Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (10 page)

The ‘great heathen army’

In 865 it was finally England’s turn to feel the full fury of Viking attack. Early in the year, a Viking fleet once again settled on Thanet. The long-suffering people of Kent had had enough of being raided by now and instead of resistance they offered the Vikings tribute in return for peace. This was the first time that what came much later to be called Danegeld was offered by the Anglo-Saxons. The offer of tribute was a sign that in the worst affected areas morale was beginning to break, but the money was never actually paid. The Vikings were merely using negotiations to lull the people of Kent into a false sense of security before launching a surprise attack on them. The Vikings had calculated that they could get more by plundering than from negotiating. Far more serious, the same year saw the arrival in East Anglia of a ‘great heathen army’ from Denmark. So far the Vikings had only been after plunder. This army was different, its objective was to conquer and settle.

The leaders of the Danish army were an alliance of landless ‘sea kings’, the most prominent of whom were Ivar, Halfdan and Ubba. Ivar and Halfdan were certainly brothers: Ubba may have been their brother but the evidence is inconclusive. Contemporary sources have nothing to say about any of the leaders’ origins, but in Danish and Icelandic sources of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Ivar had become identified with the enigmatically named Ivar the Boneless, a son of the legendary Viking Ragnar Lodbrok (‘hairy breeches’). Whether there is any truth in the tradition is anyone’s guess. Ragnar is one of those legendary characters who, like King Arthur and Robin Hood, may well be based on real historical people but whose actual lives have become buried under such a deep accretion of later legends that separating any facts from the fiction is now completely impossible.

Ragnar’s career, as told by Saxo Grammaticus, begins in a credible enough fashion, with him fighting off a host of rivals to become king of Denmark. Like real historical Viking kings, Ragnar consolidated his position by leading great plundering raids, but the range of his activities is improbable, he plundered everywhere from Britain and Ireland to the Mediterranean, the Byzantine empire, Russia and the Arctic. Ragnar earned his nickname for the shaggy trousers he wore for protection when he killed two enormous venomous serpents that were ravaging Sweden. Ragnar married three times but to no ordinary women: one of his wives was Lathgertha, a shieldmaiden (a type of Viking Amazon and just as legendary; women did not fight in real Viking armies). Another wife, according to Icelandic traditions, was the daughter of the mythical dragon slayer Sigurd Fafnisbane and his valkyrie wife Brynhild. Ragnar was survived by enough sons to crew a small longship, among them, according to Saxo, Regnald, Fridlef, Rathbarn, Dunvat, Daxon, Björn Ironside, Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, Hvitserk, Ubbi, Erik Wind-Hat and Agnar, as well as Ivar the Boneless. Most of these sons probably belong as much to the realm of legend as their father.

The Danish army wintered at Thetford in East Anglia and in the spring struck a peace deal with the locals. The East Angles would provide the Danes with horses and they would ride off and plunder someone else. This indifference to Viking raiding in the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was typical. On only one occasion did one Anglo-Saxon kingdom ally with another against the Vikings, and it worked greatly to the Vikings’ advantage as they were able to concentrate all their efforts on one kingdom at a time. Acquiring horses gave the Danes much the same mobility on land as they had previously enjoyed on water, with all the tactical advantages that went with it. The Danes used their horses to invade Northumbria, which was wracked by a civil war between rivals for the throne: Vikings always exploited political divisions when they could. Northumbria’s capital city, York, fell to the Danes without a fight on 21 November. Recognising the seriousness of the threat, the two kings, Ælle and Osberht, made common cause and together they attempted to recapture York in March 867. York’s defences were not in good condition and the Northumbrians stormed in, but once inside the city the battle turned against them and both kings were killed along with most of their followers. According to the colourful, but unreliable, medieval Scandinavian traditions, Ælle was responsible for the death of Ragnar Lodbrok. Ælle captured Ragnar after he was shipwrecked and had him thrown into a pit of adders to be bitten to death. Ragnar warned Ælle that ‘the piglets would be grunting if they knew the plight of the boar’, meaning that his sons would avenge him. When they captured Ælle at York, Ragnar’s sons sacrificed him to Odin by making a ‘blood eagle’ of him, that is cutting open his ribcage either side of the spine and pulling out his lungs to create the appearance of bloody wings. Scholars have endlessly debated whether this was a genuine Viking practice or merely the product of a fertile skaldic imagination. The sacrifice seems no more horrific than the old English punishment for traitors of hanging, drawing and quartering, so it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that it was sometimes actually performed:
víking
was not an activity for the squeamish, after all.

As well as two kings, much of Northumbria’s military aristocracy died in the Battle of York. Deprived of leadership, those Northumbrians who survived submitted to the Danes, who appointed an obscure Northumbrian nobleman called Ecgberht as a puppet king. The Danes remained quietly at York for the next twelve months before invading Mercia in spring 868. Mercia’s king, Burgred, put aside old rivalries and appealed to King Æthelred of Wessex for help. The two kings laid siege to the Danes in Nottingham, but they seem to have lacked resolve. The Danes refused to come out and fight, while the allies were unwilling either to storm the fortified city or to starve them out by a long siege. Burgred made his peace with the Danes, probably paying tribute in return for their withdrawal to Northumbria. It is likely that Æthelred preferred a more confrontational policy because the two kingdoms never co-operated against the Vikings again.

In 869, the Danes returned to ravage East Anglia, burning and destroying every monastery they came to and slaughtering their monks. In November, Ivar and Ubba crushingly defeated the East Angles at Hoxne, captured their king, Edmund, and brought the whole kingdom under their control. According to later hagiographical traditions, Ivar and Ubba offered to allow Edmund to rule East Anglia as a tributary king if he would become a pagan. Edmund refused and was tortured by being shot full of arrows, like St Sebastian, before being beheaded. Edmund’s head was thrown into the wood, where it was later found safe, supposedly guarded by a wolf calling ‘here, here, here’. Miracles followed and Edmund was quickly considered to be a saint. It is probable that the Danes appointed a caretaker puppet king, as they had in Northumbria, while they planned their next expedition. It is likely that sometime over the winter Ivar died, as he is not mentioned again in Anglo-Saxon sources.

Alfred the Great and the Danes

In 870 the Danes invaded Wessex and seized the town of Reading, which they used as their base until spring 871. However, the Danes’ further advance into Wessex was strongly resisted by king Æthelred and his brother Alfred. Eight or nine battles were fought across Wessex over the next year, none proved to be decisive and both sides suffered heavy casualties. The West Saxons lost an ealdorman and a bishop in the course of the battles, the Danes a king and nine jarls. In April 871, King Æthelred died and was succeeded by Alfred, the only king the English have thought worthy of being described as ‘the Great’. Alfred’s biographer and adviser bishop Asser would later describe his reluctance to accept the throne because he felt inadequate to the task of defeating the Danes unless God gave him support. A good Christian king should be modest and pious, of course, and Asser was determined to present a favourable image of his employer. In fact, almost all the sources on which we depend for our knowledge of Alfred’s struggle with the Danes were written by people who were close to the king or who were writing under his direction. We only have Alfred’s side of this story.

Around the time of Alfred’s accession, the Danes were reinforced by a new fleet under Guthrum, Anund and Oscetel, which sailed up the Thames to Reading. After suffering two defeats in quick succession, Alfred made peace with the Danes on condition they would depart. The terms of the deal are not known but Alfred probably paid them tribute, as the men of Kent had done in 865. The Danes finally left Reading in the autumn, but they only went as far as London, which they seized from the Mercians. Alfred was probably lucky that a rebellion by their Northumbrian puppet king forced the Danes to hurry back to York early in 872. Ecgberht was dealt with quickly enough for the Danes to invade Mercia and winter in a camp near Torksey on the River Trent. Recent excavations have discovered large quantities of hacked-up Arab
dirhems
on the site. This is probably evidence that Scandinavian merchants with links to the eastern trade routes visited the camp, most likely to buy slaves captured by the army. With the Vikings, trade and war were always closely linked. The large size of the camp, estimated at 64 acres (26 hectares), confirms that the Anglo-Saxon chronicler was not exaggerating when he described the Danish army as a ‘great’ army, probably several thousand strong.

In 873 the Danes took a fleet up the Trent and captured the main Mercian royal centre at Repton, where they spent the winter. The site of the Danish winter camp at Repton has been the subject of intensive archaeological investigation. The Danes built a slipway on the riverbank so they could draw their ships ashore for the winter, as was normal Viking practice. To protect the ships from attack, the Danes constructed a roughly semi-circular ditch and rampart, about 200 yards (183 m) long, which opened onto the riverbank. The rampart incorporated a pre-existing church building as a strongpoint. Viking fortifications of this kind were common in Ireland, where they were known as
longphuirt
(‘ship landings’, singular
longphort
). Covering only one acre, this longphort is very small compared to known Irish longphuirt, and to the previous winter’s camp at Torksey, so was clearly not intended to house the whole army. Just outside the rampart was a unique mass burial containing the skeletal remains of at least 249 individuals, 80 per cent of which were robust males aged between fifteen and forty-five. These were arranged around the body of a single male, thought to have been one of the leaders of the Danish army. None of the skeletons showed evidence of battle injuries, so it is likely that they were victims of an epidemic – in pre-modern times disease often caused more casualties in an army than enemy action. Coins found in the burial confirmed that it dated to the time that the Danish army wintered at Repton. Several individual burials were also found near the site, including a man who had died from a blow to the hip. The man was buried with a sword, a Thor’s hammer amulet and a symbolic penis to replace the one he must have lost in combat.

The loss of their capital led to the collapse of Mercian resistance and King Burgred fled into exile in Rome where he later died. The pope was probably not overjoyed to see him: he had only recently written to Burgred telling him that his kingdom’s troubles were his own fault for allowing all manner of fornication to flourish. As they had done in Northumbria and East Anglia, the Danes appointed a caretaker puppet king, a nobleman called Ceolwulf, to rule until such time as they decided what to do with the kingdom. In just eight years the Danes had conquered three of the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Only Wessex remained, but it would not have to face the full might of the Danish army again. By now, many of the Danes wanted to settle down and enjoy the fruits of victory and in 874 Halfdan left the army and took his followers back to York to consolidate his control of Northumbria. In 876, Halfdan divided the kingdom into two parts. The northern province of Bernicia (extending from the Tees to the Firth of Forth) remained independent under native rulers based at Bamburgh. The southern province of Deira (roughly equivalent to Yorkshire) Halfdan shared out between his followers and York became the capital of a Viking kingdom. Halfdan probably did not reign for long, because this is the last time he is mentioned in Anglo-Saxon sources. It is likely that he is to be identified with Alband, a Danish chief who, according to Irish sources, was killed at Strangford Lough fighting against the Dublin Vikings in 877. Little is known about Halfdan’s immediate successors. One, ‘Airdeconut’ (probably Harthacnut), is known only from a single coin discovered in a hoard at Silverdale, Lancashire, in 2011.

The rest of the Danish army, now under the leadership of Guthrum, Oscetel and Anund, moved to Cambridge, in the east of Mercia, where they spent a year before invading Wessex late in 875. This took Alfred by surprise and the Danes successfully evaded the West Saxon army, crossing the kingdom to winter at the nunnery at Wareham in Dorset, an easily defended site between two rivers. Alfred laid siege to the Danes but, just as at Nottingham, a stalemate ensued. Negotiations followed and in 876 a peace agreement was reached, which probably involved Alfred paying tribute to persuade the Danes to leave his kingdom. Hostages were exchanged as a demonstration of good faith and the Danes sealed the deal with oaths sworn on a sacred ring dedicated to Thor. Pagan Scandinavians kept such rings, reddened with sacrificial blood, in temples specifically for the swearing of oaths. It is surprising that such a devoutly Christian king as Alfred was willing to sanction a pagan ceremony, but he presumably believed that this way the Danes would feel more bound by their oaths than if they had been made over Christian relics. If so, he was wrong. The Danes did not regard oaths sworn to Christians as binding and they had simply used the peace agreement to lull Alfred into a false sense of security. They killed the West Saxon hostages and, abandoning the hostages they had given Alfred to their fate, set out for Exeter in Devon, part of the army riding overland, part going by sea. Alfred pursued the mounted army but failed to catch it before it reached the safety of the city walls. Those Danes who went by sea were less fortunate: their fleet was caught by a storm and 120 ships were lost.