by Adams, Max;
7 þæs ymb ane to Eþandune, 7 þær gefeaht wiþ alne þone here, 7 hiene gefliemde, 7 him æfter rad oþ þæt geweorc.
And one day later [he went] to Edington and there he fought against the entire Host and put it to flight; and pursued it up to the fortification.50
Thus runs the infuriatingly brief account of Ælfred’s greatest battle in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Edington is the generally recognized location for Eþandune, 6 miles (10 km) north-east of the site of the Iley Oak, Ælfred’s pre-battle camp. It lies at the foot of a north-facing scarp on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Edington Hill, a plausible site for the actual battle, lies at about 650 feet (200 m) overlooking, to the north, the broad vale of the River Avon. A long, deeply incised hollow way leads up from the village onto the plateau, evidence of its ancient use as a cattle droveway. Chippenham, the Host’s base, lay 16 miles (25 km) further north, quite visible from the breast of the scarp across the broad valley of the Avon. The broad, open country of the downs was the preferred terrain of the Anglo-Saxon armies, able to survey the whole field at once and deploy the long interlocking line of their shield wall. It is hard to say whether armies agreed the sites for their set-piece showdowns or whether the Host, anticipating Ælfred’s advance from its own intelligence, intercepted him before he could march on Chippenham.
My sense is that the two armies agreed to meet, each willing to gamble all for the highest possible stakes as they had at Ashdown in 871. But apart from Asser’s unhelpful description of the king ‘fighting fiercely with a compact shield wall’51 we know nothing of the progress of the battle for Wessex, except that the West Saxons prevailed and were able to pursue the Host back to their fortification—either a hilltop summer camp close by, or Chippenham itself. If the former, then Bratton camp, an impressive Iron Age enclosure with substantial ramparts, overlooking the vale from the same escarpment a mile and a half (2 km) to the south-west of Edington, suggests itself.†††
Ælfred’s advantages lay in his command of an army defending its homeland and in the tactical superiority of Anglo-Saxon open-field warfare against a marine assault force honed to perfection in the art of raiding. With them he achieved the ultimate objective of freeing Wessex from Danish domination and military peril. Such was the disarray of the Host that many of them were cut down during the retreat. Their horses and cattle were seized and West Saxon forces laid siege to their defences; the Host was unable to acquire reinforcements or escape. After fourteen days during which, Asser says, the Host was worn down by fear, cold and hunger, they capitulated. Ælfred took hostages, forced on them a promise to leave Wessex for good and imposed on their king, Guðrum, a personal commitment to submit to baptism at the king’s own hand, as his sponsor and godfather.52
There is potentially a significant hole in the West Saxon accounts of Edington. The historian Janet Nelson has offered the intriguing possibility that those coins issued jointly by Ælfred and Ceolwulf as co-emperors might have been a special issue, struck in the aftermath of Edington’s triumph. In that case, it might be necessary to allow for West Mercian participation in the battle, and a considerable adjustment of the traditional Ælfredan narrative which insists on the West Saxon king standing alone against a pagan foe.53 Ceolwulf’s death, soon after, allowed his role as the joint saviour of Wessex to be written out of history.
Everything about Asser’s account suggests to me that the Host were not able to retreat as far as Chippenham. To begin with, a rout of 16 miles (25 km) after a desperate battle seems unfeasibly long. And then, the circumstances of the siege suggest that the Vikings were poorly provisioned inside their fortress: no garrison to support them and counterattack; no access to boats. Chippenham, one imagines, after a five-month occupation, would have been set up as a major fortification with stores, access routes in and out and efficient intelligence-gathering: it was, after all, a royal township designed to receive goods and people from a wide surrounding territory. And, if Ceolwulf’s Mercian forces were present, they must have overrun the defences before the Host could retire there. A short siege and capitulation after two weeks suggests an ill-prepared redoubt, not the headquarters of a battle-hardened, highly experienced army. The Iron Age fortress on Bratton Hill fits Asser’s account.
20. ISLAND FORTRESSES in the Somerset levels: the monument at Athelney Farm, with Burrow Mump in the distance.
The defeated Host was allowed, in due course, to return to Chippenham, one imagines under a very tight escort. A month after the battle Guðrum and thirty of his retinue came to Aller, east across the Parrett from Athelney, where he was baptized and took the Christian name Æðelstan. The ceremony ended eight days later at Wedmore, no more than a few miles to the north and close to the royal palace at Cheddar, after which twelve days of feasting consolidated the outbreak of peace, and the senior commanders of the Host were given treasures. This was an education, for Scandinavian warrior raiders, of how Anglo-Saxon kingship worked: the bonds of Christendom, the giving of lavish gifts and the eternal obligation of the servant to his lord; magnanimity in victory; legitimacy. The divinity of the king’s appointment and the strength of the Christian oath were messages swallowed with copious mead, celebratory songs and the mutual respect of veteran heroes of the fight.
Guðrum was now being brought into the fold of the universal church and the family of European Christian kings as one of their own. His baptismal name, too, is significant. Ælfred had an older brother of the same name, and a grandson too. If Guðrum was submitting to the West Saxon king as his overlord, then Ælfred, equally, recognized the reborn Æðelstan as a king in his own right. But king of what?
* Historians are wont to ignore the survival of the House of Bamburgh, former kings of Bernicia and Northumbria.
† A charter surviving from 872 records the lease by Bishop Wærferth of Worcester of lands for 20 mancuses of gold, to be paid as wergeld. A gold mancus weighed about a sixth of an ounce (4.25 g), equivalent to about 30 pence of silver. Charter S1278, of 872, translated by Whitelock 1979, 532.
‡ Literally, items of silver cut into scrap for reworking or as currency.
§ The evidence that Old Norse and Old English could be mutually comprehensible comes from analysis of the way in which place names and other vocabulary hybridized during later periods of assimilation in the tenth and eleventh centuries, especially in what is now Yorkshire. See Townend 2014.
# It is not entirely clear just what constituted ‘free men’ in this period: ceorls, freemen and sokemen are terms that imply various levels of dependence on a lord.
∫ Originally Turcesige, Turoc’s island. A new article by Dawn Hadley and Julian Richards (2016) outlines the recent work there.
Ω Lost but rediscovered in 1779 when the ground gave way beneath a gravedigger. Stroud 1999, 6.
≈ It must be one of the most poorly curated of our national monuments: when I visited in the late winter of 2016–17 part of the site was being used for feeding pheasants; quad bike tracks wove in and out between the barely visible bracken-covered mounds; there was no signage at all.
∂ Rhodri, according to the Annals of Ulster, had briefly been in exile in Ireland during that year, ‘in flight from the Dark Foreigners’—that is to say, from Ceolwulf’s Viking overlords, the mycel here.
π The hoard was—admirably—reported to the authorities and subsequently block-lifted for laboratory excavation.
∆ The Dubhgaill, or ‘Dark foreigners’, seem to have been so labelled to distinguish them from the Finngaill, or ‘Fair foreigners’ by the Irish. It is dangerous to make too many assumptions about the precise connotations of the words, but the Finngaill are generally associated with the original invaders who had established Dublin in the 840s; the Dubhgaill with the Host which had crossed from the Continent to England in the 860s. This, incidentally, is the last contemporary mention of the Picts or Pictavia as a people or kingdom.
** The low-lying Vale of York itself remained a largely uncultivable zone, prone to frequent flooding; but t
he climate of the ninth century was warming and drying, opening it up to enterprising farmers.
†† For a more nuanced and detailed discussion, see Townend 2014, 101ff.
‡‡ At least two Scandinavian language traditions arrived in the British Isles in the ninth century: Old West Norse (from Norway) and Old East Norse (from Denmark).
§§ Asser records the same event under 876.
## Leicester is not mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle before 914; but by then it was an established Scandinavian town and stronghold, one of the so-called Five Boroughs. Æðelweard’s information was that the Host had set up camp at Gloucester in the heart of West Mercia, much closer to the borders of Wessex and more menacing. The route from Gloucester to Chippenham would involve a journey of some 40 miles (65 km) along two Roman roads: a hard day’s ride. Campbell 1962, 42.
∫∫ See below, Chapter 11.
ΩΩ For evidence that this was the case, see below, Chapter 6.
≈≈ In 878 Easter fell on 23 March.
∂∂ See below, Chapter 10.
ππ The story is discussed fully in Keynes and Lapidge 1983, Appendix 1. The widespread early acceptance of the story as a ‘real’ event came about through its shameless copying by Matthew Parker into his original edition of Asser’s Life in 1574.
∆∆ By chance, I encountered the owner of the land on which a small undistinguished stone, no more than 3 feet (1 m) tall, stands by a running brook, the nascent River Stour, in the hamlet of Penselwood. Peter Fitzgerald very kindly told me what he knows of the site called Ecgberht’s stone, and pointed out to me a small artificial mound close by, which might serve very well for a muster point. A more discreet location is hard to imagine.
*** Now an undistinguished plantation whose northern edge is truncated by a cutting carrying the A36 trunk road.
††† The great white horse carved into the chalk of its steep west flank is no earlier than the seventeenth or eighteenth century.
PART
II
Newton’s cradle
879–918
TIMELINE 2
879 to 918
Unless otherwise stated, narrative source entries are from the ASC Parker ‘A’ text.
ABBREVIATIONS
AC – Annales Cambriae
ASC – Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
Æðelweard – Chronicon
Asser – Life of King Ælfred
AU – Annals of Ulster
CKA – Chronicle of the Kings of Alba
EHD – English Historical Documents
FA – Fragmentary Annals
HSC – Historia de Sancto Cuthberto
LDE – Symeon’s Libellus de Exordio
879 Viking army relocates to East Anglia and ‘occupied that land and shared it out’; probable death of Ceolwulf II, King of Mercia.
881 Battle of Conwy: defeat of Mercians (AC) under Ealdorman Æðelred.
883 Guðrøðr episode in the HSC; reigns in southern Northumbria to 895. Possible date for relocation of the St Cuthbert community to Chester le Street.
885 Asser comes to the court of King Ælfred in Wessex; takes up residence in 886 (Asser).
886 Ælfred takes London from Danes and gives it into the care of Ealdorman Æðelred. Possible date for marriage alliance of Æðelflæd with Æðelred.
890 King Guðrum (baptized Æðelstan) dies; succeeded in East Anglia by Eohric to 904.
—Plegmund becomes archbishop of Canterbury (to 923).
892 Famine in north-east Francia; the Franks give Vikings 250 ships to leave the Seine; they sail to the mouth of the River Lympne in Kent; eighty more ships arrive under Hæsten, from the Loire and sail up the Thames. Start of a two-year military campaign against Wessex.
893 Probable date of composition of Asser’s Life of King Ælfred. Viking armies campaign across south Britain and are defeated in several battles and skirmishes, ending in 896 (ASC and Æðelweard). Possible date for original compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
894 The Host sails up the River Lea to Hertford. Ælfred brings the fyrð into the area in late summer to protect the harvesting of crops, and begins construction of a bridge and double fort across the Lea. The Host decamps and marches west as far as Bridgnorth where it overwinters.
895 Death of Guðrøðr, leader of the Northumbrian Vikings (Æðelweard). Probably succeeded by Sigfrøðr to 900.
896 The Host disperses; some stay and settle; others return overseas.
899 King Ælfred dies on 26 October; succeeded by son Eadweard ‘the Elder’.
—Possible date for the ‘Arrangements for the building of fortifications at Worcester’ (EHD).
900 King Eadweard inaugurated at the tide stone, Kingston on Thames.
—Likely dendrochronology date for the construction of the Gokstad ship.
—Death of Domnall mac Constantín (AU), killed by Vikings at Dunottar (CKA); accession of Constantín mac Áeda (to 943).
902 Overkings of Brega and Leinster attack Dublin and force its leaders out (AU).
—Norse migration begins from Ireland to Wirral. Norse under Ingimundr invade Anglesey (AC; FA).
—Subsequently Æðelflæd grants lands around Chester to Ingimundr’s followers (FA).
903 Date after which the Cuerdale hoard of silver and coins was deposited in Ribbledale in a lead-lined chest.
904 Norse army slain at Straith Erenn [Stratheran or Strathdearn] (CKA). Ívarr, grandson of Ívarr, killed by the men of Fortriu (AU).
—Rebellion by pretender Æðelwold ends in his death at the Battle of the Holme (902 in Æðelweard and ASC ‘C’).
906 Constantín mac Áeda promulgates laws of Alba at Scone (CKA).
—Eadweard ‘compelled’ to make peace with the East Anglian and Northumbrian Hosts at Tiddingford (ASC ‘E’).
—King Oswald’s Bardney remains are translated to Gloucester at the behest of Æðelflæd (ASC ‘D’ or 909 in ASC ‘C’).
907 Æðelflæd ‘restores’ Chester (ASC ‘C’); subsequent attack on Chester by Ingimundr (FA).
908/9 Death of Bishop Asser of Sherborne.
—Probable date of death of Cadell ap Rhodri in Seisyllwg (AC); succession of Hywel ap Cadell (Dda) and his brother Cadog.
910 The army in Northumbria ‘breaks the peace’; they raid Mercia. Battle of Tettenhall (Staffs): Mercia and Wessex defeat returning Danish force.
911 Æðelred, Ealdorman of Mercia dies; succeeded by his ‘queen’ Æðelflæd to 918. King Eadweard takes control of London and Oxford.
916 Æðelflæd sends force to Brycheiniog; attacks royal crannog on Llangorse lake (ASC ‘C’).
—Jarl Ðurcytel goes overseas with his followers under Eadweard’s protection and ‘with his assistance’.
912–19 Period of construction of offensive burhs by Æðelflæd and Eadweard across South and West Mercia.
914 Viking raids from Northampton and Leicester, as far as Luton and Hook Norton; they are routed, apparently by county levies (ASC ‘D’).
917 Æðelflæd captures Derby and its hinterland from Danes (ASC ‘C’). Eadweard campaigns against Danish Mercian armies across the Midlands; he conquers East Anglia.
918 Æðelflæd receives the submission of the Men of York and gains control of Leicester (ASC ‘C’). She dies at Tamworth. Eadweard occupies Tamworth and annexes Mercia.
—Rögnvaldr invades Northumbria with a Norse army: Battle of Corbridge against a Scottish and Northumbrian army (AU; CKA).
FORESPÆC
ISAAC NEWTON’S THIRD LAW OF MOTION SEEMS TO GOVERN the events of the four decades between Ælfred’s victory over the mycel here at Edington and the conquest of York by the Norse warlord Rögnvaldr in 918. Each strike of foe against foe, like the suspended steel balls of a Newton’s cradle, energized the relations between other states, conserving the political momentum of the Viking Age and producing a dizzying display of reaction and counter-reaction, opportunity and risk.
After 880 Ælfred’s political capital was such tha
t he could forge a mutually empowering treaty with Guðrum and embark on a programme of economic, military and educational reform that deserves to be compared with the Frankish renaissance under Charlemagne. Exotic visitors came to his court; the history of his people and age was written down; churches and their saintly cults were enthusiastically patronized. Above all, the painful lessons Ælfred had learned from his long-time enemy were put to good use in the series of defended garrison towns that he ordered built across the south. Relations with Mercia were consolidated, and flourished under his son-in-law and daughter. He put in place provisions for his successor and when, after some years of relative peace, a second great war of conquest broke out in 893, Wessex and Mercia were equal to its extreme dangers. Ælfred’s reign can be said to have professionalized the Anglo-Saxon state.
Accommodations were made between native and incomer at all social, political and economic levels. New lords, some more benign than others, brought both threats and opportunities to disrupt the status quo in the countryside and precipitate bold new ventures in production and trade. Archaeologists and historians looking for clear traces of such developments, the rattling local echoes of the Newtonian cradle, have to compile their case from hoards of coins deposited in unknown circumstances, from distributions of pottery and from other artefacts recovered from excavations that have often been expedient and, more often than not, provoke questions that cannot be answered. Charters, where they survive, offer another perspective, showing how kings and bishops deployed their political capital, with increasing savoir faire, by acquiring and gifting land, the stage on which dynastic and petty local interests were played out in small scenes against a grander background.
