The Anglo Saxons at War 800-1066

by Paul Hill

  884–5: Rochester

  Rochester, situated on the eastern bank of the River Medway, was a Kentish port of great significance throughout the Anglo-Saxon and Medieval period. Moreover, the town was a political centre for the Kentish kings and by 604 it was the second see in Anglo-Saxon England after Canterbury itself. Mentioned by name by the Venerable Bede as Hrofæscæstre, the city was no stranger to attack having been sacked by Æthelred of Mercia in 676. Even then, its third-century Roman walls would have provided a significant obstacle for its enemies. Later, Rochester’s position at the end of Continental trading routes probably made it attractive to the marauding Vikings of the ninth century when they took it upon themselves mercilessly to sack the place along with the trading settlement at Lundenwic in 842.

  But in 884, when a Viking force would return from the Continent to England to try its luck once again, the situation at Rochester would be very much different than it had been in centuries past. Alfred the Great, the king of the Anglo-Saxons, had been hard at work with his advisors building himself a new kingdom, the anchor points of which were a series of strongly defended towns or refuge places supported by field armies. History would prove this innovation to be too much for those who brought their hopes and expectations from a battered Francia that year.

  The Viking force that had arrived at Fulham left England for Ghent after Edington in 879. It was a period that saw great embarrassment for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fat (839–88), who was compelled to treat with a number of Viking leaders often on humiliating terms. This is not to say that there were no successes for the Frankish defenders. Louis III, the Western Emperor, achieved a famous victory at the Battle of Saucourt in 881, but even after this battle the Vikings are described as being ‘provided with horses’ indicating a considerable amount of bargaining power on their part.

  Between 880 and 884 the Vikings of Ghent moved around Francia and Flanders raiding as they went. By the autumn of 884 the force was in Boulogne where its leaders seem to have decided to split up. One part of the force travelled to Louvain on the River Dyle and besieged it, while the other set sail for England, arriving at Rochester on the Medway. Full of confidence, the Vikings arrived in the Medway having brought with them the horses and hostages they had gained from their Frankish adventure. They had not anticipated, however, the energy and organisation that had gone into the building of the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons. The reasons for the Viking choice of Rochester for this new adventure is not entirely clear, but the help these Vikings would later receive from one of Alfred’s old Danish enemies in East Anglia might indicate a certain amount of prior planning. The invaders will have been mindful of the destruction of the town in 842, but this time when they arrived, they found the city defended by a garrison.

  Upon arrival, the force prepared themselves for something they had not anticipated: a protracted siege. They dug a defensive fortification at the entrance to the city, but the townsfolk continued to hold out. It is not certain when King Alfred arrived at Rochester, but when he did he is described as having arrived ‘suddenly’. The nature of his descent upon the Viking fort outside the city certainly attracted comment from Asser and had profound effects upon the Danes: ‘the pagans then left their fortifications and abandoned all the horses they had brought with them from Frankia, and also left the greater part of their prisoners in the fort, and fled instantly to their ships, because the king had come there suddenly’. The Vikings had clearly been panicked by Alfred’s arrival. According to Æthelweard, however, they did not all sail back to Francia. Those who chose to stay behind came to terms with Alfred but twice broke their agreement with him and went raiding in the forested area south of the Thames. Alfred’s next task was to deal with the news that these newly arrived Danes were receiving help from none other than his old nemesis Guthrum, now ruling in East Anglia. But as far as the people of Rochester were concerned, they had successfully withstood a siege. But sieges of this era, however, did not always turn out so well for the defenders like they had at Rochester. The misery of the siege of Buttington (894), which comes towards the end of the new period of Viking invasions which began in 892, demonstrates just how bad it could get for the besieged.

  894: Siege of Buttington

  Quite how many of the Vikings who had sailed into the mouth of the River Lympne and into the Thames Estuary in 892 would eventually end their lives in an extraordinary campaign culminating in the siege of Buttington is unclear. Nor, for that matter, is the site of the actual siege itself universally agreed upon. Some have it at Buttington Tump at the mouth of the River Wye, but the most compelling candidate is Buttington at Welshpool, Powys, where in 1838 the Reverend Dawkins found in his churchyard 3 separate pits full of the skulls and long bones of up to 400 men accompanied by a horse jaw bone.

  Of Dawkins’s skeletons we know very little. The possibility remains that the whole thing is a great red herring amounting to little more than the usual graveyard clearance material one would expect when excavating the foundations of a new church schoolroom. But of the background to the siege of Buttington we know a little more. The 250 shiploads of Danes who landed at the Lympne Estuary drew their ships to shore 4 miles inland and came across a small half-built fortification known as Eorpeburnan. To them, the stories of grand English defensive schemes must have seemed laughable. They set about killing the few half-armed peasants they found before moving on to nearby Appledore in Kent. At the same time, a legendary Viking called Hæsten arrived in the Thames Estuary with eighty shiploads of warriors and it soon became apparent to King Alfred that a negotiation of sorts was necessary. Much like he had with Guthrum, Alfred offered Hæsten Christianity and he and Ealdorman Æthelred of Mercia stood godfather to Hæsten’s two sons. This new era of Viking incursions into Alfred’s kingdom was beginning in the same way that the last one had ended.

  Having secured promises of peace from the Northumbrians and East Anglians, Alfred positioned himself between the two Viking forces based at Appledore and Milton Regis and waited. This new era of warfare would be played out on a strategic level and would be a very different game from those encounters played out in the 870s. At some stage during this stand-off, the Appledore Vikings, laden with booty from sporadic raiding, tried to set out through the weald and head north to link up with ships they had previously sent around the coast. Alfred’s son Edward the Elder, however, caught them at Farnham in Surrey and defeated them, taking their booty and drove them across the Thames where there was no ford. The Danes then fetched up at Thorney Island in Buckinghamshire, having made their way up the River Colne.

  While Edward settled down to besiege Thorney Island, the dynamics of the campaign were changing. Alfred was due to relieve his son shortly and sent messengers to him. But the fyrd rotation system was being stretched. Edward’s men were coming to the end of their tour of duty at just the same time that Alfred learned that a man called Sigeferth, leader of the Northumbrian Danes, had sent 140 ships around the coast to attack Exeter in the west. The result was that the besieging force at Thorney was not relieved and Edward had to settle for a negotiated peace there, despite Alfred having sent to London for assistance from Æthelred. The Thorney Vikings, now off the hook, went to join with Hæsten at Benfleet in Essex, where a large new fortification had been erected by the Vikings.

  It fell to Æthelred of Mercia to sort matters out at Benfleet while Alfred went to Exeter to deal with trouble in the west. Æthelred pounced upon the fort at Benfleet and found much of the enemy out on a raiding mission. He seized money, women, children and ships, the latter being broken up on the spot or brought to London and Rochester for use by the English. Hæsten’s wife and children were among the captives, but as godsons of the king, Alfred ordered their return to Hæsten. When Hæsten saw the devastation at Benfleet and learned of the fate of so many of his warriors and their families, he was moved to gather what he had left and sail to Shoebury, where he built a new fort and attempted to entice the Northumbrians and East Angles once agai
n into supporting him. Hæsten was now on the back foot, despite support from the north. Whatever he and his allies tried, there was always an English force at hand to deal with it.

  And so Hæsten re-thought his campaign. His actions in subsequently sprinting across northern Mercia to the west of Britain may have had some logic behind them. With Alfred tied up at Exeter and just beginning to withdraw after the Danes there were themselves retiring, Hæsten may have thought he could get aid from the Welsh and come at Alfred from the west. If so, he was to be surprised. Hæsten travelled with a force across the Thames Valley and up the Severn to Buttington studiously avoiding English fortifications along the way. But after the recent wars of the sons of Rhodri Mawr, the Welsh princes had more or less thrown in their lot with the English king for protection. Hæsten would have nothing here, if this is what he had come for. Moreover, it would not be Alfred who dealt with the threat. Alfred had some very loyal generals and one surprising ally.

  What happened next, according to the chronicler Æthelweard, was ‘vaunted by aged men’. Ealdorman Æthelhelm of Wiltshire ‘made open preparation with a cavalry force’ and met up with Ealdorman Æthelnoth of Somerset and pursued the Vikings. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states: ‘Then there gathered Ealdorman Æthelred and Ealdorman Æthelhelm and Ealdorman Æthelnoth, and the king’s thegns who were occupying the fortifications, from every stronghold east of the Parret, both west and east of Selwood, and also north of the Thames and west of the Severn, and also a certain part of the Welsh race . . .’.

  The combined forces, having overtaken the Vikings, surrounded them at Buttington and besieged them ‘on every side’. The allies sat on either side of the river and watched the Danes in their fortification on rising ground. Any attempted breakout to the west would be blocked by Mervyn of Powys. Weeks went by as the Danes at Buttington were compelled to eat their own horses. It was a scene of misery beyond comparison. The Danish leadership made a decision to try to break out of the fort through necessity more than anything else. They chose the eastern option. The result was a predictable bloodbath. The Danes, like any cornered force, fought tenaciously and were able to break through in small numbers, but their casualties were immense. The sources record that Ordheah, an English king’s thegn, lost his life there. So too did many others. It was an act of desperation, but it brought a small and bedraggled force back to the Danish bases in Essex where once again they could regroup and think again of places where they could find proper refuge. Hæsten seems to have survived all this misery and soon began to set his sights on an ancient Roman city he had heard tales about in the north-west.

  894–c. 907: Chester and the Vikings

  By the time the Viking leadership under Hæsten made for the north west of England from their Essex bases, the city of Chester, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was some sort of half-forgotten place being described as ‘desolate’. Once famed as the ‘city of the legions’, Chester had literally been the last fortress of the northern Roman Empire, the place from which great military campaigns across northern Britain were organised and directed. But now the Roman fleets and soldiers had long gone, although the walls of the fortress in some places would still have stood as a grand reminder to the glorious Roman past. Chester’s desolation may not have been wholly attributable to Roman abandonment, however. It certainly was the focus of a great battle when the Northumbrian King Æthelfrifth came upon it in the early seventh century. It is likely to have remained occupied in one way or another until 893, save for that devastation brought about by sporadic Viking raiding. But it would be another eighty years before Chester would be visited by an English king (Edgar) in his imperial glory at the head of a huge naval force.

  Some general observations can be offered about the role of Chester in the minds of the Vikings and the minds of the Anglo-Saxon leadership under Alfred and his Mercian daughter Æthelflæd. Hæsten, despite the disaster for the Vikings at Buttington, still wanted to try his luck in the north-west, and it seems there was urgency in his actions to get there before the onset of winter. His army is said to have travelled there continuously by day and night, perhaps to avoid the predatory Anglo-Saxon army at large in the landscape. There must have been a reason he wanted to secure a seat in the north-west and it is likely that the Vikings of Ireland and Northumbria had something to do with it. Chester was strategically placed at the foot of the Wirral Peninsula within striking distance of the Isle of Man, of Dublin, of Northumbria and of other parts of the Danelaw, but most of all, it sat on the extreme north-west tip of the line that marked out the divide between the English and Danish midlands. Beneath Chester, in the rich and fertile lands of the English, sat Æthelflæd amid a growing series of linked fortifications. The stage was set for a curious battle for supremacy in the region.

  Hæsten got to Chester ahead of Alfred’s shadowing force, the very presence of which had made Hæsten take a circuitous route. The king of the Anglo-Saxons, as he had done before in the south, adopted a strategy of denying the Danes any resources. He killed all the cattle the Danes had brought with them and rode-down some of the stragglers outside the fort. Over two days Alfred and his horses are said to have burned all the corn and consumed the landscape. It worked. Hæsten and his force moved out of Chester and into the Welsh landscape, raiding until they returned yet again to Essex via an enormous arc which took them through Northumbria and Lincolnshire.

  By 896 the Danes who had landed in England four years earlier had dispersed with some going to Northumbria and East Anglia and others choosing to return overseas. For Chester, a new set of Scandinavians appear to have filled the void left by the Danes. These were the Norsemen from Ireland. Place-name and archaeological evidence speaks loudly for Norse settlement in and around the Wirral Peninsula and it is thought it is attributable to the early tenth century. We must rely on an Irish source of dubious ancestry known as The Three Fragments (Annals of Ireland), which was copied and edited in 1860. The original, if it can be called that, was itself a copy made in 1643 by Dubhaltach Mac Firbisigh ‘from a certain vellum MS’. It is easy then to doubt this source. But what survives from the 1860 copy may well derive from a lost tradition that is also sometimes referred to in Scandinavian sources. It concerns the invasion of Ingimund, a Norse leader from Ireland who also appears in Welsh records from around 900.

  The story, for what it is worth, goes that Ingimund, after being rebuffed by the Welsh at Anglesey, came to Æthelflæd of Mercia to ask for land to settle on as the Irish had expelled him and his men. Æthelflæd, described here as ‘queen of the Saxons’, gave him land near Chester. When Ingimund saw how rich the land was and how wealthy the city was he wanted it all for himself. He is said to have gone to the Danes for support and beseeched them to help him get the land and city and that if they could not bargain for it, they must prepare to take it by force. He set up a meeting in his own house which was well attended, but Æthelflæd got to hear about it. The Mercian leader gathered a huge army around her and flooded Chester with it.

  According to this tradition, as the Scandinavians marched on Chester one day the English army there sent messengers to the ailing Ealdorman Æthelred and to his wife Æthelflæd to ask what they should do. They were told to make battle outside the city, to leave the city gate open and to choose a body of horsemen and conceal them on the inside. The idea was to entice the enemy into the city and then to shut the gate on them and kill all those who got inside. This apparently was done, but the Norse-Irish force did not give up on the town. Instead, they vowed to make hurdles with posts under them and beneath these they would undermine the city walls.

  As the force was preparing to do this a message was received by the Irishmen who were among the Scandinavians. It was sent by Æthelred and Æthelflæd. It went like this: the Irish were much loved by their Christian brothers the English. They must turn against the Danes. They must arrange for a meeting to take place whereby terms of the city’s surrender would be negotiated. But under that guise, when the Danes were sw
earing their oaths on their swords and shields and parting company with their missile weapons during the process, they were to be killed. Indeed, it was done. Many Danes perished under a hail of beams and rocks and spears from the city walls.

  There then follows one of the most extraordinary accounts of siege warfare in the Anglo-Saxon era, an account that we can apply very little credence to as it stands, but one that has a ring of authenticity to it. It is, at the very least, a fine example of measure versus counter-measure in siege situations:

  But the other forces, the Norsemen, were under the hurdles piercing the walls. What the Saxons and the Irishmen who were among them did was to throw large rocks so that they destroyed the hurdles over them. What they did in the face of this, was to place large posts under the hurdles. What the Saxons did was to put all the ale and water of the town in the cauldrons of the town, to boil them and pour them over those who were under the hurdles so that the skins were stripped from them. The answer that the Norseman gave to this was to spread hides on the hurdles. What the Saxons did was to let loose on the attacking force all the beehives of the town, so that they could not move their legs or hands from the great number of bees stinging them. Afterwards they left the city and abandoned it. It was not long after that [before they came] to wage battle again.