Aelfred's Britain

by Adams, Max;

  One of Ælfred’s most significant historical achievements was the compilation at his instigation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which supplies a parallel, and sometimes identical, account of the wars of his reign and much more besides. Like the Royal Frankish Annals it is partisan, sometimes blatantly so; but in its various versions it offers historians sufficient shades of grey to unpick some of its claims; to look back at earlier material incorporated into it, and to hear voices from outside the West Saxon court which found their way into Mercian and Northern variants. As the battle for Britain enters its first phase in the late 860s, the historian takes up arms: Asser, the Irish Annals, the Historia and the Chronicle in one hand; archaeology, coins and charter evidence in the other. The game is afoot.

  The year that the mycel here spent unmolested in York allowed them to set up some sort of administrative framework for ruling by proxy; to plan their next campaign and to draw supplies from York’s dependent settlements. A Viking camp, recently identified by fieldwork, lying some 14 miles (23 km) upstream from York at Aldwark, may yet tell us much about the make-up and activities of the mycel here at this time.23 How many of their countrymen joined them at this stage to settle, fabricate, trade and farm, is impossible to say. What we can say is that possession of York was not enough to satisfy their ambitions; not by a long shot. During 869 they returned, this time moving unchallenged across Mercia, to East Anglia: to Ðeodford (Thetford), where they overwintered.

  A day’s journey downstream from Thetford on the River Little Ouse, at Brandon, lay a thriving settlement on a sand island in the river, looking out onto the vast peatlands of the fens to the west. Probably the lowest natural crossing point of the river, it had grown from seventh-century origins as a sort of miniature trading settlement and industrial complex. In the twenty-first century, lying on the edge of Thetford forest in Breckland, many miles from the sea, it is no more than a modest town, the odd pleasure boat moored on the river and a small railway station to connect it to the outside world. Excavations immediately west of the town during the 1980s revealed that in its eighth-century heyday the inhabitants manufactured textiles, dyeing and bleaching flax in buildings along the riverside.24 They built earth-fast houses and workshops of upright timber posts clad with planks or, perhaps, the weatherboard so distinctive of the region. They were buried in two cemeteries, one either side of a three-cell church, also built in wood. A causeway joined the island to dry land. One wonders if, like some of the Continental trading communities, Brandon was rather exclusive, perhaps even founded by Frisian artisans or traders whose presence is known at York and elsewhere.

  13. GRIM’S DITCH near Ashampstead, Berkshire.

  The people of Brandon were profligate in their accumulation of rubbish, discarding large quantities of pottery (more than 24,000 sherds of Ipswich ware and of Frankish imports) and animal bone. They lost, or discarded, an incomparably rich inventory of finds indicating that they were literate, wealthy and connected to international trading networks. They imported window glass and glass vessels for drinking; they had acquired a Coptic bowl and a gold plaque of St John the Evangelist. They ate rye bread, beans and plums, mutton and beef and large quantities of fish and oysters. The presence of writing styli alongside evidence of conspicuous consumption inclines the archaeologist to believe that Brandon was a minster complex, increasingly shedding its austere monastic traditions in favour of production and the enjoyment of the fruits of its wealth. Brandon did not survive the third quarter of the ninth century in its original form, although it was eventually rebuilt on the site of the present town. Whether its demise and relocation can be laid at the door of the Host of 868 is impossible to say.

  In 869 King Eadmund of the East Angles summoned his levies and came to fight the mycel here at an unknown location. One version of the Chronicle records that the Host’s leaders, Kings Ubba and ‘Ingwar’ (the latter better known from his Norse name Ívarr) were directly responsible for Eadmund’s death.25 Later tradition has it that Eadmund was shot with arrows and beheaded at a place called Hægelisdun after he refused to renounce Christ—but the episode is conventional in form and bears suspicious resemblance to the deaths of earlier martyrs like St Sebastian; one is sceptical.26 It is true, though, that later Viking rulers of East Anglia, who converted to Christianity, expressed penitence over his killing and that a cult centre developed at the Suffolk town that bears his name. For twenty years after 895 coins were minted in East Anglia (and perhaps in Eastern Mercia) bearing the legend SCE EADMVNDE REX—‘O St Eadmund the King’.27 But in the immediate aftermath of Eadmund’s fall, according to the Chronicle, the mycel here overran East Anglia, destroying all the monasteries they found. They slew the abbot of the great minster at Medehamstede, burned it down, killed the monks and ‘reduced it to nothing’.28 Now they were ready to turn their attentions to Wessex.

  Asser’s description of the arrival of the mycel here in West Saxon territory early in 871 contains the sort of detail that suggests he had access to first-hand accounts from someone who had fought there—possibly Ælfred himself or one of his veteran commanders—which eventually found their way into the Chronicle. In the middle of that winter the Viking army left East Anglia and came to a villa regia at Reading on the south bank of the River Thames, where it runs east to west for a few miles just before a sharp turn to the north, cutting a gorge between the Berkshire Downs and the Chiltern hills at Goring. The Thames here, some 60 miles (95 km) upstream from the now terminally-in-decline trading settlement at Lundenwic, was the frontier between Wessex and Mercia.

  The location strongly suggests, once again, a rendezvous between overland force and supporting fleet. The overland army would travel by way of the Roman road network to London and march or ride west towards what is now Staines (Stána: ‘the Stones’), where a crossing of the Thames took it onto the Silchester road a little south of Reading.‡‡‡ The precision with which the invaders seem to have been able to identify and meet at such targets demonstrates the sophistication of their knowledge of river and road systems in lowland Britain: that mental Tube map again. The river is broad and strong here, and in the Anglo-Saxon period it was not merely the boundary between Wessex and Mercia but also a great trading artery of the southern kingdoms: barges plied up and down to and from Lundenwic and the Kentish ports, as far upstream at least as Lechlade in Gloucestershire. Any fleet venturing this far inland must negotiate fish traps and flash weirs§§§ by the score, water mills tapping the river’s power; riverside minsters, farms, hamlets and ancient ferry crossings. With the open sea and a homeward passage left further and further behind, penetration of the soft underbelly of the south was a risky game played for high rewards. Rowing upstream on these waters, whose moody gods can quickly switch between the benign and the vengeful, and passing through the densely wooded gorge at Goring with the hills tumbling down on either side, one can easily believe oneself to be venturing into England’s own heart of darkness.

  That Reading was a royal estate, where food renders were collected from the townships all around, implies that the Host’s leaders were already aware of its potential for re-supplying them. It lay open to attack. We know of no villae regiae in this period defended by substantial earthworks or palisades, although there is some evidence that King Offa instituted a number of fortified settlements in Mercia in the eighth century. That may have changed in the years leading up to 871; but in any case the Host had no difficulty in taking Reading. Asser’s informant told him that on the third day after their arrival, they rode out to plunder the district under two of their jarls. The remainder threw up a defensive rampart between the Rivers Kennet and Thames, where they converge on the east edge of the modern town.### The occupation of defended confluences, and the D-shaped enclosure on a river bank, were to become the classic modi operandi of the Viking armies, allowing them to break out into open country in fighting or foraging formations and to retreat to their boats if necessary, or be re-supplied by river.

  Five miles (8 km) to th
e west the ealdorman of Berkshire, Æðelwulf, caught up with the foraging party at Englefield (Englafelda) and engaged them, killing one of their jarls; the rest retired to the new defensive position on the Thames. It took four days for King Æðelred and his young brother to muster their main forces and invest the fort. On their arrival some of the Host’s soldiers were caught unprepared outside the gates of their new camp and cut down; but those inside burst out ‘like wolves’, according to Asser, and fought with all their might. The West Saxon force was repulsed with serious casualties, including a fatally wounded Ealdorman Æðelwulf.

  Four days later the two armies met again, this time in open country on the Berkshire Downs, which rise to about 600 feet (185 m) above sea level. Despite the combined efforts of academics and enthusiastic investigators, Æscesdune (Ashdown), the site of the battle, cannot be identified: place-name scholars have shown that the name applied to the whole eastern expanse of the downs at this period. The battlefield archaeologist can reconstruct many plausible scenarios, none of them particularly convincing, but the landscape offers a few hints. Close to Ashampstead, a day’s march north-west of Reading, parts of a great earthwork complex called Grim’s Ditch might have been constructed, or re-used, by either army. The downlands are open and gently rolling here, long given over to summer pasturing for sheep and cattle; the ancient, long-distance Ridgeway passes close by to the north.

  It seems significant that the Host chose to leave its defensive position at Reading, either because its commanders believed themselves to have already struck a decisive blow and needed only to deliver the coup de grâce; perhaps because they had been sent an embassy demanding a showdown; or because they believed they could outflank Æðelred’s army and penetrate deep into Wessex further upstream along the Thames. We cannot say.

  The mycel here split into two forces, one commanded by its kings, the other by its jarls. They had, it seems, been in a position to choose the field of battle. The West Saxon force, responding, similarly divided itself in two. The king led one shield wall; Ælfred the other.∫∫∫ Asser, keen to establish Ælfred’s military credentials at an early stage in his narrative, writes that the young prince arrived first on the battlefield, his brother late at prayers in his tent, and fronted the force led by the jarls—a mark, presumably, of his and their junior status. Ælfred attacked ‘like a wild boar’, divinely inspired and protected, according to Asser.

  Battle joined, the fiercest fighting took place around a solitary thorn tree. This was no ritual testing of enemy strength: the third engagement in less than a fortnight, Ashdown was a bloody and serious affair. The West Saxons drove the Host from the field of battle, inflicting heavy casualties: a King Bacseg was killed, along with his jarls Sidroc the Older and Younger, Osbern, Fraena and Harald.ΩΩΩ The Host retreated behind its rampart at Reading and licked its wounds.

  14. ‘ASHDOWN was a bloody and serious affair’: the Ridgeway.

  King Æðelred’s commanders may have believed that they had decisively repulsed the army that had overwhelmed Northumbria and East Anglia. But two weeks later the Host had regrouped and, at a place called Baseng, most obviously identifiable with the village of Old Basing just east of Basingstoke in Hampshire, they in turn drove the West Saxons from the field. The Chronicle claimed that ‘thousands’ lost their lives. Ominously, Asser recalled that ‘when the battle was over, another Viking army came from overseas and attached itself to the land’.29 Oddly, in the litany of battles, skirmishes, retreats and cross-country campaigns of the year 871, which came to be known as the year of nine engagements, Asser fails to record a battle at the unidentified Meretun, which the Chronicle places two months after the defeat at Baseng. The result is in some doubt: the Chronicle claimed a West Saxon victory but allowed that the Host held the field: a score-draw, perhaps. Shortly afterwards, at Easter, King Æðelred died, perhaps of wounds received there. Ælfred, aged twenty-two, succeeded to the kingship of Wessex in the most perilous circumstances.

  A month later he was forced to fight again, this time at Wiltun, with what the Chronicle describes as a small force. Again, he is said to have won the victory but ceded the field of battle. Wiltun can, at least, be positively identified as Wilton on the south bank of the River Wylye, a little north and west of Salisbury, whence the partially navigable River Avon runs south towards the coast of Dorset. We know from the Chronicle that the engagements of that year were all fought south of the Thames. If Meretun, Baseng, and the other, unnamed, battlefields lay in the lands between Reading and Wilton, they cover a large swathe of the heartlands of Wessex. This was a campaign of conquest and of desperate defence, fought sometimes in the open in pitched battle, army against army; more often, perhaps, in skirmishes between reconnaissance parties, foragers and smaller war bands.

  The enemy might appear anywhere where a river penetrated deep into the shires of Wessex; their mobility, their professionalism and long experience of raiding gave them decisive advantages over a cumbersome system of farmer-militias led by a warrior élite whose loyalties were often local, familial and agricultural. Ælfred’s kingship was new, untested. The sheer pace and geographical span of the 871 campaign is breathtaking. How could a land of farms and farmers survive the onslaught of a veteran, battle-hardened raiding force able to appear and disappear at will, spawning like mushrooms in the night and evaporating like the morning mist, ghosting along inshore coasts and estuaries, ever probing, exploiting the network of major rivers and ancient roads, the legacy of Rome, to deploy at great speed? The Chronicle dourly draws a line under a tumultuous year:

  7 þy geare namon Westseaxe friþ wiþ þone here

  And in this year the West Saxons made peace with the Host.

  The new West Saxon king was forced to pay off the mycel here, to allow his warriors and followers to return to their farms and homes, to consider how he might counter the Viking threat in the months to come. The Host moved to London (the Chronicle uses Lundenbyrig, suggesting the old walled city of Londinium rather than the trading settlement at Lundenwic) where they obtained tribute from the Mercian King Burghred and overwintered. They too had cause to reconsider their plans and count the cost of war.

  * Machair: low-lying grassy coastal plains formed by the wind-borne accumulation of sand and shells.

  † Some historians have argued that there could have been no bishop in Orkney in the mid-ninth century and that, therefore, the whole story is incredible. I find the detail convincing; and that the Orkneys should have a Gaelic-speaking Christian community at this time seems to be gaining credence. See Woolf 2009 for a précis of the argument.

  ‡ A historic tribal confederation of north-eastern Ireland covering roughly the modern counties of Antrim and Down.

  § Blathmac seems to have been, as was the custom with Ionan abbots, a descendant of the same branch of the Úi Neill dynasty as its founder, Colm Cille.

  # ‘Scottish’ and ‘Scotland’ are anachronistic terms; I adopt them here, where convenient, to refer to the kingdoms later absorbed into the medieval state.

  ∫ The Senchus Fer nAlban, an apparent census of military service, among other things. See Bannerman 1974 for the text.

  Ω Historians have argued for decades about the locations and existence of these two kingdoms, but a seminal paper by the Early Medieval historian Alex Woolf seems definitively to have sorted out the mess; see Woolf 2006.

  ≈ Transhumant: seasonal migration between lowland or coastal winter settlements and high summer pastures.

  ∂ Metalwork, bone, even pottery, are susceptible to destruction in soils that go through severe wet-dry and freeze-thaw cycles, and are acidic. Exceptionally, and this is often the case with crannogs, waterlogged sites such as those covered by peat or submerged on lake beds provide anaerobic conditions offering very high levels of preservation of material culture and what is flippantly known as bio-swag: seeds, charred wood, micro-fossils and industrial waste, of the highest value to the archaeologist.

  π In a contrasting narrati
ve, the Annals of Ulster record, under 849, that relics of the saint were taken to Ireland. Many members of Colm Cille’s community had fled to Kells on the Irish mainland as far back as 807.

  ∆ The cantref, literally ‘a hundred townships’, is a very rough equivalent of the Northumbrian shire. See below, Chapter 12.

  ** Comprising roughly Ceredigion and Ystrad Tywi.

  †† But see below in Chapter 7 for a treatment of excavations at Llanbedrgoch.

  ‡‡ Civitates were tribal entities recognized by the Romans and maintained as administrative units through the Empire and beyond. Their capitals, including Canterbury, Carlisle and Exeter, often emerged in later centuries as shire towns.

  §§ The name suggests alliteratively that he was related to Beorhtwulf, who must by now have died, perhaps of wounds sustained in battle.

  ## Æðelred first witnessed one of his father’s charters in 864.

  ∫∫ From the ‘B’ version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under 867.

  ΩΩ Pronounced ‘Denishan’.

  ≈≈ Æðelweard was a descendant of Ælfred’s immediately older brother Æðelred. His Chronicle, written in a style archaic even for his own time, occasionally includes material derived from otherwise unknown sources, perhaps even orally transmitted to him at court. The manuscript survives in a single, fire-damaged copy. The best modern edition is that of Campbell (1962).

  ∂∂ The route into Fortriu from the Atlantic seems to have been that used by earlier generations of missionaries like Colm Cille: by boat and overland portage along the Great Glen; further south, it is arguable whether portages existed between the Rivers Forth and Clyde, allowing passage between the Irish Sea and the North Sea.

  ππ The historian Simon Coupland argues that only two bridges were actually fortified, one each on the Seine and Loire. Coupland 1991.

  ∆∆ See below, p. 193.