The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great (28 page)

Nevertheless, Alfred’s domboc provided an enduring foundation for justice throughout Wessex and, over subsequent generations, throughout all of England. The practice of exchanging the payment of wergild radically curtailed the mounting violence of the blood feuds and, as wrath and vengeance began to give way to mercy and forgiveness, helped Alfred to deliver his people not just from the bloody assaults of foreign raiders but also from their own vengeful blood thirst.

As peace, piety, learning, and the many arts patronized by the king began to flourish under Alfred’s rule, Britain began to experience a new type of golden age of Anglo-Saxon culture. Had Alfred only delivered his people from the plundering Danes whom he defeated at Edington in AD 879, then his contribution would have been significant and worthy of remembrance, but he would not have been worthy of the legendary status that the name King Alfred has acquired over the years. He would not have been King Alfred
the
Great
.

The king of Wessex distinguished himself from all other English monarchs because, after vanquishing the Vikings at Edington, he set his mind to the task of discovering the true cause of the pagan plague and then gave all his strength to righting these wrongs. The defensive reforms introduced in the
Burghal Hideage
, the revival of learning throughout Wessex, and the new standard of justice required by the domboc, all testify to Alfred’s tremendous insight in understanding the true flaws in the Anglo-Saxon culture and the comprehensive solution that these flaws required.

CHAPTER 8
A Final Test

And I go riding against the raid,
And ye know not where I am;
But ye shall know in a day or year,
When one green star of grass grows here;
Chaos has charged you, charger and spear,
Battle-axe and battering-ram.

And though skies alter and empires melt,
This word shall still be true:
If we would have the horse of old,
Scour ye the horse anew.

—FROM G. K. CHESTERTON’S The Ballad of the White Horse

A
s Alfred carried out his innovative domestic reforms, he continued to keep an ear tuned to news of the movements of the Danish forces who continued to pillage across the English Channel. The king was certain that at some point in the near future the Viking hordes would again turn their attention to the coasts and river networks of England. The king hoped desperately that his newly constructed defenses would be completed enough to withstand the next onslaught. The attack on Rochester in 885 had proved that Alfred’s defensive strategy was essentially sound, but the Danish force that Alfred’s mounted army had driven away from the newly fortified walls of Rochester had been a relatively small raiding army. Unlike the larger forces that Guthrum had led into Wessex nearly a decade earlier, intent on wholesale conquest and resettlement of the Christian lands, the small fleet that had attacked Rochester had merely been searching for quick plunder and easily coaxed danegeld. Whether the network of burhs and their garrisoned professional troops would be able to withstand a larger, more concerted effort to overthrow Alfred’s government entirely, still remained to be seen.

That test finally came in 892, when an enormous Viking force, numbering many more than ten thousand and dwarfing the previous invading host commanded by Guthrum, crossed the English Channel and grimly resolved to wrest the wealth of Wessex from the Anglo-Saxons and to topple the power of King Alfred and his newly restored government. This new raiding army was composed of two recently united Viking bands. One portion of the Danish army was composed of the remnants of the same army that had led the failed siege attempt against the city of Rochester in 885. After having been driven off by Alfred, this army had, along with a host of other Viking raiding armies, plagued the people of Europe. The following year, in 886, these armies, now constituting a massive force, laid siege to the great city of Paris. So enormous was the host of pagan Northmen who eagerly traveled to Paris to join in the siege, smelling the plunder profit likely to be shared if the city were to fall, that the length of the Seine River was clogged with dragon-prowed Viking longboats as far as the eye could see. The siege, though it lasted more than a year, never broke through the Parisian defenses. The affair ended in 886 when Emperor Charles the Fat bought peace for the Parisians by promising the Viking armies a total of seven hundred pounds of silver, as well as the privilege of continuing on up the Seine, then further into Francia, where Charles allowed them to plunder the province of Burgundy.

The Danes continued to plunder and raid throughout the European continent until the early spring of 892, when a terrible plague devastated the crops and brought the country into a severe famine. Uninterested in starving alongside Europe’s peasants, a large portion of the Viking army, a full two hundred fifty Danish longboats, turned their attentions again toward England.

Sailing from Boulogne, the Danish fleet crossed the Channel and rounded the southeastern coast of Kent, turning north up the river Lympne (now known as the river Rother). As the Vikings rowed hard up the river, they encountered a half-completed fortification, which they quickly wiped out, and then settled in at Appledore.

Following shortly after this first fleet, forming what would become a pincer-like attack on Wessex, was a smaller force led by the legendary Viking chieftain Hastein, a man renown for a long and successful career of plundering the unprotected churches up and down the river systems of the Somme, Loire, and Seine. As the various exploits and adventures of the Viking Hastein passed on into legend, however, the most infamous of his bloody escapades was his Mediterranean voyage during the years 859–862. During this tour, Hastein’s ravaging took an ecumenical turn as the Viking turned briefly from his typically Christian victims and instead plundered and burned the mosques of Muslim-dominated southern Spain, as well as those of North Africa. Then, returning to the plaguing of Christendom, the Dane raided many of the more prominent cities of southern Gaul, working his way along the Mediterranean Sea to Italy.

Finally, the Viking chieftain attempted what could have been one of the greatest achievements of Danish brigandage on record, the plundering of the great city of Rome. Seeing that the city walls were much too strong to be stormed, Hastein planned a clever ruse that would take advantage of the Christians’ pious gullibility.

First, the pagan chieftain sent a message to the bishop of the city, explaining that the Vikings had seen much hardship and were weary, hungry, and tired. They desired only rest, not plunder. In fact, the messenger explained, the commander of the Viking force had been wounded terribly in their last engagement, such that it was unclear whether he would survive longer than a few more days. And on his deathbed, their chief now hoped that he might receive Christian baptism to ensure the salvation of his soul before giving up the ghost.

The bishop of the great city, having mercy on the pagan raiders who seemed to have come on hard times, granted them the opportunity to buy provisions for their ships within the city walls and welcomed Hastein to the baptismal font, where the bishop stood as the chieftain’s sponsor and received him as godson. Later that evening, after the Vikings had returned to their ships, a message was sent to the bishop announcing that the bishop’s new godson had died of his wounds and that the Viking warriors, in accordance with their chieftain’s dying wish, were bringing the man’s body back to be buried in the city. Having received the sad news, the bishop organized a procession of clergymen, noblemen, choristers, and children carrying candles to meet the grieving Vikings at the city gate and then to lead the men who carried the dead chieftain on a bier through the city streets to the church where he had only just received baptism. Once the mournful procession had filled the church, the doors were shut, and the bishop recited the mass. Then the command was given to bring forward the body for burial.

The burial was interrupted when the supposedly dead Viking chieftain leaped up from the bier, snatching up the sword that had been laid beside him, and swiftly cut down the astonished bishop. At this, the rest of the Vikings gave up a blood curdling shout, drew their weapons, and proceeded to slaughter all the Christian members of the burial procession, now frozen in their bewilderment. Then, spilling out of the church and into the streets of the silently sleeping city, the Danes began a gruesome rampage of slaughter and rapine, plundering their way back out of the city and eventually returning to their longboats heavily laden with the spoils of their raid.

The Vikings, who took great pride in their ability to beguile the naïve Christians with their cunning deceptions, had much to congratulate themselves with for this ingenious ruse. At some point during their return journey, however, the Danes discovered a bit of information that dampened their enthusiasm for retelling this tale. As the result of some rather significant navigational errors, it appeared that the Vikings had been slightly mistaken about the identity of the city they had sacked. Instead of plundering the great and holy city of Rome, the pagans had raided the much smaller and fairly insignificant city of Luna, some two hundred miles north of Rome. Needless to say, when this story was retold to later generations, the beguiling cunning of the Viking plunderers was no longer the centerpiece of the narrative.

Even with the story of the comically blundered raid on Rome, Hastein enjoyed the reputation of a ruthless savage, bloodthirsty and plunder-hungry and possessed with a cruel greed for the relatively unprotected wealth of the Christian church’s monastic institutions. But Hastein had tired of plundering the continent and led his own fleet of eighty longboats across the channel to England. Entering the Thames estuary with his smaller fleet, he turned up the Swale, landed, and ordered that his men begin constructing an earthwork fortification near the river mouth. By striking Kent on the northern side, Hastein had carefully positioned his troops near the Danelaw border, giving him the ability to quickly summon help from the Danish settlers in Northumbria and East Anglia who were likely to cooperate with the Viking raid.

Soon word reached Alfred of the Danes’ latest invasion. After hearing the news, the king took some time to consider the nature of the danger, the possible pitfalls that lay before them, and the wisest solutions to this national emergency. It had been reported that these two armies did not consist solely of Danish warriors but that the two fleets of ships had been loaded down with entire Viking families, along with horses. This could have been good news because the three hundred thirty boats were not entirely filled with warriors; their numbers were diluted by the accompanying women and children.

But the presence of entire Viking families also signified that this army was not merely looking for quick plunder. These were Danes intent on seizing and settling the Kent countryside. And even after taking into account the fact that the number of fighting men was less than the number of boats might have first suggested, this was still a much larger force than the army that had conquered Northumbria. Clearly, Alfred must not allow these armies any significant foothold on the British soil.

Thinking that these two powers would be more easily defeated if kept separate from each other, Alfred gathered the might of his mobile army and led his troops to camp directly between the two hostile armies, keeping both of these invading forces well within reach of his own army. However, even worse than making contact with each other, Alfred feared that the freshly arrived Vikings might begin communicating with the Danish settlers in the nearby Danelaw. Since his godson Æthelstan (the converted Guthrum) had died in 890, Alfred had been losing confidence that the Danes living beyond his northern borders would continue to respect the terms of peace between Alfred and Æthelstan. With the presence of such an enormous Viking force lodged deep within the Anglo-Saxon territory, it was likely that many of the settlers of the Danelaw might feel emboldened and return to their previous habits of raiding and plundering.

In an attempt to prevent this possibility, Alfred sent messengers to the Danish rulers of Northumbria and East Anglia and demanded that they swear oaths promising to maintain peace between the Danelaw and Wessex and to resist the temptation to join the new Viking army in raiding the Saxons. The Northumbrians and the East Anglians complied with the king’s demands, giving their oaths and, in the case of the East Anglians, six hostages to vouchsafe their sincerity.

However, the oaths of the Danes remained consistently untrustworthy. Time after time, Alfred’s army would move to repulse some new foray from one of the Vikings’ fortified encampments, only to discover that the Danes’ numbers had swelled as a result of the continual flood of eager recruits pouring from the Danelaw to the camps of these Viking pirates. At other times, Alfred’s army encountered bands of plundering Danes manned entirely by warriors from the Danelaw, as new raiding armies began to form independently of the mob led by Hastein.

Nevertheless, because of the powerful mounted force deployed directly between the two armies by the king, and the shorter sorties made by the few fortified burhs that stood watch over the lands of Kent, the Viking forces found themselves constantly harassed on every side and unable to carve out a firm footing for themselves in the area. Alfred’s ability to keep his army in the field all year round and his well-established network of supplies and reinforcements enabled the king to pursue these invaders with unrelenting ferocity. So far, the king’s defensive innovations seemed to be standing up to the test.