The Anglo Saxons at War 800-1066

by Paul Hill

  The Kentish refusal to obey the king had nearly cost him dear. Despite his Kentish contingent losing the Battle of the Holme, as it became known, Edward had managed to rid himself of his fiercest rival and the East Anglian ruler to boot. It had been a salutary lesson for King Edward in the problems of command and control in the field on such a wide-ranging campaign, but it had also been a period that outlined the lengths to which competitors for the throne of the ever expanding kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons were prepared to go to prosecute their claim. For Æthelwold, however, despite the open hostility and bitter hand-to-hand fighting, he was only able to persuade perhaps just one moneyer to produce a coin for him, an issue still debated today. The sole surviving coin struck in the name of ALVVARDU may be testimony to the political failure of an Anglo-Saxon king who might have been.

  900–21: The Re-Capture of the Danelaw–Grand Strategy in the Landscape

  The situation across the midlands and the north of England in the early part of Edward the Elder’s reign was extremely colourful. It took almost a generation for King Edward and his redoubtable sister Æthelflæd of Mercia to re-conquer the Danish midland strongholds and gather allegiance from these communities to the king of the English. The way in which this was achieved was a matter of long-term strategy representing one of Medieval Europe’s most remarkable and sustained military come-backs. There will always be unanswered questions about how it was all done, and inevitably we are missing some important fine-grained detail.

  After the Battle of the Holme and the defeat of Æthelwold King Edward appears to have struck up a treaty agreement with the Danes. Simeon of Durham records that in 906 an agreement was reached at a place called Yttingford (on the River Ousel near Leighton Buzzard). This was frontier territory between the English and Danish-controlled areas. We do not know the terms of the treaty, but Edward’s policy towards the Danes between 906 and 909 seems to take on a certain characteristic. Land in the Danish-controlled areas was being purchased from the Danes by the king and was subsequently given to Englishmen of rank. This policy was enforced from Derbyshire in the north to Bedfordshire in the south. Combining these islands of English interest into something more tangible in the landscape, however, would take systematic campaigning and strategically sensitive fortress building.

  The first instance of a concerted campaign in the north took place in Northumbria. Edward brought his forces to the Danes on their doorstep in 909. It was a five-week campaign of reduction, of harrying the land. It led to a swift peace negotiation by the Danish leadership. But the next year, the men of the north were back with vengeance. They led a punitive campaign deep into the heart of English Mercia, into the patrimony of Lord Æthelred and his wife Æthelflæd. Edward was in Kent putting together a fleet for an eastern seaboard coastal campaign. The Danish raid went all the way down to the Avon near Bristol and along the banks of the Severn. Edward raised a force to take on the raiders, but we do not know how long it took him. We do know, however, that it was drawn from both Mercia and Wessex and that it is described as finally ‘overtaking’ the Danish force at Wednesfield near Tettenhall on 5 August 910. The Danes had just crossed a river and were laden with booty. The subsequent Battle of Tettenhall was a resounding victory for Edward, so much so that the leaders who perished on the Danish Northumbrian side left behind them a political vacuum as a result of their annihilation. There began a period of history where other Scandinavians, particularly those based in Ireland, would see their own opportunities in Northumbria.

  As for the Mercians, Ealdorman Æthelred had long been unwell and much of his policy making was carried out by his wife Æthelflæd. In fact, Æthelred died in 911 and Æthelflæd seems to have already begun her great fortress-building campaign in the midlands, starting with the unidentified fort of Bremesburh in 910. To this were added the forts at Scergeat and Bridgnorth (912), then Tamworth and Stafford (913), Eddisbury and Warwick (914) and Chirbury, Weardburh and Runcorn (915). Some of these forts were situated along the traditional Mercian borders with the northern kingdoms. And so by 915 the military landscape of the central and northern midlands of England represented a patchwork of estates and fortifications, each of them strategically positioned. Edward, for his part, had begun his strategic campaigning again in 911.

  Edward took over London and Oxford and began to build a burh on the north bank of the Lea at Hertford placed between the rivers Maran, Beane and the Lea. In 912 he took a group of men into Essex to challenge the Danish force there. He camped at Maldon and had probably taken a naval force to support him. While there, Edward’s fortress builders set to work at Witham, building another burh on the line of the Roman road from Colchester to London, thus preventing westward advance for the enemy. The people of the countryside who were under Danish control came to the king to give him their support and seek his protection. Meanwhile, some of Edward’s men were finishing a second, more southerly burh at Hertford on the Lea, clearly designed to work in conjunction with the first to control river traffic.

  The sequence of events that followed is difficult to interpret since even the entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle differ from each other by one or two years. However, it is clear that at some stage, perhaps in 913, two mounted forces from Danish Northampton and Leicester ‘broke the peace’ and killed many men around the Hook Norton area. Another mounted Danish force rode against Luton and was resoundingly beaten by the English thereabouts. In fact, they took their horses and weapons as a victory prize. The next year, this new English pride was put to the test by a Viking force that sailed up the Severn, raiding into Wales and Mercia as far as Archenfield. A garrison force assembled from the forts at Hereford and Gloucester was called out along with the men from ‘the nearest strongholds’ and the Vikings were driven into a place were they could not give battle. Their leader Hroald had perished in battle and his followers tried in vain to harass the north Somerset coast before leaving for Wales and then Ireland. The English under Edward were proving just as organised as they had been in the latter years of Alfred’s reign.

  For Edward, it was time to return to the problems not of visiting Vikings, but of the continual threat from the Danes living in England. The king took a force to Buckingham and within four weeks his men had erected a twin fortress either side of the Ouse, thereby denying the Danes of Bedford any room for manoeuvre. The effects of Edward’s remarkable energy in fortress building were profound. This latest effort brought him a visit from Thurketyl, a leading Dane, who offered his submission to the king. Also, the men of Bedford and many of the Danes of Northampton came to him. The following year, 918, saw Edward repeat his building exercise at Bedford itself, enhancing its defence by building a twin to the existing fortification on the other side of the river.

  Events are difficult to sequence after this, but it is clear that an English army took up quarters at Towcester, an old Roman fort on the River Tove. This was at the southern end of the Northampton Danes’ territory. The same force was ordered by the king to build another fort at Wigingamere, a site that is unidentified but which may well be Wigmore in Herefordshire on the Roman Road near to Offa’s Dyke. With the setting up of an English garrison at Towcester, the Danes at Leicester and Northampton took the opportunity to attack it. It was a siege that lasted all day and yet the Danes failed to break it. In the end, English reinforcements arrived and the besieging forces withdrew. There followed a punitive campaign by the Danes of the reduction of an area of land described as ‘between Burn Wood and Aylesbury’. Predatory bands took what they could in terms of men and property, capturing the population by surprise. It was a deliberate policy in that the Danes knew this area belonged to the king himself. It seems the Danish-led forces of the midlands and East Anglia were now acting if not in unison, but according to a planned grand strategy. Next, the Danes of Huntingdon and East Anglia went from their homes to build a fortress at Tempsford, a site that controlled the confluence of the Iver and Ouse. From here it would be possible to launch attacks against the areas of Bed
fordshire that Edward had re-claimed in the previous years. They soon tried just this, heading for Bedford itself. However, its English garrison had out-scouted their enemy and met them in the field outside Bedford and won a victory that saw large casualties on the Danish side.

  While the wars were being fought in the hotly debated areas of Bedfordshire, Æthelflæd was at work in the north of Mercia. She took Derby, the most westerly and most isolated of the Danish Five Boroughs of the north midlands, which included Leicester, Nottingham, Stamford and Lincoln. Æthelflæd is recorded as having lost four thegns dear to her at the gates of the city, but it was becoming clear that her part in a strategic pincer movement was being successfully carried out.

  The next move was led by the Danish East Anglians with assistance from the Danes of Essex and other areas of the Danelaw. They headed all the way over to Wigingamere and besieged it for a day, but once again they were unsuccessful in breaking it down and turned instead to cattle rustling. It was becoming clear that Alfred’s system of fyrd rotation and the tripartite division of military burdens was working very well in the wide landscape of the midlands where everything was politically fluid.

  The forces of the stronghold on the English side near to Tempsford were called out by the king and led to the new Danish fortification. Here, a successful siege was carried out and the place was broken down. It cost Jarl Toglos and his ‘king’ their lives, along with many others. Being a Danish king of East Anglia in the early tenth century was clearly not good for one’s health. All those who put up a fight were killed. Edward was on something of a roll now and headed soon to Colchester where he conducted another successful siege and broke the old Roman fortification killing many of its defenders, save those who managed to scale the old Roman walls from inside and flee. Clearly now, the march of the Anglo-Saxons was looking inexorable, particularly in what had seemed safe East Anglian Danish territory. With a hint of desperation on the part of the Danish leadership, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that at harvest time the East Anglians summoned up an army from their own bases (and from a force of Viking ‘pirates’ they had enticed to join them) and travelled to the English fortification of Maldon in Essex intent on a revenge attack. Maldon withstood the siege and was relieved by another mobile English force. If this was not enough ignominy for the Danes, they were caught and defeated by the garrison force itself in open battle.

  Map 2. Forts involved in the re-conquest of Danish held territories c. 910–918.

  It was harvest time of the same year when Edward moved again. This time, he took an army to Passenham, which controls the point where the Roman road out of Towcester fords the road across the Tove. From here, a detachment strengthened the defences with stone walling at Towcester. It seems to have been enough to gain the submission of Jarl Thurferth and the Northampton Danes. In fact, the submission of Jarl Thurferth included an area of land as far north as the River Welland, the inhabitants of which sought Edward as their lord and protector. The tour of duty for the Passenham fyrdsmen had come to an end and they were quickly replaced by a new English army which set out to Huntington to repair its defences. More people were coming to Edward from the surrounding countryside. It was a triumph of royal organisation and military discipline. The combination of King Alfred’s fyrd rotation system and the building of strategic fortifications in the landscape across the heartlands of England was proving to be invincible. Edward would even have coins minted showing a reverse with a tower or fortification on it, much in the style of Constantine the Great’s coinage, the legendary Roman emperor (Fig. 5).

  Fig. 5. Silver penny of Edward the Elder, Tower Type.

  Some more repair work was ordered at the damaged fort of Colchester and to Edward came the people of East Anglia and Essex, some of whom had been under direct Danish rule for thirty years. The fighting men of East Anglia even agreed to ally themselves with Edward and assist him by both land and sea. The Vikings of Cambridge, a long-established force, also came to Edward. The Kingdom of the English was growing rapidly. The Anglo-Saxon king was taking control of a great part of the midlands on both sides of Watling Street. There would, however, be battles to fight with a new Norse power that had just established itself in York. However, the remaining towns of the Danish Five Boroughs, whose leaders may have had one eye on developments in York, were the next to receive Edward’s attention. Edward took an army to one of them, Stamford in Lincolnshire. Here, at a point where Rutland, Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire meet on the River Nene, Edward built a fortification on the south side of the river and the Danes in the fort on the north side submitted to him. The king then must have heard the news that his sister Æthelflæd had died while at Tamworth, having just recently peaceably taken control over Danish Leicester. He set out there with a force and seized control of the town and of all Mercia and its subject Welsh patrimonies which his sister had achieved lordship over.

  Only Nottingham and Lincoln remained disloyal to Edward of the traditional Danish Five Boroughs. He went next to Nottingham where he captured the place and ordered it to be improved and occupied by both Danes and Anglo-Saxons. There is evidence that the town at this stage had an additional encircling ditch and bank built around it. Soon the Mercian frontier would be restored to what it had been in the glory days of the middle English kingdom under King Offa. Edward’s visit to Thelwall (commanding the crossing of the Mersey at Latchford) and the repair of the Roman fort at Manchester can be seen as a strengthening of Mercia’s northern territories. The focus would now shift to a battle in the next generation between the Kingdom of the English, complete with its dynamic and multi-cultural Mercia, and the Norse kingdom of York, the political and military activity of which would dominate the tenth century in the north. Before his death in 924 Edward would again visit Nottingham and had a bridge built over the Trent linking both fortifications there. From here he went to Bakewell to oversee the building of yet another fortification. His reign was marked near to its end by the submission to him of the king of the Scots, of Strathclyde and of York and the English enclave at Bamburgh in the far north. The strength of the northern leaders’ commitment to this agreement would be tested in the years to come and its meaning has been debated down the centuries. One thing is certain, however, the campaigns of Edward the Elder and his sister Æthelflæd must be regarded as the most sustained and successful in Anglo-Saxon history.

  1063: Harold Godwinson in Wales–the Making of a Leader

  Harold Godwinson’s rise to power in 1066 was not a matter of accident. Many writers attribute Harold’s mastery of the late Anglo-Saxon political landscape to familial ties and the respect with which he was held on the eve of Edward the Confessor’s death, even by the ailing king himself. But it has been put forward that the defining moment in Harold’s career was not in fact the assuming of the English throne in 1066, but his devastatingly effective campaigns in Wales in 1063. It was here that the reputation of the man changed from one-time rebellious member of the Godwin family to that of an effective military commander and ‘statesman’.

  Harold’s opponent during his Welsh wars was Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, who began his reign in the Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd in 1039. Gruffydd was an acquirer–an expansionist warlord, ready to play all the games available to him at the expense of his Welsh neighbours and very often at the expense of the Mercian English, into whose territory he launched frequent raids. For the Welsh, however, he had soon begun to develop something of a personality cult. Gruffydd’s main target area across the border was rural Herefordshire. It is because of such raids into this marcher territory that King Edward the Confessor had entrusted the defence of it to Earl Swein Godwinson, Harold’s brother, in around 1043. Swein’s approach was to ally himself with Gruffydd and in doing so pose a problem for Gruffydd’s enemy Gruffydd ap Rhydderch of Deheubarth. The two even went on campaign together, resulting in the handing to Swein of several Welsh hostages. But on his return from this very campaign Swein took something of a personal shine to the abbess of Leominster a
nd held her for a year. It was a serious enough crime to cost Swein his earldom and exile. Into the vacuum over the next few years stepped King Edward’s Normans, whose presence in their first marcher castles seemed not to deter Gruffydd from further raids.

  Harold, as the new earl of Wessex, became directly involved in Welsh affairs in 1055. His family had handsomely recovered from the political crisis of the early 1050s, which saw them return from exile in overwhelming force. The Godwinsons were in the ascendancy now, with Harold playing an increasingly leading role. This year saw a great turn around in the ruling of England’s earldoms, from which Harold and his brothers benefited. Ælfgar, earl of East Anglia, found himself exiled, accused by some people of treason. His response was to go to Ireland and fetch himself eighteen ships’ companies of mercenaries, and then head to Wales and into the welcoming arms of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn. The two of them led their forces to Hereford where they were met by the Norman Earl Ralph, whose lack of success in getting his fyrdsmen to fight mounted is well documented but possibly misunderstood (p. 61). The subsequent allied sacking of Hereford was too much for King Edward to bear, so he sent Harold to the area. Harold had come from Gloucester with a huge force. It was enough to ensure the allies fled back into Wales for the time being. Harold then turned his attention to the town of Hereford, so pitifully mauled by Gruffydd ap Llywelyn and Ælfgar. He had built a broad, deep ditch and ‘fortified it with gates and bars’. High politics then seems to have played its part, as Harold sought peace with the allies and King Edward restored to Ælfgar his lost earldom.