Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  Although this description is generic – it could apply to any festival – the fact that it follows Snorri’s reference to Yule implies that he expects it to be read in that context. Much of it evokes a familiar yuletide scene – families gathered together around the fire, plenty of booze and roasted meat, companionable glasses raised to family and absent friends, to peace and good fortune. From a modern perspective, however, this cheerful tableau of comfort and joy is somewhat compromised by the torrent of gore applied liberally to walls, floors and guests. Still, if we believe Snorri (and his description is disarmingly artless and non-judgemental), this is the sort of scene that we can imagine Ivar, Ubbe and Halfdan enjoying over the York festive period during the winter of 866/7.

  Snorri Sturluson, as imagined by the artist Christian Krohg, 1899 (Wikimedia Commons)

  After consolidating their initial victory by defeating and killing Osberht and Ælle, the Viking army was soon making provision to move on. By the end of 867, the great heathen horde was in Mercia, bedding down for another winter and, perhaps, a new round of Yule sacrifice. This, understandably, was not to the liking of the Mercian king, Burhred, though there seems little he could do about it. He was compelled to send south – to Wessex – and request the assistance of his brother-in-law, King Æthelred (Burhred had married Æthelswith, the daughter of the old West Saxon king Æthelwulf in 853). The following year, 868, the West Saxons, led in person by Æthelred and his brother Alfred, joined forces with the Mercians and advanced on Nottingham where the Viking army, ‘protected by the defences of the fortress, would not give battle’.24 This was probably not what the English had expected; pitched battles – not sieges – had long been the preferred Anglo-Saxon way of war. This new-fangled use of fortifications set an unwelcome precedent.

  We don’t know a great deal about the realities of siege warfare during the early medieval period, and what we do know is often derived from continental contexts where continuity with late Roman military strategy and technology was arguably stronger. Even so, offensive strategies against fortified positions were, in the words of one distinguished historian of early medieval military affairs, ‘usually conducted with a minimum of finesse’.25 In the ancient world, siege technology had been impressive. A great Assyrian relief carving produced in the early seventh century BC depicts the capture of the walled Hebrew city of Lachish in 701 BC by the Assyrian king Sennacherib. That siege, which took place 1,500 years before the Viking Age, involved massed archers, scaling ladders, siege towers and battering rams – the latter encased in a contraption with more than a passing resemblance to a tank.26 Compare this to the images depicted in relief on the early eighth-century AD ‘Franks’ casket, a remarkable whalebone box crafted in Northumbria and now housed (apart from a single panel in the Bargello Museum in Florence) at the British Museum. On its lid, a single archer is depicted defending a fortified enclosure, firing arrows from the only point of egress – presumably the door. Ranged against him is a motley band which, compared to the mighty hordes of Sennacherib, seems woefully underprepared for the task in hand (although, to be fair, the scale of the undertaking hardly appears comparable).

  Techniques of siege warfare seem to have been rudimentary at best. In the absence of any evidence in Britain for siege engines, the assumption has to be that assaults were typically conducted using the ‘direct approach’; such seems to be the implication of the few indications that survive.27 In 757, an internecine feud within Wessex resolved itself in a kerfuffle at the royal hall at Meretun (unidentified). The episode concluded with fighting that took place ‘around the gates’, until a faction loyal to the (slain) king, Cynewulf, ‘forced their way in’ and did for the would-be usurper, Cyneheard. In 917, when Æthelflæd, ‘the lady of the Mercians’, captured Derby from the Vikings, ‘four of her thegns [lesser Anglo-Saxon noblemen], who were dear to her, were slain within the gates’, implying that – 150 years later – barrelling through the front door was still the principal method for gaining access to fortified places.28 These are the occasions on which such tactics worked: when they went wrong – as at York in 867 – they could be catastrophic. More often than not, however, the sieges reported in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle seem to have ended in something rather more bathetic. Engagements of this nature probably resembled the first attempt on the French castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: a futile charge, a pelting with a range of unpleasant objects, and an ignominious retreat.

  Of course, we don’t know for sure that the siege of Nottingham was quite as calamitous as all that. Nevertheless, it does seem to have been a bit of a damp squib. ‘There occurred no serious fighting there,’ the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle offers, rather feebly. John of Worcester adds limply, ‘the Christians were not able to breach the wall’.29 In the end, the Mercians ‘made peace’ with the Viking army; in other words, with no end to the stand-off in sight, and the troops grumbling about their fields and families, the English bought the Vikings off.

  All parties went their separate ways – the Vikings back to York, Æthelred and Alfred back to Wessex (presumably). The whole affair has the appearance, if not of cock-up, then certainly of anti-climax. Nevertheless, the episode is significant for several reasons: firstly, it demonstrated how weak Mercia had become since its heyday a hundred years earlier. Not only had Burhred failed to deal with the Viking threat, but he had been forced to turn to his brother-in-law (and, probably, nominal overlord) to dig him out of the hole – unsuccessfully, as it turned out.30 Secondly, it highlighted the willingness, as we have seen, of the Vikings to make use of fortifications in a way which left their enemies off-balance and struggling for military solutions. Finally, and related to the last point, it points to the strategic choice to which Anglo-Saxon kings would resort over and over again when faced with this sort of Viking aggression: they reached for their metaphorical chequebooks, rather than their swords, frequently with – predictably – disastrous consequences.

  Burhred was not the first to pay the Vikings to go away. The East Anglian king, Edmund, seems to have done much the same when the micel here turned up on his doorstep in 866; the horses and provisions they had taken in his kingdom in 865 were almost certainly rendered up by the East Anglians in order that they might avoid any further unpleasantness, instead passing the bad news on to their northern neighbours. If that had been Edmund’s hope, then it proved to be a forlorn one.

  Here is how the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it: ‘870: [In this year] the here rode over Mercia into East Anglia and took up winter settlement at Thetford. And that winter King Edmund fought with them, and the Danes took the victory, and slew the king and took all the land.’31 This brief notice, a mere thirty-five words, represents effectively everything that is known of the Viking conquest of East Anglia: no battle, no deed of heroism or cruelty, no desperate resistance or punitive vengeance has survived to be passed on to us. All we know is that, 450 years after the Anglian settlement of eastern England, 300 since the South folk and the North folk had recognized a single king to rule over them, 250 since the occupant of Mound 1 had been laid to rest at Sutton Hoo in a ship filled with the treasures of the age, and only 40 since the East Anglian king Æthelstan had slain two Mercian kings in battle,32 Anglo-Saxon East Anglia had fallen to new rulers.

  Like the capture of York and the death of King Ælle, however, the conquest of East Anglia and, particularly, the killing of King Edmund were to leave a lasting imprint on the early medieval imagination, eventually developing a significance that would reverberate through the centuries. And, as with Ælle, this would hinge almost entirely on the way that Edmund’s death was later reported.

  The first – and fullest – account of Edmund’s death, the Passio Sancti Eadmundi, was written in Latin during the second half of the tenth century by a man called Abbo, a Frankish Benedictine monk from the Abbey of Fleury (in modern France). Probably aware that the century-long gap between Edmund’s death and his account might raise issues of credibility, Abbo was particular about establishing t
he provenance of his tale. He claimed that he had heard it from Archbishop Dunstan, who had himself heard it told to King Athelstan (of Wessex) by an ancient who had served as King Edmund’s armour-bearer. Believe that if you will – there is no way to prove it either way. Suffice it to say, however, that there are aspects of Edmund’s death (and subsequent undeath) that present certain difficulties.

  Abbo starts, in time-honoured fashion, to establish some familiar tropes (I quote at length to give a flavour of his idiosyncratic waffle). He reminds us:

  that from the north comes all that is evil, as those have had too good cause to know, who through the spite of fortune and the fall of the die have experienced the barbarity of the races of the north. These, it is certain, are so cruel by the ferocity of their nature, as to be incapable of feeling for the ills of mankind; as is shown by the fact that some of their tribes use human flesh for food, and from the circumstance are known by the Greek name Anthropophagists. Nations of this kind abound in great numbers in Scythia, near the Hyperborean Mountains, and are destined, as we read, more than all other races, to follow Antichrist, and to batten without compunction on the agonies of men who refuse to bear on their foreheads the mark of the beast.33

  Vikings, Abbo wants us to understand, are a very bad thing.

  He continues, in this wonderfully circumlocutious way, to elaborate the arrival of Ivar (‘a tyrant who from sheer love of cruelty had given orders for the massacre of the innocent’) and Ubbe (‘his associate in cruelty’) in East Anglia and the hideous and horrible atrocities they carried out there. All of which is mere preamble to the real point of Abbo’s story – the description of the gruesome and absurdly sadistic killing of King Edmund, drawn out in lingering, almost eroticized, prose. Edmund, stoic in his refusal to fight, was bound in chains, mocked, beaten and tied to a tree. He was lashed and tortured, ‘but unceasingly called on Christ with broken voice’. Irritated by this, the Vikings ‘as if practising at a target’ discharged a forest of arrows into the hapless king until he resembled ‘a prickly hedgehog’ (asper herecius). Somehow, this was not enough to finish off the defiant Edmund, or even to silence him (his people may have wished that he had shown the same backbone on the battlefield). This was apparently the final straw for Ivar. Edmund, barely able to stand, ‘his ribs laid bare by numberless gashes’, prepared for the killing blow: ‘while the words of prayer were still on his lips, the executioner, sword in hand, deprived the king of life, striking off his head with a single blow’.34

  In the past, some historians have attempted to argue that Abbo’s lurid descriptions are an essentially accurate illustration of a ritualized killing, a garbled retelling of the sacrificial rite of the blood-eagle. This is manifestly absurd. For one thing, the Passio Sancti Eadmundi should be judged precisely as it is titled. It is a Passio (a ‘passion’), a story modelled on the Passion of Christ, a martyrdom story explicitly intended to elicit empathy and sympathy from its audience for its anguished protagonist – an overwrought exhortation for reader or listener to wallow in second-hand suffering, to facilitate mental excoriation in order that the audience can better comprehend the corporal self-sacrifice that God inexplicably demands from his most devout followers. It is also, of course, modelled explicitly on the sufferings of Christ and of St Sebastian, that other famous Christian pin-cushion. Abbo is not trying to fool us. ‘In his agony’, he patiently explains, Edmund resembled ‘the illustrious martyr Sebastian’. To argue that the Passio is a description of an offering of royal blood to Odin, with Ivar officiating as fanatic pagan priest,35 betrays a gross misunderstanding of the conventions of martyrological literature, as well as a failure properly to challenge the dubious provenance of the tale.

  Other details more fundamentally undermine the Passio’s credibility. After the killing, Edmund’s severed head was taken into the woods and thrown into a bramble patch. Dismayed, those loyal to the dead king resolved to find it and bring it back for burial alongside the rest of his remains (which, Abbo delights in reminding us, were ‘bristling with grievous arrows, and lacerated to the very marrow by the acutest tortures’). However, not even decapitation could stop Edmund from babbling:

  The head of the holy king, far removed from the body to which it belonged, broke into utterance without assistance from the vocal chords, or aid from the arteries proceeding from the heart. A number of the party, like corpse-searchers, were gradually examining the out-of-the-way parts of the wood, and when the moment had arrived at which the sound of the voice could be heard, the head, in response to the calls of the search-party mutually encouraging one another, and as comrade to comrade crying alternately ‘Where are you?’ indicated the place where it lay by exclaiming in their native tongue, Here! Here! Here! In Latin the same meaning would be rendered by Hic! Hic! Hic! And the head never ceased to repeat this exclamation, till all were drawn to it. The chords of the dead man’s tongue vibrated within the passages of the jaws, thus displaying the miraculous power of Him who was born of the Word and endowed the braying ass with human speech.36

  The search party duly discovered the garrulous head in the bushes, where it was being guarded by a monstrous wolf. ‘Lifting up, therefore, with concordant devotion the pearl of inestimable price which they had discovered, and shedding floods of tears for joy, they brought back the head to its body.’37 They were accompanied by the wolf, who – having seen the head safely entombed – wandered placidly back into the forest.

  The Passio was, transparently, a carefully crafted piece of promotional literature – a puff piece for an ineffective king, elevated to sainthood on account of his death at the hands of an ungodly horde. The cult of St Edmund developed in East Anglia remarkably quickly after his death, but it was Abbo’s writings that really got it off the ground. Shortly after it was written it was translated into Old English (in a mercifully abridged – and far more elegant – form) by the prolific writer and abbot of Cerne, Ælfric of Eynsham. With new-found interest beyond East Anglia, and a compelling myth with which to sell it, the cult grew during the latter half of the tenth century and into the eleventh. By the reign of Cnut, the shrine of the saint-king was receiving significant investment and royal patronage. Enthusiasm for the saintly Edmund continued beyond the Norman Conquest and grew throughout the Middle Ages: Edward I’s younger brother (1245–96) was named after him, and St Edmund also appears on the Wilton diptych as a patron and guardian of the angel-faced Richard II (r. 1377–99), alongside John the Baptist and Edward the Confessor. Although his prominence declined after the adoption of St George as the patron of Edward III’s Order of the Garter in 1348, Edmund’s tomb-shrine ceased to be a major place of pilgrimage only when it was destroyed in 1539 during the reign of Henry VIII. Nevertheless, the town and the abbey which housed it still bear his name – Bury St Edmunds: the burh (‘stronghold’) of St Edmund.38

  Edmund’s story reminds us that the Christian Anglo-Saxons had their own notions of sacrifice, their own notion of the power of holy blood. And of course, like the Vikings, Christians had their own corpse-god, and their own spiritual mysteries to unravel. Like Odin, Christ had also hung upon a windy tree (in Old English, treow, ‘tree’, was a ubiquitous simile for ‘cross’), pierced in the side by a spear. And, like Odin’s auto-sacrifice, Christ’s semi-permanent death on the cross was also – in its own confusing way – an offering of self to self: the sacrifice of a son by a father, both of whom were indivisible parts of a triple-faceted deity.39 These similarities are unlikely to be coincidental. The story of Odin’s sacrifice may well have been influenced by Christian theology (bearing in mind that all the written sources pertaining to the god date – in the form they survive – from the Christian era). Conversely, both stories, Christian and pagan, may have derived some of their content and their cultural capital from yet more ancient mythic stock. What is certain, however, is that the Vikings shared a range of fundamental religious, moral and supernatural ideas with the Christian Anglo-Saxons with whom they came into contact, not least concerning
the transcendental value of self-sacrifice. They saw it in the stories of their god, and they also found it in the way that human beings met their own ends.

  9

  Wayland’s Bones

  From hence he little Chawsey seeth, and hastneth for to see

  Faire Reading towne, a place of name, where Cloths ywoven be.

  This shewes our Aelfrids victorie, what time Begsceg was slaine

  With other Danes, whose carcasses lay trampled on the plaine …

  WILLIAM CAMDEN, Britannia (1607)1

  We are treading on heroes. It is sacred ground for Englishmen, more sacred than all but one or two fields where their bones lie whitening. For this is the actual place where our Alfred won his great battle, the battle of Ashdown (‘Æscendum’ in the chroniclers), which broke the Danish power and made England a Christian land.

  THOMAS HUGHES, Tom Brown’s School Days (1857)2

  ‘Probe with bayonets,’ Lenin is famously supposed to have advised. ‘If you encounter steel, withdraw. If you encounter mush, continue.’3 If the Vikings in England had a strategy in the years that followed the death of King Edmund, this may have been it. Northumbria and East Anglia had fallen, Mercia revealed as decidedly soft. Only Wessex was yet to be properly tested, and the micel here was preparing to thrust the bayonet.

  In 870, a Viking army struck suddenly up the Thames valley and seized the settlement known as Readingum (Reading) at the confluence of the Thames and Kennet rivers. It was mid-winter, and Reading may have been a tempting target, a depot, perhaps, for provisions gathered against the season. Local resistance, however, did not collapse entirely. Soon after the Vikings had captured Reading, a Viking raiding party – presumably foraging for supplies – managed to fall foul of the Berkshire levy, led by their ealdorman, Æthelwulf. A Viking jarl, Sidroc, was killed in the fighting. The engagement was fought just west of Reading, at a place called Englafeld (somewhere near the small village of Englefield, Berkshire, about a mile south of the M4). It was, in all likelihood, a minor skirmish, fought between a provincial militia and a small band of raiders (who had probably expected little resistance from the terrified peasantry). Nevertheless, it was the first time – so far as we are aware – that the micel here had suffered any sort of reverse in England since its arrival in 866. It was the first time that the bayonet had struck anything like steel.