The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings

by Lars Brownworth

  Of the two remaining independent kingdoms, East Anglia was the more tempting prize. Control of its coasts would give Viking ships shelter from the North Sea, and its rivers – most notably the Thames – gave access to the great river systems that penetrated deep into central England. Ivar opened the campaign by splitting his forces in two. While his brother Ubba led the army down the Roman road from York, he sailed along the coast, wreaking havoc in towns along the way. His objective was to link up with Ubba at the East Anglian capital of Thetford, and force the submission of its king.

  Thanks to the Roman road, which was still in good repair despite the five centuries that had passed since its construction, Ubba made good time. He reached the city of Peterborough in early autumn and burned it, taking special care to slaughter any clergy he found.60 From there he headed into the Fens, a large, nearly impassable marsh, which separated Peterborough from the strategically vital cities of Thetford and Cambridge.

  Thetford was a kind of religious and political capital – the East Anglian king Edmund had a palace there – but Cambridge was undoubtedly more important. As far back as the first century A.D., it had been recognized as a crucial spot: the surrounding area is boggy, but Cambridge rises to firm ground and provides the most practical crossing of the Cam River for many miles. The Romans, recognizing the superb location, connected the road from London in the south to York in the north through Cambridge. In addition to its trade and military value on land, the city was also an important port since the river is navigable all the way to the North Sea. Cambridge, therefore, dominated both the land and sea communications of the entire border.

  King Edmund probably called up his peasant levies as soon as he heard of the sacking of Peterborough, but they did not have the time to arrive. While he had been focused on the Viking land army, Ivar the Boneless had arrived with the fleet. After a short skirmish between the king’s housecarls and the Vikings, Edmund managed to escape to his stronghold in the city.

  Ivar sent a messenger to the king with the usual request – a healthy bribe and acknowledgement by Edmund that he was now a client king. Edmund foolishly, if bravely, refused, adding that he would submit only if Ivar would accept Christianity. The king was negotiating from a position of weakness, a point which was soon made brutally clear. Ivar sent more men and this time Edmund was seized, bound in chains, and beaten severely with iron rods.

  The king, now naked and bleeding, was dragged before Ivar, but still refused to submit, calling on Christ to deliver him. This annoyed Ivar to such an extent that he ordered Edmund to be tied to a tree and instructed his men to see how many arrows they could shoot without killing him. When he was ‘bristling like a hedgehog’ Ivar finally put him out of his misery by decapitating him. The body was left where it fell, but the head was thrown into a nearby wood.61

  The kingship of East Anglia devolved to Edmund’s younger brother, Edwold, but he sensibly fled and became a hermit, ending the royal line. Ivar again appointed a native client king, and collected tribute. By this time, he had shattered three of the four English kingdoms; only Wessex remained.

  Ivar, however, decided not to take on Wessex immediately since he was needed elsewhere. His old Dublin colleague, Olaf the White, had requested his aid in storming Dumbarton Rock in Scotland, so Ivar left his brother, Halfdan, in command of the great heathen army and returned to Northumbria with his Irish Vikings.

  The fortress of Dumbarton was the capital of Strathclyde, an ancient native kingdom covering most of modern south-west Scotland. Over the years it had repulsed numerous attempts to take it by storm since its garrison had access to a deep well and could therefore outlast most besieging forces. Therefore, when the Vikings arrived at the end of the summer, the defenders could realistically hope that worsening weather would drive them away before their supplies ran out.

  The two Viking allies reached Dumbarton from opposite directions. Olaf’s fleet had sailed up the Firth of Clyde while Ivar had taken the overland route from York.62 The Norwegians and Danes had no trouble making common cause, especially since Dumbarton offered much plunder if it could be taken. As it turned out, the siege was unexpectedly short. Somehow, the Vikings figured out how to draw off the well water, and within four months the parched defenders surrendered.

  They regretted their decision immediately. The Vikings had come for loot, and were not in a ransoming mood.63 Most of the garrison was killed and the citadel was thoroughly plundered and then razed. So much wealth was gathered that some two hundred ships were needed to haul it off. The unfortunates that survived were transported to Dublin where they were packed onto slave ships and sent to the Islamic markets of Spain.

  Ivar returned to his Irish capital in triumph. By now, he was the most famous Viking living, the greatest of the sea-kings. In 871 he took the unwieldy but impressive title ‘King of the Northmen of all Ireland and Britain“, and Olaf seems not to have contested it. As Ragnar Lothbrok had long ago feared, Ivar had surpassed his father. Two years later he died peacefully, having had, as Winston Churchill put it, “the best of both worlds” – unconquered in war, and immensely rich.

  It isn’t clear where he died, but at least one legend claims that he wanted to be buried in England – a plausible enough story since it was the site of his most famous triumphs.64 His death left a leadership void, but there were plenty of able candidates. Olaf the White was his natural successor in Dublin, and his brothers Halfdan and Ubba would continue the work in England. In fact, they had already started. Even before Ivar had conquered Strathclyde, the final assault on Wessex had begun.

  Chapter 6

  England under Siege

  “One who sees his friend roasted on a spit tells all he knows.”

  - Edda of Sæmund the Wise

  The only remaining independent English kingdom was tottering. King Aethelwulf of Wessex, an unambitious and unimpressive ruler, had died in 858, leaving four surviving sons to succeed him. None of them seemed particularly inspiring. The eldest, Aethelbald, married his widowed step-mother to shore up his credentials, but died two years later. The crown then passed to the second son, who, after a short rule, had the good fortune to expire the year the great heathen army landed in England. That left the last two brothers, Athelred and Alfred to face the Viking onslaught.

  They both had experienced Viking opponents first hand at the siege of Nottingham three years before, and had learned two valuable lessons. The first was that peasant armies make reluctant soldiers unless they are defending their own homes. Their unwillingness to stay and fight in Mercia had dictated the retreat more than any command given by king Athelred. The second lesson was one of logistics. Calling up an army was much easier than provisioning it, and neither brother had the administrative experience yet to pull it off. In 871, therefore, news that the great heathen army under the command of Halfdan Ragnarson had crossed into Wessex territory, probably sent a ripple of fear through the kingdom.

  Halfdan had spent the previous winter gathering supplies, probably linking up with other Vikings who had crossed from the continent and were ravaging Kent. In the late autumn he marched west in search of the royal army of Wessex, probably intending to break its will in a single battle. The two brothers dispatched a local fyrd (peasant levy) to occupy them while the entire army was mustered.

  The English force surprised one of Halfdan’s foraging parties near Reading and after a short skirmish, the Vikings withdrew. The Saxon’s, believing that they had forced the entire heathen army to retreat, now moved in for the kill. Athelred and young Alfred jointly led the army to Reading where they found only a light guard outside the walls. Seizing the moment, they attacked.

  Alfred’s biographer, a Welsh monk named Asser, recounted what happened next in his Life of King Alfred: “When they had reached the gate (of Reading) by hacking and cutting down all the Vikings they had found outside, the Vikings fought no less keenly; like wolves they burst out of all the gates and joined battle with all their might. Both sides fought there for
a long time and fought fiercely, but, alas, the Christians eventually turned their backs, and the Vikings won the victory and were masters of the battlefield.”

  The loss was shattering to morale. Athelred and Alfred only evaded capture by slipping across a little-known ford of the Thames. The English army was scattered. The Vikings, as the fleeing king and his brother could now appreciate, were experts at defending fortified camps. They had demonstrated this at York and Nottingham in opposite ways, and now had used Reading’s multiple gates to stage a lightning counterattack.

  The only silver lining was that the Wessex army had fled, rather than been destroyed. Halfdan, who had already spent more than a week at Reading, had to keep moving. He needed to break the Saxon army in order to crush Wessex, and that meant hunting Athelred and Alfred. He also needed to strike quickly while morale was low and before reinforcements could arrive.

  Athelred regrouped his forces at Abingdon Abbey, where there were fresh supplies and spiritual support for the shaken army. Unless they traveled by water, it would have been nearly impossible for Halfdan to disguise his movements, and he seems to have made no effort to do this. Just four days after the battle at Reading, Athelred was informed that the Viking army was moving towards him along an old Roman road.

  Out in the open, Halfdan wanted to avoid a serious battle unless he was sure of victory. For this reason he was staying close to the Thames river and access to his ships. The English brothers moved to intercept him, positioning their army at Ashdown, near an old Roman road.

  The Vikings reached the Saxon lines just before noon. Seeing that his enemy held the high ground, Halfdan split his forces in two and attempted to outflank the English. Alfred, who had been watching for just such a maneuver, asked his brother for permission to split their army in the same way and fall on both halves at once. He appeared to have given quick permission for his brother to act, for Alfred’s division immediately threw themselves at the Vikings.

  The fury of the attack seems to have caught the Vikings completely by surprise. Just four days earlier they had scattered this same army with ease, but now they were being driven steadily back. Motivated by the defense of their own farmlands, the English fought with desperate courage. As the Vikings retreated up a hill, Alfred charged ‘like a young boar’ after them, shattering the Norse shield wall. The Vikings, now hopelessly disorganized, turned and fled.

  To the English, it was a miraculous victory of crushing significance. Alfred’s biographer gushed that “…many thousands on the Viking side were slain… over the whole broad expanse of Ashdown, scattered everywhere… The Christians followed them until nightfall, cutting them down on all sides.”

  Although the numbers claimed are obvious exaggerations, the list of earls killed illustrates the high casualties of the battle in the bloody hand-to-hand fighting. What Asser fails to mention, however, is that this was true for both sides. It was a victory for the English, but it was a pyrrhic one, since the Saxon army was also mauled.

  This high casualty rate was actually a greater problem for the Saxons than for the Vikings, since the royal army was drawn from local forces. Each shire would send its contingent of men who would in turn be commanded by the local lord or ealdorman. However, these subunits were most interested in defending their own territory, and when a shire was overrun its service was lost to the king. Perhaps a few of the professional soldiers would stay loyal, but most peasants would understandably return home to be with their families. As the Vikings advanced therefore, the pool of available men kept shrinking. The more victories the Vikings piled up, the less Saxon resistance was possible.

  From the perspective of manpower, therefore, the victory was almost indistinguishable from a defeat. The local forces had been exhausted and could no longer be counted on in the case of a fresh Viking attack. Halfdan, on the other hand, had no such problems. There was also a continuous stream of raiders arriving from Ireland, France, and Scandinavia to boost Viking numbers.

  At least military supplies were no longer a problem since the English held the field. This was, as Hannibal had dryly remarked after the battle of Cannae in 216 BC, almost as good as the victory itself. A harvest of weapons and armor was waiting to be claimed, replenishing items lost or damaged during the struggle.

  The English would soon have need of their weapons. Halfdan retreated to Reading and built up his strength, unleashing waves of roving war bands to harry the surrounding lands. Two weeks after Ashdown, one of these groups caught the Saxon army and, in another bruising battle defeated them. To make matters worse for the English, this was followed by the arrival of a large fleet led by a Viking named Guthrum. The new addition nearly doubled the size of the Viking army. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls Guthrum’s force ‘the great summer army’, and its arrival at Reading solved any manpower issues Halfdan might have had. The two leaders took joint control and in March of 871 left their base to plunder Wessex. Just before Easter they met the English army and this third time proved decisive.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports simply that there “was great slaughter on both sides… The Danes had possession of the battlefield.” One of the casualties appears to have been King Athelred. He was either mortally wounded during the fighting, or was simply worn out by the exertions of his five year reign. The crown should have gone to his young son, but with the national emergency it passed to his twenty-three year-old brother, Alfred.

  The new king understood better than most how desperate the situation really was. The army was putting up a brave resistance, but had already effectively lost control of eastern Wessex, and the first months of his reign seemed to promise the loss of the west half as well. While he was burying his brother the Danes attacked again, causing what was left of the English army to flee. Alfred managed to raise a fresh one, but this too was pushed back in a series of skirmishes which left the Vikings in control of the battlefield.

  Alfred sued for peace. His army hadn’t been able to stop the Danish advance – or even prevent a group of Vikings from plundering his brother’s grave. Surprisingly, Halfdan and Guthrum agreed. Despite their success, the Vikings had suffered heavy casualties as well, and there were elements within the army pushing for a settlement. The point of raiding was to live to enjoy one’s plunder, and the uncharacteristic pitched battles that Halfdan had been fighting had probably damaged morale. Accepting a large payment of Danegeld, and the designation of eastern Wessex as a kind of Danish ‘protectorate’, Halfdan pulled back to his base at London.

  He had been reassessing his priorities for some time. The death of his brother, Ivar, had loosened the family’s hold on both Ireland and Northumbria. In the former, the Norwegians had once again gained the upper hand, and in the latter, there was a full-scale rebellion against Viking rule. He spent a year in London gathering supplies, then marched north to reestablish control over Mercia. Burghred, the Mercian king, didn’t wait around for him to arrive. Slipping out of his capital before the Vikings got there, he escaped to Rome where he spent the rest of his life as a pilgrim.

  With that last victory, the Great Army began to fracture. Its organization was always fluid since it was less a proper ‘army’ and more a collection of war bands with aligned goals. That unity, however, had been fractured by the arrival of Guthrum and the heavy losses in Wessex, and at the conclusion of the Mercian campaign the army divided in half. The Lothbrok brothers peeled off and headed north, leaving Guthrum to finish off Wessex.

  Halfdan’s portion of the army was probably made up of veterans who had been steadily campaigning for a decade. What they wanted now was land, and Halfdan himself probably was thinking about establishing himself in a permanent location. He may have intended this to be London and had gone so far as to mint coins of his own there in imitation of Wessex. The Lothbrok base of power had always been in the north though, so Northumbria was a more suitable choice. As soon as he had pacified it, he started deeding land to his soldiers, like some Anglo-Saxon monarch. His veterans, for their part, seem t
o have eagerly abandoned swords for plows.

  The life of a sedentary king, however, didn’t quite suite Halfdan, and the old sea-wolf couldn’t resist the temptation for one last adventure. In 875 he launched an invasion of Dublin, losing the support of most of his soldiers and eventually his life, during the two-year campaign. He seems at least to have gone down fighting. Of the various accounts of his death, the most believable is that he was killed in a sea-battle with the Norwegian king of Dublin.65

  The departure of the Lothbrok brothers gave Wessex some much needed breathing room, and Alfred used it to reassemble his army. Expecting an attack, he kept the army in the field, attempting to block the fords across the Thames. The canny Guthrum, however, evaded the Saxons by splitting his forces in two. A small, mounted field army slipped across the river at night and seized the port of Wareham, while the main forces sailed along the coast. By the time Alfred was aware that Guthrum had left Cambridge, the Vikings were already dug in.

  The main Viking army had not arrived yet, but experience had taught the Saxon king of the dangers of attacking entrenched Vikings, so he offered to buy them off instead. Guthrum, after some initial reluctance accepted, and the two leaders exchanged hostages as a show of good faith.

  Guthrum, however, had no intentions of making peace. As soon as the Saxon army withdrew, he had all of his hostages butchered, and then seized the much more defensible fortress of Exeter. The Vikings were now established in the heart of Wessex. If they could hold that position, commanding the Thames River valley, they would dominate both the economic and spiritual heart of the English kingdom.

  From his stronghold, Guthrum ravaged the south, building fortified camps and breaking morale. His fleet, meanwhile, reached Wareham and began to plunder its way along the coast. If the two linked up, there was little hope for Wessex of avoiding a Viking triumph. Alfred would be forced to his knees, Danegeld would be paid, and Wessex would be compelled to admit the supremacy of a Viking overlord.