The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great (3 page)

News of the sacking of Lindisfarne spread quickly. Alcuin, a native of Northumbria who was serving abroad in the court of Charlemagne, heard of the tragedy and wrote to Æthelred, king of Northumbria. In his letter, Alcuin took his inspiration from the prophets of the Old Testament who warned Israel to turn from her sins before God sent an even greater judgment.

For nearly 350 years we and our fathers have dwelt in this most beautiful land, and never before has such a terror appeared in Britain, such as the one that we are suffering from this pagan nation. Nor was it thought that a ship would attempt such a thing. Behold the church of Saint Cuthbert, splattered with the blood of the priests of God, plundered of all its treasures, a place more venerable than anywhere in Britain is given over to pagan nations for pillaging . . . the heritage of the Lord has been given over to a people who are not his own. And where the praise of the Lord once was, now is only the games of the pagans. The holy feast has been turned into a lament.

Carefully consider, brothers, and diligently note: lest this extraordinary and unheard of evil might be somehow merited by the habit of some unspoken wickedness. I am not saying that 13 the sin of fornication never appeared before among the people. But since the days of King Ælfwold, fornications, adulteries, and incest have inundated the land, such that these sins have been perpetrated without any shame, even against nuns who have been dedicated to God. What can I say about greed, robbery, and perverted judgments? When it is clearer than daylight, how much these crimes have flourished everywhere and it is witnessed by a plundered people.

Alcuin wrote a second letter to Higbald, the bishop of Lindisfarne. Again his letter sternly admonished the Christians of Lindisfarne that a disaster of this magnitude must be answered first and foremost with repentance, lest further catastrophe follow.

What confidence can there be for the churches of Britain, if Saint Cuthbert, with such a great number of saints, does not defend his own? Either this is the beginning of some much greater anguish or the sins of the inhabitants have demanded this. Clearly it has not happened by chance, but it is a sign that this was well deserved by someone. If there is anything that must be set right in your Grace’s behavior, correct it swiftly.

But whatever response the Anglo-Saxons mounted, it was far too little and too late. The Vikings had tasted the undefended plenty of England and would soon return in greater and greater numbers. Rather than an unheard-of tragedy, “the church of Saint Cuthbert, spattered with the blood of the priests of God,” would soon become an all-too-common scene throughout ninth-century Britain.

The year after the sacking of Lindisfarne, Vikings struck Jarrow, another monastic community farther down the coast, to the south of Lindisfarne. The next year Iona was plundered. And so on.

Initially the raiding parties consisted of small Viking bands traveling in as few as two to three ships, but occasionally parties came in larger fleets numbering as many as several dozen. The design of the Viking warship—perfected during the eighth century by northern sailors and shipwrights while transporting trade cargo along the Scandinavian coasts—played a significant role in the success of the raids. In the nineteenth century, the excavation of a burial mound on a Norwegian farm in Gokstad revealed the remains of a mid-ninth-century Viking ship, giving a likely example of the kind of vessel that prowled the Anglo-Saxon shores. The Gokstad ship has a length of seventy-six and a half feet and a width of seventeen and a half feet. The ship was clinker-built, meaning the hull was formed out of overlapping oak planks, joined with iron rivets and sealed with a caulking of tarred animal hair. Each layer of oak plank is called a
strake
, and the Gokstad ship was built of sixteen strakes. The nine lowest strakes would have been submerged when the ship was afloat. Though the draught of the ship was deep enough that the vessel could maintain a steady course in the heavy gales of the open seas as it sailed to Britain, the Gokstad ship would have generally required no more than a depth of three and a half feet of water to float freely. This meant that, in addition to being able to safely cross the North Sea loaded with plunder, the ship could be rowed up the shallow rivers that pierced deep into England’s countryside without running aground. The fourteenth strake held sixteen oar holes per side, for a total complement of thirty-two oarsmen. Rowing would have been resorted to only occasionally, however, as the boat depended primarily on its sail for propulsion.

© MUSEUM OF CULTURAL HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF OSLO, NORWAY / UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER

The men of the ninth-century Viking raiding party could leave their Scandinavian homes after the crops had been planted and the ice on the seas had melted. Then, traveling under the power of sails, their ships would reach the British shores within a matter of weeks. They could begin plundering along the coastline or could pierce deep into the heart of England, searching out the tributaries of the larger rivers like the Umber or Thames, switching to rowing when the winds failed. The Vikings would beach their ships just outside the walls of their target (rarely looking for targets very far from the waterways, which offered a hasty retreat). After striking their target and seizing whatever portable wealth could be found, they would then return to their ships and vanish, long before any force could be mustered to strike back. The Vikings then returned triumphant, 16 laden down with booty and plunder, just in time to harvest their now fully grown crops.

Soon the stories of these horrific raids were reported throughout all of England. Every monastery and abbey, every marketplace, and every mead hall heard the haunting tales of the savage Viking attacks. Even Alfred, the young prince of Wessex, could not have been unaware of the nightmarish accounts of the pagan barbarians and their bloody raids. Nevertheless, Alfred’s earliest years were relatively unaffected by the intermittent Viking raids. The story of the savage Northmen was just another thrilling feature of life growing up in the royal court of Wessex. More likely than not, the gory accounts of the Danish attacks added more to Alfred’s daydreams than to his nightmares.

Alfred’s biographer, a Welsh monk named Asser, later wrote that Alfred’s parents had a particular fondness for him, an affection that exceeded their love for their other sons. Since Alfred was probably around twenty-five to twenty-six years younger than his oldest brother, this would imply that his mother, Osburh, was well into her forties when Alfred was born. At a time when the average person did not live past the age of thirty-two, Osburh must have felt like Sarah from the Bible: “old and well stricken in age, ceasing to be after the manner of women” (Genesis 18:11). It is quite likely that Alfred, the son of her old age, did hold a special place in the affections of his mother. His company was enjoyed enough that he was included in all the journeys of the royal court, a fairly exceptional practice at 17 that time. The young boy’s zeal for Anglo-Saxon poetry must have also endeared him to his mother.

In the year AD 853, at the age of four, Alfred was sent by his father on a lengthy pilgrimage from Wessex to Rome—the Holy City and the threshold of the apostles. Despite the prince’s youth and the fact that he was fifth in line from the throne, Æthelwulf hoped the appearance of his young son in Rome would win the favor of the pope for the king and his nation. This trip must have had a lasting impact on Alfred, even at the age of four. The journey took the young boy across the English Channel, crossing from Canterbury to Calais.

In Calais was the beginning of a well-traveled path known as the
via francigena
. This route was formed by a series of connected roads leading pilgrims all the way to Rome, a road that Alfred’s company most likely followed. This path broke the journey into some eighty stages, with each stage requiring a journey of approximately thirteen to fifteen miles. The trip was treacherous. Danes were raiding up and down the Frankish river systems, and Saracens had only recently been driven away from the gates of Rome. When travelers were not avoiding enslavement and slaughter at the hands of large pagan armies, they were running from smaller murderous bands of robbers who hunted the pilgrims’ paths for easy wealth.

The route led all the way south through modern France, crossing the Alps in Switzerland, and then into Italy. Travelers along the
via
francigena
stayed in a series of hostels, inns, churches, and monasteries, which had sprung up along the route to serve the needs of tired travelers. One of these small monastic communities in northern Italy ran a hostel in the town of Brescia. The monks of this particular monastery maintained a record of the various guests who 18 had been given lodging in the hostel, a record preserved to this day with the scrawled signature “Alfred” among its ninth-century Anglo-Saxon guests.

After the several-months’ journey of more than one thousand miles, Alfred and his noble company arrived in Rome, “the threshold of the apostles,” a city of dazzling wealth, sophistication, and architecture far beyond anything Alfred had seen in Wessex. Here stood the Pantheon, the Coliseum, and countless other architectural relics of the Roman Empire, awe-inspiring even in their decay. But another Rome had risen out of those pagan ruins—the Christian city. And this city was still very much alive. Here Alfred could worship in the basilicas of Saint Peter or Saint Paul, both built over the graves of their respective apostles. Both basilicas rose more than one hundred feet and must have dwarfed any of the Anglo-Saxon buildings Alfred had ever seen. Saint Peter’s Basilica had been the site of Charlemagne’s crowning as emperor a little more than fifty years before.

But there was yet another Rome that must have caught Alfred’s eye. Only ten years before Alfred’s visit, Rome had been sacked by Saracen invaders who had plundered the city, including both the basilicas of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. As a result of this, Pope Leo IV had begun to refortify the city. The old city defenses had left the basilicas outside of the city’s protective walls, making them easy targets for plundering. During the last Saracen invasion, the altar of Saint Peter’s had been stripped of more than two hundred pounds of gold. Only a couple of years before Alfred’s arrival, a new defensive wall had been completed, surrounding the city and providing protection for the vulnerable basilicas. This new wall marked off what would become known as the City of Leo, named for the pope who had constructed the new defenses. As the boy Alfred was shown through the city and the new city walls were pointed out to him, the daydreams of fortifying a city against hostile invaders were planted in his imagination.
⁷

Alfred’s stay in Rome was brief. Once their task was accomplished and they had met Pope Leo IV, who confirmed him, taking him as a spiritual son, the company of Anglo-Saxons was soon heading north, back up the
via francigena
.