An Onslaught of Spears E-Book

Jeffrey James

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 417

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

After more than 200 years of menacing Viking attacks, England finally fell under Danish control in 1016. While earlier kings of Wessex had pushed back the tide of Danish encroachment, wave after wave of incursions from powerful Scandinavian raiders – such as fierce Thorkill 'the tall', wily Olaf Tryggvason and the redoubtable Swein Forkbeard – caused Aethelred II's English forces to eventually buckle under the mounting pressure. Though losing and then regaining his kingdom through force of arms makes him one of only two English monarchs ever to do so, Aethelred's military reputation has, as a result of bias, become irrevocably tarnished. And no less misunderstood is his son Edmund (Ironside), whose energetic campaign against Cnut in 1016 would decide England's fate. An Onslaught of Spears comprehensively chronicles the events in England from the late eighth century to Cnut's victory in 1016. Linking the Danish invasion to the Norman conquest that took place just fifty years later and challenging the myth of Aethelred 'the Unready', Jeffrey James's military history of this turbulent period reveals the true nature of England's armies and her kings.

Leseprobe

Front cover: Viking longship at sunset. Courtesy of and copyright of Mark Milham.

Contents

Title

Introduction

1. First Onslaught

2. Confronting the Danelaw

3. Dawn of the Second Viking Age in England

4. ‘The Insolence of the Danes’

5. ‘Winning the Swordmoot’

6. Swein Forkbeard’s Invasion of 1013

7. ‘After Great Toils and Difficulties’

8. ‘Flet Engle … Ded is Edmund’

9. Aftermath

Selected Further Reading

Appendix 1 Battle Chronology 796–1016

Appendix 2 The Burhs of the Burghal Hidage

Appendix 3 The West Saxon and English Succession (858–1066)

Plates

Copyright

Introduction

England fell under Danish control around 1,000 years ago, in 1016. The motive of the invaders was not to settle land but to gain riches, wreak revenge and establish political and military hegemony over a rich and prosperous country. For the best part of three decades, successive Danish kings ruled in England as well as Denmark and much of Norway. Had each king not been short-lived, an Englishman’s national heritage might now be considered in large part Scandinavian.

Viking attacks on England had been an overriding menace for more than 200 years. Historians identify two discrete Viking ages: the first (c. 793–954) when three of the four old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England fell for a time under Viking control, before being won back; the second spanning much of the reign of Aethelred II (978–1016), when sustained attacks from successive, voracious Scandinavian warlords toppled English rule altogether. The first two chapters of this book cover the ‘first Viking Age’; the rest of the book focuses on the second. The narrative spans a period of our history when the way armies were organised and how they fought is not fully understood; the locations of even the larger battles are unknown or disputed. Assandun, the culminating battle of Cnut’s campaign of conquest in 1016, was fought in Essex, but whether at Ashdon, on the borders with Cambridgeshire, or at Ashingdon, in the south-east of the county, is unclear. Some battles are not referenced in the mainstream chronicles. Only tantalisingly brief mentions occur in little-known Celtic annals or in later Icelandic sagas of dubious provenance. Over fifty known battles were fought between Anglo-Saxons and Vikings in England from the late eighth century up until 1016, approximately one every four years on average, but they often arrived in clusters. Outside of unusually eventful years such as 871, 893 and 1016, battles were uncommon, and only a few were major cataclysms (see the Appendix 1 Battle Chronology 796–1016).

Encounters could be quite formal affairs. A lengthy period of religious observance, including the hearing of Mass, took place on the Christian side before the Battle of Ashdown (871). Large communities of monks accompanied the English army into battle at Assandun. An Old English poem known as ‘The Battle of Maldon’ (991) describes the English leader Byrhtnoth allowing a stronger Viking force to cross a causeway unopposed, enabling both sides to fight on an equal footing. Although rarely sought, set-piece battles at this time seldom appear to have been rushed.

If the military history is elusive, the geography of the time is no less so. Forests were more extensive than today; roads across mountainous districts, such as the Pennines, almost non-existent. Extensive regions of marshland curtailed or funnelled movement. Areas such as the Humberhead Levels (circumscribing the borders of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire), Romney Marsh in Kent and the Somerset Levels (all now dry land), were in early medieval times permanently or seasonally waterlogged and subject to regular inundation from the sea. The political term Northumbria attests to the Humber being a major barrier between North and South, splitting the country geographically. The sinuous course of the Thames (demarcating the boundary between Wessex to the north and Mercia to the south) underwrote the importance of heavily garrisoned fords at flashpoints such as Wallingford, Oxford and Abingdon. Seaways and navigable river systems such as the Trent and the Severn often afforded the safest and quickest mode of travel for raiding armies, and islands such as Mersea in Essex, Sheppey and Thanet in Kent, and the Isle of Wight became important Viking strongholds.

The most densely populated areas of England in early medieval times were parts of Lincolnshire, East Anglia and east Kent. Other, lesser concentrations of peoples existed in south Somerset and along the South Coast. Population estimates range from 1.25 to 2 million people in the late eleventh century, a marked decline from more prosperous and secure Roman times, when the population is estimated to have peaked at as many as 4 million. It would not be until the 1300s that numbers would again reach such levels; only to decline again with the arrival of the Black Death in the Middle Ages.

Early English chroniclers routinely described Viking invaders up until the eleventh century as ‘raiding-armies’, and sometimes used the same terminology to describe local forces striking back. In its mildest form raiding might equally well be termed foraging, the procurement of forage and supplies being (as in any period of history) an on-going requirement for large armies, and one needing to be undertaken ever further afield, for obvious reasons. But Viking raiding armies were not noted for their mildness. If contemporary accounts are to be believed, their sorties were aggressively undertaken, with local peasant communities bearing the brunt of the violence; men were killed and women and children enslaved. Such Viking depredations resulted in untold misery for captives sold on in the slave marts of Dublin and Rouen. Harrying of an opponent’s land differed only in motivation. It was an overtly warlike activity which both sides engaged in, designed to deny resources to an enemy or to punish transgression. Areas harried were systematically destroyed by fire and sword. Villages were razed to the ground and inhabitants indiscriminately slaughtered.

To the early English chroniclers, the Vikings were simply referred to as ‘heathen men’ or, more often, Danes. Only later was the term Viking commonly used, thought variously to mean sea pirate, trader, traveller or men of the fjords. Irish chroniclers made a clear and early distinction between the Norse ‘Finngaill’ (white foreigners) and Danish ‘Dubhgaill’ (black foreigners), whose fierce, hereditary rivalry turned all Ireland into a battleground in the ninth and tenth centuries, and whose depredations resulted in enormous losses to the Irish in destroyed manuscripts and precious religious objects. The route from Oslo fjord to Dublin became known as the ‘sea road’ and the islands and archipelagos of northern Britain became established settlement points and stopovers for seagoing Viking communities. Seafaring acumen and fierce fighting skills gave the newcomers mobility and martial advantage capable of overwhelming the relatively flimsy, static defences of much of Christianised Europe. Even the mighty Carolingian Empire was rocked by the severity of their attacks, and kings such as Charles ‘the Bald’ and Charles ‘the Fat’ were forced to pay tribute to avoid protracted warfare in the same way as a number of Anglo-Saxon kings, including Alfred ‘the Great’ (d. 899) and Aethelred II. River systems and estuaries which acted as buffers between rival petty kingdoms in Ireland, Britain and on the Continent were highways for the invaders, whose shallow-drafted boats were able to penetrate deep into the interior before disgorging raiding parties, forerunners of full-scale armies.

As early as the eighth century, warships are thought to have been quite different from other mercantile craft, and were designed to be distinctively long in proportion to their width. Eight knots was a likely maximum speed for a typical longship under oars, though it was not a pace likely to be kept up for long, and would have been impossible to achieve against a swift tide. Size mattered. The number of warriors on board determined the ship’s combat potential and speed. King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway (d. 999) is credited with having a flagship capable of carrying 500 men. Such enormous ships were presumably quite rare; their size was also likely exaggerated for dramatic effect. More typically, longships are thought to have carried around forty to forty-five men when at full complement – three men to an oar, depending on space – allowing for one or more relief crews, an important consideration in wartime or when undertaking long-distance voyages.

Though renowned as seafarers, with a good knowledge of rudimentary astronomy, early medieval mariners did not take unnecessary risks. They stayed well in sight of land whenever possible, making use of estuarine islands and inlets as safe havens. Also, the need to regularly take on fresh water and re-victual would have necessitated frequent stopovers. Even so, disaster sometimes struck. Just a year after the Vikings first appeared off the north-east coast of England, in 793, the twelfth-century chronicler Simeon of Durham reported how a violent storm shattered, destroyed and broke up the Viking’s vessels – ‘the sea swallowing up very many of them’, while others were cast ashore and speedily slain without mercy by the locals.

Sandwich and Thanet are often mentioned as the first landfall for raiders from Scandinavia and northern Europe, indicating that the Vikings sought to minimise sailing time by crossing the English Channel at its narrowpoint.

The construction of simple but effective fortifications and supply depots in the territories invaded indicates a strong sense of forward planning among early Viking leaders. Their trademark D-shaped defensive enclosures exist today as ghostly, barely discernible earthworks, notably at places such as Repton in south Derbyshire. Garrison sites such as these served as centres for domestic and commercial activities as well as warlike ones.

Though fierce and uncompromising, the majority of Vikings were not as keenly impatient for death and glory as popular mythology would have us believe. Danish settlement north of the Thames and in East Anglia was in large part driven by the requirements of a retired Viking warrior class, exhausted by campaigning. Having seized overall control and stripped an area of its riches, Viking leaders were often content to coexist with compliant Anglo-Saxon kings, sometimes puppets set up by the Vikings themselves. When faced with strong opposition they would look elsewhere for plunder.

Once an initial period of raiding and fighting was over, there appears to have been no great barrier to coexistence of Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians. The campaigns fought in the second half of the ninth century, which saw the demise of three of the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England, paved the way for future prosperity. York and Chester became booming commercial centres for Scandinavian trade; the former is thought to have been able to support a population in excess of 20,000 by the close of the tenth century.

Whereas chronicled accounts of Alfred the Great’s time are both objective and immediate, such objectivity is rarely found in the narratives of Aethelred II’s troubled reign. Failure in battle for the latter attracted criticism more on moral grounds than material ones, the assumption being that God was punishing the loser for good reason. By the end of the tenth century, chroniclers had become increasingly judgemental of their rulers. As a result, the accounts of campaigns fought against a succession of Viking invaders in the first decade of the tenth century were systematically contaminated by the frequent scapegoating of Aethelred’s ministers and commanders.

Despite the fact that he reigned for significantly longer than any other early medieval king, and is one of only two English kings ever to win back his throne by force of arms (the other was Edward IV), Aethelred’s military reputation has, as a result of this bias, become irrevocably tarnished, leading to the indictment of him as being ‘ill-counselled’, a ditherer, unprepared to face his aggressors. The accounts of Aethelred’s reign in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were written some time after the king’s death, and were based (it is thought) on a single history of his reign written by an anonymous and judgemental author. The writer knew the fateful outcome for the English and backdated portentous events for dramatic effect, including ominous red clouds appearing at midnight and unexplained routs and mutinies afflicting his countrymen.

The historian Pauline Stafford has stated in her book Unification and Conquest that the ‘bleak picture of incompetence, arbitrariness and treachery’ painted by this writer, plus ‘the fullness and compulsion of his narrative’ has resulted in future historians being unable to free themselves from his influence. Building on this early gloss, twelfth-century historians embellished their own histories with dubious acts of treachery, of decapitated heads changing the course of battle and of assassins lurking in the shadows. Being the work of monks (writing was a clerical monopoly – laymen could often read, but could seldom write), such authors were hampered by having access solely to classical or biblical works for descriptions of how men might fight or overcome their enemies.

Earlier accounts from Alfred the Great’s time are generally crisper and more detailed, implying they were dictated by someone who actually witnessed the fighting. The first version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (known as the Winchester manuscript) may even have been sponsored by Alfred directly, the accounts of battles and campaigns fought by him and his commanders being written during his lifetime. Later histories, such as those written by Florence of Worcester (referred to in this text as Florence), William of Malmesbury, Simeon of Durham and Henry of Huntingdon – all written in the twelfth century – also provide valuable insights, being based, it is thought, on versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that are now lost. Other important sources include Bishop Asser’s contemporary Life of Alfred – Asser was a monk of St Davids in Pembrokeshire who entered Alfred’s service and eventually became the Bishop of Sherborne – and the Encomium Emmae Reginae, written ‘in praise of Queen Emma’ (the wife of both Aethelred II and Cnut) by an anonymous author around the year 1040, less than thirty years after the Danish Conquest. Nevertheless, the Maldon battle poem is by far the most detailed written account of men facing battle in the so-called Dark Ages.

Although a literary undertaking first and foremost, the Maldon poem is not thought to be a work of fiction, despite some important aspects of the narrative owing more to classical history than late tenth-century reality. Though not intended to be precisely accurate, the poem must have contained sufficient factual detail for it to have been believed by a contemporary audience. Moreover, the absence of retrospective statements indicates it was penned before the full impact of the Viking onslaught was recognised. In the second half of the eleventh century, the Bayeux Tapestry (a 77yd-long embroidered account of the campaign and the battle at Hastings) provides a more direct visual insight to medieval warfare, showing not only the way warriors were armoured and equipped, but also how William of Normandy’s invasion was launched and how armies of the period fought. But no such tapestry exists to help the military historian seeking to understand the time of Swein Forkbeard’s and Cnut’s invasions and equally hard-fought campaigns fifty years earlier.

1

First Onslaught

1.1

Reports in twelfth-century histories of ‘horrible lightnings and flashes of fire, glancing and flying to and fro’ heralded the first appearance of the Vikings in England. They invoke images of fierce, heavily armed and opportunistic freebooters arriving in shield-bedecked longships, slaughtering and plundering at will. But this highly romanticised view is unlikely to be true. Norse raiders, who arrived in three ships – the first recorded raid – and who bludgeoned a king’s reeve (customs officer) to death on Portland beach, Dorset, in 789, had been mistaken by their victim for commonplace traders. Viking appearance cannot therefore have been in any way remarkable.

At the religious centres at Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Iona (all in the far north), raiders knew beforehand that their victims were rich and undefended, having had commercial dealings with them in the past. At each, the Viking marauders are said to have dug up the altars and plundered the church treasures: gold, silver and other precious objects. In the case of Iona (off the west coast of Scotland) the religious community there was attacked several times in the space of a decade. On one occasion sixty-eight of its monks were slain. On another the abbot was killed when he refused to disclose the location of the hidden shrine of St Columba. A letter sent by the cleric Alcuin to the King of Northumbria bewailed, ‘Never before has such terror been seen in England as we have suffered from heathen people.’

Further fierce ‘heathen men’ – both Norse and Danes – began arriving in ever greater numbers on the coasts of England at the turn of the ninth century. Viking war-bands were campaigning in Kent as early as 804. When confronted by a resolute defence, these forays could be driven off and the Vikings defeated and destroyed, but not always. King Egbert’s West Saxons were defeated at Carhampton in Somerset in 836. Carhampton was one of several Saxon royal estates located between Minehead and the estuary of the River Parrett. Others included Williton and Cannington. Carhampton was also at one time a Celtic monastic site; its name is thought to derive from little-known St Carantoc. Other monastic centres lay nearby at Porlock, St Decumans, Timberscombe and Cannington. Two years later Egbert got his own back, crushing a combined Viking and Welsh army at Hingston Down beside the River Tamar. Southampton and Portland were assaulted in 840; the men of Wessex prevailed at the former, but were defeated at the latter. The terrified inhabitants of Romney Marsh in Kent were slaughtered or enslaved the following year. London and Rochester were both broken into and sacked. Then, in a repeat encounter at Carhampton, thirty-five shiploads of Vikings raided the royal estate there in 843, defeating King Aethelwulf’s Devon array. But when the Vikings struck the South-West Coast later in the decade, the West Saxons butchered them in a bloody encounter at the mouth of the River Parrett.

Main battle sites between 836 and 860.

The West Saxon royal tomb at Sherborne Abbey: the bones of kings Aethelberht and Aethelbald lie nearby.

The great victories won at the midpoint of the century stemmed the tide of Viking attack for a decade of so. One occurred at Wigborough in Somerset, where the men of Devon came out on top; another took place in the South-East at the unlocated battlefield of Aclea (Oak Leigh). On this second occasion the locals were faced by an exceptionally large army of Vikings arriving up the Thames in 350 ships, ten times the number that assaulted Carhampton in 843. Once they had plundered London and Canterbury, the invaders travelled into Surrey, where King Aethelwulf of Wessex and his son Aethelbald faced them. The hardy West Saxons are said to have made the greatest slaughter of any heathen army ever heard of at that time. The Battle of Aclea was a major encounter by the standards of the day. King Aethelwulf was a formidable leader, just as his son Alfred would become.

Three ambitious brothers – Ivar (known as ‘the Boneless’), Ubba and Halfdan – fronted the first successful and concerted Danish onslaught on England, dismantling the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, East Anglia and Mercia within a decade of their arrival in 865. They had been militarily active in Ireland and on the Continent for some time; the motivation of these particular men and others of their kind was the forcible occupation and exploitation of lands richer and more fertile than their own. The term ‘great’ used by the chroniclers to describe their army differentiates it from many of the earlier war-bands plaguing England throughout the first half of the ninth century. Only the Viking army at Aclea and perhaps another which devastated Winchester in 860 can have rivalled it in living memory. Behind a protective screen of spears, Scandinavian settlement proceeded apace between the years 865 and 870, and the ‘great army’ gained military control over much of the north and east of the country.

In Northumbria a puppet king was established and whole swathes of territory east of the Pennines fell under Viking control, later to be settled by Scandinavian incomers. The northern and eastern lands were not occupied without a fight, and much savagery was enacted. Two Anglian claimant kings of York and eight northern ealdormen were slain attempting to wrest York back from heathen clutches in the spring of 866. One of the kings – Aelle – was reputedly ‘blood-eagled’ by Ivar – sacrificed to the Norse god Odin; the dying king’s ribcage was shattered, and then his lungs drawn out in a cruel parody of an open-winged bird. Legend has it this was done to avenge the death of Ivar’s father – the semi-mythical Ragnar Hairybreeks – who had earlier been thrown alive into a Northumbrian snake pit on Aelle’s command.

Three years later, Ivar’s mounted war-bands are described as ‘falling like wolves’ on King Edmund’s East Anglian kingdom, while Ubba with the Viking fleet harried the coastline. Villages were burned and monasteries destroyed. At the religious centre at Peterborough the abbot and all his monks were brutally killed. Edmund, retrospectively lauded as ‘the most saintly and glorious King of the East Angles’, having fallen at the Battle of Hoxne (c. 870), suffered martyrdom. Although variously alleged to have been blood-eagled, decapitated or tied to a tree and executed by a firing squad of archers in the manner of St Sebastian, more likely he died fighting. Whatever the manner of his death, the East Anglian king had made the mistake of withholding his submission and any tribute demanded by the Vikings until Ivar and his brothers accepted Christianity. Unfortunately for Edmund it was a tactic that worked better for Alfred the Great, and later for Aethelred II, when faced by opponents less committed to a pagan way of life than the sons of Ragnar.

Heavily decorated Viking sword hilt and pommel.

Ivar’s name disappears from Anglo-Saxon records around this time. The chronicler Aethelweard claims he died in 870, shortly after martyring King Edmund of East Anglia. Yet someone called Imhar (Norse for Ivar) is recorded in the Annals of Ireland as having ended his days in Ireland in 873. A decade or so earlier this same Imhar is said to have won a great victory against rival Scandinavians and their Irish auxiliaries in Munster. After further battles, he descended on the rich Boyne valley in the company of a mixed band of plunderers and looted the revered royal tombs of Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange. The outrage this engendered forced him out of the country and the Irish chroniclers lose track of him at this point.

If Imhar was the same person as Ivar ‘the Boneless’, he spent the next few years dismantling the kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia. He then switched his attention to Strathclyde and the Scottish lowlands. After capturing the stronghold of Dumbarton, on the Clyde, he is claimed to have brought away with him into captivity ‘a great prey of Angles and Britons and Picts’, and to have arrived back in Ireland in 200 ships. He died soon after. Whether he enjoyed a natural death or suffered a violent one is not known. What fate awaited his captives, sold on in Dublin’s bustling slave marts, can only be imagined, and such unsavoury activities should serve as a salutary reminder of the appallingly destructive nature of Dark Age aggression at this time. Ivar was hailed grandly as ‘king of the Norsemen of all Ireland and Britain’ and many of the kings at Dublin and York in the first half of the tenth century would claim to be directly related to him, later becoming known as Clan Ivar. Slave trading and tomb raiding aside, his activities represented an astonishing and unique achievement. The Dublin–York axis he helped to create would prove to be a long-standing and powerful political counterweight to later English unification attempts; this is testament to Ivar’s restless energy, and, if the traditional stories about him are to be believed, to his unbounded cruelty.

Having first occupied London, the great heathen army – now led by Ivar’s brother Halfdan – marched against the kingdom of Wessex and set up their winter camp at the West Saxon royal manor at Reading, in Berkshire, in the winter of 870–71. Situated on an island at the confluence of the Thames and Kennet, the Viking base there benefited from strategic attributes beloved of Vikings. Naturally moated, with good communications eastwards to the sea and a rich hinterland to plunder, it was an ideal site. During the year that followed – sometimes referred to as Alfred the Great’s ‘year of battles’ – the men of Wessex are described as often ‘riding out’ on horseback against the enemy. The Vikings did the same, in their case on horses seized or bartered from the terrified locals. The seizure of horses had been a feature of Viking warfare in Europe for some time. Once they were unable to penetrate further inland by ship, the raiders used stolen or purchased horses to travel deeper into the interior. For this reason the Frankish king, Charles the Bald, having seen his lands almost overwhelmed by Viking incursions, forbade the sale of horses to the Northmen on pain of death.

The Battle of Ashdown – January 871

After suffering an initial setback outside the gates of Reading, the Wessex forces, led by King Aethelred I, met the Vikings in battle a day’s march to the west, at Ashdown in east Berkshire. A day’s march westwards from Reading is Lowbury Hill, the highest point on the East Berkshire Downs, and a likely rallying point for the West Saxon forces. The momentous battle which followed would in large measure determine the fate of the kingdom. Though no battle plans from this period exist, accounts in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Asser’s history agree that both sides formed up two divisions apiece, squaring up to each other across a shallow valley. King Aethelred was opposed by forces led by the Danish kings Halfdan and Bagsecg; Aethelred’s younger brother Alfred faced a force led by a number of ‘jarls’. Asser deliberately embellished Alfred’s role in the battle, while at the same time downplaying Aethelred’s. He portrayed the king as reluctant to fight immediately, stubbornly waiting to hear Mass in his tent until battle was joined, leaving his younger brother to make the first move against the heathens.

Attending to spiritual needs was an essential adjunct to martial preparedness in medieval times. Yet surprisingly Asser – a churchman – appears to make this a point of criticism. Both Aethelred and Alfred must have taken considerable time preparing themselves prior to the battle, and it is much more likely Mass was over and done with when they – together – co-ordinated their efforts against the Viking divisions, closing with them simultaneously. The stronger of the two Danish units would have been the kings’ force. Even the biased Asser admitted the ‘core’ of the army had been assigned to the command of the two heathen kings; the rest were assigned to the jarls confronting Alfred.

Aethelred I’s army would have comprised his own and Alfred’s war-bands, embattled together with the armed retainers of other noblemen and prominent landowners from the shires of Wessex, the latter levied based on formalised military obligations. The call-up rate was based on one fighting man per five ‘hides’ of land – a ‘hide’ being a measure based on a quantity of land capable of maintaining a family unit. The absolute size of the army is difficult to gauge, but must have been at least equivalent to the Viking army opposing them; the latter comprised a large part of the force which had already overrun Northumbria and East Anglia, and which may have been reinforced since then. Some idea of its size can perhaps be gained from another better-documented Viking force that arrived in south-east England from the Continent in the 890s in two fleets. Frankish chroniclers reckoned the smaller of the two fleets to contain around 400 warriors. The other force, described as a ‘great army’, was larger still. The two fleets comprised vessels of all shapes and sizes, the craft having been procured in an emergency triggered by famine and the threat of Carolingian retribution. Some were described as merely light ‘barks’, transporting not just warriors but also horses, womenfolk, children, weaponry and provisions. If the army arriving in eighty ships was 400 strong (much of the space on board being taken up by dependents and belongings), the other Viking force, arriving in 250 ships, might have fielded 1,250 warriors on the same basis, making the size of the combined army around 1,650 – a not unreasonable number for the time. The complement of a Viking longship in wartime might normally be in the region of forty men, but the two fleets which arrived in 892 were not war fleets, and might better be described as ‘boat people’. The Viking forces at Ashdown may have numbered little more – 2,000 men perhaps. That the West Saxons defeated them implies their numbers to have been at least comparable, if not greater.

If it was made up of semi-professional soldiers, Aethelred and Alfred’s army might have been assembled at short notice. If the participants also worked the land, they would take longer to be gathered, as they would be spread out across the countryside. Additionally, farmers could only be relied upon to fight outside of the busy planting and harvesting seasons, otherwise everyone would starve. Society was broadly split between those who prayed, those who laboured and those who fought. Common shire-folk could hardly be expected to down tools and ride the length and breadth of the countryside when the need arose, although locals might on occasion have acted as gofers, fetching supplies for the army and tending the wounded after battle. Terms such as ‘the great fyrd’ have been used in the past to describe the way Anglo-Saxon and later English armies were called up. Countering this, David Sturdy, in his book Alfred the Great, asserts that the belief that peasants and small farmers ever gathered to form a national army or fyrd is a strange delusion dreamt up by Victorian antiquarians; he argues instead that such armies comprised the henchmen and bodyguards of noblemen (landowners).

Both Anglo-Saxon and Viking armies throughout the ninth and tenth centuries appear to have routinely dismounted before battle, and tethered their horses to the rear; they remounted only to pursue or flee. Leaders emulated their men, demonstrating their resolve to stand and fight. Cavalry in the strictest sense of the term, with drilled units of horsemen charging together in open or closed order, did not feature in English warfare until the arrival of the Normans, mainly because the wherewithal in terms of suitable mounts, training and accoutrement was lacking. Tactical units – war-bands or divisions – comprised discrete groups of men owing allegiance to one or more nobleman or leader. Larger musters were led by a king or by his delegated appointee. For the Anglo-Saxons this was often a grandee known as an ealdorman, the equivalent of a regional overlord, sometimes called a ‘half-king’, later an earl.

When the king or his ealdormen took the field, mailed thegns were required to follow them into battle. Noblemen and landowners in their own right, thegns were first and foremost battle-hardened warriors. Post-Norman Conquest, they would become better known as knights or barons. Viking armies followed a similar organisational structure, with kings and sub-kings, jarls and housecarls mirroring the Anglo-Saxon pecking order. Alfred the Great’s will made reference to payments to ‘the men who serve me’, and a sixth of all Alfred’s revenue was paid to his well-armed fighting retinue. Warriors such as these ‘rode out’ with the king on a day-to-day basis.

The combat dress of a well-equipped Anglo-Saxon or Viking warrior might have comprised a conical helmet made from a framework of metal (iron or bronze) bands, strengthened by a leather cap with or without a nasal guard, with a studded or ringed leather byrnie over a padded jacket known as a ‘gambuson’ or ‘aketon’, plus leather greaves to protect the legs. Only the nobles and their bodyguards would have been so well equipped. Many of the rank and file would likely have worn just a simple leather coat or jacket, and may have lacked body and head protection altogether. It was not until the early eleventh century, in response to Viking aggression from better-armed and -equipped warriors – many clad in mail – for whom fighting had become a vocation, that armour and helmets became more commonplace among the English. King Aethelred II’s militarisation programme during the latter part of the first decade of the eleventh century laid the groundwork for this, and the Bayeux Tapestry illustrates the way warriors had evolved by 1066, with full-length mail tunics, iron helmets and kite-shaped shields.

Leaders and their bodyguards wielded good-quality swords; the common fighting men did not. Weapons reflected status. The rank and file relied on javelins, spears, axes and daggers. Ownership of a finely worked double-edged sword – the supreme weapon of war – is thought to have been almost completely restricted to the nobility in England in early medieval times, something probably true for the Vikings as well. An example of such a sword was discovered deep in the bed of the River Frome at Wareham in 1927. Its guard was decorated with copper and silver; its handle grip was made of antler horn. An incomplete inscription in Old English on the handle read ‘Æ[something] owns me’. Æ being a prefix restricted to the West Saxon Royal Family, the sword most likely belonged to a Wessex nobleman of some standing, and was probably lost later than Alfred’s day, during fighting around the turn of the millennium, or even later in 1015.

The Wareham sword found in the River Frome. (By kind permission of Dorset County Museum)

Circular shields, larger ones just under 3ft (90cm) in diameter, made of leather-bound wood and centred with a 6in (15cm) iron boss, were carried by the warriors of the time until superseded by kite-shaped ones originating from the Middle East. A formidable weapon in its own right, the shield boss could be used as a knuckleduster when fighting in close order to topple an opponent before despatching him with spear or dagger. Javelins (sometimes called ‘darts’) launched at a range of around forty to fifty paces were designed to embed themselves in shields, which bent under the weight, rendering the shield useless. They could even penetrate mail at a depth sufficient to disable an armoured warrior, and were sometimes barbed, hindering their removal from an unarmoured victim’s torso, causing frightful wounds. Throwing axes and slingshots were also hurled during the preliminary exchanges, and archers appear to have figured too.

Anglo-Saxon shield bosses and partial sword. (By kind permission of Hampshire County Council)

Circumstantial evidence points towards the use of bows being more prevalent among Viking armies than Anglo-Saxon ones. The bows in question were longbows between 5 and 6ft in length, and a grave find containing twenty-one arrow heads might be taken to represent a typical quiver load. Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla – a collection of sagas written in the first half of the thirteenth century – recounts, with reference to Eric Bloodaxe, how ‘the prince bent the yew, and wound bees flew’, and how ‘the yew bow twanged when swords were drawn’; this vividly illustrates how archery preceded hand-to-hand combat in battle. The Scandinavian-inspired Old English heroic poem Beowulf tells how, ‘the rain of iron when a storm of darts, sped by bowstrings, came flying over the shield wall’. The Frankish chronicler Regino of Prum described a Viking army seeing off a Frankish attack by, ‘rattling their quivers, raising shouts and joining battle’. The lower margin of the Bayeux Tapestry shows William the Conqueror’s diminutive archers supporting their cavalry by ‘shooting in’ the deciding charge of the day at Hastings in 1066.

Bowmen shown in this way are sometimes explained as reflecting an archer’s low social status in comparison with other warriors. At odds with this notion, Viking arrows have been uncovered in numerous high-status graves in Ireland and elsewhere. Because it needed strength and a high degree of proficiency, archers were much valued in Scandinavian armies, and probably in Anglo-Saxon ones too. Longbows excavated at Hedeby, at the southern end of the Jutland peninsular, and at Ballinderry in Ireland, unless one-offs, indicate that the bows carried by their Viking owners would have been very considerable weapons. Norwegian law listed bows as among the items to be brought to an army’s muster by those summoned. Casting doubt on assertions that English armies made do without archers, outlines of decomposed bows of more than 5ft in length have been found in pagan Anglo-Saxon graves, predating the Alfredian period. Since weaponry does not appear in Christian graves, it could well be that Anglo-Saxon bowmen continued to feature in Alfred’s wars and the wars of his successors, even though they get scant mention.

Fighting spears, known variously as ‘francas’ or ‘aescs’, named for their geographic origin (Francia) or wood type (ash), comprised the most commonly employed melee weapons in both Anglo-Saxon and Viking armies. Some were fitted with wings part way down the shaft to prevent over-penetration of the victim’s torso, thereby facilitating its reuse. The wings might also deflect an enemy’s weapon, or be used to hook around an opponent’s shield. Spear heads were either spiked or leaf shaped: the former for piercing, the latter for inflicting lateral blows. When a spear was lost or broken, the ‘scramasax’, a widely used Frankish dagger, or the ‘seaxe’, a long knife that gave the Saxons their distinctive name, became invaluable secondary weapons. Spears were later supplemented by the two-handed broad axe – a weapon introduced into England by Scandinavians around the turn of the millennium and shown wielded by the English to good effect against Norman cavalry on the Bayeux Tapestry.

Anglo-Saxon spears heads and axe head. (By kind permission of Hampshire County Council)

Virtually all accounts of battle from early medieval times are brief and formulaic, with little or nothing of the course of the action described. Common terminology includes phases such as ‘place of slaughter’, medieval shorthand for locating the dreadful aftermath of battle. Where a decisive result was gained, the death toll from Viking Age battles could be very high, with the bulk of the killing occurring when one or the other side turned in flight. The experiences of modern-day re-enactors indicate that someone who fell in battle would never have seen the face of the opposing warrior who killed him. Even if facing to the front, each man would tend to crouch to the right in a reflex to fear, seeking to shelter his unshielded side securely behind the warrior beside him.

The two Saxon divisions, or ‘bands’ as they are described in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, attacked simultaneously at Ashdown; the opposing lines clashed violently with loud shouting from all sides. Greek warriors, half a millennium before the birth of Christ, are said by Plutarch (d. 120 BC) to have worn their body armour for their own use, but carried their shields for the entire army. This same co-operative principal still applied more than 1,000 years later during ‘Alfred’s wars’. Commanders such as Aethelred I and Alfred must have reminded their warriors to maintain their formation and stay closed up in rank for the good of all, in much the same way as any successful Spartan general might have done. At the Battle of Ellendun (c. 825), fought in Wiltshire between rival Anglo-Saxon armies, the opposing battle lines are described as meeting ‘head on’, having first drawn up some few hundred yards apart. At an unnamed battle fought in Ireland in 867 a unit escaped the slaughter meted out to their friends by forming themselves into close order. Troops failing to get into order – taken by surprise or unable to do so – were quickly seen off or destroyed.

Drawn up in close order, a unit facing its enemy, holding its ground and maintaining cohesion was unlikely to be immediately broken. Attackers would sensibly baulk at the prospect of closing to hand-to-hand combat; especially if their own shuffling lines of spearmen remained disordered. Not until both sides had dismounted and formed up into opposing solid and impenetrable arrays – had faced each other for some time, nerving themselves to close in combat – might one or both sides do so. Whether or not there was a period of mounted skirmishing between rival noblemen is not clear, though late seventh-century cross slabs in Scottish churchyards indicate that this might have been the case. One in particular, from Aberlemno in Angus and thought to depict scenes from the Battle of Dunnichen, fought between the Picts and Northumbrians in 685, shows warriors fighting in this way. But whether Anglo-Saxons and Danes followed such a practice is not known.

The Aberlemno stone, showing mounted battle scenes from the Battle of Dunnichen fought between the Picts and Northumbrians in 685.

Based on the evidence of the Aberlemno stone, Nick Aitcheson, in his book The Picts and the Scots at War, argues that seventh-century battles may have begun with a cavalry charge, and that the protagonists comprised largely or exclusively of mounted nobles in, or in advance of, the front rank of the army. True or not, the sight of uninterrupted lines of brightly painted shields and rows of levelled spears may have inspired sufficient terror to make men bolt without the need for either side to close. Otherwise, battles might be joined in a gradual way, with undisciplined or over-eager troops launching sudden rushes, hurling their javelins and threatening to bring on a more general engagement. While a close-order unit – sometimes referred to as a shield wall – remained ordered, neither volleys of spears nor throwing axes, nor repeated surges forward could break it. In all likelihood such skirmishing would become protracted, and might even constitute the sum total of the battle unless one or other side resolved to charge and fight hand-to-hand. Then only through close co-operation, one man with another, could such formations do battle effectively. Discipline and cohesion were crucial; long-standing ties of kinship fostered and strengthened the determination to fight. Deep formations made for unyielding lines and the lack of combat specialisation kept things brutally simple. Survival in battle – especially in its later stages – relied as much on aggression and strength as on weaponry.

Alfred the Great was described by Asser as charging like a wild boar at Ashdown. The description could simply have been meant to flatter the future king. Emblematic of virility, the wild boar is a regularly occurring Dark Age motif. The famous Sutton Hoo helmet (one of only four helmets discovered in England) has representations of a boar above each cheek guard, and was thought to endow the helmet wearer with semi-magical qualities. Another, found at Benty Grange Farm in Derbyshire, is topped by a wild boar crest. At the ninth-century Viking encampment at Repton in Derbyshire, among the individual burials was the skeleton of a man nearly 6ft tall, an officer or nobleman who died in battle. A wild boar’s tusk had been placed between his thighs. Warriors of old clearly viewed a charging boar as something to emulate.

Roman writers sometimes describe ancient Germans as charging en masse in a ‘boar’s head’ formation – a column of men, narrower in front and wider in the rear. The unique aspect of the ‘boars head’ appears to have been that the shape of the attacking horde started out in column, but became progressively distorted into a wedge by the effect of its leaders and their retinues pulling and encouraging the mass of more-reluctant fighting men along with them. The term ‘wedge’ is derived from the Latin word cuneus, which means column, a standard deployment up until as late as the twentieth century, which enhanced both the psychological and physical shock of attack; where the depth of the unit is either equal to or greater than the width.

Almost nothing is known of the course of the Battle of Ashdown: but as it was fought in midwinter, the ground would have been churned up by hundreds of marching feet, and so the soldiers there must have had a hard time of it. Asser reports that when both sides had been fighting ‘resolutely and exceedingly ferociously’ for quite some time, divine judgement told against the heathens. Unable to withstand the Saxon onslaught, with a great part of their force already fallen, they fled. Possibly the death of the pagan King Bagsecg started the Viking collapse. Unnerved by the calamity, his war-band broke in panic. Many were cut down by pursuing Saxon spearmen as they attempted to regain their horses. The killing is said to have continued until darkness fell. The tenth-century chronicler Aethelweard recounted how all the nobler youth of the barbarians died at Ashdown, and how never before had such slaughter been known. Though something of an exaggeration, it represented nonetheless a fitting tribute. Should the two West Saxon brothers have lost the battle, and the hope of eventual success, a Viking Conquest of England might have been brought forward by almost 150 years. Certainly Alfred must have viewed the battle as important. Asser claimed he had the exact spot where the future king proudly fought pointed out to him by his hero – its location was marked by a lone ash tree.

1.2

The first half of the year 871 is littered with battles fought in Wessex. Nine are mentioned and six are named: Englefield, Reading, Ashdown, Basing, Mereton and Wilton. Despite victory at Ashdown, the men of Wessex became dangerously overstretched. The robust defensive policies of the Frankish king, Charles the Bald – including the fortification of places such as Dijon and Le Mans – had resulted in the displacement of large numbers of Vikings to the east coast of England at around this time, swelling the ranks of Halfdan’s army. King Aethelred I was just one of the many Saxon fighting men who lost his life, dying from wounds received in battle at Mereton, probably Martin, near Cranborne in Dorset. As at Ashdown, the Saxons formed up in two divisions at Mereton. For some time they held the edge over their opponents. But coincidental with the king’s mortal wound, and the death in battle of Heamund, Bishop of Sherborne, the Wessex men gave way. Aethelred was taken to the nearby monastic site at Wimborne and later died and was buried there.

The brass at Wimborne Minster of Aethelred I, buried nearby after being mortally wounded at Mereton in 871.

Severe fighting also occurred at Abingdon, an important crossing place on the River Thames. A camp to the north-east, called Serpen Hill, is reputed to have been the scene of a battle fought between Saxons and Danes. Perhaps this is one of the three unnamed fights in 871 mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Monastic buildings at Abingdon were destroyed and the dozen or so monks they housed scattered as a result of the conflict. Despite the damage having being caused by the Danes, the religious authorities afterwards accused Alfred of violently seizing their monastery and all of their lands close by. It had been an action forced on him in a desperate effort to put the area into a fortified state in the lull after Ashdown. Even so, the monks appear to have found it hard to forgive their future king for further disrupting their monastic routine. Alfred was perhaps feared by his own people for his ruthlessness as much as he was later praised for his courage. What is more, he made no later effort to restore the ancient monastic site. It was not until the reign of King Edgar (d. 975) that the monastery was re-established, and not until even later, in the early twelfth century, that work on a new church was started.

Although only two of the battles fought in 871 appear to have been won by the men of Wessex, the others were not decisively lost either; this despite Halfdan’s best efforts and a supply of fresh troops arriving from the Continent. Nonetheless, the combination of Aethelred’s death, defeat at Mereton and the arrival of reinforcements, plus a further defeat at Wilton, forced Alfred to make a holding treaty with Halfdan, probably with the payment of a hefty tribute. The Danish host fell back on London in the autumn of 871. Coins minted there from this time proudly bear the name Halfdan.

The traditional Alfredian narrative is of the young king (he was still in his early twenties) facing an overwhelming threat, unprepared, with his back to the wall. But Halfdan may not have seen it that way, the impetus of his campaign wrecked on successive Wessex battlefields, where one Danish king, nine jarls and (according to Asser) countless heathen men were killed. As a result, he opportunistically reassessed his options and looked elsewhere for conquest. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates how the raiding army went from Reading to Lindsey (Torksey), and then on to Repton, where they took up winter quarters. The next year they attacked and drove out the Mercian king, Burhred, who fled to the Continent, and eventually to Rome. All of Mercia was apparently subdued by them.

Repton was a high-status monastic centre like Wimborne, serving the Mercian royal dynasty since the seventh century. Here, on a cliff top above the then swift-flowing Trent, the Vikings built a large D-shaped defensive enclosure, including a rampart and ditch. St Wystan’s church and its tower were used as a gatehouse and command centre. Having Vikings in residence must have been enormously humiliating for the proud Mercians – the ‘men of the march’.

Contained within the famous church’s (still-existent) crypt were the bones of several of their kings, queens and princes. The relics of the venerated Wigstan (Wystan) – a prince of Mercia, murdered during a family dispute in 849 – claimed pride of place. His bones had long been credited with miraculous powers, making the mausoleum a magnet for pilgrims. Nearby, the remains of more than 250 individuals have been uncovered in a two-roomed subterranean basement area 15ft square. Though the bones were originally neatly stacked, by the time formal exhumation commenced in the nineteenth century they had become jumbled. These men (and some women) must have formed part of ‘the great heathen army’, which overwintered at Repton in 873–74; their deaths were probably due to contagion – camp fever. The numbers of those buried helps establish the Viking army as numbering in the low thousands – assuming roughly 10 per cent died and were buried at the site.