The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great (15 page)

The raven on the flag that Ubbe carried was said to have been imbued with magical qualities by his own sisters. Before a battle, if the Viking forces were to be victorious, the flag would prophesy that victory by fluttering and flapping, regardless of whether there was a breeze or not. If the battle was doomed to go against the Viking army, then the flag would hang still, no matter how fierce a gale blew against it.

As the men of Devon considered their situation, it was clear that they were fairly unprepared for a siege. Their preparations had been too hasty. In addition to not completing the fortifications of the town, they had not had time to stock Countisbury with the necessary provisions. Food supplies were already low, and there was no source of water within the town’s defenses. Their future looked grim as they peered over the fortifications of Countisbury at the ominous raven banner, trying to discern whether the banner hung still or stood out, unfurled by a nonexistent breeze. And so, rather than wait until the situation became dire, the men of Devon decided to strike while they still had their strength, placing the Viking attackers on the defensive. It seemed to them that if one was doomed to die, it would be better to die while grasping for freedom, rather than while being starved into submission.

Bursting suddenly out of the besieged stronghold at dawn, they crashed into the astonished Viking army in an utterly unexpected frenzy. The Danish army was completely unprepared for this assault, and their front forces were overrun in an instant. Though outmanned, the sheer audacity of the attack gave the battle to the Saxon army. As the rampaging men of Devon cut through the astonished Viking front line, the rest of Ubbe’s men had no choice but to turn and run. The savage predator had become the frantic prey. All the way to the coast of Devon, the Saxons chased the fleeing Vikings, hacking down virtually the entire Viking force. By the time the slaughter was finished, Ubbe and eight hundred of his men lay dead, a fresh feast for the ravens. Ragnar’s banner, the raven flag, was carried proudly from the place of slaughter by Ealdorman Odda.

Many of the ealdormen of Wessex continued to put up a resistance against the Danish occupation. Men like Odda of Devon regularly proved to the Vikings that the Wessex resistance had not been entirely crushed. Had Alfred wanted to, he could have easily withdrawn from Athelney to a shire where the resistance to the Viking occupation was more established. Hampshire and Dorset seemed to be relatively untouched by the Viking invaders, and Alfred could have simply retreated to one of these royal estates. But the king refused to leave Somerset. Through his persistent raids on the unsuspecting Danes, he sought to remind Guthrum that the king of Wessex had not abandoned his nation. He also kept fresh in the minds of the people of Wessex that their king was soon to return, ready to repay the faithful and the unfaithful accordingly. But most of all, Alfred remained in Somerset because he insisted on staying as close to Guthrum as possible, shadowing all of his movements and observing his tactics. Alfred was studying his enemy, learning to hunt all over again.

1
Wassail was a drink that derived its name from the Old English
wæs hæl
, meaning “be you well.”

2
Another poem,
The
Wanderer
, describes the sorrows of a man who had served a lord who had died in battle. His ring-giver gone, the wanderer has been robbed of the hall fellowship that he once had with his lord. He, too, has been driven to wander the unforgiving wastelands of Anglo-Saxon England.

CHAPTER 5
Whitsunday and the
Battle of Edington

Now his passion and his resurrection have become our Eastertide, since he has loosed us from the bondage of the Devil, and our persecutors are submerged through that holy baptism, just as Pharaoh and his men in the Red Sea.

—ÆLFRIC , Catholic Homilies I. xxii

T
he months spent at Athelney gave Alfred the opportunity to reflect on his defeats and the various missteps he had made during the first few years of his reign. He could not be faulted for his zeal or for his raw courage during that brief period, but he began to realize he had lacked the cunning necessary to outwit such a battle-savvy opponent as Guthrum. The only great victory he had experienced to date had been the glorious triumph at Ashdown. But that victory had come largely as a result of an entirely accidental ruse the Saxons had played on the Vikings. Hiding half of Wessex’s forces until after the battle was well under way had been a brilliant and effective trick. But it had been an entirely unintended stratagem, whereas the pagan warriors seemed capable of deceiving and manipulating the Saxons almost at will. They could lure the gullible Christians into almost any treaty and then break it without a second thought. They could exchange hostages as a great show of good intentions and then slit the throats of the innocents a moment later.

Not only were the Vikings significantly more cunning, they were also far more logistically effective. They could successfully organize incredibly complex troop movements, sending one army over land and another by sea to meet at a prearranged point—hundreds of miles deep into their enemy’s territory and weeks into the future. Even more astonishing, they could execute these troop movements through hundreds of miles of Wessex territory, with Wessex only beginning to notice when one of her great cities had already been seized and fortified against her. If Alfred was to be victorious against Guthrum, he would need the ability to defeat the Danish king at his own game.

Additionally, if Alfred was to make a stand against the Viking conquerors, then he would need to find a way of instilling a deeper sense of principle in the Wessex ealdormen. Across Britain, the Vikings had thoroughly exploited all the character defects in the Saxon leadership. By capitalizing on these weaknesses, the Danes had easily divided the Saxon nobility and weakened Britain’s resistance to their conquest. For instance, when the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok invaded Northumbria, they struck just as the nation had fallen into a vicious civil war between Osberht and Ælle, two contenders for the Northumbrian throne. The bitter infighting of the Northumbrian leadership had left the nation defenseless and ripe for the picking.

When the Danes received danegeld from King Burgred in Mercia and King Edmund in East Anglia, they sensed a weakness begging to be exploited in the rulers. They returned soon after with such a show of strength that both Mercia and East Anglia immediately crumbled with very little military resistance.

If Alfred was to defeat his enemy, he needed to teach his noblemen to be cunning but principled, crafty as serpents and innocent as doves. His men had to become deathly shrewd and able to trump the Vikings in guile and deception. But at the same time, they had to sense the deep need for leaders who understood the principles of nobility. They had to despise the nearsighted purchasing of today’s peace with tomorrow’s freedom and see it for the cowardice that it was. They had to prefer to die a gory death in a hopeless combat than to live a craven life having betrayed the king and the people of Wessex. The pagan invaders could not have conquered a nation led by noblemen who understood true nobility.

Living these few months under Guthrum’s authority had already taught a good deal of this second lesson. The continued looting and pillaging of the Wessex shires, the ransacking of the churches and farms, the raping and kidnapping, had all exacted a heavy toll from the people of Wessex. Anyone who had thought that life under the Vikings would be preferable to a campaign against them had been thoroughly corrected. It was now clear that freedom would have been worth continuing to fight for.

The cunning that Alfred had lacked, he began to learn in Athelney. From here he tracked the Viking king, learning to predict his movements and how to react effectively and counter his tactics. He practiced moving his own men unseen throughout Guthrum’s newly occupied territory. He also began to construct an effective but entirely secret network of communication between himself and the ealdormen who were still loyal to him among the shire fyrds of Wessex.

By Easter, Alfred had constructed his own hidden fortress at Athelney, guarded by a watery seclusion and the few faithful thegns who had followed the king into hiding. A mile northeast of Athelney, Alfred was able to post a lookout on Burrow Mump, a prominent peak rising several hundred feet above the desolate surrounds that offered, on a clear day, a view for hundreds of miles in all directions. From here, Alfred could easily track from afar any movement of the Danish troops, offering him even greater opportunities to harass Guthrum’s uneasy troops.

For Guthrum the situation had become surprisingly more and more difficult. He had been a master at commanding an invading army, but occupying a foreign nation while being savagely harassed by a resolute underground force was a skill in which he was terribly unpracticed. To truly control Wessex, Guthrum needed to conquer Alfred and his small band of guerrilla warriors, who seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. Fighting this ubiquitous menace required that virtually all of his troops be held back either in the shire of Somerset searching out Alfred or in Wiltshire protecting Guthrum’s base at Chippenham. But this left the southern shires of Dorset and Hampshire untouched by the Viking occupation, as well as the other far reaches of Wessex. Alfred’s continued attacks from Athelney were keeping Guthrum from driving his conquest home. The one chance Guthrum had of finding assistance had been lost when the ealdorman of Devon, Odda, had routed the newly arrived Ubbe and his men at the failed siege of Countisbury.

Alfred realized it was critical that the southern shires remain free from the desperate grip of Guthrum. Had Ubbe been successful in his earlier invasion of Devon, the fate of Wessex would have been sealed. Therefore, even though it would have been very helpful if the strong Saxon fyrds of Dorset and Devon were to come to the north to help wage battle against Guthrum, it was necessary that they remain at home to defend the coasts of Wessex. This left Alfred depending on the men of Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire to fill out the army he was secretly gathering. The ealdorman of Wiltshire, Wulfhere, had betrayed Alfred, however, and pledged his faithfulness to Guthrum. Gathering the men of Wiltshire to his side without the leadership of the shire’s ealdorman would not be easy for Alfred. But Wulfhere’s duplicity had been a betrayal of his own people every bit as much as it had been a betrayal of the Wessex king. During the months since Guthrum’s attack on Chippenham, the men of Wiltshire had come to loathe their perfidious lord, a loathing that made them all the more passionately devoted to their outcast king and his cause.

In the middle of the month of April, when the men of Wiltshire received a secret communication from Alfred summoning them for battle, they received the call to arms with intense joy and thanksgiving at the chance to rid themselves of the pagan oppressors. The call was passed on to Somerset and Hampshire as well, shires whose ealdormen had remained faithful to Alfred throughout Guthrum’s conquest. At the village level, the leading men regularly gathered together at a meeting called the “folk-moot,” where local business was conducted and word from the ealdormen and king was regularly announced. Additionally, each village would send leading men to meet at the “shire-moot,” a similar meeting convened to conduct shire business. These governing bodies provided the means for Alfred to summon the men of Wessex to battle easily. These bodies also provided natural assembly points for each village and shire.

As the countryside of Wessex shook off the death grip of the English winter, as the frost and bone-biting chill fled from the climbing sun and lengthening days, as the floor of the woods sprang to life with the budding of the daffodils and bluebells, as all of nature declared with finality the death of winter, every man of Wessex capable of carrying a weapon into combat began his preparations for one more perilous clash with the Viking hordes. The following days were filled with the necessary task of equipping themselves for the fight, a task made all the more difficult by the need to hide the preparations from the Danish occupiers. Swords and axe-blades were sharpened, chain byrnies mended, spears fashioned, and hearts hardened. The message that had been passed on commanded the fyrds to gather at Egbert’s stone on the southern border of Wiltshire, east of Selwood Forest.