Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (12 page)

Together, Alfred’s reforms were intended to deny the Vikings freedom of movement and ensure that they would be pursued everywhere they went, preventing them from plundering effectively, reforming the army and building a fleet to take on the Vikings at sea. A devout Christian, Alfred believed that no amount of military reforms would defeat the Vikings unless he also had the support of God, so he introduced educational reforms to raise the standard of the clergy. Alfred invited scholars from abroad and personally translated several major works, including Pope Gregory the Great’s
Pastoral
Care
, into English. He was also responsible for beginning the
Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle
. This is the major source for the events of the Viking Age in England, but modern readers need to be aware that, despite the chronicle’s matter-of-fact style, its main purpose was to glorify the West-Saxon dynasty’s role in saving Christian England from the pagan Vikings.

Alfred’s reforms got their first test in 885 when a large Viking force arrived in Kent and laid siege to Rochester. When Alfred turned up with his army, the Vikings fled to their ships, abandoning their prisoners and all the horses they had brought with them from Francia in anticipation of harrying the countryside. Guthrum had broken the peace by supporting the invaders so, in 886, Alfred seized London in retaliation, which had been under Danish control since the fall of Mercia, rebuilt its Roman walls and installed a permanent garrison. By doing so he effectively closed the Thames to Viking fleets. In the same year Alfred was recognised as king by all the Anglo-Saxons who were not living under Danish rule. It was probably at this time that Alfred agreed a peace treaty with Guthrum, the text of which still survives. In return for treating the Anglo-Saxons under his rule equally with Danes, Alfred recognised the borders of Guthrum’s kingdom as running ‘up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to Watling Street’ (an old Roman road). The agreement was most advantageous to Alfred, as it effectively recognised his annexation of all of western Mercia. Alfred had prepared the ground for this already by marrying his daughter Æthelflæd to the ealdorman Æthelred, who had been the ruler of Mercia since Ceolwulf’s death in 879 or 880.

Hastein’s invasion

The arrival of two large Viking armies from Francia in 892 tested Alfred’s new defences to the limit. The larger of the two armies built a camp at Appledore on Kent’s Channel coast. The smaller of the two sailed into the Thames estuary and built a fort at Milton Regis in northern Kent. The leader of this army was Hastein, a brilliant commander who had made his name leading a daring Viking raid in the Mediterranean in 859 – 62 (see ch. 7) and had spent most of the previous thirty years plundering in Francia. A Norman monk, Dudo of St Quentin (
c
. 960 –
c.
1043), would later describe Hastein in lurid terms as a ‘cruel and harsh, destructive, troublesome, wild, ferocious, infamous, destructive and inconstant, brash, conceited and lawless, death-dealing, rude, ever alert, rebellious traitor and kindler of evil’, and every bit the freebooting Viking of the popular imaginative. Hastein certainly lived the Viking dream, a peasant boy who made good through sheer guts but whose lack of royal blood prevented him from reaching the pinnacle of Scandinavian society by conquering a kingdom of his own.

Alfred responded to the invasion by placing his army in mid-Kent between the two Viking armies. A long stand-off followed. Alfred could not concentrate his forces against one Viking army without leaving the other free to plunder as it wished but, with a large Anglo-Saxon army in the field, the Vikings were also reluctant to stray far from their camps. At some point Alfred entered negotiations with Hastein. These resulted in the baptism of Hastein and his family and a payment of tribute in return for his promise to withdraw. In the event, Hastein took the money and stayed. The stalemate was finally broken when a third Viking army, this one from York, arrived in Devon in spring 893 and occupied Exeter. This left Alfred no choice but to split his forces. The new Viking army spent the summer besieged in Exeter before breaking up in the autumn, some to return to York, others going to Ireland. This diversion gave the two Viking armies in Kent the opportunity to escape. Alfred had easily contained the Vikings in Kent so both armies decided to move across the Thames estuary to East Anglia, where they could expect support from local Danish settlers. Hastein built a new fort at Benfleet in Essex, while the Vikings from Appledore sent their ships to Mersea Island, also in Essex, and then set out to join them by marching overland through Wessex, plundering as they went. Heavily burdened with booty, the Vikings moved slowly and were intercepted by Alfred’s son Edward at Farnham in Surrey. Rather than abandon their booty and run, the Vikings fought and were defeated. The survivors escaped to Mersea but their king had been badly injured in the battle and could no longer provide effective leadership, so most of them defected to Hastein at Benfleet.

Encouraged by this reinforcement to his army, Hastein set out on a plundering expedition in east Mercia. While he was gone, ealdorman Æthelred raised an army from London and stormed Hastein’s camp at Benfleet, capturing all his ships and booty, along with his wife and two sons. Many of Hastein’s ships were taken to London and Rochester, the rest were broken up and burned. Charred ships’ timbers found by navvies building a railway bridge at South Benfleet in 1855 may have belonged to the Danish ships destroyed after the battle. Hastein built a new fort at Shoebury, 10 miles east of Benfleet, where he received new reinforcements from the East Anglian Danes. Undeterred by the defeat at Benfleet, Hastein launched a raid across west Mercia to the Welsh border. Harried by Mercian and Welsh forces, he was besieged at Buttington on the River Severn, near Welshpool in Powys. Hastein fought his way out but suffered heavy casualties and retreated back to Shoebury. Reinforced by more East Anglian Danes, Hastein set out for Mercia again in the autumn. This time he occupied the old Roman legionary fortress at Chester, but the Mercians had cleared the surrounding countryside of food. Short of supplies and with winter coming on, Hastein again retreated, this time to Mersea Island. Alfred now released Hastein’s family but his conciliatory gesture was not reciprocated. In 894 Hastein sailed up the Thames and built a new fort on the River Lea, north of London, but was forced to abandon his ships in 895 when Alfred built a stockade to block the river. Another raid into west Mercia that summer also failed while Alfred’s new fleet won victories over several small raiding fleets from York and East Anglia. Though Hastein had never suffered a decisive defeat, Alfred’s reformed defences had denied him the freedom to plunder. Frustrated, the Danish army broke up in 896, some to settle in East Anglia, others to return to Francia with Hastein, where it is likely he settled. A relieved chronicler wrote: ‘The raiding army had not, by God’s grace, greatly afflicted the English people to a very great extent, but they were much more severely afflicted during those three years by the mortality of cattle and men.’ Wessex had weathered the storm.

Alfred had never enjoyed good health and he lived only three more years. In the late Anglo-Saxon period, Alfred’s reputation was overshadowed by those of his son Edward the Elder and grandson Æthelstan. Alfred’s reputation began to grow in the twelfth century, thanks to his almost hagiographical treatment by the chronicler William of Malmesbury (
c.
1095 –
c.
1143) but it was not until the sixteenth century that he acquired his unique title ‘the Great’. Certainly, with the benefit of hindsight, Alfred’s reign can be seen as decisive in English history, marking the beginning of a national kingship. In his combination of political, military and scholarly abilities, Alfred stands alone among the rulers of early medieval Europe.

The Danelaw

While Wessex’s survival still lay in the balance, the Danes consolidated their control over their conquests in East Anglia, the east Midlands and Yorkshire. Because different legal customs, introduced by the Danes, prevailed there, the area subsequently became known as the Danelaw. The scale of Danish settlement is difficult to assess. Danes certainly formed the social and political elite of the Danelaw, what is unclear is if there was also widespread settlement of Danish peasant farmers. Genetic studies of the modern population of the Danelaw have failed to shed light on this because the Danes came from much the same area that the Anglo-Saxons originally hailed from, so the two populations were not genetically distinct. However, place-names of Danish origin are very common in the Danelaw, strongly suggesting that Danes did settle in substantial numbers. Two of the most common place-name elements are
-by
, as in Grimsby (‘Grim’s village’), and
-thorpe
, as in Kettlethorpe (‘Ketil’s outlying farm’). Danish place-names are not spread evenly throughout the Danelaw so it would seem that many areas saw little or no Danish settlement. The military nature of the Danish settlement is reflected in the local government of the Danelaw. In Anglo-Saxon England, the basic unit of local government, for taxation and defence was the hundred, a unit of land considered sufficient to support a hundred families: in the Danelaw it was the much larger wapentake, from Old Norse
vápnatak
(‘weapon taking’). The Anglo-Saxon hide (the area of ploughland needed to support one peasant family) was generally known as the ploughland (Old English
plogesland
). The law of the Danelaw was distinguished from English law by procedural differences, heavy fines for breach of the king’s peace, and the use, unknown in England at the time, of sworn aristocratic juries of presentment to initiate the prosecution of criminal suspects in the wapentake courts. While under contemporary English law, trial by ordeal was used for the most serious crimes. In the Danelaw trial by combat was normal. There were also major differences in landholding in the Danelaw, with much larger numbers of peasant freeholders, or ‘sokemen’ than in the rest of England. In Lincolnshire freeholders accounted for nearly 50 per cent of the population and in the rest of the Danelaw counties they averaged around one third.

Assimilation of the Danes with the native population began with conversion to Christianity. This was a diplomatic necessity at the top levels of Danish society because it made relations with English rulers easier. The Danish kings of East Anglia issued coins in the name of St Edmund as early as 890, but this may have been intended to appeal their English subjects as much as it was a genuine show of piety. It is not clear how quickly Christianity was adopted by the rest of the Danish population but pagan burial customs had died out by around 950. There probably still were pagans in England after this date, however, because the Anglo-Saxon chronicler criticised King Edgar (r. 957 – 75) for allowing heathen ways. Assimilation was made easier because the Old Norse and Old English languages were to a limited extent mutually intelligible (this is particularly the case with the Old English dialects spoken in East Anglia and Northumbria). Although it was the Danes who finished up speaking English in the end, it was not a linguistic one-way street as hundreds of Danish words were adopted into the English language. Modern English words pronounced with a
sk
, as in skin, sky, skirt and scrape, are usually of Danish origin as are words pronounced with a hard
k
or
g
, like kid, get, give and egg.

While the establishment of the Danelaw was an undoubted triumph for the Danes, it came at a price. By taking land and settling down, the Danes lost their main military advantage over the English, their mobility. Now that the Danes had farms and families to protect they became vulnerable to English retaliation. The Danes were also vulnerable because they were divided into many small politically unstable kingdoms. The changed balance of advantage soon became apparent in the reign of Alfred’s son and successor Edward the Elder (r. 899 – 924). Edward’s first three years as king were spent suppressing a rebellion by his cousin Æthelwold, whose claim to the throne was supported by the East Anglian Danes. Æthelwold’s death in battle in 903 freed Edward to take the offensive against the Danes. In 909 Edward attacked the Danes of York: the following year they retaliated by invading Mercia only to be defeated by the combined levies of Mercia and Wessex at Wednesfield, near Tettenhall in Staffordshire. Danish casualties were heavy and included three kings and eleven jarls.

Following his victory, Edward, aided closely by his sister Æthelflæd of Mercia, embarked on the methodical conquest of the Danelaw. Danish resistance crumbled after an unnamed king of East Anglia was killed in battle at Tempsford in Bedfordshire in 917, and by the end of 918 all of the Danelaw south of the Humber was under Edward’s control. Edward was generous in victory. The Danish settlers were not dispossessed of their lands and were allowed to retain their own laws and customs. The Danelaw would retain a distinctive identity within England until well after the Norman Conquest. Vikings were not political nationalists. Laws and customs were the true markers of ethnic identity in early medieval Europe, not states, and these concessions helped bind the Danes more closely to the English crown. In parallel with his campaigns in the Danelaw, Edward steadily absorbed Mercia into Wessex, seizing London, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire in 911 and the rest of the kingdom in 919 following the death of Æthelflæd. Edward consolidated his conquests by extending Alfred’s system of fortified
burhs
north. When Edward died in 924, it was clear that he had set his sights on eliminating the last bastion of Danish power in England, the kingdom of York.

The Viking kingdom of York

York originated as a Roman legionary fortress, founded in
AD
71 on a low, level ridge between the confluence of the rivers Ouse and Foss. The Romans named the fortress Eboracum, a name of Celtic origin probably meaning the place of the alders or yews. York had two great attractions to the Romans: it lay at the heart of a large and fertile plain, the produce of which could feed the garrison, and the Ouse was easily navigable to the ships of the day so it could be reached from the North Sea. Like most Roman fortresses, York soon attracted merchants, craftsmen, innkeepers and brothelkeepers eager to relieve the soldiers of their wages and a civilian settlement, or
vicus
, developed on the west bank of the Ouse, opposite the fortress, to which it was linked by a bridge. The
vicus
had grown to such an extent that by 237 it had been formally recognised as a city. It was in York, in 306, that Constantine the Great, Rome’s first Christian emperor, was proclaimed emperor by his troops following the death there of his father Constantius.