with three of their six ships, while the remaining three, stood on dry land at the upper end of the river mouth–and the men were gone off up inland’. But where was this river mouth? Possible candidates for this locale have been put forward. They include the Exe Estuary in Devon (an area clearly recently attacked by the Danes) or Poole harbour in Dorset. The English ships are said to have captured two of the three ships at the entrance to the river mouth ‘and killed the men’. But one of the three ships got away. However, on this remaining ship only five Danes survived to sail their vessel away amid a sea of drowned men.

This may sound like a victory for the English ships of Alfred’s brave new navy, but more action was to come. The one Danish ship that just about escaped a mauling had managed to do so due to the fact that many of the English ships had run aground ‘very awkwardly’. Three English ships ran aground on the side of the channel that the three beached Danish ships were on, whereas what we must assume to have been the remaining six English ships ran hopelessly aground on the other side of the channel and were unable to play a part in the ensuing struggle.

So, three English ships were aground, leaning on their sides near to where the Danish beached ships had been set. The crews of the Danish ships had been inland, but either very soon returned or had left a reasonable force in those three ships, because the chronicler says they set about the crews of the stranded English ships. The difference in disposition between the Danish and English ships is implied by the chronicler. The Danes, who had beached deliberately, almost certainly will have positioned their vessels to aid a quick get-away after the tide had ebbed. The English, however, simply ran aground, hence the reference to them being on their side.

It was not a happy experience for Alfred’s sailors. Not all of them were English, either. It seems from the list of those killed in action, that Alfred had employed a good number of Frisians in his new navy. Famous for their sea-faring capabilities, the Frisians had been masters of the trade routes of the North Sea and English Channel for centuries. But here, on a bleak English shore the lives of some very high-ranking and beloved men to the king of the Anglo-Saxons perished at the hands of the Danes. Wulfheard the Frisian, Æbbe the Frisian and Æthelhere the Frisian accompanied many Englishmen in the list of the fallen to the number of sixty-two dead. But it was recorded that 120 Danes had perished as well. Two of the first three ships’ companies at the river mouth had been completely annihilated in what must have been a bloody encounter of close-quarter fighting on the decks.

Back on the beach, at the scene of what will have looked like a pyrrhic Danish victory, efforts were being made to float the Danish vessels to effect an escape. Indeed, the chronicler recounts that the tide reached the Danish ships first, implying that they were able to float away earlier than the English. It is not known how many men were left on the Danish ships, but they managed to row out to sea and headed east again from where they had come. But the effects of the raging battle around their beached vessels must have been great indeed. ‘They were so damaged that they could not row past the land of Sussex’ is the dry assertion of the quill. Two of the ships foundered on the shores of the ancient Saxon kingdom, now comfortably absorbed into the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons. The local Sussex men found the wretched Viking shipmen on their shore and took them to their king–a long and agonising march to Winchester. Here, the king of the Anglo-Saxons heard the story of the Danish audacity–of their destruction of some of the finest men in the king’s household and ordered every one of them to be hanged.

But there was one wretched survivor of the swords and arrows of the great naval encounter. The one remaining ship of the Danes had limped back to its home in East Anglia. The Danes returned from their Wessex coastal expedition ‘very much wounded’. But had it been a success for Alfred’s new navy? Yes it had, but the cost was dear. The new ships of the English had foundered on the beach and their crews had not been able to get away as quickly as their enemy. The deeper draft of the English ships had let them down in this regard. Several of the English ships had run aground without hope of taking part in the battle. In this sense, it can be argued that the new naval arrangements in terms of ship design were a failure. But the purpose for which they were built–to out-man and out-manoeuvre the enemy–seems to have been proved a success by the emphatic victory of those first ships which intercepted the three fleeing Danish ships at the mouth of the channel. This was progress made in the truest of Anglo-Saxon styles: expensively, and at the edge of sword.

991: The Battle of Maldon–an Invitation to Disaster?

The poem The Battle of Maldon is of course extensively quoted in any work on Anglo-Saxon warfare. Without it, the record would simply show another defeat at the beginning of a series of English disasters at the dawn of the second age of Viking incursions. But with it, we are given a glimpse of the heroism of the age and find ourselves asking such searching cultural questions as to whether it really was possible in 991 for thegns to give their own lives in vengeance for the death of their lord, a seemingly idealistic and archaic concept. Another question that is often raised in respect of Maldon is why Byrhtnoth, the East Saxon ealdorman, allowed an advantageous situation to be forfeited for a level playing field. Some observations on a mixture of military necessities and political culture, as well as some obvious landscape issues, should provide the answer.

But first, who actually fought at Maldon in 991? On the English side it is certain that the army was led by Byrhtnoth, ealdorman of the East Saxons (956–91), a man of long-standing service to the region. But on the Viking side the picture is not so clear. It is probable that Swein Forkbeard of Denmark and Olaf Tryggvason led the force opposing the English. There are even dark hints that a certain Æthelric of Bocking was treacherously planning to receive Swein on his arrival on the East Saxon shore. From the king’s confirmation of Æthelric’s will comes the grave accusation in a passage that hints at how the famous king may have got his long-remembered nickname of the ‘Unready’: ‘It was many years before Æthelric died that the king was told that he [Æthelric] was in the bad plan [‘unræd’] that Swein should be received in Essex when first he came thither with a fleet.’

The Battle of Maldon came at the beginning of a new era of Scandinavian aggression in Britain. For years the Anglo-Saxon kings had been powerful enough to deter serious raiding activity and incursions. But now, after a series of small-scale opportunistic raids on various coastal settlements, there came to Folkestone in Kent a force of a size comparable with the period of the Great Heathen Army of the ninth century, if not even greater in number.

The area around Folkestone was ravaged in the summer of 991. The difference this time was that the punishment was meted out by the crews of up to ninety-three ships. From here the force went to Sandwich and from there to Ipswich. On or around 10 August 991 the force sailed to Northey Island in the estuary of the River Blackwater. They had moored opposite the burh at the heart of the East Saxon patrimony, the burh of Maldon. Byrhtnoth had to do something about it. A narrow causeway links Northey Island to the mainland outside the modern town of Maldon. There are only a few hours between high tides when it is usable, just as it was then. Here, on the mainland side, there is flat ground where the battle itself took place. From the text of the poem it seems that Byrhtnoth ordered his men to dismount and go ahead on foot, then sent their horses to the rear. He was able to bring his army up to this area thus closing off any passageway for Viking troops coming across the causeway from Northey Island. Byrhtnoth then began to drill his men in an apparently rare example of Anglo-Saxon military training. When the ealdorman finally dismounted and joined his own personal hearthtroop of warriors a Viking messenger appeared and tried to extract tribute from the Saxons in return for not bringing battle, but Byrhtnoth heroically declined the offer. He ordered his shield wall to line the shore in readiness.

The tide prevented both sides from coming at each other for some time. There then follows a curious defence of the causeway by the chosen brave Anglo-Saxon warriors Wulfstan, Ælfhere and Maccus, who when the waters had parted, slew the oncoming individual Vikings. Having observed this the Vikings chose a tactic of guile to gain the upper hand. They proposed to the ealdorman that they should be allowed to come across the causeway and form up on the mainland so that they could bring battle. Byrhtnoth is then criticised in the poem for allowing ‘too much land’ to the Vikings–an act of over-confidence it is said. A wonderful vision of Byrhtnoth marshalling his troops under skies swirling with circling ravens and the air thick with the shouts of men then follows. But why did he allow it to happen at all? We must understand where Byrhtnoth stood in the overall politics of his day. He was a regional ruler who had long service and was responsible for the defence of a large stretch of coastline. He may not have known of the sedition of others, of their desire to betray the king to the Vikings. Furthermore, he may have already had to gather his forces only recently against a similar foe at the end of the very same causeway, if a strange yet seldom quoted entry in the twelfth-century Liber Eliensis is to believed: ‘Accordingly, at one time, when the Danes landed at Maldon, and he [Byrhtnoth] heard the news, he met them with an armed force and destroyed nearly all on the bridge over the water. Only a few of them escaped and sailed to their own country to tell the tale.’ This entry is not thought to be reliable. It is followed by the return (four years later) of the same defeated Viking force to Maldon. These men goad the East Saxon ruler into another fight, which lasts a seemingly impossible fourteen days and finally results in Byrhtnoth losing his head in the final push. It also mentions Byrhtnoth’s campaigns in Northumbria and the presence of a Northumbrian hostage in the ranks of the East Saxon army, which is supported by the text of the poem. But the point is not whether the Liber Eliensis is accurate or not. It is to do with the fact that the Battle of Maldon cannot have been an isolated incident in the long history of Byrhtnoth’s defence of the shore on behalf of his lord. We are missing a whole raft of political intrigue that is barely hinted at in the sources, but which allows us tentatively to conclude that Byrhtnoth allowed the Vikings into a pitched battle because it was vital that he won it, and probably expected to do so. The Life of St Oswald, written just a few years after the battle, mentions that the Viking casualties were so many that they had only a few men to crew their ships afterwards. It all points to a deliberately chosen war of attrition, a policy that cost Byrhtnoth his life, but which may have temporarily saved his lord’s kingdom.

Map 4. The Battle of Maldon, 991.

The poem then, for what it is worth, continues with individual acts of heroism and some thumpingly good warrior antics. Byrhtnoth is soon slain. His followers, Ælfnoth and Wulfmær, also gave their lives alongside their lord, but others chose a different course. Godric had the temerity to take Byrhtnoth’s horse and flee along with others, giving the false impression that it was Byrhtnoth himself whom had fled. The poet, of course, heartily disapproves of all this. Into the fray stepped the men of the ealdorman’s hearthtroop who specifically had vowed to avenge the death of their lord or die in trying. Assisted by their Northumbrian hostage whose weaponry was limited to a bow and arrow, the comrades stepped into the battle and slew many opponents, before giving their own lives.

The poem, like so many other important Anglo-Saxon literary survivors, is incomplete and ends as the comrades are loyally fulfilling the avenging of the death of their ring-giving lord as their numbers inevitably dwindle. The heroism is of course designed for a certain audience. However, like so much in Anglo-Saxon history, it is as impossible now as it was then to divorce the ideal from the reality. This is because the values being vaunted by the poet were so deeply rooted in the psychology of the warriors of the day. Æthelred’s long and complex reign would include more military defeats and a general collapse of English morale until his son Edmund began to fight in a way perhaps echoing the heroics of Byrhtnoth and his hearthtroop in 1016. But in 991, somewhere in the region of South House Farm on the flat land opposite Northey Island to the south of Maldon, there took place a struggle that typifies all that was honourable about the Anglo-Saxon spirit.

1066: Stamford Bridge–the Secret of Surprise

Of all the campaigns in 1066, the Battle of Stamford Bridge demonstrates a good number of themes explored in this book. The importance of hostages to the leaders, the influence of terrain on the battle at a tactical level and, above all, the importance of descending upon an enemy when he is not expecting it. Another aspect of warfare is also brought out by a study of the battle. This is the question of how far a Viking army of the period can be from its reinforcements and supply before suffering the consequences of over-stretching itself.

The Battle of Stamford Bridge has garnered plenty of attention over the years. Its immediate predecessor, the Battle of Fulford Gate, has received less. Nevertheless, Fulford Gate is just as important a battle. The political events leading up to the campaigns of 1066 are very well documented. Suffice it to say that on the one side was the newly crowned King Harold of England, supported locally by his new brothers-in-law Earls Edwin and Morcar, and on the other was Harold’s by now estranged brother Tostig, whose loss of his earldom of Northumbria had all but consumed him while he was in exile. Tostig had found himself an ally, a man already a legend in the Viking world. Harald Sigurdsson (later named ‘Hardraði’ or ‘ruthless’) had been in the Varangian Guard serving the Byzantine emperor and was now the Norwegian king. He was a man of extraordinary physical stature. His claim to the English throne was based on a promise made by King Harthacnut of England to King Magnus of Norway that who ever died first, the other should inherit his kingdom. It was Harthacnut who died first, but Magnus never really prosecuted his claim and so now in 1066, very much at the request of an insistent Tostig, Harold Sigurdsson of Norway sailed to the Humber Estuary with a colossal fleet of up to 500 ships. His wars with Swein Estrithson the king of Denmark were getting him nowhere, and now would be the time he would take the English throne instead.

It is probable that Sigurdsson came to England via the Orkneys where he picked up Earls Paul and Erland and probably Tostig and his Flemish mercenaries, who were by now in Scotland. Scarborough was ransacked on the journey around the coast to the south, after which the combined fleet sailed up the Humber Estuary and then up the Ouse to Riccall where they moored ready to take York. This was on or around 16 September. Edwin and Morcar sent to King Harold the news of the landing and raced to York. The brothers got to York and gave battle to the south of the city at Fulford on 20 September. They appear to have formed up along the Germany Beck, a water feature feeding into the river, pinning one of their flanks on the river itself. It was an ideal defensive position in that this was where route ways into York from the south converged. The Vikings knew they had to defeat the brothers to get to York. On the west flank nearest the river the Norwegians had most of their muscle and it was here they prevailed in the end. Earl Edwin’s forces suffered greatly as they were retreating with their backs to the river in places. Morcar’s men seem to have recoiled as far as Heslington, a mile away to the north-east. The way was open now for Harald and Tostig to take York. Edwin and Morcar, although defeated, would later play a part in the campaign, but for now the speedy response of the new king of England would bring on the next stage.

It seems that after the initial hostage exchanges, Tostig may have prevaricated at York. Northumbria after all was an earldom Tostig had recently held and there must have been room for some negotiation. A total of 150 hostages were exchanged and supplies given to the allied army. Harald and Tostig then returned to their ships at Riccall. By Sunday 24 September, King Harold had arrived at Tadcaster, 8 miles south-west of York. Here he is said to have ‘marshalled his fleet’, a possible reference to some English deserters from Tostig’s fleet who would have found themselves hemmed in by the allies at Riccall. Alternatively, it is just possible that the ships might have been crewed by the Danes sent by the king of Denmark to aid the English against Harald Sigurdsson. Nevertheless, Harold of England swept into York on Monday 25 September apparently unopposed.

King Harold quickly stifled any means of alerting his enemies to his presence. The two allied commanders Tostig and Harald were dividing their forces into those who would stay behind with the ships and those who were to go out to the junction of the roads to the east of York and meet with the expected regional leaders for hostages and tributes to be paid. They cannot have been anticipating King Harold of England to arrive so quickly. Earls Paul and Erland stayed at Riccall and Harald and Tostig travelled to claim their hostages. When the latter two got to Stamford Bridge at the junction of the regional roads, they were 11 miles from Riccall. Not only would this distance prove to be a fatal miscalculation, but according to legend the Norwegians had left their armour on shipboard, so fine was the weather.

The account given of the Battle of Stamford Bridge by the thirteenth-century historian Snorri Sturluson is shot through with anachronisms and inaccuracies. It still provides us, however, with a flavour of the subsequent battle that is difficult not to include in any modern observation of it. As the allies approached York from where they had been they saw a large cloud of dust raised by horses’ hooves. Shields and white coats of mail shone beneath the cloud. Harald Sigurdsson asked Tostig who these people might be, but Tostig was unsure. So they waited. ‘The closer the army came’, says Snorri, ‘the greater it grew, and their glittering weapons sparkled like a field of broken ice’.

There was no way Tostig could get back to the ships at Riccall as the realisation dawned upon him that the approaching force was that of his brother. He and Harald instead fell back across the Derwent over the bridge. Harald had sent three messengers to Riccall for reinforcements, but these men were several hours march away at best. It was during the falling back operation that a famous holding action is supposed to have occurred at Stamford Bridge itself. Inserted by a later hand into the Abingdon version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the following fascinating account:

There was one of the Norwegians who withstood the English people so that they could not cross the bridge nor gain victory.

Map 5. The Battle of Stamford Bridge, 1066.

Then one Englishman shot with an arrow but it was to no avail, and then another came under the bridge and stabbed him through under the mail-coat. Then Harold, king of the English, came over the bridge, and his army along with him, and there made a great slaughter of Norwegians and Flemings . . .

Just before the full battle commenced Snorri recalls that an English horseman enquired of a man whether Earl Tostig was in the army. The earl answered the man in person. The rider told Tostig that the king of England would offer Tostig his earldom back and a third of his kingdom. But this did not impress the earl who told the rider of the damage done to him by his brother during his exile. Tostig then asked the mystery rider what his new lord, King Harald Sigurdsson, could expect from the English king. The rider’s famous answer (according to Snorri) was emphatic: ‘King Harold has already declared how much of England he is prepared to grant him: seven feet of ground, or as much more as he is taller than other men’. Tostig knew the rider all too well. Brothers cannot successfully disguise themselves from one another. When he revealed the identity of the rider to his new lord Harald, the Norwegian berated him for not alerting him sooner, but did at least admit to his men that King Harold of England, although ‘little’, sat ‘proudly in his stirrups’. The story Snorri spins is a wonderful yarn, but what happened next was very grim for those who lost their lives. There followed one of the most comprehensive annihilations in Medieval history. Upon these battle flats to the east of York would be piled the bones of thousands of warriors. They could still be seen in the twelfth century according to Ordericus Vitalis, an Anglo-Norman monk.

Snorri gives us an account of the battle but confuses what happened later at Hastings with events at Stamford Bridge. He talks of repeated English cavalry charges against the Norwegians, which although not beyond credulity, smacks of the Normans at Hastings and not the English at Stamford Bridge. He talks too of pauses in the fighting and of the death of a king (Harald) through the firing of an arrow. All we know for certain is that neither Tostig or Harald survived the Anglo-Saxon onslaught. Harald was possibly shot in the neck with an arrow. As for Tostig, William of Malmesbury says the earl was found slumped beneath his banners, capable only of being identified by a wart between his shoulder blades.

It was all too late for Eystein Orri, the leader of the Riccall relieving force. Notwithstanding their arrival with armour as well as weapons, they were exhausted when they got there. There is even the distinct possibility that Harold’s ‘marshalling of his fleet’ at Tadcaster contained an instruction to fall upon the Viking reserves at Riccall should they get a chance. If this happened it may well explain why just twenty-four ships returned to Norway out of the several hundreds that came. Just Earl Paul and Olaf, the son of Harald, led the sorry remnants home with a solemn promise not to return. The Battle of Stamford Bridge was nothing short of a masterpiece of military planning. The conqueror of the Welsh, Harold son of Godwin, had just one more enemy to defeat to be sure of a permanent grip on the throne of England.

1066: Hastings–Landscape, Locations and Evidence

We cannot read about the Battle of Hastings and pretend we do not know the result. Such were the consequences of King Harold’s defeat on 14 October 1066 that more has been written about the battle than any other battle in English history. However, it is interesting that with so much literature at our disposal, there are questions about the battle itself that still remain. For example, where was the battle actually fought? Where was it intended to be fought? How long did it last? Was there a feigned Norman flight on the battlefield? Why did William of Normandy win it against the odds, and that most famous of all Hastings talking points–where did the ‘malfosse’ incident where many Norman horsemen met their doom take place?

As William’s remarkable invasion fleet stood out to sea on the rising tide at St Valeééry on the evening of 28 September 1066, taking advantage of long-awaited south-westerly winds, we know that he was heading for the south coast of England to claim a kingdom. However, there are disputes even about his intended landing place. William of Malmesbury tells us that the duke had told Harold ‘he would claim what was his by force of arms and come to a place where Harold supposed his footing secure’. To the west of Pevensey lay the rich Sussex estates of Harold’s family. Also, and perhaps more significantly, lay the Steyning estate seized by Harold from the monks of Feéécamp Abbey. It should not be forgotten that the Norman invasion fleet’s original starting point on the other side of the English Channel had been in the Dives Estuary, more or less directly opposite these English target areas. The Norman fleet had been blown by adverse winds to its second launching point at St Valeééry.

However, on the morning of 29 September 1066 it was at the old Roman fort of Pevensey where William set up his first temporary fortification on the western side of a salt marsh. His appearance on the south coast of England went largely unchallenged save for the unfortunate fate of some errant vessels’ crews which strayed onto the defended shore line at Romney.

The landscape around Pevensey Bay is no longer like it was in 1066. Land reclamation and drainage have vastly altered its appearance. When William landed it was a salt marsh which had once been a tidal lagoon. It was practically uncrossable and was still penetrated here and there by tidal inlets, some of which stretched almost as far inland as Ninfield and Catsfield, some 5 miles from the sea. To march from Pevensey to Hastings in 1066 involved a circuitous route. Through Standard Hill at Ninfield, then down the 7-mile ridgeway road to Hastings. It seems likely that William left an armoured reconnaissance force at Pevensey surrounded by supplies and equipment and well enough protected. Then, as is also evidenced by The Carmen, the Bayeux Tapestry and William of Poitiers, he sailed to Hastings (‘as soon as they were fit’ says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). Two hours after setting off at high tide he would have arrived at Coombe Haven alongside the settlement at Hastings. Here began a long road to London which stretched along the ridgeway to the north and penetrated the thickly wooded weald of Sussex. Precisely what happened to the townsfolk of Hastings is not fully recorded but we can expect their experience was not pleasant.

So, William set himself up with camp and castle at Hastings and waited. To the west of him was Coombe Haven and to the east the landscape curved around to the north from the Fairlight cliffs. To the north the Brede Estuary stretched as far as Sedlescome. William was, in effect, at the end of a peninsula. There was only one way out of this place and that was directly to the north. For Harold, who had begun his legendary race to the south, the task was to trap his Norman enemy in this bottleneck of land and smash him into the sea.

It is probable that Harold received the news of William’s landing while he was at York on or about 1 October. The king had just won a thumping victory over Harald Sigurdsson. Within two weeks he was in London. In this time 190 miles had been covered. This amounts to an average of just over 13 miles a day. Interestingly, a similar marching rate has been gleaned from the charter evidence of King Athelstan’s (924–39) campaign to Scotland in 934. Here, the king covered 130 miles between Winchester and Nottingham between 28 May and 7 June, averaging, like Harold after him, around 13 miles a day.

It is difficult to piece together what was going on in the mind of King Harold during the days between Stamford Bridge and Hastings. There are a number of possibilities, but the sources are quiet about it. William of Malmesbury and Ordericus Vitalis, writing in the twelfth century, give us a possible glimpse at best. Malmesbury tells us that Harold suffered some desertions from his army during this time. This, he says, was down to the king’s reluctance to share out his booty from Stamford Bridge. He had instead instructed the earls Edwin and Morcar to take the spoils to London. This single point is remarkable if it is true. It may explain a line in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s brief but noteworthy account of the Battle of Hastings. The Worcester scribe describes it thus:

Then this [William’s arrival at Hastings] became known to King Harold and he gathered a great army and came against him at the grey apple tree. And William came upon him by surprise before his people were marshalled. Nevertheless, the king fought very hard against him with those men who wanted to support him and there was a great slaughter on either side.

This is the only near contemporary English account of the battle and it contains a reference to some sort of dissent among Harold’s army, giving further weight to Malmesbury’s observations. The fact that there seems to have been disquiet among some of the men in Harold’s army is not often spoken of. It has, however, haunted Harold’s reputation.

William of Malmesbury, often regarded as something of an eccentric writer, says something else too. He insists that Harold’s army at this particular moment was not as big as everyone else says it was. This is a little more difficult to defend, given the wealth of literature pointing to the huge size of the English army at Hastings, but it still may have something of a kernel of truth in it. He says that the king’s army consisted of just his stipendiary household troops–his housecarls, some mercenaries (possibly Danes) and a few men from the shires. Might this explain the desertions? Mercenaries are far more likely than duty bound fyrdsmen to desert their employer if the spoils of war are not shared out among them.

Only when Harold reached London did the size of the army swell once again, but even here the king did not wait until he was at maximum strength. The things that were said and done in London hold the key to understanding why Hastings was fought the way it was. In London Harold’s brother Earl Gyrth, according to Ordericus Vitalis, is said to have offered to lead the army into Sussex for the king so he should get another chance at William should things go wrong. Their mother Gytha had also expressed a concern that Harold should not fight against William lest he be seen as an oath breaker. Earls Edwin and Morcar were also present in London during this time, along with Archbishop Aldred. Had the earls been told to wait behind at London with their forces? Was Harold’s strategy to once again be the master of surprise like he had been at Stamford Bridge? It is probable that the English fleet was also being prepared for a blockading action in the English Channel whereby the king would trap the duke in the landscape around Hastings in a hammer-and-anvil manoeuvre.

There is some evidence that Harold was planning a night surprise against William’s camp. This is suggested by William of Jumièges, another twelfth-century writer. If this was the case, Harold need not have waited for huge reinforcements. Perhaps tellingly, Jumièges says that William had already told his men to prepare for it. William of Poitiers, whose bias is enormously in favour of the Normans, often has some revealing things to say. He was, after all, the duke’s military chaplain. For example, he is insistent on Harold’s plan for a night surprise supported by a fleet of 700 ships to finish off the retreaters. The Carmen mentions the surprise attack too. With such weight given by the evidence towards Harold’s plan for a surprise attack on William’s position, in light of what we all know to have been the outcome of Hastings, what do we suppose went wrong? We might remind ourselves of the Worcester scribe’s pronouncement that it was William, and not Harold, who in the event achieved surprise at Hastings. John of Worcester tells us more. He perhaps paints the clearest picture of them all:

Thereat the king at once, and in great haste, marched his army towards London; and although he well knew that some of the bravest Englishmen had fallen in his two [former] battles, and that one half of his army had not yet arrived, he did not hesitate to advance with all speed into South Saxony [Sussex] against his enemies; and on Saturday the 11th of the kalends of September [22 October–a mistake by John], before a third of his army was in order for fighting, he joined battle with them nine miles from Hastings, where they had fortified a castle. But inasmuch as the English were drawn up in a narrow place, many retired from the ranks and very few remained true to him.

So, with ‘half’ an army Harold had marched into Sussex. Before even a third of this ‘half’ army had deployed, battle commenced. Someone, it would seem, had been out-generalled in his own landscape.

But where did it all happen? Here, local tradition has dominated the story. Harold had marched his way through the thickly wooded weald to the place of the hoary apple tree, a known meeting point at the junction of three separate hundreds. We cannot be sure his encampment here was due to the fact he was awaiting reinforcements, but it seems most likely. Here, on the high ground at Caldbec Hill Harold was just a short march from the camp at Hastings some 7 miles away. But this is where the tables were turned on Harold. One of King Edward the Confessor’s Breton ministers had visited the duke in his camp at Hastings to tell him of the expected numbers of English who might swallow him up in the countryside if he ventured out. William must have known by now that the longer he waited the more likely he was to be overwhelmed. He had to get out of Hastings before it was too late.

William of Poitiers says that before the battle an exchange of embassies took place in the form of monks. Harold had sent a trusted monk to William at Hastings telling him to leave the kingdom. The duke, who responded in person by pretending to be his own seneschal, sent the monk back to Harold with his own embassy Hugh Margot the next day. There was, of course, much coverage of oath taking and breaking, but the response was emphatic. The duke was not going home. Harold then put it to God himself to decide. By now, Harold’s position was known to the Normans and it probably came as a surprise to William to learn just how close he was to Hastings. There is a hint of urgency in the Norman camp at this stage as preparations were hurriedly made for a departure. There was still enough time to steal the final march. He set out from Hastings in an order of march that had his bowmen and crossbowmen (possibly) at the front, the heavy infantry (which are nowhere represented on the Bayeux Tapestry) in the middle and the cavalry at the rear. We cannot be sure of the exact timings of the exchanges of the embassies or of any other scouting or intelligence that took place that morning of 14 October 1066, but William’s army, having camped at Telham Hill, chose to deploy at the base of a slope across the London to Hastings track way. At the top of the slope was a lateral ridge just some 900yd in width with steep drops and forested valleys on either side. To the north was Harold, now aware of the arrival of an army that he had not expected. Somewhere behind him in the weald and beyond, countless English numbers were still snaking their way towards his probable marshalling place at Caldbec Hill. But as Harold sent men down the narrow ridgeway which is now Battle High Street to line the frontage across the road to Hastings, his heart must have sunk. Had he 10,000 more men than he did, he could not have brought them all into play on such a constricted front. For William, the gamble would be to have to fight the most costly of all types of battle–a frontal assault. The day was set for the longest of struggles.

By far the most detailed account of the battle is that of William of Poitiers. He is careful to point out that William was not put off ‘by the difficulty of the place’–a clear reference to the gamble he had made in deploying at the base of a steep slope bounded by impassable terrain either side. As far as the Norman deployment is concerned, however, we must balance the evidence from numerous sources. Wace, in his Roman de Rou of the later twelfth century, is very specific on William’s deployment. He says the Bretons formed up on the left flank in company with the men of Poitou (sometimes called Aquitanians in other sources). With them were also the men of Maine. In the centre section were the men of the duke himself with some of his men spilled over to the right under the command of Roger of Montgomery (who is thought by some not to have arrived in England until the following year) and William FitzOsbern. On this flank too were the men of Poux in Picardy, the men of Boulogne and, in all probability, some Flemish mercenaries.

Sadly, in comparison to the explicit claims of the Norman sources regarding Norman deployment, we are left with the enigmatic suggestion by William of Malmesbury for the English disposition that Harold merely planted his standards at the highest part of the slope. This gives rise to a number of interpretations when compared to the rest of the evidence, some of which contradicts. It has been suggested that not only did Harold line the ridge, but he also pinned a flank on a small hill on his right. His line, instead of being bent round the contour of the hill would then have been flatter and skewed at right angles to the road to Hastings. It is argued that the lightly armed men seen in the Bayeux Tapestry defending the hillock with all their might are in fact desperately trying to hold this flank. However, there are simply too many references to the constricted nature of the English ranks for this interpretation to gain general acceptance. It is still more likely that the English could not gain effective command and control over the proceedings due to the difficulty of their position. In other words, they were confined to a narrow ridge and could not bring their numbers to bear.

According to tradition, when the forces were arrayed against each other the battle opened with the approach of Taillefer, a Norman juggler, towards the English lines. Henry of Huntington has him juggling his sword before the enemy and heading straight for the English standard where he slew two men before being inevitably consumed himself. The sound of horns then heralded the true beginning of the battle. It was the Norman infantry, according to Poitiers, who advanced first, probably the bowmen who provoked the English lines with their ‘missiles’. But it seems they got too close and were met with a missile repost.

Then the Norman cavalry rode to rescue the infantry which had got into difficulties against the English. An exchange of ranks is argued by Poitiers–a very complex evolution–and it resulted in the Norman horsemen being able to hack their way towards the English lines as the bowmen retreated. But the response was emphatic, even by Poitier’s estimation. Soon, the battle plan of the duke was in disarray. Both Poitiers and The Carmen remark upon the difficulty of the place, the latter going as far as saying that the English dead could not even fall down to the ground but remained rooted shoulder to shoulder with their comrades. Poitiers hints that the assistance given to the infantry by the Norman cavalry at this stage came from William’s central command and included the duke himself. But here we enter the mists of tradition again. Was it possible that the Norman response to the difficulties of a frontal assault led the cavalry into executing a tactic known as a ‘feigned flight’ to lure the English off the ridge to their doom? Poitiers has it done once by accident at this early stage of the battle and twice more deliberately. He is not alone. But is it not the case that if faced with only a frontal assault as an option the Normans would be compelled to try again and again?

It was the Bretons who were first to yield. They fell back along with the infantry on the left flank and caused almost the whole army to break. The duke then rode in to rally the troops personally and as the rumours of his own untimely demise were spread, the duke lifted his helmet to reveal he was still alive. Why did Harold not unleash his whole line at this point of Norman confusion? Is this episode a mere lift from the classical antecedents around which the designer of the Tapestry based his or her story? Was it the case that the English were so constricted that a proper steamrolling shield wall like the one allegedly used at Sherston could not be organised? Whether the feigned flight was deliberate or a mere necessity based on the need for repeated attacks, the result on the English right flank was that Harold’s men ran from the hill and were cut off and annihilated.

Piecing together what we can from the other sources as William of Poitiers descends into a sycophantic rant about his master, it is just possible to suggest the next step in the battle sequence. Harold’s brother Gyrth, according to The Carmen, is set against the duke himself. William of Normandy is supposed to have mistaken Gyrth for his brother Harold. It is probably here that Gyrth fell in battle, having been at his brother’s side for so long. The war of attrition was now edging towards the Normans. The English were unable to manoeuvre tactically and had to stand there and take the repeated onslaught.

Now we enter a further realm of legend as the sources deceive us once more. It is at this point that it seems Harold moved his standards to the eastern flank of his army away from the summit. Here it is said by the Brevis Relatio (written by a monk from Battle Abbey) that the High Altar of the Abbey Church was set in remembrance of where Harold fell. There must have been some trouble on this flank for the English. It was the shallower of the two flanking slopes of the English lines and it is probable that the Franco-Flemish wing had been gradually carving its way up the English flank. The king came forwards to his lines to reinforce a desperate situation and it seems this was where the famous last stand took place. Historians have struggled to reconcile this interpretation with William of Jumièges’ statement that Harold fell in the first wave of attacks. It could be a question of how we interpret our Latin. Jumièges’s words are that Harold fell ‘in primo militum congressu’, meaning ‘in the first military encounter’. For Harold, the move to the eastern flank and the stepping into the front line to shore up a problem would indeed have been his first military encounter in the battle if we accept William of Malmesbury’s notion that the king had set his standards way up at the top of the hill. Therefore, this was the first (and the last) of Harold’s actions on the battlefield and very dramatic and furious it was too.

More arrows were ordered into the English lines as William spotted his counterpart fighting in the thick of it. The Normans looked for the kill and sent men towards the English standards. Robert of Ernies managed to race forward to grab a standard but was cut down by English blades, his mangled body later found at the foot of the fallen English standard. But the pressure on Harold’s household troops was too much. He was slaughtered there on Senlac Ridge, hacked at the chest, beheaded with blows, pierced in the torso and chopped at the leg. A proud and accomplished warrior died defending a kingdom of great antiquity. It is because the story has gained such an importance for English cultural identity that one cannot help but feel a tinge of emotion about this battle and the fate of Harold Godwinson. No matter what we might say about the Scandinavian influence in Later Anglo-Saxon England (Harold himself was half Danish and many of the troops around him at Hastings may even have been the Danes from whom he had openly solicited help), the death of Harold has had a deep impact on the English psyche, something that will never go away.

So, Harold lay dead on the field at Hastings. His army began to retreat as it saw the standards fall. They had not been able to withstand such a protracted battle fighting purely on the defensive. Their king had not intended to fight on Senlac Ridge, he had other surprises in store for William, but was out-thought at the last moment by a man who had taken the time to come to know his enemy. The line of retreat should hardly be in dispute. This army, like most others, had no choice but to retreat along the route it had come, such was the constriction of the landscape. Back along what was to become Battle High Street, and towards the baggage at Caldbec Hill which they had left earlier that day. Those of any rank who were left must have held onto thoughts of making it back to London, or linking up with earls Edwin and Morcar, but for the most part the English army’s morale was utterly destroyed and they were in rout.

Something, however, happened towards the coming of darkness at the end of the battle that would get historians arguing for centuries. No less than five separate sources speak of an incident in which Norman horsemen chasing after the vanquished English succumbed to a catastrophe at a huge ditch they knew nothing about. William of Poitiers says that the Normans rode after the English until the English found an excellent position on a steep bank with numerous ditches. William of Jumièges says that some long grass had hidden from the Normans an ‘ancient causeway’ into which they fell with their horses. William of Malmesbury, however, is a little more expansive. The English had taken possession of an ‘eminence’ and drove the Normans down as they strove to gain the higher ground. The English had arrived by a short passage known to them thus avoiding a deep ditch. They trod underfoot so many Normans as virtually to make the ditch level with the ground. The name given to this famous ditch is provided by the twelfth-century Chronicle of Battle Abbey. ‘Between the two armies lay a dreadful chasm’ it says–the ‘malfosse’ (‘evil ditch’). It was a natural cleft or something that had been ‘hollowed out by storms’. Bushes and brambles had obscured it from the Normans.

Of all the accounts of the malfosse incident the twelfth-century writer Ordericus Vitalis has the most vivid. An ancient rampart had been concealed by long grasses. The Norman horsemen fell into it at a gallop. The English then saw that they could be sheltered by the ‘broken rampart and labyrinth of ditches’ and so re-formed their ranks and made a stand against the Normans killing 15,000 (sic) of them.

It would seem churlish to argue that this incident did not happen, but where in the local landscape could such a feature be? Could it be on the battlefield itself or is it more likely to be somewhere to the rear? Candidates have been put forward over the years. E.A. Freeman, a famous Victorian scholar, thought it was a ditch behind Battle church, whereas Francis Baring in 1906 had it on the western side of the battlefield at a place called Manser’s Shaw. Far more likely is that the Normans chased the English to their baggage and camp at Caldbec Hill and carried on chasing them to the north as the English retreated. Just 600yd to the north of the camp at Caldbec Hill just to the north of Virgin’s Lane is a colossal chasm in the ground known to locals as Oakwood Gill (see Map 6). The ground falls away sharply into a wooded glade. It is so remarkably huge that it is easy to miss.

Map 6. The aftermath of Hastings, 1066.

Eustace of Boulogne and Duke William both believed that those English lining the northern side of the ditch were newly arrived reinforcements. Certainly, for a group of men to form up in an orderly way upon such a feature indicates that they may not have been part of the fleeing army, but members of a fresh command or least had been rallied by the same. Who, however, could have turned up at this late stage? Whoever he was, could he have been the commander Harold was waiting for at Caldbec Hill, the well-known meeting place? Earl Waltheof is one such candidate. Waltheof continued to struggle with the Normans in the years after Hastings. Earls Edwin and Morcar may also have come down from London after all, as John of Worcester hints that they ‘withdrew from the conflict’ after hearing of Harold’s death and went to London.

Whoever the Englishmen of the malfosse were, it was surely clear to them that the Battle of Hastings had been lost. Less clear at this time, however, was the huge difference it would all make in the long term. The Battle of Hastings for which we have a wealth of historical and topographical evidence clearly shows the difficulties of interpretation. Even if we had a field littered with the archaeological remains of the dead (who are conspicuously absent), we would make some great advances, but would we be any closer to understanding how the battle was fought? It is the allure of Anglo-Saxon military studies that there is always something to find out.

Sieges

Sieges in the Anglo-Saxon period were not quite the stuff of Medieval legend. For example, there were no giant siege engines or pyrotechnics which we are used to seeing in popular recreations from the period. There were in all probability siege ladders, grappling hooks, missiles and torches. There is some evidence that sieges could involve specialist equipment, however. The Exeter riddle no. 53 may well refer to a battering ram. Also, the Vikings’ famous siege of Paris in 885–6, according to Abbo of St Germain-des Preéés, apparently involved a wheeled battering ram. More often than not, however, the English evidence points to protracted sieges ending in starvation, desperation and surrender, while on other occasions direct assaults of fortifications were made. That there were campaigns that culminated in siege after siege of strategic fortifications is undoubted. But what was the nature of this kind of warfare? The examples chosen below of Rochester, London and Chester show how sieges could be conducted at re-fortified towns, whereas the example at Buttington shows the personal cost of such sieges at the temporary fortifications thrown up by the Danes in England. In the tenth century under Edward the Elder and his Mercian sister Æthelflæd, Anglo-Saxon siege warfare was at its peak, with both leaders devoting incredible amounts of resources into the strategy with great successes (pp. 108–9). Here, however, with the help of some colourful semi-legendary material, we are concerned with showing the approaches to (and effects of) siege warfare in Anglo-Saxon England.

884–5: Rochester

Rochester, situated on the eastern bank of the River Medway, was a Kentish port of great significance throughout the Anglo-Saxon and Medieval period. Moreover, the town was a political centre for the Kentish kings and by 604 it was the second see in Anglo-Saxon England after Canterbury itself. Mentioned by name by the Venerable Bede as Hrofæscæstre, the city was no stranger to attack having been sacked by Æthelred of Mercia in 676. Even then, its third-century Roman walls would have provided a significant obstacle for its enemies. Later, Rochester’s position at the end of Continental trading routes probably made it attractive to the marauding Vikings of the ninth century when they took it upon themselves mercilessly to sack the place along with the trading settlement at Lundenwic in 842.

But in 884, when a Viking force would return from the Continent to England to try its luck once again, the situation at Rochester would be very much different than it had been in centuries past. Alfred the Great, the king of the Anglo-Saxons, had been hard at work with his advisors building himself a new kingdom, the anchor points of which were a series of strongly defended towns or refuge places supported by field armies. History would prove this innovation to be too much for those who brought their hopes and expectations from a battered Francia that year.

The Viking force that had arrived at Fulham left England for Ghent after Edington in 879. It was a period that saw great embarrassment for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fat (839–88), who was compelled to treat with a number of Viking leaders often on humiliating terms. This is not to say that there were no successes for the Frankish defenders. Louis III, the Western Emperor, achieved a famous victory at the Battle of Saucourt in 881, but even after this battle the Vikings are described as being ‘provided with horses’ indicating a considerable amount of bargaining power on their part.

Between 880 and 884 the Vikings of Ghent moved around Francia and Flanders raiding as they went. By the autumn of 884 the force was in Boulogne where its leaders seem to have decided to split up. One part of the force travelled to Louvain on the River Dyle and besieged it, while the other set sail for England, arriving at Rochester on the Medway. Full of confidence, the Vikings arrived in the Medway having brought with them the horses and hostages they had gained from their Frankish adventure. They had not anticipated, however, the energy and organisation that had gone into the building of the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons. The reasons for the Viking choice of Rochester for this new adventure is not entirely clear, but the help these Vikings would later receive from one of Alfred’s old Danish enemies in East Anglia might indicate a certain amount of prior planning. The invaders will have been mindful of the destruction of the town in 842, but this time when they arrived, they found the city defended by a garrison.

Upon arrival, the force prepared themselves for something they had not anticipated: a protracted siege. They dug a defensive fortification at the entrance to the city, but the townsfolk continued to hold out. It is not certain when King Alfred arrived at Rochester, but when he did he is described as having arrived ‘suddenly’. The nature of his descent upon the Viking fort outside the city certainly attracted comment from Asser and had profound effects upon the Danes: ‘the pagans then left their fortifications and abandoned all the horses they had brought with them from Frankia, and also left the greater part of their prisoners in the fort, and fled instantly to their ships, because the king had come there suddenly’. The Vikings had clearly been panicked by Alfred’s arrival. According to Æthelweard, however, they did not all sail back to Francia. Those who chose to stay behind came to terms with Alfred but twice broke their agreement with him and went raiding in the forested area south of the Thames. Alfred’s next task was to deal with the news that these newly arrived Danes were receiving help from none other than his old nemesis Guthrum, now ruling in East Anglia. But as far as the people of Rochester were concerned, they had successfully withstood a siege. But sieges of this era, however, did not always turn out so well for the defenders like they had at Rochester. The misery of the siege of Buttington (894), which comes towards the end of the new period of Viking invasions which began in 892, demonstrates just how bad it could get for the besieged.

894: Siege of Buttington

Quite how many of the Vikings who had sailed into the mouth of the River Lympne and into the Thames Estuary in 892 would eventually end their lives in an extraordinary campaign culminating in the siege of Buttington is unclear. Nor, for that matter, is the site of the actual siege itself universally agreed upon. Some have it at Buttington Tump at the mouth of the River Wye, but the most compelling candidate is Buttington at Welshpool, Powys, where in 1838 the Reverend Dawkins found in his churchyard 3 separate pits full of the skulls and long bones of up to 400 men accompanied by a horse jaw bone.

Of Dawkins’s skeletons we know very little. The possibility remains that the whole thing is a great red herring amounting to little more than the usual graveyard clearance material one would expect when excavating the foundations of a new church schoolroom. But of the background to the siege of Buttington we know a little more. The 250 shiploads of Danes who landed at the Lympne Estuary drew their ships to shore 4 miles inland and came across a small half-built fortification known as Eorpeburnan. To them, the stories of grand English defensive schemes must have seemed laughable. They set about killing the few half-armed peasants they found before moving on to nearby Appledore in Kent. At the same time, a legendary Viking called Hæsten arrived in the Thames Estuary with eighty shiploads of warriors and it soon became apparent to King Alfred that a negotiation of sorts was necessary. Much like he had with Guthrum, Alfred offered Hæsten Christianity and he and Ealdorman Æthelred of Mercia stood godfather to Hæsten’s two sons. This new era of Viking incursions into Alfred’s kingdom was beginning in the same way that the last one had ended.

Having secured promises of peace from the Northumbrians and East Anglians, Alfred positioned himself between the two Viking forces based at Appledore and Milton Regis and waited. This new era of warfare would be played out on a strategic level and would be a very different game from those encounters played out in the 870s. At some stage during this stand-off, the Appledore Vikings, laden with booty from sporadic raiding, tried to set out through the weald and head north to link up with ships they had previously sent around the coast. Alfred’s son Edward the Elder, however, caught them at Farnham in Surrey and defeated them, taking their booty and drove them across the Thames where there was no ford. The Danes then fetched up at Thorney Island in Buckinghamshire, having made their way up the River Colne.

While Edward settled down to besiege Thorney Island, the dynamics of the campaign were changing. Alfred was due to relieve his son shortly and sent messengers to him. But the fyrd rotation system was being stretched. Edward’s men were coming to the end of their tour of duty at just the same time that Alfred learned that a man called Sigeferth, leader of the Northumbrian Danes, had sent 140 ships around the coast to attack Exeter in the west. The result was that the besieging force at Thorney was not relieved and Edward had to settle for a negotiated peace there, despite Alfred having sent to London for assistance from Æthelred. The Thorney Vikings, now off the hook, went to join with Hæsten at Benfleet in Essex, where a large new fortification had been erected by the Vikings.

It fell to Æthelred of Mercia to sort matters out at Benfleet while Alfred went to Exeter to deal with trouble in the west. Æthelred pounced upon the fort at Benfleet and found much of the enemy out on a raiding mission. He seized money, women, children and ships, the latter being broken up on the spot or brought to London and Rochester for use by the English. Hæsten’s wife and children were among the captives, but as godsons of the king, Alfred ordered their return to Hæsten. When Hæsten saw the devastation at Benfleet and learned of the fate of so many of his warriors and their families, he was moved to gather what he had left and sail to Shoebury, where he built a new fort and attempted to entice the Northumbrians and East Angles once again into supporting him. Hæsten was now on the back foot, despite support from the north. Whatever he and his allies tried, there was always an English force at hand to deal with it.

And so Hæsten re-thought his campaign. His actions in subsequently sprinting across northern Mercia to the west of Britain may have had some logic behind them. With Alfred tied up at Exeter and just beginning to withdraw after the Danes there were themselves retiring, Hæsten may have thought he could get aid from the Welsh and come at Alfred from the west. If so, he was to be surprised. Hæsten travelled with a force across the Thames Valley and up the Severn to Buttington studiously avoiding English fortifications along the way. But after the recent wars of the sons of Rhodri Mawr, the Welsh princes had more or less thrown in their lot with the English king for protection. Hæsten would have nothing here, if this is what he had come for. Moreover, it would not be Alfred who dealt with the threat. Alfred had some very loyal generals and one surprising ally.

What happened next, according to the chronicler Æthelweard, was ‘vaunted by aged men’. Ealdorman Æthelhelm of Wiltshire ‘made open preparation with a cavalry force’ and met up with Ealdorman Æthelnoth of Somerset and pursued the Vikings. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states: ‘Then there gathered Ealdorman Æthelred and Ealdorman Æthelhelm and Ealdorman Æthelnoth, and the king’s thegns who were occupying the fortifications, from every stronghold east of the Parret, both west and east of Selwood, and also north of the Thames and west of the Severn, and also a certain part of the Welsh race . . .’.

The combined forces, having overtaken the Vikings, surrounded them at Buttington and besieged them ‘on every side’. The allies sat on either side of the river and watched the Danes in their fortification on rising ground. Any attempted breakout to the west would be blocked by Mervyn of Powys. Weeks went by as the Danes at Buttington were compelled to eat their own horses. It was a scene of misery beyond comparison. The Danish leadership made a decision to try to break out of the fort through necessity more than anything else. They chose the eastern option. The result was a predictable bloodbath. The Danes, like any cornered force, fought tenaciously and were able to break through in small numbers, but their casualties were immense. The sources record that Ordheah, an English king’s thegn, lost his life there. So too did many others. It was an act of desperation, but it brought a small and bedraggled force back to the Danish bases in Essex where once again they could regroup and think again of places where they could find proper refuge. Hæsten seems to have survived all this misery and soon began to set his sights on an ancient Roman city he had heard tales about in the north-west.

894–c. 907: Chester and the Vikings

By the time the Viking leadership under Hæsten made for the north west of England from their Essex bases, the city of Chester, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was some sort of half-forgotten place being described as ‘desolate’. Once famed as the ‘city of the legions’, Chester had literally been the last fortress of the northern Roman Empire, the place from which great military campaigns across northern Britain were organised and directed. But now the Roman fleets and soldiers had long gone, although the walls of the fortress in some places would still have stood as a grand reminder to the glorious Roman past. Chester’s desolation may not have been wholly attributable to Roman abandonment, however. It certainly was the focus of a great battle when the Northumbrian King Æthelfrifth came upon it in the early seventh century. It is likely to have remained occupied in one way or another until 893, save for that devastation brought about by sporadic Viking raiding. But it would be another eighty years before Chester would be visited by an English king (Edgar) in his imperial glory at the head of a huge naval force.

Some general observations can be offered about the role of Chester in the minds of the Vikings and the minds of the Anglo-Saxon leadership under Alfred and his Mercian daughter Æthelflæd. Hæsten, despite the disaster for the Vikings at Buttington, still wanted to try his luck in the north-west, and it seems there was urgency in his actions to get there before the onset of winter. His army is said to have travelled there continuously by day and night, perhaps to avoid the predatory Anglo-Saxon army at large in the landscape. There must have been a reason he wanted to secure a seat in the north-west and it is likely that the Vikings of Ireland and Northumbria had something to do with it. Chester was strategically placed at the foot of the Wirral Peninsula within striking distance of the Isle of Man, of Dublin, of Northumbria and of other parts of the Danelaw, but most of all, it sat on the extreme north-west tip of the line that marked out the divide between the English and Danish midlands. Beneath Chester, in the rich and fertile lands of the English, sat Æthelflæd amid a growing series of linked fortifications. The stage was set for a curious battle for supremacy in the region.

Hæsten got to Chester ahead of Alfred’s shadowing force, the very presence of which had made Hæsten take a circuitous route. The king of the Anglo-Saxons, as he had done before in the south, adopted a strategy of denying the Danes any resources. He killed all the cattle the Danes had brought with them and rode-down some of the stragglers outside the fort. Over two days Alfred and his horses are said to have burned all the corn and consumed the landscape. It worked. Hæsten and his force moved out of Chester and into the Welsh landscape, raiding until they returned yet again to Essex via an enormous arc which took them through Northumbria and Lincolnshire.

By 896 the Danes who had landed in England four years earlier had dispersed with some going to Northumbria and East Anglia and others choosing to return overseas. For Chester, a new set of Scandinavians appear to have filled the void left by the Danes. These were the Norsemen from Ireland. Place-name and archaeological evidence speaks loudly for Norse settlement in and around the Wirral Peninsula and it is thought it is attributable to the early tenth century. We must rely on an Irish source of dubious ancestry known as The Three Fragments (Annals of Ireland), which was copied and edited in 1860. The original, if it can be called that, was itself a copy made in 1643 by Dubhaltach Mac Firbisigh ‘from a certain vellum MS’. It is easy then to doubt this source. But what survives from the 1860 copy may well derive from a lost tradition that is also sometimes referred to in Scandinavian sources. It concerns the invasion of Ingimund, a Norse leader from Ireland who also appears in Welsh records from around 900.

The story, for what it is worth, goes that Ingimund, after being rebuffed by the Welsh at Anglesey, came to Æthelflæd of Mercia to ask for land to settle on as the Irish had expelled him and his men. Æthelflæd, described here as ‘queen of the Saxons’, gave him land near Chester. When Ingimund saw how rich the land was and how wealthy the city was he wanted it all for himself. He is said to have gone to the Danes for support and beseeched them to help him get the land and city and that if they could not bargain for it, they must prepare to take it by force. He set up a meeting in his own house which was well attended, but Æthelflæd got to hear about it. The Mercian leader gathered a huge army around her and flooded Chester with it.

According to this tradition, as the Scandinavians marched on Chester one day the English army there sent messengers to the ailing Ealdorman Æthelred and to his wife Æthelflæd to ask what they should do. They were told to make battle outside the city, to leave the city gate open and to choose a body of horsemen and conceal them on the inside. The idea was to entice the enemy into the city and then to shut the gate on them and kill all those who got inside. This apparently was done, but the Norse-Irish force did not give up on the town. Instead, they vowed to make hurdles with posts under them and beneath these they would undermine the city walls.

As the force was preparing to do this a message was received by the Irishmen who were among the Scandinavians. It was sent by Æthelred and Æthelflæd. It went like this: the Irish were much loved by their Christian brothers the English. They must turn against the Danes. They must arrange for a meeting to take place whereby terms of the city’s surrender would be negotiated. But under that guise, when the Danes were swearing their oaths on their swords and shields and parting company with their missile weapons during the process, they were to be killed. Indeed, it was done. Many Danes perished under a hail of beams and rocks and spears from the city walls.

There then follows one of the most extraordinary accounts of siege warfare in the Anglo-Saxon era, an account that we can apply very little credence to as it stands, but one that has a ring of authenticity to it. It is, at the very least, a fine example of measure versus counter-measure in siege situations:

But the other forces, the Norsemen, were under the hurdles piercing the walls. What the Saxons and the Irishmen who were among them did was to throw large rocks so that they destroyed the hurdles over them. What they did in the face of this, was to place large posts under the hurdles. What the Saxons did was to put all the ale and water of the town in the cauldrons of the town, to boil them and pour them over those who were under the hurdles so that the skins were stripped from them. The answer that the Norseman gave to this was to spread hides on the hurdles. What the Saxons did was to let loose on the attacking force all the beehives of the town, so that they could not move their legs or hands from the great number of bees stinging them. Afterwards they left the city and abandoned it. It was not long after that [before they came] to wage battle again.

Perhaps it is a mangled tradition based on a number of different instances. Chester was ‘restored’ in 907 according to an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It was the focus of further activity during the later years of the reign of Edward the Elder and again in the reign of Athelstan. We cannot know if the work of Dubhaltach Mac Firbisigh was truly authentic or not, but the amusing descriptions of this siege of Chester in or around the year 907 have much in them that we might expect of siege warfare in the Anglo-Saxon era, a grim but at times almost comical encounter.

993–1016: London Under Siege

By 1016, London was hardly a stranger to foreign attack and domestic political strife. Centuries earlier, the port of Lundenwic, situated outside the old Roman city walls, had experienced direct assaults by Viking flotillas which preyed upon the market stalls near to the shoreline of the Thames. By the time of King Æthelred, however, the place was much better defended and had changed out of all recognition. It had become the focus of the wars between the Danes and the English and now the stakes were so high that the taking of London was tantamount to the taking of the whole kingdom. The city had grown throughout the ninth and tenth centuries in terms of economic and political importance as commercialisation and urbanisation had spread by royal decree across the towns of southern England. London was at the centre of international trade routes and was conveniently placed at the border of two great former Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Wessex and Mercia.

Alfred the Great’s capture in 886 of the Danish fortification at London was a landmark event in the city’s history. He had subsequently provided it with planned streets and refortified it. He then parcelled out valuable wharves and allotments to important Anglo-Saxons and when he had done so, he returned the city to its rightful owner, the Lord of Mercia. Throughout the tenth century the city thrived and was the focus of legislation from King Athelstan who encouraged posses of mounted men to chase down criminals in the local countryside. During King Edgar’s reign London got on with its life, but by the 980s when Æthelred had come to power the town once again became vulnerable as the Duchy of Normandy began to harbour its Viking cousins’ ships in its English Channel ports.

After the defeat of Byrhtnoth at the Battle of Maldon in 991 (pp. 117–20), King Æthelred ordered his ships to fall back on London. From here, an attempt was made by Londoners to bottle up the enemy Danish fleet in the Thames Estuary but the treachery of Ælfric of Hampshire led to failure in this respect. In 993 it seems that London withstood an attack by up to 100 ships led by Swein of Denmark and Olaf Tryggvason, an achievement attributed by John of Worcester to divine intervention. The Danes returned many times and in 1009 they stationed themselves off London, frequently attacking it but apparently at great cost to themselves.

Swein of Denmark, who by 1013 had secured the support of most of the country, had set out south from his base at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire ravaging through the countryside, but failed once again to take London because he could not find the right place to ford the Thames. Æthelred and his Danish ally Thorkell the Tall sat strong in the city while they repulsed stratagems and direct assaults. Swein decided to move to Wallingford where he sat and secured the submission of the western thegns of England. From here he returned to Gainsborough confident that his reduction of the countryside had brought him the throne of England. Even the Londoners knew by now they had no choice. Swein’s reputation for cruelty and the fact that Æthelred had gone to Winchester meant that it was just a matter of time before London would surrender. Soon London’s hostages were sent to the Dane and it must be that the price paid was that London was once again flooded with Danish warriors. Æthelred turned to Normandy for refuge, sending his Norman wife Emma and his sons Alfred and Edward ahead of him.

Upon Swein’s death at Gainsborough in 1014, his place was taken by his son Cnut. Æthelred, however, was recalled from exile by his countrymen. London it seems would once again play a vital part in the struggle between Dane and Englishman. Here, for some fascinating–if unreliable–evidence we turn to the Legendary Saga of St Olaf. It is said that while in exile (apparently in Flanders), Æthelred had solicited the aid of the great Norwegian Olaf and his Vikings who were more than happy to take on their Danish enemies in England. We cannot know if this is true or not, but the description of Æthelred’s return to London contains things that have an authentic ring about them, even if some of them may be borrowed from what happened later in London:

On the other side of the river there was a large trading-town which is called Southwark; there the Danes had made great fortifications, dug large ditches, and built inside them walls of wood, stones, and turf, and there had a large force. Æthelred caused a fierce attack to be made on it; but the Danes defended it, and the king could not capture it. There was such a broad bridge across the river between the city and Southwark that wagons could pass each other on it. On the bridge were bulwarks which reached higher than the middle of a man, and beneath the bridge piles were driven into the bottom of the river. When the attack was made, the whole host stood on the bridge and defended it.

Against the missiles of these defenders Olaf’s forces are said to have covered his ships with hurdles, and then rowed once again into the fray:

As the host came near the bridge they were shot at, and such large stones thrown down on them that neither their helmets nor shields could withstand them; and the ships themselves were greatly damaged, and many retreated. But Olaf and the Northmen with him rowed up under the bridge, and tied rope round the supporting posts, and rowed their ships down stream as hard they could. The posts were dragged along the bottom until they were loosened from under the bridge. As an armed host stood thickly on the bridge and there was a great weight of stones and weapons upon it, and the posts beneath were broken, the bridge fell with many men into the river; the others fled into the city or into Southwark. After this they attacked Southwark and captured it. When the townsmen saw that the River Thames was taken, so that they could not hinder ships going up into the country, they became afraid, gave up the town, and received King Æthelred.

With Æthelred restored, Cnut had secured the support of the men of Lincolnshire who had provisioned him with warriors and horses. Æthelred then launched his punitive campaign in that area (p. 78). Cnut sailed to Sandwich where he cruelly disembarked the hostages he had held since one of Swein’s earlier negotiations (p. 33) before sailing for Denmark. Meanwhile, Edmund Ironside, the king’s son, was playing out an intriguing game of politics through marriage alliance with the widow of a northern Anglo-Dane called Siferth, who had been murdered by the treacherous Eadric Streona. With new estates in the north as a result of this new alliance, Edmund Ironside was able to build a sizable force for himself. So now Edmund sat in the north where Cnut had once been strong. Cnut, for his part, sailed back into English politics and headed around the south coast and laid waste Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire. While Æthelred lay ill at Cosham in Sussex, Edmund was busily recruiting in the north. Moreover, the treacherous Eadric Streona gathered an army in Mercia, but we are told by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of Eadric’s desire to betray Edmund. And so it would turn out.

Eadric Streona managed to persuade the Danish fleet that had been serving Æthelred under Thorkell the Tall at Greenwich to join with him and go over to Cnut. Now Edmund, the son of a king of England of West Saxon lineage, would be leading a force recruited from the historic Danish areas of the midlands in direct opposition to a Danish challenger in the south who had at his disposal an ealdorman of Mercia and a Danish fleet of forty ships. As if to add to the confusion, all this was taking place while there was one rightful king of England (Æthelred) still just about alive.

It was now 1016. Cnut and Eadric Streona began their punitive campaigning by crossing the Thames at Cricklade and striking into Mercia, ravaging the Hwicce heartlands of one Ealdorman Leofwine. Edmund amassed his forces, but those Mercians in his ranks were reluctant to engage the West Saxons and the Danes without King Æthelred and the Londoners being present. It had long been the tradition that the Londoners would stand beneath the banners of the reigning monarch on the battlefield and it seemed to many Mercians in this new cultural confusion of warfare that this was the only logical way forward. Edmund’s army therefore disbanded until word could be got to the king with a plea for him to join in the fray.

Æthelred on hearing the plea in London did indeed ride out with his men to meet with his son who had called out a new national host, but somewhere on the way the king was told of a man who would betray him and he disbanded his forces and rode back to the city. Edmund, now somewhat desperate, rode to the earl of Northumbria Uhtred, soliciting his aid, which he gave. There began a giant campaign of cat-and mouse in the widest of landscapes, but always at the centre of it was London. Together, Edmund and Uhtred ravaged Staffordshire, Shrewsbury and Chester, targeting Eadric’s homelands. For their part, Cnut and Eadric ravaged Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, along the fen to Stamford, into Lincolnshire and then up the Great North Road towards York. Uhtred, who received news of this invasion of his homeland, split from Eadric and hurried to York where he was brutally murdered along with thirty-nine others at the hands of Cnut’s henchmen (pp. 22–3). The stench of treachery hung everywhere. Cnut left a Scandinavian called Eric in charge of Northumbria and headed south, reunited with his ships and headed for London. So too did Edmund Ironside. Here at London, lay an increasingly ill Æthelred knowing very well that two giant armies were heading for his city.

As Cnut later sailed from Poole harbour to the mouth of the Thames, Æthelred died. It was 23 April 1016. The men of London and the garrison chose Edmund as their king. In Southampton, however, leading abbots, bishops and ealdormen gave Cnut their support when they met him there and in a bold move specifically renounced the line of Cerdic. Edmund would have none of it. It was he who was the legitimate heir to the Old English throne. Cnut sailed to Greenwich and then to London itself. It was May 1016. John of Worcester describes Cnut’s forces as digging a giant ditch on the south side of Thames. They then dragged their ships to the west side of the bridge. They surrounded the city with a broad and deep trench so that nobody could get in or out. Frequently, Cnut’s forces assaulted the city but were repelled to a distance from the walls. This surely indicates the use of projectiles by the defenders. Cnut raised the siege himself. He decided to carry the war into Wessex and left a force to guard the ships that he had protected at London. Edmund he knew was at large in Wessex. Back in London was Æthelred’s widow Emma and her two sons Alfred and Edward, whose veins still pumped with royal blood from the line of Cerdic. Legend tells that they both managed to escape in a boat. No one knows if they fled to the Continent straight away or stayed a while to fight alongside Edmund.

Edmund met Cnut in the field at Penselwood near the manor of Gillingham in Dorset and won a rare battlefield victory. Soon the armies clashed once again at Sherston. Cnut returned to concentrate on London. Edmund headed after him after raising yet another giant army to attempt to relieve the city. This time his attempt was successful. He came from the north side of the town, coming out through Clayhanger, near Tottenham and surprising the besiegers who took to their ships and fled. There soon followed a disaster for Edmund at Brentford in London where his own warriors went ahead of the army in chase of the enemy in the hope of booty, this coming after a defeat of the Danish forces. Many of them drowned as a result of their impetuosity. Cnut knew he needed London to submit to him, so he returned to have yet another go at the city while Edmund went off recruiting yet again. This time, as so many times before, the Dane was unsuccessful. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes Cnut’s attempts to attack the city by land and by water as unsuccessful, its ultimate defence once again being the work of the Almighty.

The wars of 1016 were by no means over, but London had held out. There would be more double dealing and treachery from Eadric Streona, more battles in the open countryside and ultimately, despite a heroic and legendary defence of his rightful inheritance, Edmund Ironside would succumb. The kingdom of England would indeed pass to Cnut, who became a very successful and powerful monarch. However, London even gained a place in the hearts of the Danes during these hard-fought years. An old Scandinavian song of victory, the Lithsman’s Song, recalled how

every day the buckler was stained red with gore when we were out on the foray with our prince Cnut; but ever since the hard fight was fought we sit merrily in fair London.