by Chris Peers
Excavations at Repton undertaken between 1974 and 1988 revealed a surprising amount of information about the brief Viking occupation of 874 and 875 (Biddle and Kjolbye-Biddle). A ‘D’-shaped defensive earthwork was found on the south bank of the Trent, into which the vandalised ruins of the stone church of Saint Wystan had been incorporated as a sort of strongpoint. This building was already an important minster church in the eighth and ninth centuries, and contained a mausoleum which housed the remains of several Mercian kings, including Aethelbald and Wiglaf. Its irreverent treatment by the pagan invaders must have been seen by most Mercians as a desecration. Several burials identified as Viking were found around the church, at least one of which was of a woman. Outside the earthwork, but identifiable by coin finds as dating from the same period, was a mass burial of approximately 260 bodies in what had probably been an Anglo-Saxon stone crypt, four-fifths of which were of males between 15 and 45 years old. The excavators believed that it was possible to identify skeletal features similar to those characteristic of Scandinavia, but this sort of analysis is very subjective. Perhaps more reliable is their description of them as ‘massively robust’, which obviously suggests a group of well-fed and physically fit warriors, although in that case the lack of obvious battle injuries on the bones seems strange.
The site had been opened in the late seventeenth century, when it was reported that in the centre of the mass burial was a coffin containing a human body nine feet long, but unfortunately no trace of this Viking giant was found during the latest excavation. The presence of four pits outside the building, but apparently contemporary and containing individual bodies, hints at human sacrifice and argues against the alternative explanation that the main burial was of monks from the nearby monastery, who might be just as robust as soldiers as a result of an unusually good diet. The excavators suggested that the mass burial did not necessarily mean that there had been a serious mortality in the camp, but that the bodies of members of the Great Army who died at Repton and elsewhere may have been collected and reinterred to accompany the deceased king who must have been in the lost coffin. In that case the implication of the lack of battle injuries is that the Vikings had lost at least as many men to disease, and perhaps hunger, as they had to enemy action. However, it has recently been suggested that the bones, many of which were already disarticulated when they were placed in the grave, might have been supplemented by remains collected from the local cemetery and rearranged, for some inscrutable reason, around the central burial (Fleming). At the same time another cemetery, established within sight of the damaged church, was the site of more-traditional Viking cremation burials.
The Danes did not immediately follow up their advantage after the seizure of Repton, but instead dispersed in several directions. Halfdan returned to Northumbria, where he established a base on the River Tyne and raided the Picts and the Britons of Strathclyde. Then, in 876, the Chronicle reports that he divided up the land among his followers and set them to ploughing and ‘providing for themselves’. This seems a surprising change of policy for a Viking, but it appears likely that the objective of the Great Army had always been land for settlement. The presence of non-combatants in the cemetery at Repton suggests that many of the warriors had already brought over their families or acquired new ones in England, and after a decade of overwintering there the ties of the original veterans to their homelands must have been considerably weakened. The three ‘kings’ Guthrum, Oscytel and Anund went to the borders of East Anglia and encamped at Cambridge, while others continued the fight against Wessex.
At harvest time in the year 877, we are told that the ‘raiding army’ returned to Mercia, divided part of the country among themselves, and ‘gave’ the remainder to King Ceolwulf. The timing suggests a certain ruthless acquisitiveness among the Vikings: probably they intended to seize at least some of the harvest which had been sown, and perhaps even already gathered, by Mercian farmers on the land they took from them. English families may have been evicted in places, and left to starve while the invaders enjoyed the fields and barns full of grain. But the Chronicle’s description is not one of a military operation, and there is no hint that the local inhabitants or their leaders offered any resistance. This contrasts with the situation in Wessex, where, under the year 871, the Chronicle notes that, in addition to the campaigns undertaken by the king and his ealdormen and thegns, there were no fewer than nine ‘folcgefeoht’, or ‘people’s fights’ against the invaders, which must surely imply spontaneous local resistance movements. This strange acquiescence was not because the Mercian army had ceased to exist. In 878 the Welsh Annals record that the formidable King Rhodri of Gwynedd and his son Gwriad were killed by invading ‘Saxons’, who can only be Ceolwulf’s forces. And even in the following decade Asser states that many of the Welsh came to seek West Saxon protection against the continuing ‘tyranny’ of the Mercians.
In midwinter 878 Guthrum’s Danish forces in the south, having made peace with Wessex, broke their agreement and launched a sudden attack on Alfred’s base at Chippenham. The West Saxons were taken by surprise and scattered, and the Chronicle reports that many of them fled overseas. The whole country was overrun, but the king himself and a few companions escaped into the forests of Somerset. From there Alfred began the epic struggle to reclaim his kingdom, which was ultimately to bring not just Wessex but the whole of England under the rule of his dynasty.
There are obvious parallels between the surprise attacks on Chippenham and Repton, and it would not be surprising that the Great Army’s leaders would seek to repeat a tactic that had been so successful on a previous occasion. It is possible that the dramatic difference between the West Saxon and Mercian experiences of Viking conquest was due mainly to the fact that Alfred survived his defeat and exile, whereas Burhred, who may also have intended to make a comeback after the disaster at Repton, was unfortunate enough to die before he could put his plans into action. This seems unlikely, however, as there is other evidence that the relations between the Danes and the Angles were fundamentally different from those with the Saxons.
This is a priori quite plausible, because Angeln was situated very close to the southern borders of Denmark, and the two peoples and their languages were closely related. As discussed in Chapter 2, most of the inhabitants of the ‘Anglian’ kingdoms were probably not actually descended from recent immigrants, but culturally they clearly believed themselves to be of the same stock. Place name evidence gives a fairly clear picture of the areas where the Great Army and subsequent Danish immigrants settled. Although not stated in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it is obvious that the portion of Mercia which they divided up and farmed was in the north and east, roughly north of a line running from Stafford to London. Further north Danish names are found throughout Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, and in East Anglia. (The Scandinavian settlements in Cumbria, west of the Pennines, seem to have been mainly Norwegian in origin, and although roughly contemporary they were not a result of the Great Army’s campaign.)
For a time in the early tenth century this line of demarcation was recognised by the kings of Wessex, and later England, and the land beyond it became known as the Danelaw. It has been noted, however, that although Essex, the home of the East Saxons, was on the Danish side of the frontier, it was never colonised by Danish settlers. It seems as if the Danes only put down roots in areas whose native population was Anglian – although they were happy to plunder the Saxons they never saw them as potential neighbours (Oppenheimer). The logical conclusion is that relations between the newcomers and the population of the Mercian heartland were not necessarily unfriendly. Of course foraging armies are never likely to be popular with their hosts, but in an age in which population densities were relatively low there was probably room to accommodate a few thousand farmers without having to dispossess the existing occupants of the land.
Place name evidence from Lincolnshire and neighbouring counties has suggested that names ending in the suffix ‘-by’ – a strong indicator of Dani
sh settlement – are concentrated on light, sandy soil on the upper reaches of tributaries rather than on the fertile ground beside the main rivers. Possibly the Danes preferred these areas as reminiscent of conditions in Denmark, but it also seems likely that they were reluctant to dispossess their Anglian neighbours en masse, or simply lacked the strength to do so (Wood, 1986). The plundering activities of the previous few years had probably fallen heaviest on the rich and undefended monastic estates such as Peterborough, which greatly agitated the chroniclers, but which the ordinary Anglian peasant might not have perceived as a personal threat. Our sources constantly emphasise the distinction between Christians and ‘pagans’, but even this may not have been the barrier it seems. J. D. Richards has interpreted the two cemeteries at Repton as evidence of open rivalry between Christian and pagan elements, and suggested that Halfdan’s men, who had by then lived in England for nearly ten years, were already in the process of conversion by 874, while the more recent arrivals under Guthrum were still pagan. The latter might have set up their cremation site within sight of the church at Repton as a deliberate challenge to the foreign influences that were affecting, and in their eyes corrupting, their comrades.
So was the Viking objective in their attacks on Mercia mainly dynastic? Was their quarrel not with the people but with King Burhred personally? Was Ceolwulf purely a Danish puppet, or a popular candidate for the throne who followed the common practice of inviting a neighbouring power to assist him? And was the division of the land really a version of ‘ethnic cleansing’ at the expense of the general population, a welcome addition to the manpower of the kingdom, or a negotiated reward to Ceolwulf’s allies for their help against Burhred? In the latter case the new king seems to have miscalculated, because the Danes were not at all keen to accept English overlordship and a long struggle for supremacy lay ahead. Perhaps that is why the Chronicle describes him as ‘foolish’, rather than treacherous, cowardly, or any of the other insulting epithets which might have come to mind.
It is not clear what happened to Ceolwulf, but his reign was apparently short. According to an eleventh-century king list he held the throne for five years, and it is possible that his death is implied in a laconic entry in the Welsh Annals for 880 describing a battle at Conway: ‘vengeance for Rhodri at God’s hand’. William of Malmesbury’s epitaph for Ceolwulf, which concludes his chapter on the Mercian kings, is characteristically brutal: ‘Thus the sovereignty of the Mercians, which prematurely bloomed by the overweening ambition of a heathen [i.e. Penda], altogether withered away through the inactivity of a driveller king, in the year of our Lord’s incarnation eight hundred and seventy five.’
Chapter 10
The ‘Liberation’ and the Triumph of Wessex
At any rate, Ceolwulf II was the last generally acknowledged king of Mercia, his death bringing to an end the dynasty which had ruled the heart of England for nearly three centuries. The next surviving record of events is a charter of 883 which was issued by Aethelred, ‘ealdorman of the Mercians’, with the approval of ‘King Alfred and the whole Mercian council’. The last few years had seen a dramatic change in the fortunes of the West Saxons and their leader. In the summer of 878 he emerged from his refuge, mustered the fighting men of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire, and inflicted a decisive defeat on the Danes at the Battle of Ethandune on the slopes of the Wiltshire Downs. Guthrum, driven into his camp and besieged there for a fortnight, surrendered and agreed to be baptised. A formal peace was made at Wedmore, and the invaders retired to settle on the land in East Anglia.
For the next few years the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records Viking raids against the Franks, and a minor engagement at sea in which four shiploads of renegade Danes were defeated by Alfred’s fleet, but on the whole England was left in peace. It is not clear who ealdorman Aethelred was: he was probably a native Mercian, but he owed his position to Alfred and obviously recognised him as his overlord. The two men may well have developed a relationship based on mutual respect, for they were both outstanding war leaders. In a later charter Aethelred is described as ‘dux et patricius’, ‘earl and patrician’, of Mercia, but he never took the title of king, though Aethelweard’s version of the Chronicle does use it to describe him, probably anachronistically.
In 885 a raiding army from France broke the peace when it attacked Rochester, but Alfred repulsed it and retaliated by a seaborne raid on East Anglia. In the following year he recaptured London from the Viking force which had occupied it since 879, repaired the physical damage done by their occupation, and then handed it over to Aethelred to govern on his behalf. Another treaty with Guthrum formalised relations with what had now become recognised as a separate Danish kingdom in the east of England. At about the same time Aethelred married Alfred’s daughter Aethelflaed, later to become famous as the ‘Lady of the Mercians’. Asser tells us that ‘all the Angles and Saxons’ not under Viking rule ‘turned willingly to King Alfred and submitted themselves to his lordship.’ This is not unlikely, as Alfred was the only English leader who seemed to be able to offer protection against the invaders. Nevertheless, if the Mercians were now junior partners in the alliance, they still had an important part to play. Aethelred was still in control of more than half of the territory of Offa’s kingdom south and west of the Danelaw, and to judge from the charters which he continued to issue he was allowed a large degree of autonomy. He also campaigned independently in South Wales, causing the Welsh rulers to protest to Alfred about his ‘tyrannical behaviour’.
In 892 another great Danish army arrived in Kent in 250 ships, later supplemented by another eighty under Haesten. Guthrum had by now died, and the Danes of East Anglia, under his successor Eric, launched raids of their own to take advantage of the confusion. Most of the fighting in this campaign occurred in south-east England, where the West Saxon armies, probably with the aid of Mercian reinforcements, had the best of it. They defeated a Danish army at Farnham and forced it to abandon all its loot and escape across the Thames at a place where there was no ford, which must have led to further losses of equipment if not loss of life from drowning. They subsequently stormed Haesten’s camp at Benfleet, burned his fleet and took his wife and children hostage. This success was possible because the main Danish force was absent from its base at the time, but is significant because it was the first time that an English army had taken a fortified Viking camp by assault. Haesten’s family were returned to him as a gesture of reconciliation, and because his sons were the god-children of Alfred and Aethelred, but this did not bring about peace.
Instead Haesten led a great raiding army against Mercia. Why this region was targeted we do not know, but it implies that the Danes were well aware of the Mercian role in their defeats. They managed to make their way, by a route which is unclear, from the Thames to the mouth of the Severn, and up that river into western Mercia. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes the Vikings going ‘up the Thames until they reached the Severn’, but as there is no passage by water from the upper reaches of the Thames into the Severn it seems likely that they took the sea route along the south coast of England and round Land’s End. They were reinforced by raiders from East Anglia and Northumbria, although the Chronicle does not make it clear whether these were all Danes, or whether some of their English subjects also joined them, glad of an opportunity to avenge themselves on the Mercians who had once dominated them. Alfred was busy campaigning in Devon, but Aethelred, with the West Saxon ealdormen Aethelhelm and Aethelnoth, gathered an army to resist the invasion, mustering men not only from all over southern England, but even some allies from North Wales. They went in pursuit of the Vikings, probably on horseback, and caught them at a place called Buttington, which has been identified either with a site near the confluence of the Rivers Severn and Wye, or more credibly further upstream at the village of Buttington near Welshpool, where traces of an earthwork of possibly Anglo-Saxon date still survive (Swanton (trans.), Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 1996).
The Danes built a defensive camp and Aeth
elred invested it from all sides, deploying his troops on both sides of the river. Eventually the besieged Danes ran out of food; when they had eaten their horses and were on the verge of starvation they sallied out and attacked the English on the eastern bank. The Chronicle says that many Englishmen of rank were killed, singling out a king’s thegn named Ordhere for special mention, but the Danes were defeated with ‘great slaughter’. The survivors retired to their ships and fled back to Essex, only to regroup and sail back round the coast, this time landing near Chester. They occupied the town before the English could catch them; strangely the Chronicle calls it ‘deserted’, perhaps meaning that most of the houses were outside the old Roman walls, which were consequently undefended.
Aethelred’s troops were again mounted on horses, but they were not equipped for an assault on a fortified town. They contented themselves with ravaging the countryside and bottling up the Vikings inside the defences, one of the less glamorous aspects of warfare which is graphically described in the Chronicle: they ‘took all the cattle that were outside there, and killed all the men they could ride down outside the fort; and burned up all the corn, and with their horses ate up all the neighbourhood.’ Once again deprived of supplies, the invaders abandoned Chester and retreated into Wales, from where they finally sailed home to East Anglia for the winter.
