Offa and the Mercian Wars

by Chris Peers

  Artistic evidence is not always clear, though three of the figures on the Franks casket – one of whom is probably the legendary dragon-slayer Sigurd – wear helmets which bear a striking resemblance to the reconstructed Coppergate example, complete with nasals. More basic iron helmets of a similar segmented ‘spangenhelm’ design were common in Western Europe from late Roman times until the twelfth century, and it would be surprising if they had not made an appearance in England, but no examples have so far been found. They were constructed from a number of iron plates – usually four – riveted together by metal bands running across the crown, and could be made with or without a nasal to protect the face. By the eleventh century helmets seem to have become much more common, and the laws of King Cnut (reigned 1016 – 35) regard them as standard equipment for everyone serving in his armies, but paradoxically less physical evidence survives from this era. Not only were pagan-style burials with grave goods no longer in favour, but the very commonplace nature of what were becoming mass-produced items militated against their survival. A plain ‘spangenhelm’ which was no longer required as armour might make a useful cooking pot until it finally disintegrated!

  A few of the men on the Franks casket have very obvious sculpted hair, which suggests that those who do not are wearing some sort of soft headgear. It is possible that these, and the plain caps shown in other sources, could have been made of boiled leather or similar perishable material, which would have provided some protection to men unable to afford metal helmets while leaving no trace in the archaeological record.

  Surviving body armour is even rarer than helmets, although again there is written and artistic evidence for its use. In Anglo-Saxon England it took the form of the mail coat or ‘byrne’ made of interlinked iron rings – a type of armour which seldom survives even from later periods when we know it was common. The only known example from our period comes from the Sutton Hoo burial, but, as in the case of helmets, there is no reason to suppose that it was restricted to men of the very highest rank. Two of the figures on the Franks casket lid, and one on the rear panel which depicts a column of Roman soldiers attacking Jerusalem, are wearing tunics which almost certainly represent mail, shown as a pattern of solid raised dots. This is a proportion of about one in five, depending on exactly who we interpret as being a combatant in these carvings. A similar pattern appears on one of two armed men depicted on the silver plate from the Staffordshire Hoard which is believed to have formed part of a helmet.

  Battle Tactics

  There is a common assumption that Anglo-Saxon battle tactics were of the very simplest kind. One writer refers to ‘an alarming absence of tactical sense’, considering that once battle was joined ‘it was merely might, determination and often numbers which decided the day’ (Heath). Contemporary sources certainly give this impression, although they are difficult to interpret because their authors were seldom interested in the details of military science. For Bede, for example, strategy and tactics were entirely redundant, as battles were decided by the will of God. Therefore battles usually went in favour of the most devout Christian commander, though occasionally the divine verdict might be reversed as a punishment for His worshippers’ sins. (The career of Penda, as a consistently successful pagan general, must have been an embarrassment to Bede’s world view, but he offers no explanation for it.)

  In other cases battles are described according to the conventions of epic poetry, which have sometimes been mistaken by modern commentators for sober tactical analysis. A prominent example is the ‘shieldwall’, a term used almost universally nowadays as if it described a standard Anglo-Saxon formation, or even a tactical doctrine. As mentioned above, two quite different terms are routinely translated as ‘shieldwall’: ‘bordweall’ (‘wall of boards’) and ‘scyldburh’ (‘fortress of shields’). The impression gained from these translations is that ‘shieldwall’ was a term in early English military parlance with a definite meaning. We might even imagine a commander giving his troops the order, ‘Form shieldwall!’ as modern re-enactment groups have been known to do. But no contemporary source describes any order given in these terms. Earl Byrhtnoth at Maldon told his men to ‘make a war-hedge with their shields’ (‘he mid bordum het wyrcan thone wihagan’), but although both the ‘shieldwall’ terms occur elsewhere in the poem they are notably absent here where we might expect them.

  There are also practical difficulties with the shieldwall as a formation. It is usually portrayed as consisting of a solid block of men standing in close order with shields overlapping, as Harold’s huscarles seem to be doing on the Bayeux tapestry. Such a deployment has its advantages: it can present an unbroken line of spearpoints which will deter cavalry, as it was no doubt intended to do at Hastings, and the men can protect each other from missiles with their shields. But it is only useful on the defensive, as it is almost impossible to manoeuvre in such a close-packed mass – especially if the ground is at all uneven – unless the men are drilled in marching in step, for which there is no evidence from Anglo-Saxon times. Furthermore, although spears can be thrust straight forward fairly effectively, there is no room to wield swords without endangering one’s comrades. The use of the shield boss as an offensive weapon would also involve breaking up the ‘wall’ and exposing the men on either side. We must therefore conclude that a battle between two English armies, both of which employed a ‘shieldwall’ formation, could never have been decisive, as both would have had to stand on the defensive. Attacks must have been carried out, and combats actually fought, in a looser, more open formation which allowed men to use their weapons as they were intended. Most writers concede that this was the case, but few give much thought to exactly how a close-packed shieldwall could be opened up while in action. It may have happened automatically as soon as the army advanced, as a result of the less eager or less well-equipped men hanging back slightly while their braver comrades pushed forward.

  An example of this in Scandinavian warfare comes from ‘Eyrbyggja Saga’, where the opposing commander threw a spear over the heads of Snorri’s warriors as they advanced uphill. This was a ritual act, intended to consign the enemy to the wrath of Odin, but in this case the spear hit and wounded a man who was lurking in the rear: Snorri’s reaction was that this was a good thing, as it would show his men that hiding at the back was not always the safest option! And yet, assuming that the army would start the battle with the best-equipped men in the front rank, it would hardly have been consistent with either honour or military effectiveness to allow them to abandon this position. The result of a free-for-all advance might have been that the elite, weighed down with their armour, would have been left behind by their more lightly armed followers – or worse still, jostled and pushed to the ground. So we must imagine the army moving forward in loose formation, but still in some kind of order, and the only way to do that would seem to be to extend the line to the flanks. Again this might happen without a specific order being given, as the men on the ends of the line would be reluctant to allow the enemy to outflank them, and so would be inclined to drift outwards as they advanced to prevent this. The process would be helped if the younger, fitter and perhaps more lightly equipped men were posted on the flanks, but we have no contemporary evidence for this.

  Neither, apart from a few hints such as Henry of Huntingdon’s account of the Battle of the River Idle, or Penda’s thirty ‘legions’ at the Winwaed, can we tell from our sources whether the different contingents which made up an Anglo-Saxon army were capable of manoeuvring independently of each other. If battles were decided by any kind of tactical ploy the sources seldom if ever say so, though this may be due to several factors: surviving informants might not have seen enough of the field to know what was going on on the flanks, or clerical writers might have been indifferent to such technicalities, or war leaders themselves could have preferred to be remembered for their courage or personal fighting skills rather than what might have been seen as underhand tricks. The Battle of Chester in 605 appears to have been won
by a Northumbrian charge at a weak spot – the Welsh monks who were praying for victory – followed by a swift wheel and an attack on the Welsh main body from an unexpected direction. But we cannot tell from Bede’s account whether or not this was deliberate, and as usual the chronicler is more concerned to reveal the workings of God’s plan to punish the Welsh heretics than to explain the minutiae of tactics.

  In actual combat, as opposed to pre-battle manoeuvres, Anglo-Saxon warriors generally, if not invariably, operated on foot, though the question of whether they ever fought on horseback has been vigorously debated. Horses and horse riding are mentioned frequently in most of our sources, but remains of the animals are rare in agricultural contexts, and it is likely that they were kept mainly for military purposes. Several mentions in contemporary sources of what appear to be royal stud farms tend to confirm this (Davis, in Hawkes). Mound Seventeen at Sutton Hoo contained the skeleton of a horse which may have been sacrificed to accompany its late owner, as well as a magnificent and expensive set of harness. It is often stated that Anglo-Saxon warriors would have ridden ponies too small to be effective warhorses, but the Sutton Hoo horse was a respectable fourteen hands.

  In the pre-Viking era, when armies were small and made up overwhelmingly of professional fighters, most campaigning armies would probably have been entirely mounted, which makes the success of lightning raids such as Wulfhere’s attack on the Isle of Wight in 661 easier to understand. In fact the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that the Vikings of the eighth and ninth centuries made use of captured horses on their overland raids, implying that the English forces which pursued and often caught them must also have ridden rather than walked. Mounted warriors could sometimes ride down fugitives or raiders who were taken unawares, as happened to the Vikings outside Chester in 893. A plaque on the Sutton Hoo helmet shows a scene of a mounted spearman attacking enemy footsoldiers, and the Aberlemno Stone, a monument thought to commemmorate the Battle of Nechtansmere in 685, suggests that the Northumbrians deployed some mounted troops in their wars against the Picts. This suggestion may be supported by the mention of Northumbrian ‘equitatui’ or horsemen in the ‘Life of Saint Wilfred’, but this term could refer simply to men who rode on the march but dismounted to fight. Too much weight has perhaps been placed on the remark of Florence of Worcester that an English force fled from the Welsh in Herefordshire in 1055 because they had been ordered to fight from horseback, ‘contra mores’, or ‘contrary to their custom’. This was an isolated and very late incident involving local levies fighting alongside French and Norman contingents, so it cannot be taken as good evidence for either English cavalry or English ineptitude.

  Nevertheless, there is no convincing evidence for the use of large bodies of cavalry in pitched battles, at least before the eleventh century. We can be certain that if the English did not use cavalry it was not because they were unfamiliar with the idea. Contacts between the English kingdoms and the Franks on the Continent had been frequent since the sixth century, and the many English exiles living at the Carolingian court can hardly have failed to observe the increasing popularity of cavalry tactics in the Frankish armies. However, it has been suggested that even in the Frankish Empire in the tenth century the rise of cavalry was due more to the decline of the infantry than to any improvement in the effectiveness of mounted tactics (Nicolle). If this was the case it is possible that the English failed to adopt cavalry not because of ignorance or conservatism, but because they did not need to. They remained effective as infantry, and had already perfected the technique of manoeuvring mounted and fighting dismounted which was to be characteristic of English armies in the later medieval period.

  The experience of a great battle must have been unforgettable, even for those, like the veterans of Penda’s wars or the late ninth-century campaigns against the Danes, who had seen it all before. There would surely have been an important element of theatre in the preliminaries, with the waving banners and the gleaming gold and silver decoration of the thegns’ equipment designed to overawe the enemy as much as to impress their comrades. It might have been possible to detect a big army even before it was in sight by the gleam of sunlight on its armour, as was said of the Vikings at Stamford Bridge in 1066. The opposing lines would probably have closed at a steady walking pace, imposed by the need to keep the lines straight, as well as by the difficulty of negotiating rough and perhaps slippery ground in smooth-soled leather footwear. The advance would almost certainly have been accompanied by chants or war cries, with the aim of frightening the enemy and encouraging your own forces to move together in time to the rhythm. Men might have competed to shout out the names of their gods or rulers, especially against an opponent of a different religion. It is hard not to be reminded of the rival slogans of the Norwegians at Stiklarstadir in 1030: ‘On, on, farming men!’ ‘On, on, Christ’s men, cross men, king’s men!’

  A passage in Beowulf implies that this phase of the battle would be remembered for the ‘iron shower’ of arrows sent on a high trajectory over the shields of the men in front to wound those behind. The ‘shieldwall’ might have seemed to waver as warriors raised and lowered their shields to intercept the missiles, giving observers an opportunity to assess their steadiness. Men with a reputation to make or maintain might nevertheless have braved the arrows and stepped out from the ranks to harangue their followers or insult the enemy, before charging forward to strike a blow in the sight of their king. At Maldon, if the poet is to be believed, the Mercian Aelfwine recounted his ancestry in true heroic style before rushing forward to stab a Viking with his spear. Then the lines would clash, men stabbing viciously downwards over their opponents’ shields until their spears broke or an enemy got too close for them to be effective, then drawing their swords.

  Graphic proof of the brutal nature of hand-to-hand fighting comes from skeletons excavated from various sites around the country. Six burials from a cemetery of apparently seventh-century date at Eccles in Kent were of men, mostly in their twenties or early thirties, who had suffered head injuries, probably from sword cuts: the lack of any evidence of healing shows that all of them had died either immediately or soon afterwards (Wenham, in Hawkes). One man had been struck in his unshielded right side by a spear or arrow, which had left its point in his spine and presumably disabled him before he received the coup de grace. Another had been virtually cut to pieces, with three wounds to his arms, ten to his back and no fewer than sixteen to the head and neck, several of which had almost severed his head. Probably he had been one of the last to fall, fighting on despite being surrounded and finally succumbing to a rain of blows from all directions. Perhaps he had made such an impression on his enemies by his determined stand that they needed to make sure that he would not get up again, and continued to hack at him when he lay on the ground. All the victims had been struck on the front or top of the head, mostly from the left side, which would be consistent with an attack by a right-handed swordsman. It is of course possible that they had suffered other wounds to the soft tissues, especially from arrows or spear thrusts, which would not be detectable from the skeletal remains.

  A young man buried in Mound Five at Sutton Hoo also probably represents a battle casualty: he had been partially cremated, but a surviving piece of his skull shows that he had suffered at least nine serious cuts to the head (Carver). Another skeleton, excavated at Repton and identified by the sword and silver Thor’s hammer amulet found with him as a ninth-century Viking, was presumably the victim of Anglo-Saxon wrath. He had been around 40 years old when he died, probably as a result of a deep cut to the left thigh. His skull also showed the marks of two blows to the head, and other damage suggested that he had been both disembowelled and castrated, though whether deliberately or as an incidental result of the attack which killed him is not known (Biddle and Kjolbye-Biddle). This gruesome evidence is supported by written accounts. Those from Anglo-Saxon sources are scarce, though at the Battle of Maldon a thegn named Eadweard is said to have brought down a Viking with a si
ngle sword cut. Norse sagas are full of stories of mighty blows which severed heads, arms or legs, and Beowulf had a sword which was said to have often sliced through helmets. This, of course, is the common currency of legend, reminiscent of later epics such as the ‘Chanson de Roland’, in which champions on both sides smash through armour with such regularity that one wonders why anyone bothered to wear it. On the other hand, modern experiments have shown that early medieval swords were easily capable of cutting right through animal carcasses similar in size to human bodies (Loades).

  It is unlikely that the fittest warrior could fight hand to hand in armour for more than a few minutes without needing to rest, and the battle lines must have drawn apart at intervals to regroup and assess their chances. Where the sides were evenly matched the struggle might be brought to a close only by nightfall or mutual exhaustion, which might explain those cases like Offa’s encounter at Otford in 776, where the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions a battle but gives no indication of the outcome. The leaders might then have arranged a truce. Kings and leading noblemen often fought in the front rank, and their deaths could demoralise their followers and bring about their defeat. We hear of numerous cases in which a king was killed and his army slaughtered, but it is often difficult to sort out cause and effect, and decide whether the army collapsed because of the loss of its commander, or the king was left unprotected when those around him ran away.

  The Aftermath of Battle

  From Bede’s stories we do know that the bodies of kings were usually recovered from the battlefield by their followers, and buried with ceremony. The mutilated warrior from Mound Five at Sutton Hoo was most likely a pagan, as both the date and the cremation rite suggest, so it was clearly not just the Christian war dead who were treated with reverence. Other casualties were no doubt carried off by relatives or surviving comrades in arms, and probably interred in groups close to the site of the battle, like the six bodies from Eccles. An army which had been driven from the field would of course have little opportunity to recover its dead or wounded, and the enemy rank and file seem to have been left where they lay. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s poem on the Battle of Brunanburgh preserves the gruesome details of their fate. It tells us that the characteristic scavengers of the battlefield were the raven, the white-tailed eagle and the wolf, the same trilogy that appears in Beowulf, where the raven ‘tells the eagle of his takings at the feast.’ These creatures of ill omen might follow an army for days in expectation of being fed. It was said in ‘Y Gododdin’ of the Welsh hero Caradwg that ‘the motion of his arm invited the wild dogs’, the idea being that the wolves knew his exploits so well that they would gather as soon as they saw him draw his sword.