The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great (6 page)

There is one story about his wedding, however. As Alfred moved from boyhood to manhood and the passions and lusts of a young man began to grip him, he became alarmed at the sudden power of these new temptations. Fearing the bondage of these lusts and the possibility of losing favor with God if he gave in to them, Alfred began the habit of going to churches very early in the morning to beg God that he might send him some sort of physical affliction that would be severe enough to curb his sinful lusts, but not so severe that it would render Alfred useless in his duties. God seemingly answered Alfred’s prayers by afflicting the prince with the extremely unpleasant disease of piles. Alfred suffered from this malady for years, and after some time the affliction became more than he could take.

Finally, exhausted by the pain and humiliation of his disease, Alfred prayed again that God might replace his disease with something less painful and less grotesque. After this prayer, Alfred never suffered from piles again. On the day of his marriage to Ealswith, in the middle of the marriage feast, however, a severe and incapacitating pain struck Alfred. The affliction of piles had been replaced by a mysterious internal agony. This pain would continue to recur for the next twenty years of Alfred’s life, leaving him in constant fear of its onset.

In the year AD 869, the Viking army poured from York to the south once more. Marching through Mercia, which now made no attempt 35 to stop them, the pagan army advanced on East Anglia, the site of their initial landing in Britain five years earlier. The East Anglian king, Edmund, had fed the Viking forces for an entire year and then supplied enough horses for the entire army’s journey to York. Now the Vikings came to repay this favor by conquering the East Anglian kingdom entirely.

The East Anglian army, unprepared for the surprise attack, was beaten easily. On November 20, 869, Edmund was taken captive by the Viking chieftains Ivar and Ubbe and, according to the story passed on by his sword-bearer, was tortured and executed. First the king was bound to a tree, where he was scourged and beaten. Then the Vikings shot arrows at him until he “bristled like a hedgehog.” Annoyed at his continued calling out to Christ, the Vikings finally beheaded him.

And so, with Northumbria conquered and the kingdoms of Mercia and East Anglia crippled, the only Anglo-Saxon nation left to be subdued by the raiding Vikings was the kingdom of Wessex.

1
The Vikings took comedic delight in their cruelties. In one Icelandic saga, the Viking warrior Egill is captured by the owner of a farm he is trying to plunder. In the middle of the night, Egill and his men get free from their bonds and plunder the farmer’s belongings once more. However, as they sneak back to the ship, Egill begins to feel a tinge of guilt for his theft, realizing he has acted as a thief and not a warrior. And so, Egill sneaks back to the farm and lights it on fire, burning its inhabitants in their beds and turning himself into an honorable warrior. The crueler the death, the more enjoyable the story. No doubt, the retelling of Ælle clawing the ground as the sword hacked at his rib cage provided innumerable delights around Viking campfires for many of the following decades.

2
At that time, more than three centuries before the time of Robin Hood, the Anglo-Saxon name of Nottingham was
Snotengaham
, apparently named after an earlier chieftain named Snot. Luckily for the modern-day residents of the city, the “S” was eventually dropped from the name, and so, rather than Snottingham, the city is now called Nottingham.

CHAPTER 3
The Battle of Ashdown

When Alfred could no longer hold off the enemy battle line, without either retreating back from the fight or prematurely charging against the enemy troops before his brother had come to the battle, he finally commanded the Christian troops to advance against the enemy army, acting manfully, like a wild boar.

—FROM ASSER’S Life of Alfred

A
fter conquering East Anglia, the Viking army was slightly reorganized. Ivar the Boneless returned to York, now called by its Viking name
Jorvik
and functioning as the capital of the Viking-controlled north. Ivar soon traveled to Dublin where he was later killed. Ubbe also departed to inflict himself upon the Welsh, leaving the Danish forces to be led by Halfdan and Bagsecg, another Viking king who had only recently arrived in Britain to add his forces to the swelling Viking hordes. Having settled in the East Anglian town of Thanet, they continued to raid and plunder the East Anglian countryside. But even as the air turned bitter cold with the oncoming winter, the Viking chieftains began to gather supplies and make all the necessary preparations for their armies to move out once more.

By December 870, the Danish forces were ready. Despite the treacherously worsening weather of the winter months, they boarded their longships and set out to sea, working their way down the eastern coast, all the way to the mouth of the Thames. Then, turning up into the river, alternating between rowing and sailing, they followed the snaking waters deep into the heart of Britain. Their destination was the last defiant Saxon kingdom—Wessex. As Halfdan and Bagsecg moved their massive fleet silently up the Thames, a portion of their forces must have traveled over land. How they managed to keep the news of their movement completely silent is difficult to explain. By the opening days of the year 871, the various components of the Viking forces had reunited and were crouching on the very borders of Wessex.

The first assault was swift and successful. In a few hours, the Viking raiders attacked and quickly captured the unsuspecting and unprepared town of Reading. Reading lay in the center of Berkshire, a county the Mercians had ceded to Wessex only a few decades earlier. The town was strategically located at the confluence of the river Thames and the river Kennet, providing natural defenses as well as mobility for the Viking longships. But it was also conveniently placed very near several attractive targets for Viking pillagers—the abbey of Abingdon and the royal estate of Wallingford (not to mention the royal estate already located in Reading). Immediately after seizing Reading, the Vikings began constructing an earthen rampart that spanned the distance between the two rivers and left the Vikings in a well-protected triangular stronghold, surrounded by rivers on two sides and an easily defended rampart on the third.

As these defenses were being constructed, two Viking earls rode out with a raiding band intent on looting some of the nearby farms to begin providing for the Vikings’ voracious appetites, as well as to begin familiarizing themselves with the area surrounding their new fortress. As they explored their environs, however, these two Viking earls discovered that news of their arrival in Wessex had traveled quickly. Twelve miles from Reading, near a small village called Englefield, the reconnoiter of the Wessex countryside was interrupted by an ealdorman of Berkshire named Æthelwulf and a host of men whom he had marshaled for battle. Too far from their newly constructed defenses of Reading and cut off from their fellow Danish troops, the Viking party was forced to stand and fight the troops of Wessex.

The struggle between the two forces was protracted and savage. Although it was true that the Viking strategy generally was to avoid having to step onto the battlefield with a prepared army, that should in no way give the impression that the Viking forces were incapable of fierce fighting. Once it was clear that the Vikings could not simply withdraw and wait for the Berkshire ealdorman to pay for his peace, the Danish forces eagerly and zealously turned themselves to the ugly business of hacking their way through the men of Berkshire.

Their hopes of easily returning to the secure outpost in Reading were soon dashed when they realized the men of Berkshire were not so easily conquered. Ealdorman Æthelwulf was an experienced warrior. Ten years before, when a Viking navy had attempted an attack on the city of Winchester, it was Ealdorman Æthelwulf, leading the men of Berkshire, who had driven the Danish raiders from the city. Æthelwulf and his men showed the same resolve once more.

Again and again the Vikings threw themselves at the line of Saxon shields, and each time the Saxon men, grim and determined, matched and bettered the Vikings’ power, defiantly driving them back. Despite the Danish ferocity, the Saxon men just wouldn’t back down. Even worse, they gained ground on the Viking army. After one of these engagements, when it was discovered that the Saxons had cut down Sidroc, one of the two Viking earls, the raiding army began to lose its resolve. Soon panic struck the Danish troops, who were far more accustomed to seeing fear in the eyes of their opponents than in the eyes of their comrades.

Panic then gave way to a frenzied horror, and soon the somewhat astonished Berkshire troop stood victorious as the masters of the battlefield as the Vikings ran from the slaughter.

Æthelwulf was soon able to report the news of his glorious victory in person to Æthelred, the king of Wessex, and his younger brother Alfred. The royal brothers arrived in Berkshire soon after Æthelwulf ’s encounter with the raiding band. Within four days of the Berkshire forces’ encounter with the Danish army, Æthelred and Alfred had gathered the Wessex military before the earthen ramparts of Reading and prepared their men for an assault on the Viking stronghold.

Unlike Æthelwulf, this would be the first actual combat that either Æthelred or Alfred had ever faced. The closest the two brothers had come to real fighting had been during the siege of Nottingham—a siege that had been resolved with the payment of the danegeld rather than with the sword point. Now Æthelred, twenty-five, and Alfred, twenty-two, arranged the might of Wessex for an assault on the Viking defenses, a daunting task.

In almost any combat engagement, it is understood that defensive forces command a significant advantage over the attacking troops. A soldier carefully selects and prepares his defensive position to guarantee that it affords him the most cover while forcing his enemy to approach him as vulnerably as possible. And though this is generally understood by all armies, it was particularly well understood by the Viking forces. Throughout the ninth century in northern Europe and the islands of Ireland and Britain, the Vikings had perfected the art of digging in and forcing their opponents to make enormous sacrifices in every assault on a Danish position. All of this is to say that the assault on Reading did not go well for Wessex’s forces, and the introduction to combat given to Æthelred and Alfred was not a pleasant one.

Initially the Wessex attack caught the Viking forces by surprise. Æthelred, Alfred, and Æthelwulf, shoulder to shoulder with their troops, swooped down on Reading, hacking and hewing their way through the startled resistance. But by the time the Saxons had pushed the Vikings back to the walls of the fortress, the gates opened, and an inexorable tidal wave of Danish warriors poured forth, driving the men of Wessex back and crushing their hopes of a victory. Later descriptions of the battle claimed the Vikings had poured out of the gates like wolves hungry for battle. Soon the men of Wessex had turned and fled. For miles the Vikings pursued the fleeing Saxons. It 42 was not until the Saxon troops crossed the river Loddon at a hidden ford that the Vikings finally gave up the chase and Æthelred and Alfred had a moment to compose themselves and their troops. The fight had been humiliatingly lost, and Æthelwulf, their most experienced military commander, was dead.

Æthelred and Alfred were struck with grief and shame at their terrible defeat. Their first attempt at combat had been a dismal failure costing countless lives, including one of Wessex’s most seasoned military leaders, and leaving the rest of Wessex vulnerable to a Viking attack. Though the loss had been significant, it was of the utmost importance that Wessex’s forces regroup and the zeal of the soldiers be rekindled. The poor performance in the assault on Reading and the subsequent hasty retreat had communicated to the Vikings the weakness of the Wessex troops and the vulnerability of their cities. The Danes were sure to follow up on their victory with an assault on other towns in Wessex. The Saxons had to reorganize swiftly and prepare to meet this inevitable attack.