The Anglo Saxons at War 800-1066

by Paul Hill

  From the story of one famous hostage, we go to the handing over of countless people to the Danish King Swein in 1013. Swein, who had long harboured a bitter resentment against Æthelred, had sailed down the Humber and Trent to Gainsborough and called to him the men of Lindsey, those of the Danish Five Boroughs of the Danelaw (Nottingham, Stamford, Leicester, Lincoln and Derby) and Earl Uhtred of Northumbria. Their allegiance was cemented by supplies of hostages from ‘every shire’–a figure that must have been considerable. Some time after the hostages were given, Swein entrusted them to his son Cnut. It was a move that would have profound ramifications. Swein poured his forces south across Watling Street and fell upon Oxford, the townsfolk of which provided further hostages to him. Next, it was Winchester’s turn and in an embarrassing exchange for the English king, the Oxford story repeated itself. The beleaguered Æthelred and his new ally Thorkell remained in London, contemplating. It would not be long before the king would sail to Normandy, to the home of his wife Emma and into exile.

  In February 1014 Swein unexpectedly died. He was succeeded as nominal king in England by his son Cnut. However, many Englishmen appealed to the exiled Æthelred to return to England and rule once again as their natural lord, although there would be conditions in the bargain. Æthelred did indeed return and not long after this he conducted a punitive campaign of destruction in Lindsey against the land of Cnut’s supporters. Cnut then decided to sail down the east coast of England to Sandwich where he dropped off those English hostages his father had passed to him, each with their hands, ears and noses cut off before they were put to shore. Then, after this grisly act, the would-be Danish king of England set sail for Denmark.

  Cnut did, of course, return to England. Through the political machinations of one famously seditious Eadric Streona, a turncoat English earl, he secured a hold on power. But in an unlikely turnaround Edmund Ironside, the son of Æthelred, found himself with the support of the Danelaw (through marriage) ranged against Cnut and Eadric based in the south of England, the traditional strong areas for the family of Edmund. With a reluctant King Æthelred lying ill in London, there began a giant circle of campaigning across the country which also involved Uhtred of Northumbria, whose grisly end we have already observed (see p. 23). Soon Æthelred would die in London and there began a siege (see pp. 143–4) and subsequent campaigns in Wessex between Cnut and Edmund which eventually ended in a pyrrhic victory for the Dane.

  The situation in London, if the chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg is to be believed, was full of dramatic bargaining. Emma of Normandy, Æthelred’s widow, was to hand over her sons ‘Ethmund’ (Edward) and ‘Athelstan’ (Alfred). These were her sons and heirs to the English throne, but they are both said to have escaped in a boat. A tangled tale then ensued involving the mutilation of a great many English hostages. We shall never know the truth about the fate of the hostages or their exact numbers. Thietmar has his critics when it comes to his accounts of these important events in London.

  Further sieges at London and pitched battles in the countryside around Wessex between Edmund and Cnut followed this episode. Eadric Streona subsequently changed sides and when supporting Edmund bitterly betrayed him on the battlefield at Ashingdon. The agreement finally reached between Edmund and Cnut, at an island in the River Severn after they had fought each other to a standstill up to this point, saw the English king hold Wessex and the Dane hold the rest of the country including London. Once again, the agreement was sealed with hostages. There is also a hint in the sources that Edmund offered single combat to Cnut, but nothing is really known of it.

  On 30 November 1016 Edmund Ironside died. The finger of suspicion surrounding his death was historically pointed at Eadric Streona, but no absolute proof has ever been offered. Cnut in an instant took the throne of the whole of England. Throughout his reign he ruthlessly dispatched his political enemies and always seemed to be aware of the potential of the popular appeal of the line of Cerdic, Æthelred’s ancient royal family. Political assassinations meant that his grip on power became stronger and there is no evidence of any significant hostage exchanges for many years. But in 1036, after Cnut died, there was one hostage whose fate was every bit as significant as that of Archbishop Ælfhere a quarter of a century earlier. Earl Godwin, a favourite English magnate of Cnut’s, whose new allegiance was very much in the camp of the new King Harold Harefoot (1036–40), was the main player in the drama of the murder of Alfred, son of Æthelred.

  For the Normans, the death of Alfred would pretty much justify the entire Norman Conquest. Alfred, half Norman himself, was on his way to meet his mother Emma. Having landed at Dover and tracked his way towards Winchester, Alfred and his followers arrived at Guildford where they were met by Godwin and his men. Alfred was carried away and taken hostage to Ely where he was brutally blinded. The others were either killed or sold into slavery. It was a horrible affair. Although the Norman chroniclers never forgave Godwin for his role in the taking of Alfred, Godwin would later atone for it when Harthacnut (1040–2)–Alfred’s kinsman–came to power. As king of England, Harthacnut made Godwin stand trial for the crime and received from the powerful earl a magnificent ship complete with its warrior complement for his compensation.

  The early years of Edward the Confessor’s reign (1042–66) saw no significant usage of hostages as such until 1046, when Earl Swein, the eldest son of Earl Godwin and whose new earldom bordered southern Wales, went into that country in force. He allied himself with Gruffydd ap Llewelyn, king of Gwynedd and Powys, and was granted hostages by his southern Welsh enemies. Their fate is unrecorded. The Godwin family would, however, continue to dominate the politics of King Edward’s reign, but it was with the old man Godwin that things would come to a head between king and earl and once again hostages would play their part.

  There followed royal appointments of Normans, the building of castles in Herefordshire and Dover and one infamous visit to England by Eustace of Boulogne, whose men ran amok in the streets of Dover. These were just some of the reasons for the tensions between Godwin and King Edward. By 1051 Godwin had had enough of it all. He had raised a huge army from his own Wessex combined with Earl Swein’s men from Oxfordshire, Herefordshire, Somerset and Berkshire and Earl Harold’s men (the future king) from East Anglia, Essex, Huntingdon and Cambridgeshire. At Tetbury, just 15 miles away from a concerned King Edward, this force came together. A demand was sent to the king by the earl. There will be war unless the king gave him Eustace of Boulogne and the men ‘who were in the castle’, a reference possibly alluding to either the castellans of Dover or the notorious Herefordshire Normans. But against Godwin would be ranged the forces of Earl Siward of Northumbria and Earl Leofric of Mercia, plus a contingent of knights from Earl Ralph the local Norman. Once these forces had been gathered after urgent messages were sent to the north there was something of a stand-off. It seemed to those present that a battle between the finest men of England in a time of foreign interest in the English throne would be of such grave consequence that it should not be allowed to go ahead. The situation was therefore resolved with the exchange of hostages and the arrangement that there would be another meeting on 24 September between the protagonists in London.

  Godwin fell back to Wessex in the meantime and the worried king took the time he had bought to raise a huge army from Earls Leofric and Siward’s lands and bring them to London for the meeting. This took around two weeks. At London the net was closing in on Godwin and his family. Godwin asked for safe passage when he was at Southwark, but this time the hostages were refused him. The upshot of the meeting was that he was outlawed along with Swein and Harold. They had to leave England. Before they did this however, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that the thegns of Harold were ‘bound over’ to the king, indicating that a shift in lordship bonds of Harold’s followers was part of the punishment. So, as a ship was prepared at Chichester Harbour the Godwin family sailed off to the court of Baldwin of Flanders, all except Harold who sailed via Bristol to Ireland. At
this time it is thought that Wulfnoth, Harold’s brother, and Hakon, Earl Swein’s son, were given to the king as hostages. The way was clear for a young man from Normandy–Duke William–who had been promised the throne of England to pay a visit to Edward’s kingdom.

  Godwin was no fool. On 22 June 1052 he left the Yser Estuary with a small fleet and evading Edward’s forty ships at Sandwich, he landed on the Kentish coast. His former men in Kent came to him as did the ship men of Hastings and the men of Sussex and Surrey who declared they would ‘live and die with him’. The earl’s son Harold joined forces with him and between them they gathered a force large enough to intimidate the king on his own doorstep in London. Godwin had made the most triumphant of returns. In the subsequent scramble for safety, the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury Robert of Jumièges may well have taken Wulfnoth and Hakon to Normandy as he and others fled the vengeful Godwin family, handing the hostages over to Duke William.

  Godwin’s subsequent death in 1053 and the rise of his son Earl Harold set the scene for the years preceding the Conquest. Harold’s hostage-taking successes on his remarkable Welsh campaigns are accounted for below (pp. 110–14). Harold Godwinson’s contribution to the story of oath making, however, is legendary–if a little controversial. His journey to France in 1064 saw him unexpectedly fetch-up on the shores of Count Guy’s Ponthieu. The count could not believe his luck. It seems that Harold was on his way to William of Normandy presumably with King Edward’s promise of the English throne. However, Guy’s subsequent imprisonment of Harold before he reluctantly handed him over to William amounts to a very high-profile hostage taking. Guy almost certainly was holding out for a ransom as he presumably believed that as master of these dangerous lee shores he had such a right. But William would have none of it and took the English earl on a Breton campaign with him, holding him at court and making him his man. During this period the famous oath was extracted at Bonneville from Harold on ancient relics–a scene depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry–that Harold would support Duke William’s claim to the English throne (Fig. 2). However, we should not forget that the kinsmen of Harold were hostages in the Norman court and the riches that Harold had taken with him on his ship may well have been to entice Wulfnoth and Hakon’s captor into releasing them, another possible motive behind the journey. Nor should we miss the contemporary historian William of Poitiers’ account that the oath swearing was not in fact as one sided as history has subsequently portrayed it. Harold had asked William that he recognise all of Harold’s land holdings in the event of the death of King Edward. We will never know what was really said or done in Bonneville that year, but the sources speak of a proposed marriage of Harold’s sister to a Norman noble and of Harold taking Agatha, William’s daughter for a bride. It is suggested by the Medieval historian Eadmer that William would allow Harold to return to England with Hakon and would release Wulfnoth once Harold had masterminded the succession of William to the throne. In the event, Harold did indeed return with Hakon, leaving Wulfnoth behind.

  Harold’s subsequent elevation to the throne, his brother Tostig’s banishment and alliance with Harald Sigurdsson of Norway are the stuff of history. It all led to the invasion of Northumbria by Harald and Tostig and the opening battles of the tumultuous year of 1066. After Harald and Tostig’s victory over Earls Edwin and Morcar at Fulford Gate outside York on 20 September 1066, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that York gave hostages to the two victors, with the chronicler John of Worcester noting that 150 were exchanged on either side. If this is the case, it would seem Harald Sigurdsson, despite his victory, was in a mood to do business with Northumbria in his quest for the English throne. The need for further hostages was to be satisfied by a rendezvous at the junction of roads to the east of York. History would show that here at Stamford Bridge on the crossing of the Derwent the English King Harold and his men would be ahead of the allies and achieve a famous victory, but once again the issue of the hostage exchange plays centrally in the story. After the crushing and total defeat of the Norwegians at the hands of the English, the remnants who were allowed to sail away by King Harold included Earl Paul of Orkney, who dutifully left hostages behind promising, along with the son of the Norwegian king, never to return.

  Fig. 2. Harold swears English history’s most notorious oath at Bonneville, Bayeux Tapestry.

  William the Conqueror’s usage of the hostage was no less effective. After the victory at Hastings, he extracted hostages from the remaining English nobility at Berkhamstead during a punitive campaign conducted around southern England. The submission of Edgar the Ætheling (with whom William would have a curiously long and troubled relationship) and the notable Londoners with him did not stop the countryside from being pillaged and burnt. A new era was dawning as England began to feel the effects of the Norman style of strategic warfare.

  It can be seen that the history of Anglo-Saxon warfare is very well evidenced by an account of one of its chief mechanics–that of the hostage negotiation. Deals were broken, oaths sometimes meant nothing, treaties ignored. On other occasions, the method worked very well indeed. But always somewhere in the thick of it stood a hostage. Blinded, mutilated, incarcerated or sometimes just kept at court and treated well enough, the story of the hostage is the story of Anglo-Saxon warfare. We have observed many examples of the grim fate of hostages throughout the period. One is drawn to sympathise finally with a certain Æthelwine, nephew of Earl Leofric, whose mention in Hemming’s Cartulary (a list of charters and documents compiled around the time of the Norman Conquest) includes the fact that he had lost both hands while a hostage of the Danes. If our Æthelwine could ever have dictated his story, it would not have made pleasant reading for anyone.

  Chapter 2

  Military Organisation

  Recruitment and Obligation

  The words used by Anglo-Saxons themselves for ‘army’ vary between the word ‘fyrd’ and the word ‘here’. Historically the word fyrd (from ‘faran’–to travel) has been taken to mean ‘an expeditionary force’, which may not in essence be correct. The contexts in which the words here and fyrd are used in the contemporary texts tend to point to the Anglo-Saxon fyrd being a defensive type of army and the here being an offensive kind. Both Danish and English armies could be described as a here provided they were somehow on the offensive. Few subjects, however, are more obscure and controversial in the world of Anglo-Saxon military studies as that of how the fyrd of the Later Anglo-Saxon era was suplied with its men.

  It was the right of an Anglo-Saxon freeman to bear arms. Central to the historic arguments over how Anglo-Saxon armies were formed was the role of the ‘ceorl’, the free peasant warrior. Ideas varied for centuries as to whether an Anglo-Saxon army was essentially one of noble warriors who were summoned by the king in return for land and privileges, or whether it was a general levy of able-bodied freemen, or even a mixture of both. These arguments had their basis in political perceptions of the origins of Englishness and the contemporary spin that people put on it. Was the Anglo-Saxon army some sort of socialist utopia or a system more closely linked to post-Conquest feudalism and aristocratic bonds? The view often held by Victorian historians that the Anglo-Saxon army was somehow a ‘nation at arms’ is not generally accepted today but remnants of the idea of it still can be found in the modern literature.

  Historians have tried to address exactly how the mechanics of military obligation worked. How would anyone be made to come to battle and what would they do if they could not? It is now generally accepted that the key to understanding how this worked is in acknowledging the mechanic that drove the whole thing–the personal lordship bond. It has been argued, with growing success, that the lordship ties that held society together were central to the military process throughout the whole period.

  In the early 1960s, Warren Hollister provided a seductive solution to the whole problem, acknowledging the diversity of opinion on the matter. The fyrd was not in fact one, but two things. There was a Great Fyrd which consisted of a kind
of poorly armed peasant ‘nation at arms’, and there was a Select Fyrd consisting of semi-professional, well-equipped, land-owning warriors whose obligations were based on the 5-hide land-holding unit. The linchpin around which Hollister constructed his theory was a now widely quoted passage in the Domesday Book for Berkshire: ‘If the king sent an army anywhere, only one soldier went from five hides, and four shillings were given him from each hide as subsistence and wages for two months. This money, indeed, was not sent to the king but was given to the soldiers.’ Here, then, was the Select Fyrdsman, a warrior supported by funding, whose duty was to attend the royal host. The fact that he brought money with him hints at the likelihood that there was somewhere arranged for him to spend it. But to find out why the Berkshire thegn bothers at all to turn up for the king, we need to dig deeper into history.

  In the early Anglo-Saxon period, when a king summoned his fyrd, he would expect his personal retainers (‘gesiðas’, or companions) to arm themselves and would expect the duties of his ‘duguð’ (senior landed retainers with a proven military track record) to be fulfilled. The duguð were men who had served with their lord’s household throughout their youth and had been rewarded with a little land themselves upon which to found their own group of dependent men. Given the right circumstances, such a man could rise to become as powerful as the lord he served. They would turn up for campaign with their own retinues consisting of people who had received from them various gifts such as rings, treasures and war gear. Above the duguð was a senior warlord for whom all this was being done. Ultimately, the head of the kin group was the man whose influence, wealth and gift-giving capabilities were the greatest. He was the king. The very word ‘king’ comes from the Old English ‘cyning’, which means ‘chief of kinsmen’. Understandably, in a system such as this his power was immense.