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Authors: Benjamin R. Merkle

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BOOK: The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great
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Alfred’s biographer later emphasized the rightness of the cause of the Wessex soldiers, a confidence that their fight was just and that God was on their side. The intensity of the fight, the thrill of the early success, the confidence of divine favor, all worked powerfully on Alfred, awakening a savage fury in him. His men later described him as a wild boar on the battlefield, a bloody beast, rampaging through the Viking lines in a ruthless rage. On and on the combat continued, swirling around a lone thorn tree. Many years after the battle was over, veterans would come and point with pride to that thorn tree, which marked the very spot on the hillside where they had stood with Alfred and fought in the battle of Ashdown.

The surprising strength with which the Wessex shieldwall resisted the initial Viking charge may have sent a momentary disappointment through the Danish host. They quickly converted their hope for an easy victory into an indefatigable determination to bathe the slopes of Ashdown in Wessex blood. Soon the ground gained by Saxon troops was being slowly granted back again to the Viking horde, passing the lonely thorn tree once more.

A well-formed shieldwall was virtually impenetrable, so long as the wall held together. If a gap could be cut into the wall, then the enemy would pour through the line and attack from behind, where the wall was vulnerable. Once a hole was cut into the shieldwall, even if for just a moment, the sudden attack of enemy soldiers from behind made it impossible to keep the formation together; the shieldwall would be abandoned quickly, and general chaos would ensue. Thus, most methods for assaulting the wall focused on ripping open the wall, hoping to capitalize on the bedlam that inevitably followed.

An attack would come as a sudden hard push, a human battering ram, where one shieldwall tried to outmuscle the other. In this type of engagement, the primary weapon was the spear. Instead of being thrown, the spear was kept in hand and thrust over and in between the shields. The spear’s length made it possible to wield it effectively against the enemy while standing several ranks back from the front line of the shieldwall. A Norse manual would later insist that a spear was worth two swords when fighting against a shieldwall.

Swords and axes were more difficult to wield in such close quarters and tended to be reserved for hand-to-hand combat in the many smaller skirmishes that followed once the shieldwall had broken. It was possible, however, to use the bottom of the axe head to hook an opposing shield and pull it away to leave its owner vulnerable to a spear thrust. Additionally, many soldiers carried a sax, a much shorter sword with a blade of one to two feet. A sax could be much more easily wielded inside the tight confines of the shieldwall. Swords and axes may have also been useful for attacking the unprotected legs of the enemy, but the awkwardness of swinging such bulky weapons within the confines of the shieldwall, however, made the spear the weapon of choice.

Though the Wessex shieldwall continued to hold, the casualties inflicted by the Viking attack began to mount. The Danish spear-men constantly wormed their deadly spears through the network of shields, searching for the tender flesh of the Wessex front rank. Each time the spear was driven home— sometimes with a deadly precision to the neck or abdomen, but more often catching some Saxon in a less vital area like the thigh or an unprotected shoulder—the wall was weakened by one. These wounds may not have been immediately fatal, but the pain and blood loss removed the soldier from the fight.
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The Wessex line now required endurance and discipline to hold together throughout this cruel battle of bloody attrition. As each warrior fell, his place had to be filled quickly and willingly by the man standing immediately behind him. A moment’s hesitation, a moment of considering what price might be paid for filling that gap, and a hole was left open for a horde of Vikings to pour through the shieldwall, ending the battle. And once a man took a position in the front rank, there could be no turning back. He was woven into a wall of shields that utterly depended on his constant struggle to hold the line together.

When a shieldwall did fail, it was almost inevitably not from the power of the attacking army, but from cowardice in the ranks of the shieldwall. If a man ripped himself from the wall and turned to run, it would trigger a chain reaction in all those around him, and the entire wall would dissolve in seconds. One man running from fear was far more damaging to the integrity of the wall than twenty men falling from stab wounds.

The movements of the shieldwall were not coordinated from afar. Generals could not sit at a safe distance from the conflict sending messengers into the fray with orders for troop movements and changes of tactics. After the command to form the shieldwall had been given, the only leadership the soldiers required was the leadership of example. The commander joined his men, standing shoulder to shoulder with them throughout the gruesome conflict. While he stood and fought, they stood and fought. If he fell, a spirit of hopelessness would smother the spirit in his men, and the battle would immediately turn against them. If he fled, there was absolutely no reason for the men to stay and fight, so the battlefield would empty in moments. Alfred, though completely new to this responsibility, held his place and fought on, the wild boar rampaging across the slopes of Ashdown.

And then without warning, the inexorable Viking assault suddenly dissolved. In one moment, the fierce and relentless barrage of Danish warriors vanished as if it had been a mirage. All that was left was a view of the backside of a panic-stricken mob fleeing for its life. It took several moments for Alfred and his men to recover from their amazement and to realize what had happened. Suddenly, it became clear.

King Æthelred had finished his prayers.

The Viking commanders had not realized that the Wessex troops they had engaged represented only half of the army they would be facing that day. Thus, when they had stood on the summit of Ashdown to 61 watch Alfred lead his meager force onto the slope below and form his men into a shieldwall, they confidently advanced the entirety of their army on that one small troop. Though they may have been surprised by the strength of the Wessex shieldwall during their initial assault, they were confident that their vastly superior numbers would enable them to win.

With their sudden appearance, King Æthelred and his men not only removed the Viking advantage of outnumbering the men of Wessex but also were perfectly poised to attack the unprotected flank of the Viking shieldwall. The Vikings were utterly defenseless as the second half of the Wessex army charged onto the battlefield and drove straight for the vulnerable flank of the Viking line.

The appearance, however, of Æthelred and his men did not signal an abrupt end of combat; rather, it meant a major transition in the nature of the fighting as the Vikings grew more and more desperate. The Danish shieldwall crumpled in seconds as astonishment at the sudden appearance of another Saxon army turned to raw fear. The Viking force, which had moved as one only moments before, now dissolved into a thousand bands of individual warriors no longer fighting to drive the Saxons from the battlefield but now merely trying to find a way to free themselves from the clutches of Wessex. Those who were able to hack their way free from the melee sprinted for the safety of the woods, but those who found themselves surrounded by the Saxon forces were forced to fight on in smaller, more chaotic, skirmishes. No longer encumbered by the shieldwall, the hand-to-hand combat turned to a more one-on-one style of fighting where each combatant relied solely on his own quickness of sword or axe and general cunning.

The gruesome fighting continued for several hours until the entire Viking host had either fallen or fled and the men of Wessex once again dominated Ashdown. Those Vikings who fled were chased throughout that evening and into the next day, when they were finally able to find refuge behind the fortifications of Viking-held Reading. Those who fell in battle, numbering well into the thousands, became plunder for the victorious Anglo-Saxons.

Possession of the battlefield meant much more than clear military triumph. It also meant the right to plunder the dead. Because the Viking force traveled with much of its wealth on its back, the booty that could be collected from the bodies of the fallen was substantial. As the dead were searched for coins, jewelry, and other portable wealth, the bodies of a number of Viking chieftains were discovered. Among the dead were the Viking king, Bagsecg, as well as five Viking earls—Earl Sidroc the Elder, Earl Sidroc the Younger, Earl Osbern, Earl Fræna, and Earl Harold.

Once the battle was truly over, Æthelred and Alfred began to accept their victory. The enemy had been routed, leaving the corpses of thousands littering what the Anglo-Saxon tongue would refer to as “the place of slaughter.” The Viking leadership was well represented among the dead, and what was left of the raiding army had limped back to Reading. For that brief moment, it seemed as if the Creator had smiled upon them, and their fortunes could have been no better.

But fortunes fade quickly. King Æthelred and his brother Alfred soon discovered that, despite the good name they had won on the slopes of Ashdown and the plunder the triumphant men of Wessex had carted off, the victory had cost the Saxon forces a price just as high as the price paid by the raiding army of Vikings. From the initial contact between the Viking foraging party and the small army led by Æthelwulf, the Berkshire ealdorman, to the great victory at Ashdown, the number of the Wessex slain throughout this campaign was equal to the significant casualties suffered by the Viking armies.

The loss of life affected the Saxons differently than it did the Vikings, however. The Viking raiding army was filled with professional soldiers, men whose absence from home left no significant gap in the local economy. But the men of Wessex who had fallen in battle were not professional soldiers. They were farmers and craftsmen. When they failed to return from battle, crops failed and villages went hungry. Even those who returned from the battles victorious and unscathed still suffered loss. Their fields had been left untended too long. The work had piled up. Men who lived productive lives growing food for others and caring for the various needs of their villages could not afford to spend months of time wandering the countryside of Wessex, searching out the Danish bandits.

BOOK: The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great
8.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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