The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great (5 page)

But they did not find peace at home. When Ragnar returned to Denmark, the king of the Danes, Horik, ordered all of Ragnar’s forces to be executed as a punishment for their lawless raiding. Whether Horik was really bothered by the lawlessness of their raiding or by the competition that Ragnar’s raiding posed to the crown is a question worth asking. Ragnar and his sons, however, managed to slip away from King Horik unharmed and began to focus their 27 raiding away from the continent and onto the islands of Britain and Ireland.

Many years later, Ragnar’s “little pigs” landed on the shores of East Anglia, on the southeast coast of modern England. The East Anglian king, King Edmund, quickly sought peace for his kingdom from the Vikings and found it could be purchased, though its cost would be far greater than Edmund bargained for. Ragnar’s sons restrained their armies from pillaging the East Anglian kingdom, as long as the East Anglians supplied food and all other necessary provisions to the Viking camps, which began to swell daily with newcomers from other Viking armies hearing of this new life of ease. When the winter months arrived, a time when the Viking armies normally returned across the North Sea and left the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to recover, the great army gave no hint of leaving.

Throughout the long winter, the East Anglians served the appetites of the Viking army, supplying them with food, drink, and other gifts. Then, in addition to these provisions, the Vikings demanded horses for the entire army. Though the Vikings never fought on horseback, they had learned that a mounted army had the ability to strike even deeper and more swiftly into the British countryside, where rivers did not always provide an easy path.

This last demand having been met, the Vikings finally marched on in the autumn of AD 866, leaving the East Anglians wishing they had been so lucky as to have only had their villages plundered and burned. From here, the great army, now more than five thousand strong, not counting the innumerable noncombatant members of their camp, rode north to the kingdom of Northumbria.

Whether there was truth to the legend of the death of Ragnar 28 and the burden of revenge placed on his sons, or whether the wealth of the Northumbrian kings had caught their attention, the Danes were determined that their conquest of England was to begin with the Northumbrian capital of York.

The target was well selected. A commercial center that was advantageously connected to the network of roads and rivers of Northumbria, York offered quick wealth and a strategic base for further conquests. But even more strategic was the date chosen for the attack. First, Ivar and Halfdan arrived in Northumbria when the kingdom was divided by a cruel civil war between King Ælle and his rival, King Osberht. Second, the Vikings launched their surprise attack on York on November 1, All Saints’ Day, a feast day the Anglo-Saxon church observed in great earnest. This meant that the attack came when the city was packed with the wealth of those who had come to observe the feast, as well as when the city was least prepared to defend itself because the two warring factions were absent from the city. And the city itself, busy with preparing for the feast, was entirely distracted from thinking of its own defenses.

Undefended, York quickly fell to the Viking attack. Upon hearing the news, Ælle and Osberht, recognizing how dire the situation was, quickly made peace with each other, joined their forces into one large Anglo-Saxon army, and returned to prepare for their own assault on the now Viking-held York. Their attack came several months later, on March 23, Palm Sunday. Initially the battle favored the Northumbrian forces, who broke through the walls of York and engaged the Viking warriors on the narrow streets of the city. But the tide of the battle suddenly turned, and the forces of Ælle and Osberht were cut down both inside the city walls and outside as they fled.

Though both Ælle and Osberht fell that day, the death of Ælle would be particularly immortalized by later Viking sagas, eager to emphasize the revenge Ragnar’s sons were able to exact from the man who had executed their father. Ivar and Halfdan captured Ælle and ordered him to be ritually sacrificed to the Norse god Odin, the Viking war god who had given the victory to the Norse raiders. The particular method of sacrifice chosen for Ælle was the grisly ceremony of the Blood Eagle. Ælle was held face down on the ground while a sword chopped two gaping holes into the back of his ribcage, one on each side of his spine. Then to the cheers of the Vikings crowded around the floundering victim, his ribs were pulled back and his still-inflating lungs were seized and pulled out through the bloody holes, heaving and gurgling through the last few painful gasps of the shrieking sacrifice.
¹

Shortly after Æthelwulf married Judith, but before the royal family returned to Wessex, Alfred’s brother, Prince Æthelbald, had attempted to usurp the throne. The prince had announced that he refused to let his father back into Wessex and intended to rule as king in his place. Æthelwulf apparently did not take much notice of this attempted coup and returned to Wessex. Æthelbald, his bluff called, was given several shires in the west of Wessex to rule in exchange for his peaceful submission to his father.

With his mother, Osburh, dead and his father more and more distracted, Alfred found it increasingly easier to slip through the cracks in his father’s courts. Though he maintained the fondness for Anglo-Saxon poetry his mother had instilled in him, far less effort was put into his studies. In fact, it was not until the age of twelve that Alfred learned to read in his native tongue, but he was still not able to understand anything in Latin, the language in which most literary works of the time were available.

In January 858, within two years of his return home, King Æthelwulf died, leaving the throne to his grasping son Æthelbald. Unfortunately, Æthelbald was not satisfied with just the throne. Shortly after he was made king of Wessex, Æthelbald took his stepmother, the fourteen-year-old Queen Judith, as his wife. Thinking that his marriage to Judith would bring all the Carolingian legitimacy that his father had received from having married the girl, Æthelbald was surprised to find that he had merely invoked disgust and not respect in the hearts of his subjects. Taking his father’s bride for his own wife was a violation of canon law and nature itself. The rash move could have endangered his reign had he not died of disease not long after the wedding. Judith soon returned to her father in West Francia, and the power of Wessex was once again reserved for the spear-side.

After the death of Æthelbald in AD 860, Æthelberht, the 31 next son in line, took the throne. Æthelberht now ruled over all of Wessex, as well as the northern shire of Berkshire, and the eastern subkingdoms of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Essex. But as was his older brother’s, Æthelberht’s reign was brief. By AD 865, Æthelberht was dead as well, leaving the fourth son, Æthelred, as king and Alfred as the next in line.

With the conquest of the Northumbrian capital of York, Danish rule had been thoroughly established in the north, and it was time for the Viking forces to begin expanding their empire. In AD 867 Ivar and Ubbe led the army south to Nottingham—the capital of the kingdom of Mercia, the northern neighbors of Wessex.
²
The city was quickly captured by the Viking army, who refortified it against any attempts to retake the city. The Mercian king, Burgred, appealed to Wessex for aid in ending the Danish occupation of Nottingham. The Mercian kingdom was closely allied to Wessex after King Æthelwulf ’s daughter, Æthelswith, married the king of Mercia in the spring of 853 in an attempt to forge a military alliance between these two kingdoms. Thus Burgred and the new king of Wessex, Æthelred, were brothers-in-law.

Æthelred quickly consented and set about raising the army of Wessex to go and battle the Danish invaders. When Æthelred and his younger brother Alfred finally arrived at Nottingham leading the battle-ready men of Wessex, however, they were frustrated to find that the Danes had withdrawn behind the city walls of Nottingham and refused to come out and fight. Many years of raiding and running had taught the Viking forces the advantage of avoiding all combat except when they were sure to be the victors. And now, even though the goal of the Vikings was no longer simply plundering but all-out conquest, they continued to use many of these old tactics.

The forces of Wessex were not prepared to break through Nottingham’s old Roman ramparts and its city walls. They had no choice but to settle in for a lengthy siege of the city. Unfortunately, unlike Ivar and Ubbe’s army, the men of Wessex were not professional soldiers. This meant that though they could be counted on for fierce fighting during short and intense battles, they could not be counted on for long, protracted campaigns. These men were farmers who had to return home to tend to their crops and livestock and could not spare months of waiting for the Viking troops to be starved into submission by a dwindling food supply. After a very short time, the Wessex forces began to steal out of the camp secretly in order to return home. Burgred, realizing he would not be able to wait the Vikings out, reluctantly won peace for his city by bribing the raiding army to leave.

This was Alfred’s disappointing introduction to the bitter frustration of doing battle with the Viking raiders. Though the reputation of the Danes for ferocity in battle was well deserved, the true skill of the Viking forces was the ability to maximize their raping, pillaging, and plundering, while minimizing the chances of facing another 33 army on the open field of battle. Ivar and Ubbe led their troops past Æthelred, Alfred, and Burgred, completely unscathed, with the plundered wealth of the city on their backs. The Mercian king, Burgred, though he had won back the city, had ultimately lost his authority to rule. During the following years, the kingdom of Mercia became a thoroughfare for Viking armies, with the Mercians incapable of putting up any resistance.

Alfred did find one rather significant consolation in the failed siege of Nottingham. At some point during, or shortly after, the siege, Alfred was betrothed to and then married a Mercian woman, Ealswith. His new bride’s father was an ealdorman of one of the older tribes of Mercia, and her mother was from the royal line of the Mercian kingdom. She remained married to Alfred for the rest of his life, dying several years after her husband.

Though Alfred said little about his relationship with his wife in his writings, his silence is in keeping with the general Anglo-Saxon austerity and does not indicate any particular coolness on Alfred’s part toward his wife. The notions of chivalric romance and knights sick with love for beautiful maidens would not come to England for another several hundred years. Not until long after Norman rulers from northern Europe replaced the Anglo-Saxon kings would the idea of romantic love become a prominent theme in English literature. Therefore Alfred’s silence about his marriage can’t be interpreted as indifference to Ealswith. Like all Anglo-Saxon men, he did not wish to share with the world his romantic affections for his wife. Their marriage was a fruitful one, with Ealswith giving Alfred two sons and three daughters (in addition to other children who did not survive into adulthood).