In Search of the Dark Ages

by Michael Wood

  ‘THE HATEFUL PLAGUE OF EUROPE’: THE VIKINGS – HEROES OR VILLAINS?

  Success or failure for a king in the ninth century was measured by how he dealt with the Vikings. In the last few years the image of the Vikings has undergone drastic revision. From seeing them as destroyers, the climate of opinion has shifted to emphasising their role as craftsmen, explorers and traders; from the bane that the monkish chroniclers write about, raping and pillaging, they have become a creative catalyst in European civilisation. A view which has also gained wide currency is that the numbers of Viking armies were not great, a few hundreds at the most.

  However, these revisions are now proving difficult to sustain when seen against the evidence found in the contemporary annals of western Europe as a whole, that is of Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England and Francia. The annals state that some Viking armies were large, numbering thousands of men and sometimes hundreds of ships. They paralysed and overran wealthy and long-established kingdoms. They defeated the ‘national’ armies of kingdoms like the Franks and the West Saxons. They virtually destroyed learning in England. They were numerous enough to transform the racial and linguistic characteristics of places like Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Cumbria and Normandy. To deny this and to concentrate on the cultural achievements of this vigorous but barbaric race is to deny the achievements of Alfred the Great and his son and grandson who were among the most effective kings to rule in England.

  ‘MY AUGUST MASTER … COMMANDS YOU TO SHARE WITH HIM YOUR ANCIENT TREASURES, AND YOUR HEREDITARY WEALTH, AND TO REIGN IN FUTURE UNDER HIM’

  The first Viking raids, in the 790s, were merely for plunder, but the later Danish armies of the ninth century were out for more lasting gain. In the middle years of the ninth century England was still divided among the four great independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: Mercia, Northumbria, East Anglia and Wessex. By 878 only Wessex remained.

  The Viking descent on England then was a blitzkrieg of a permanent kind. After it there would be no return to the old ways, only change and accommodation. With their traditional ways of raising armies and methods of fighting the old kingdoms found it impossible to resist the Vikings with their longships and their fast mobile armies. One by one they suffered military defeat. And for the kings themselves a terrible fate was reserved which has only relatively recently been elucidated from dark hints in our sources. When in 867 the ancient kingdom of Northumbria ended in flames as York burned down, their king Aelle suffered the ‘blood eagle’. This was a Viking rite in which the victim was offered to Odin; the ribs and lungs were cut from the living man and spread like eagle’s wings.

  The Danes then set up a puppet king in Northumbria north of the Tyne, a man who would pay them tribute and cause them no trouble. In 869 the blood eagle was performed on Edmund, king of the East Angles, the last successor of the Wuffingas of Sutton Hoo. In 874 Burgred, king of Mercia, heir to Offa and the great Mercian kings, abdicated and fled to Rome. Once again a puppet, Ceolwulf, was installed to maintain the status quo. Soon after these events large-scale, permanent Danish settlements began to appear in Northumbria, East Anglia, and in Mercia north of Watling Street. To educated men in Wessex it must have seemed that the very survival of Anglo-Saxon civilisation was now in the balance. In this grim atmosphere Alfred found himself king almost by default.

  ALFRED AND THE WEST-SAXON ROYAL FAMILY

  Alfred was born at Wantage in Berkshire in 849 and died in 899. The world he was brought into was hard and dangerous, and while he was still a child events had moved to make it more so. In 851 the Danes had changed their hit-and-run tactics and spent the winter in England for the first time, in Thanet. The nature of the Viking threat was thus changing even as Alfred grew to boyhood. Alfred’s father, Aethelwulf, was king of the West Saxons. There were four older brothers, so in the normal run of things Alfred could hardly have expected to become king. But it was not an era in which kings could expect to live long, and in fact all five of Aethelwulf’s sons reigned after him.

  The family was a close one. Aethelwulf had pursued a carefully managed policy of looking after the family resources, keeping intact the estates on which they relied for revenue. He also seems to have arranged something similar with the succession, providing for the brothers to succeed each other rather than risk leaving the kingdom in the hands of the under-age children of the eldest. This caused problems for later West-Saxon kings, confronted with claims by the descendants of Alfred’s elder brothers; but Alfred was the beneficiary, and his father’s foresight may in the end have saved him.

  All young noblemen in Anglo-Saxon England were brought up in the saddle, hunting and hawking, and in the martial arts. But Alfred seems to have been more influenced by his father’s religious and contemplative bent. In a time of peace he might have been the young son destined for the church whom we meet in so many Dark Age families.

  At the tender age of four he was sent to Rome by his father for an audience with the Pope. His poetic sensibility (and perhaps something of his competitive obstinacy?) is revealed in a delightful story about the king’s boyhood which he later told to his biographer Bishop Asser. His mother had promised a beautifully illuminated book of Saxon poems to whichever of her sons would first learn it by heart. Although the youngest, Alfred went to a teacher who repeated the book out loud until Alfred had memorised it, and so he won the prize. A determined young boy.

  Alfred remained illiterate in Anglo-Saxon until his teens, and in Latin until his mature years. The main span of his life was to be occupied with war. In his twentieth year, now married (to a Mercian noblewoman called Ealhswith), second in command and possibly the designated heir to his brother King Aethelred, Alfred underwent the first great test of his ‘dangerous but brilliant apprenticeship’.

  ASHDOWN:THE PRELUDE

  In the winter of 870 after their successes in Northumbria and East Anglia, the Danish armies began their attack on Wessex. In the next few months nine battles were fought. On 8 January after inflicting a heavy defeat on the West Saxons the Danish forces marched from their new base at Reading up the Great Ridgeway, the prehistoric route which cuts across England into the heart of Wessex. There on the top of the Berkshire Downs the Ridgeway passes by the ramparts of an Iron Age hillfort which commands wide vistas into Wessex. Under it, centuries earlier, a white horse had been cut through the turf into the chalk; it was a familiar landmark, near the junction of old roads. Here on Ashdown, as it was called, the Vikings found the ridgeway blocked by the West Saxon army under King Aethelred and his young brother Alfred. The actual site of the battle may have been on the lower land to the west of the Uffington horse where a Domesday hundred was called Nachededorne, ‘at the naked thorn’, a prominent tree at the meeting of local tracks (Bishop Asser, who was shown over the battlefield by Alfred himself, says the fiercest fighting took place around ‘a single thorn tree’).The battle was won by Alfred’s hotheaded impetus, charging uphill ‘like a wild boar’ while his brother was still at prayer. The Danes fled till nightfall leaving one of their kings and five leaders dead ‘and the whole breadth of Ashdown covered with bodies’.

  The victory on Ashdown proved illusory. Within months the English had lost the upper hand. Defeated in further battles, King Aethelred died. The West-Saxon councillors, as Alfred’s father had foreseen, had no choice in this extremity but to pass over the king’s young sons to the one man who had proved his arm in battle. At twenty-one years of age Alfred became king. His biographer, the Welsh bishop Asser of Sherborne, who knew him well in his later years, portrays him as an oversensitive, highly-strung young man, strongminded and inventive, but something of a hypochondriac, constantly suffering from some sort of nervous illness. (One modern scholar has inferred that it could have been venereal disease – not an impossible idea in view of the libidinous behaviour of Dark Age royal families.) He was in some ways an unlikely king, then, though trained in the kingly pursuits of hunting, hawking and fighting.

  His start was not auspicious. Massively reinforced the Dan
es beat him at Wilton in the heart of Wessex. Weakened by so many engagements, he offered to buy them off. (Ethelred the Unready was by no means the first to pay ‘Danegeld’.) They accepted his money and turned to easier pickings in Mercia. But both the Vikings and Alfred knew they would be back.

  In 874 Mercia fell to the invaders, and in the following year the Danish army divided, part of it going to Northumbria, where ‘they shared out the land … and proceeded to plough and support themselves’. The rest, under three kings, Guthrum, Oscetel and Anwend, went from Repton in Mercia to Cambridge where they remained for a year. The move to Cambridge was the opening gambit in the Danish attempt to defeat and dismember Wessex once and for all. When the campaigning season of 876 opened, Guthrum rode from Cambridge into Wessex and slipped past Alfred’s army into Wareham in Dorset. There Alfred made a truce with them, only to see them steal away under cover of night to Exeter where they established themselves within the Roman walls of the old city. Alfred doggedly rode after them with the West-Saxon mounted force, and again they made him promises and gave him hostages. However, when the harvest came this time, rather than fight a major battle they agreed to move out of Wessex into Mercia, and in August 877 they rode up to Gloucester, where there was a Mercian royal hall and church. There they built booths for winter quarters. In the meantime Alfred disbanded his army and prepared to celebrate Christmas. The climax of this game of cat and mouse was at hand.

  THE CRISIS – CHIPPENHAM

  Christmas passed and then Guthrum made his move. In a lightning strike he rode south from Gloucester over the snowy Wiltshire countryside and seized Chippenham which was in West-Saxon territory. Chippenham was to serve as the Viking base for the next four months, and it was well chosen. According to Bishop Asser it was a royal residence. Here in 853 Alfred’s father, Aethelwulf, had given his daughter, Aethelswith, to Burgred, king of Mercia. We also know from Alfred’s will that Chippenham was a royal estate, and it was probably a hunting lodge, for the royal forests of Melksham and Barden were nearby. The site of the town itself was in a strong position, protected by the Avon on three sides and by a ditch and palisade on the fourth, blocking off the promontory: an ideal Viking base.

  The timing of Guthrum’s advance gives us another clue to the dramatic events of 878. He came ‘after Twelfth Night’, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and it may be that Alfred had spent the festival at Chippenham and that the Danes were trying to take him alive. There is nothing unlikely in this: attacking on major Christian feast days was a common stratagem of Viking armies. More important, and less conjectural, Guthrum made Chippenham his base for the ensuing campaign, and as it is reasonable to think that he and his chiefs were shrewd men of war, we can assume they would not have left Gloucester in the middle of winter for a centre which lacked supplies. They must have known that provisions for their army would be available, and it may be that Alfred’s royal assessors had provided Chippenham with provisions because there was to be a royal visit around Twelfth Night. So Guthrum may well have discovered a food store with salted meat, eels, bread, honey and unhopped beer.

  The whole operation was typical of Viking warfare. To maintain an army in winter they needed to plunder the country round about and when supplies ran out it was necessary to move to a new base in an undevastated area where the inhabitants could be forced to provide more food, fodder, horses and, if possible, protection money. This was what Viking armies had done countless times before in Britain and Europe, and in the middle of the winter Alfred had no standing army to oppose them. Sitting in the royal hall at Chippenham (which was perhaps in the centre of the town west of the church where late Saxon timber buildings have been found) Guthrum had reason to be pleased. He had a secure base with good lines of communication from whence he could probe deeper into Wessex, devastating, extorting and frightening the inhabitants into submission. It would surely only be a matter of time before he captured Alfred and the West-Saxon king too suffered the rites of the blood eagle.

  As soon as their base was consolidated, the Danes moved south along the Fosse Way and ‘rode over’ and occupied the land of Wessex, in a wide mounted raid which probably struck down as far as the south coast. Recently scholars have proposed that when the Vikings occupied Wessex they actually started to settle there, but Guthrum would never have done this while Alfred was still in the field. Nevertheless their depredations were enough to force many of the West Saxons to submit to the invaders, according to Alfred’s official account in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and this must refer to men in positions of leadership, not just the peasantry.

  We can follow the trail of destruction. In Hampshire people ‘fled across the water’, perhaps to the Isle of Wight, although a tenth-century writer thought they escaped to France. In Wiltshire one ealdorman, the king’s top local official, ‘deserted his king and country’ (the words are from a contemporary charter) and fled abroad with his wife. Of Dorset though we hear nothing, nor is the militia of that shire mentioned as participating in the final battle. Were the chief men in Dorset among those who submitted? Could it possibly be that at this time the Danes approached other members of the West-Saxon royal family with a view to setting up a puppet regime after Alfred’s death, just as they had in Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia? In fact Dorset was the stemland of Alfred’s brother’s son Aethelwold, who was to ally with the Danes as soon as Alfred died. In 878, with the king on the brink of destruction, power politics may have cut through the bonds of kinship and race.

  But Finest Hours always tend to be exaggerated in the memory, and though there is no denying Alfred’s distress, we know he was not as alone as his account in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle implies. Forces from Somerset were still available to him, for the annalist Aethelweard, a royal kinsman writing a century on, says that Aethelnoth, ealdorman of Somerset, also maintained himself in wooded country with a small force. At this time the West Saxons were reduced to hit-and-run attacks on the Danes, and seizing provisions from wherever they could. Their situation was certainly desperate. If Alfred had given up and fled overseas like Burgred of Mercia then not only England but the whole English-speaking world would not exist today. But after six weeks of roughing it in the swamp came the turning point. Alfred and Aethelnoth were able to construct ‘something of a fort’ at a place deservedly hallowed in the British story, Athelney.

  The country round Athelney was ideal for guerrilla warfare. According to Bishop Asser it was surrounded by reeds and thickets, and abounded with wildlife and marsh birds; punts were the only reliable way of getting about, for the whole area changed from swamp to lagoon according to the rainfall and the tides, so unless you knew the tracks, you could not approach it by sea or land. And Alfred knew it well. He must have hunted, fished and hawked there in his youth, and also as king whenever he stayed at his palace at Cheddar. (As its name means ‘island of the princes’, Athelney may have been one of the royal estates specifically set aside for the use of the royal athelings, the young princes.) Even today floods can make this part of West Somerset inaccessible. In 878 it was almost impenetrable. From this place was launched the salvation of Wessex and of England.

  ‘SOMETHING OF A FORT’

  No trace survives of the fort built by Alfred during Easter 878, and the land is now drained. The low hill, now surmounted by a monument, has been flattened by the building of Alfred’s church and the later monastery. We must imagine a comparatively small construction, a couple of hundred feet across, ditched and palisaded with perhaps twenty feet from the bottom of the ditch to the top of the defences. Inside there would have been rough timber and wattle huts with room for extra tents, a refuge for a small force, a hundred men or two hundred at most. This would have been the base for the nucleus of royal support, that is, the royal family, the king’s thegns, and the royal bodyguard. As the chronicler Aethelweard wrote, Alfred ‘did not cease from daily forays against the barbarians with the help of the men of Somerset only. He had at that time no other reinforcement except the servants
who had royal maintenance’. In other words the king was shorn of his wider support. A king who had only a few acres of marshes as his domain was almost a contradiction in terms. How could he be the ‘sustainer of his warriors’, ‘rewarder of soldiers’, ‘ring giver to men’, when he had nothing? Patriotism was not a widely appreciated concept in 878, though it existed in the minds of some, not least Alfred himself.

  THE COUNTERATTACK

  Another event may have had a more decisive influence than we now realise on the fortunes of Wessex that spring which was coincident with the construction of the emergency burh at Athelney. A second Viking army comprising 23 ships and 1200 fighting men had wintered in south Wales, and when Guthrum moved into Wessex, this force sailed across to the Devon coast, apparently part of a planned pincer movement to trap Alfred. But at Countisbury Hill this force was engaged by the men of Devon under ealdorman Odda, and their leader, Ubba, was killed along with 800 men. According to the chronicler Aethelweard, who may have been descended from Odda, the Danes actually won the battle, but their losses meant they could play no further part in the campaign. The way was cleared for Alfred’s action against Guthrum.

  It is a great pity we know nothing of the underground organisation which Alfred used to assemble an army big enough to attack Guthrum, but such a movement undoubtedly existed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that the king was able to make contact with his supporters in Wiltshire and Hampshire and to arrange a rendezvous. At this point Guthrum had retired with his army to the north of Salisbury Plain, and when Alfred knew this he sent out messages to the local leaders to gather their forces and meet him. The time was the seventh week after Easter, says the chronicler, which suggests that the day appointed for the rendezvous was Whit Sunday, 11 May. The meeting place was known as Egbert’s Stone; it has not yet been located though we know it lay close to the junction of the boundaries of Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset near Penselwood. There the men of Wiltshire, Somerset and part of Hampshire met the king and, the chronicler says (perhaps echoing Alfred’s own report), ‘they were overjoyed to see him’.