The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great (12 page)

Torksey lay within the borders of Mercia, meaning the Viking army had not left King Burgred’s borders, despite having taken his danegeld. This alarmed the weak Mercian king, who soon began to wonder if the Vikings planned to betray their implicit agreement that he was allowed to rule Mercia if he would regularly bow and scrape before the Danish rulers. Burgred attempted to appease the Viking overlords by welcoming into his court the puppet king and bishop whom the Northumbrians had ousted. Then, to make his subservience doubly clear, Burgred paid Halfdan the danegeld one more time.

Not surprisingly, Burgred’s attempts at conciliation only hastened the end of his reign. Rather than gratefully receiving Burgred’s desperate offers of friendship and peace, the Danes sensed profound weakness in the Mercian king, a weakness that begged to be exploited. Immediately after accepting the second offering of danegeld, Halfdan sent a small force sailing up the Trent to Repton, where they constructed a small earthen fortress along the riverbank. Though the force was not large enough to launch a viable assault on Burgred in Nottingham, the move still spooked the jittery Mercian king. Burgred immediately abandoned Nottingham and fled England along with his wife Ælswith, Alfred’s sister.

The Mercian king and queen left their thrones to become pilgrims of the holy city of Rome. Soon their names were entered into the book of guests recorded by the monks of Brescia, the same book that had recorded Alfred’s pilgrimage as a young boy. Burgred and Ælswith took up residence in the Saxon quarter of Rome, where Alfred and his father had lived during their visit. Burgred was later buried in the Church of Saint Maria in the
Schola Saxonum
, which Alfred’s father had renovated during his visit.

The Mercian throne was then filled by a Danish appointment— Ceolwulf, a puppet king—much like the king the Danes had previously left in charge of Northumbria. Ceolwulf would later be remembered as a foolish and worthless stooge of his Danish masters. At this point, the Viking army split up. Halfdan led a force to the north to crush the Northumbrian rebellion, and Guthrum led another army to Cambridge in East Anglia, from where he would control East Anglia and Mercia.

For Alfred, the Northumbrian rebellion and the collapse of Mercia may have seemed to provide a welcome respite in that it demanded the Danish forces to devote their attention elsewhere for several years. However, this interlude allowed the Vikings to more firmly establish their grip on the rest of Britain, and it put them in a much more powerful position from which to launch their next assault on Wessex. Had Alfred used these years well and addressed the real weaknesses of the Wessex defenses, the Viking kings may have regretted giving him several years of peace. Even though Alfred was keenly aware of where the Wessex army had fallen short, he still lacked either the insight or the means to address these shortcomings. During these few years, the Wessex king heard regular reports about the conquests by the Danish armies throughout Britain. All the while, he was at a loss as to how he would be able to withstand the next invasion.

Sensing that a renewed Viking attack on his nation was imminent, Alfred ensured that the borders of Wessex were carefully watched. This meant a vigilant watch over all the possible avenues of approach, including the vulnerable southern coastline. With this in mind, he worked hard at developing a small naval force that might be able to fend off some of the smaller Viking attacks.

In the year 875, Alfred received word of a Viking fleet approaching the shores of Wessex. To Alfred’s relief, there were only seven ships in this small raiding army. Clearly the goal of this fleet was plunder and not conquest. Nevertheless, Alfred personally led the ships of Wessex to intercept the Viking boats. In this brief engagement, one Viking ship was captured, and the other six were put to flight. The victory was small, but sweet. The following year, a much more formidable attack was launched against Wessex. This time the intention was not merely looting and plundering but all-out conquest.

In the year 876, the Viking king, Guthrum, leader of the Danish forces occupying East Anglia, led his army out of Cambridge under the cover of darkness and began a hasty march toward Wessex. Combining the secrecy of swift nighttime marches with a route carefully chosen to minimize any encounters with the forces of Wessex, Guthrum was able to lead his Danish army, virtually unnoticed, through the heart of Wessex all the way to the southern coast. Whatever improvements Alfred had made to Wessex’s ability to respond to a raiding army, they were proved utterly futile by this one march. By the time Alfred received word of the Danish intrusion and began to muster his army in response, Guthrum had already seized the strategically located town of Wareham and begun to fortify his position against Saxon attacks.

Once again, the Vikings had chosen an ideally located position for their base of operations. Wareham was bounded on the north by the river Tarrant and on the south by the river Frome. The two rivers merged just past the city, on the eastern side, and then dumped into Poole Bay. These waterways provided highly effective defenses on three of the city’s four sides and offered passage to Viking longboats, the preferred means of travel for the Danish raiders striking deep into the heart of Wessex and of providing reinforcement from the sea. The western side of the city was defended by one long earthen rampart. Wareham was the site of an ancient Anglo-Saxon convent, which meant it offered the sort of undefended ecclesiastical wealth the Vikings so appreciated, as well as a number of highly productive farms. Between the two rivers and Wareham’s earthen fortifications, the Vikings had access to around one hundred acres of land. Guthrum had chosen his beachhead well.

Alfred arrived with the army of Wessex shortly after Guthrum’s men had settled into their new fortress. The fact that the Vikings had been able to march straight through the heart of Wessex, reaching all the way to the southern coast, and then capture and fortify a village
before
the Wessex fyrd was able to form was clear proof of how fatally flawed the fyrd system had become. By the time Alfred’s men arrived, Guthrum had dug in and was more than prepared to resist any assault on the well-defended town of Wareham.

Remembering the disastrous attack that Æthelred and Alfred had launched against the Viking fortifications at Reading, Alfred was hesitant to begin another assault on the rampart of Wareham. He chose instead to lay siege to Wareham, cutting off the Danes’ ability to send out foraging parties and hoping to starve the Vikings out of their new lair. But it soon became apparent that Guthrum was far too well prepared. The Vikings were amply supplied and, much like the earlier episode at Nottingham, were likely to outlast the Wessex fyrd.

If Alfred was to make any headway against this force, he would need to choose another approach very soon, for two reasons. First, the Wessex fyrd could only be kept in the field for a short period. Soon their supplies would dwindle, and the need for the men of Wessex to return to their fields and shops would begin to sap away the strength of the Saxon shieldwall. Second, Alfred had a very ominous foreboding about Guthrum’s strategy. The Danish king had clearly chosen a position easily reached from the sea and well connected to the waterways of Wessex. Why would he choose what was clearly a naval base when he had come with land forces? Wareham was the perfect stronghold for a ship army. But where were the ships? Alfred knew that at any moment swarms of Viking longboats were likely to arrive, bringing thousands of Danish warriors, doubling or tripling Guthrum’s army and killing any possibility the men of Wessex had of repelling this attack. Guthrum must be driven from Warehem immediately.

Alfred’s desperation showed in the approach he finally chose. Once more, he paid the danegeld. Of course this wasn’t the sort of tactic that could work over any extended period of time, but it was enough to extract Guthrum and his troop from Wareham. It should also be pointed out that, as disastrous as paying the danegeld had been for East Anglia and Mercia, Alfred’s previous payment had been temporarily successful. It had seemed to buy a few years of peace.

Alfred clearly felt uneasy about this payment and made two extra demands as he negotiated the Viking withdrawal. First, the two armies exchanged hostages. A selection of Wessex men were taken into captivity by Guthrum, and Alfred chose an assortment of the most distinguished Danish noblemen to remain with him. These hostages were to ensure that the two kings honored their pledges to one another. If Guthrum failed to keep his end of the peace bargain, then Alfred would be free to exact his revenge on the Viking hostages, and vice versa.

Second, Alfred insisted that when Guthrum swore to withdraw his men, he must do so on the pagan relic that he held most dear, the holy ring of Thor. Fully aware that the Danish pagans had no respect whatsoever for the Christian God, Alfred was groping for something that might hold the Danish king to his vow. The ring of Thor, a large gold armband often worn on the chieftain’s arm, was used by the Vikings when they swore oaths to one another. That Alfred would resort to a pagan relic was a clear sign of his deep desperation.

Alfred soon learned that an oath sworn to Thor meant no more to pagan Guthrum than it did to Christian Alfred. In the middle of one night, Guthrum cut the throats of all the Wessex hostages whom he had taken, mounted his entire army on horseback, and slipped out of Wareham. Completely ignoring his pledge to leave Wessex, 86 Guthrum rode hard and fast, straight to the city of Exeter, another easily fortified city sitting on the bank of the river Exe on the southern coast of Wessex. From Exeter, Guthrum could easily continue a lengthy campaign of conquest.

Alfred pursued the Danish troops with his own small mounted force, but he was too late. By the time he had reached Exeter, Guthrum had already taken the town, and the Danes were fattening themselves on the fresh provisions of their new fortress. Then, to make matters worse, Alfred received news that an enormous Viking fleet was moving along the southern coast of Wessex. Several thousand more Danish soldiers would soon be sailing up the river Exe to join Guthrum in his conquest of Wessex. With these troops, the Viking conquest of Wessex would be inevitable.

The fate of Wessex was all but sealed. Once this new navy joined forces with Guthrum, it would be impossible to drive the Danes from their freshly fortified stronghold in Exeter. Though Alfred’s navy had been successful in repelling an earlier Viking fleet, that fleet had consisted of a mere seven ships. This new naval force was more than twenty times that size and far too large for Alfred to engage ship-to-ship. Only a miracle could prevent Wessex from being overrun by this pagan force.

And that was exactly what Alfred was given—a miracle. As the Viking longboats sailed along the southern coast, a terrible storm struck the fleet just off the shore of Swanage. Much like the great gale that was to deliver England from the invading Spanish Armada some seven centuries later, this tempest smashed the Danish ships to pieces on the perilously rocky coast of Dorset. Some accounts describe a thick mist that swallowed the ships and led them blindly to be dashed on the treacherous shores. In that one calamitous storm, 120 ships of the Viking fleet sank. Assuming that each of these ships was manned by an average of thirty men, this would have cost the Vikings thirty-six hundred men—a catastrophic loss. For Alfred, this storm was clearly nothing other than divine deliverance.