by Adams, Max;
Fortune initially favoured the Host: their mounted force outpaced its West Saxon pursuers and, by the time Ælfred caught up with them, they had fortified themselves within the old Roman walls on the banks of the navigable River Exe. But a storm destroyed 120 of their fleet’s ships and Ælfred was able to impose his terms on the remainder. More oaths were sworn; more hostages exchanged. By now the mycel here seems to have been under the sole command of Guðrum; the fate of the other members of the triumvirate, Anund and Oscytel, is utterly obscure.
After the stalemate of 871 and the retreat from Reading to London, the Host’s ambitions for Wessex had been thwarted; now they must give up a second time in the face of unattractive odds. In 877 they moved from Exeter back into Mercia, where they called in their marker with King Ceolwulf, and ‘some of it they shared out and some they gave to Ceolwulf’.32 Ceolwulf was to rule the western half, while a Scandinavian régime which later became known as the Danelaw was established in the east, based perhaps on the old kingdom of Lindsey and the lower Trent valley. It is not clear from either Asser or the Chronicle where the border, if any, was drawn or where they established their base—at Nottingham, perhaps, or further east and south in Cambridge.
The desire to settle appeared, in the first instance, to have overcome the thirst for battle. But if that was the hope of the West Saxons it was illusory:
Her hiene bestæl se here on midne winter ofer tuelfan niht to Cippanhamme, 7 geridon Wesseaxna lond 7 gesæton [7 ] micel þæs folces [7 ] ofer sæ adræfdon, 7 þæs oþres þone mæstan dæl hie geridon, 7 him to gecirdon buton þam cyninge Ælfrede. 7 he lytle werede unieþelice æfter wudum for, 7 on morfæstenum.
In this year the Host went secretly in midwinter after Twelfth night to Chippenham and rode over Wessex and occupied it, and drove a great part of the inhabitants overseas, and of the rest the greater part they reduced to submission, except Ælfred the king; and he with a small company moved under difficulties through woods and into inaccessible places in marshes.33
In this way the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, closely echoed by Asser, sets the scene for Ælfred’s near-nemesis and improbable fightback. Chippenham lies on a defensible inverted U-shaped promontory on the east bank of the Somerset Avon, which issues into the Severn just west of Bristol. The Avon was probably navigable as far as Bath, and it is possible that the standard modus operandi of the Scandinavian armies was employed in this devastating and wholly unexpected attack on the heart of Wessex, with their fleet sailing around the south coast and disembarking at the former Roman Spa town. But it was late in the year for those dangerous winter waters. More significant, perhaps, is Chippenham’s proximity to the Fosse Way, the direct cross-country Roman road linking Bath with Lincoln, which would allow a mounted force based at, say, Leicester, to achieve its object in two or three days.## Chippenham was a royal estate centre, and Ælfred’s sister Æðelswið had been married to King Burghred here: its choice as a target can hardly have been fortuitous, militarily or psychologically. Its capture was a decisive blow struck at a vital organ of the West Saxon state.
We have a good idea of what royal townships like Chippenham might have looked like in the ninth century from the palace and royal hunting lodge excavated at Cheddar in Somerset under Philip Rahtz’s direction in the early 1960s.∫∫ Like most royal townships of the period, its great hall, 78 feet (24 m) in length, worthy of Beowulf, was undefended apart from a fence and gate, and lay at the heart of a coaxially aligned complex of prestigious wooden buildings (including a chapel and what the excavator interpreted, from its foundation, as a windmill) intended to demonstrate kingly wealth, power and influence. Built at the highest navigable point of the River Axe, Cheddar was mentioned in Ælfred’s own will, and hosted a great council or Witangemot, three times during the tenth century.34
Ælfred’s apparent failure to fight the invading force is, on the face of it, inexplicable. His activity in the field since the invasion of 871 shows that he could deploy substantial forces, that he was an active, enterprising commander; and there is no hint in the Chronicle that he had, up to that point, lost the support of his closest ealdormen. His alliance with Burghred and then Ceolwulf II had seemed secure. But he had not yet conceived of the unified defence system on which his military and administrative reputation justly rests. Such was the impact of the Host’s arrival en masse in north-west Wessex that many of the shires seem to have immediately capitulated, submitting to Guðrum and offering him tribute; many of the nobility, we are told, sailed overseas ‘through poverty and fear’.35
There is a hint of naïvety in Ælfred’s repeated attempts to treat the Host as though it was another Anglo-Saxon army, playing by the old rules. The mycel here played its own game, and the Insular states seem to have suffered a collective failure of imagination in countering its threat. Ælfred may simply not have anticipated this third, midwinter invasion; if so, he was also guilty of complacency. But there is another possibility: that he was himself at Chippenham, celebrating Christmas with the royal household; if so, he was the target of a bold attempt to literally decapitate the regime. In the chaos of a winter assault, with no army in the field and no means of raising one, there was nothing to be done but flee.
One small clue suggests that a key to the instant fall of Wessex lay in the disloyalty of senior figures among Ælfred’s fighting élite. Those of his ealdormen who deserted the king, breaking the fundamental bond of lordship that demanded loyalty in exile, or death, were not forgotten. A charter of 901, a rare survival from the reign of Ælfred’s son Eadweard, recalled the forfeiture of an estate in Wiltshire by Ealdorman Wulfhere ‘when he deserted without permission both his lord King Ælfred and his country in spite of the oath which he had sworn’.36 The land in question comprised a smallish holding of ten hides at Wylye—the site of one of the engagements of 871. Wulfhere, it seems, had been ealdorman of Wiltshire during that eventful campaigning year. Did he flee overseas after the assault on Chippenham? Were there others, as the lamenting Asser suggests, including perhaps the disempowered sons of Ælfred’s older brothers?ΩΩ Did one or more of them offer up the intelligence of the king’s festive location?
Other events of that winter suggest that the assault on Wessex was co-ordinated, and that we are only seeing a part of the overall picture. The Chronicle records the arrival in Devon of a brother of Ívarr and Hálfdan with twenty-three ships and that he was killed along with 800 of his men. Several versions of the Chronicle add that the famous raven banner of the Norse armies was captured. If the kingdom of Wessex was on its knees, it was not yet dead.
19. RECONSTRUCTION of a Viking period hall at Fyrkat, near Hobro, Denmark.
Asser fills in some of the detail. The brother, whom we might suggest was Ubba, unheard of since the campaign of 871, had overwintered in Dyfed, across the estuary of the River Severn, ‘slaughtering many Christians there’. Asser names the fortress which the Norse attacked as Cynuit (Countisbury in English), just east of the port at Lynmouth. Drawing, presumably, on knowledge from his own Welsh correspondents and from personal acquaintance with the geography, the Welsh bishop describes how the invaders besieged the naturally defensible position; how the garrison broke out of their hastily prepared defences and ‘by virtue of their aggressiveness, from the very outset they overwhelmed the enemy’.37
Ælfred’s winter in the remote fastnesses of the Somerset levels has become a legendary hero-in-exile tale, like Robert Bruce and the spider or Julius Caesar and the Cilician pirates. For Asser, it is likely to have echoed his belief that Ælfred was a latter-day King David, the biblical exemplar for youngest sons and righteous giant-slayers. The Chronicle is terse in the extreme; but the drama needs no embellishment.
7 þæs on Eastron worhte Ælfred cyning lytle werede geweorc æt Æþelingaeigge, 7 of þam geweorce was winnende wiþ þone here, 7 Sumursætna se dæl, se þær niehst wæs.
And the Easter≈≈ after, King Ælfred with a small company built a fortification at Athelney, and from that fortific
ation, with the men of that part of Somerset nearest to it, he continued fighting against the Host.38
Athelney is a small prominence in the Somerset levels, still an island in the ninth century and periodically surrounded by floodwaters into recent times. At its highest point it rises no more than 40 feet (12 m) above sea level. It was connected westwards to the small village of Lyng by a causeway, and less than a mile away to the south, on a long spit of higher ground, perches the small village of Stoke St Gregory. It is a landscape of few trees, apart from the ubiquitous pollarded willows that line the innumerable drains and narrow, canalized rivers of the peatlands. Athelney farm, an elegant red brick structure framed by sky and Scots pines, bears a nineteenth-century monument to Ælfred’s stay there. From it, on a bleak late winter’s morning, the mind’s eye allows the flat grassy fields around, drained by innumerable grid lines of catchwater, lode and rhyne fringed with sedge and willows, to disappear beneath dark waters reflecting only matt clouds, and a bleaker aspect for a king without a kingdom can scarcely be imagined.
Æðelweard’s Chronicle masterfully understates the position: ‘King Ælfred, indeed, was then in greater straits than was befitting.’39 But he adds a significant detail: that the beleaguered king was accompanied by a new ealdorman of Somerset, Æðelnoth, with a ‘small force’.40 Somerset, then, remained loyal. Asser, with the benefit of more direct knowledge, describes frequent raiding parties sent out from Athelney to forage and to gather intelligence, not just from the Host but from those who had submitted to the invaders. If, as we understand it, Wiltshire and Hampshire had fallen and only Somerset, Devon and perhaps Dorset remained loyal to Ælfred, his circumstances were straitened indeed.
Remote places, like the haunts of robbers and wild beasts on the moors of Yorkshire41 or the marshy fenlands of East Anglia, the Vale of York and the Somerset levels, were profitable sources of fear and wonder in the Early Medieval imagination, inhabited by faeries, devils and unspeakable demons. The peaty levels that drained into the Wash—‘a dismal fen of immense size’ with its ‘black waters, overhung by fog’42—attracted pilgrims like St Guthlac, seekers after isolation, privation and risk. The great hall at Heorot, villa regalis of Beowulf’s legendary king Hrothgar, was beset by the abysmal monster Grendel, ‘ill-famed haunter of the marches of the land, who kept the moors, the fastness of the fens’.43
It is not beyond the realms of possibility, I think, that Grendel is the animal personification of that real killer of the marshes, the malarial mosquito, creeping up on unsuspecting warriors and carrying them off in their fighting prime, deprived of the glory of death in battle, to his grisly underworld. Recent research has shown a potentially very high level of mortality from malarial fever in Early Medieval fenlands.44 In mythologizing Ælfred’s sojourn in these lonely and unhealthy landscapes his hagiographers were not just preparing the ground for his miraculous survival and improbable final triumph; they were also tapping the dark recesses of the Early Medieval psyche.
Within half a day’s ride (or punt) of Athelney, settlements at Taunton and Somerton, from which the county derives its name, were Ælfred’s nearest sources for news and provisions. Landing stages at Stathe, below the spit on which Stoke St Gregory stands, and Langport, a little further up the River Parrett, gave navigable access to the Severn estuary from Bridgewater Bay. The king’s personal retinue, his comites, and members of the shire thegnage, made up a meagre force. He was now forced to learn the same tactics of guerrilla warfare so adeptly practised by his enemies. Asser, recording the foundation of a monastery there in later years, describes Ælfred’s construction of a fortress at the western end of the causeway at Lyng, with a smaller redoubt on Athelney itself. A natural prominence, Burrow Mump, lay just across the river, and it is often suggested that Ælfred was able to maintain a lookout here. To be sure, it offers a splendid prospect of the countryside for many miles around; the remains of a small chapel stand on its summit, looking like a miniature copy of the famous tor at Glastonbury.
The Historia of St Cuthbert’s community, suffering its own travails hundreds of miles to the north, maintained a story that their saint appeared to Ælfred during those desperate days. The king, we are told, sent his men out fishing one day, leaving behind his wife Ælswið and a servant. A stranger appeared and asked the king for food. Being a good Christian, Ælfred shared with the man his last loaf and the little wine which he had left. The stranger subsequently disappeared; the servant came back to find the loaf whole again. Later, the king’s men returned with three boats full of fish—an appropriate haul, perhaps, for an Easter miracle. That night, while the rest of the household was asleep, a great light shone like the sun on the troubled king and an old priest appeared in the apparel of a bishop. Introducing himself as Cuthbert, a soldier of Christ, the visitor confirmed that he was the stranger whom Ælfred had seen earlier. He promised to be the king’s shield and sword in the fight to come; that the West Saxons would be victorious; that, in fact, Ælfred, his sons and their sons would be kings of all Britain.45 Like King David, his throne would be established forever.
Those acquainted with Bede’s eighth-century account of a visionary appearance by Bishop Paulinus before the exiled ætheling Edwin Yffing in his great hour of need at the court of King Rædwald, and with Adomnán’s miracle concerning Oswald’s vision the night before battle at Heavenfield in 634,46 will recognize in the Cuthbert tale a hagiographic trope which cannot be taken at face value, evocative and appealing as it is. For the fascinating solution to the question of why Cuthbert should appear to Ælfred, one has to look at the career of his grandson, Æðelstan.∂∂
There is another, more familiar tale relating to the Athelney exile: it involves cakes, the scolding wife of a swineherd and an admonishment by a Cornish saint, better known from the town that bears his name in Huntingdonshire and to which his relics would one day be transferred. The story is found in the late tenth- or early eleventh-century Vita Prima Sancti Neoti (First life of St Neot). Like Cuthbert, St Neot appears to Ælfred during his stay on Athelney and promises victory in return for his future patronage. The tale has no credence except insofar as the Æthelney episode became and remained a suitable legend for including in great stories from the past, and as a retrospective means of linking royal fortunes with saintly virtues.ππ Ælfred’s humility when confronted with his baking faux pas fits nicely with his elevation, many centuries later, as England’s only king worthy of the epithet ‘Great’. As historian Barbara Yorke and my colleague Joy Rutter have both pointed out, Ælfred’s failure to earn the status of a Christian saint (by virtue of avoiding martyrdom in battle against the heathen) allowed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Protestants to co-opt him as a virtuous prototype, to which they attached all sorts of libertarian and republican values entirely inappropriate to the ninth century. His alleged common touch, so perfectly expressed by his humility in the cake-burning episode, suited their purpose very well.47After Easter 878, then, Ælfred built a small fortification at Athelney, from where he seems to have sent out a stream of intelligence-gathering and ambassadorial messengers as well as raiding parties intended as much, one imagines, to raise morale among his household troops and those who had submitted to the Host, as to actually engage their forces. Abandoned by many of his ealdormen and, on the face of it, by impotent Mercian allies, cut off from eastern Wessex, from London and from the sub-kingdoms of Kent and Sussex, one imagines that Ælfred’s primary concern was to find out who might rise with him against the Host. A story preserved in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum has the king himself, disguised as a jongleur and minstrel (another biblical echo of King David), spying on the enemy in their camp at Chippenham. It is probably wishful thinking on William’s part; and yet, that sort of escapade cannot be ruled out—later wars inspired many such acts of derring-do.48
In the second week of May 878, with spring’s greenery bursting everywhere and roads and fords now passable, Ælfred made a rendezvous, with those shire f
orces on whose support he could still rely, at a place called Ecgberht’s stone (Ecgbryhtes stane), in the eastern part of Selwood, a great expanse of woodland. The consensus seems to be that the stone lay (possibly lies) in the proximity of the three-shire boundary between Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire just north of Bourton.∆∆ The name Ecgbryhtes stane suggests that it had been a muster site in the days of Ælfred’s grandfather. The distance from Athelney is about 31 miles (50 km): two days’ march or a day’s hard ride almost dead east, using ancient roads through Selwood and perhaps passing beneath the magnificent ramparts of South Cadbury hillfort, gathering recruits and precious news of the enemy’s movements along the way. Shire boundaries were very often used as meeting places; and the additional advantage of Bourton is its discreet setting in a narrow vale on the south-west corner of a broad expanse of downland. Here Ælfred must have nervously counted numbers; Asser, with the benefit of triumphalist hindsight, says that when those forces who had come to the muster saw the king, receiving him (not surprisingly) as if one restored to life after such great tribulations, they were filled with immense joy.49
Ælfred now moved decisively in the knowledge that his intelligence was sound; that he had sufficient forces to strike back against the Host. The day after the muster, the whole army marched north-east across country to a place that Asser identifies as Iley Oak: Eastleigh wood, just north-west of the village of Sutton Veny, overlooking the River Wylye. From Bourton to Wylye, the same river on which the engagement at Wilton had taken place in 871, is about 12 miles (20 km) over downs that rise to 800 feet (245 m) above Kingston Deverill. It is a wold landscape of plateaux dissected by mostly dry valleys and peppered with the remains of Neolithic long barrows and Bronze Age tumuli. The River Wylye runs north through those downs until, at Warminster, it executes a smart right turn, opens out into a broader flood plain, and flows south-east towards Wilton, the sometime shire town and battle site of 871. On a wooded hill overlooking the crook of the river’s bend lies the site of the Iley Oak, an ancient meeting place where one can imagine the last of Ælfred’s forces joining his army, and where news of the Host’s position must have been obtained.***
