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Overview
On a day in August, one thousand years ago, a fleet of ninety viking ships sailed into the estuary of the Blackwater river, Essex. Fresh from the ravage of Ipswich, under the command of the king of Denmark, they were intent no doubt on the rich spoils to be had from the royal Mint of Maldon. This is a history of the battle of Maldon.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752496405 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 664 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Return of the Vikings
The Battle of Maldon 991
By Donald Scragg
The History Press
Copyright © 2013 Donald ScraggAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9640-5
CHAPTER 1
Pillage and Settlement
Viking attacks on England began two centuries earlier than 991, long before England existed as a single political unit. Early Anglo-Saxon England consisted of many independent kingdoms. Gradually the smaller were absorbed by the larger, until by the beginning of the ninth century, the land was divided into four: Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia and Wessex (see Map 59). The relative power of these kingdoms lay largely in the strength of their individual kings. As one king grew in strength, others became weaker and had to wait for the death of their rival in order to regain some of the power enjoyed by their predecessors. Nonetheless, these four had survived for many generations and retained a good part of their independence from one another when the ninth century began in 800. The largest in area was Northumbria, consisting of all the lands north of a line stretching from the Humber estuary in the east to the Mersey in the west and extending as far as modern Edinburgh. South of the Humber, the dominant kingdom at the very beginning of the ninth century was Mercia, covering the whole of the midlands. Whereas at an earlier period both East Anglia and Northumbria had had their turns of over-lordship of the south-humbrian kingdoms, during the eighth century Mercia had grown in strength, subjugating earlier, smaller adjoining kingdoms like Essex, and gaining major influence in East Anglia and Wessex as well. In the first quarter of the ninth century, it was the turn of Wessex to dominate. Having begun as a relatively small kingdom south of the Thames, it first absorbed Kent and the Celtic areas of Devon and Cornwall, and then extended its influence north of its traditional border of the Thames to Wales and Mercia. Wessex was thus the last of the great kingdoms of the country to achieve prominence in England as a whole, but its domination was ultimately to prove the most enduring.
The story of the rise of Wessex is intimately tied to the first wave of Viking attacks against English shores, yet the most infamous of those early attacks was not against Wessex itself but against the eastern seaboard of Northumbria. Small groups of Vikings began raiding lightly defended settlements on the coast of England at the close of the eighth century, and the most poorly guarded settlements of all, as well as potentially the most rewarding in terms of the treasure they contained, were monasteries. What the church saw as the most barbarous act of Viking aggression was the sack in 793 of the celebrated monastery of Lindisfarne, now Holy Island, near Berwick-on Tweed. Lindisfarne had been founded in the early years of English Christendom in the late sixth century and was venerated later as the seventh-century home of St Cuthbert who died in 687. Thanks to the writings of churchmen, the effects of this attack reverberated through Christian Europe, and quickly became the symbol of Viking barbarism. An equally significant raid in the following year involved another north-eastern monastery, usually assumed to be Jarrow, home of Bede until his death in 735, while the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which in its early years was written entirely from the point of view of Wessex, records the first attack by the Vikings on English shores under the annal for 789 when three ships from Norway attacked Portland in Dorset and killed the king's reeve. Although this date appears to contradict the tradition that the Lindisfarne raid signalled the start of major Viking attacks, the precise year of the Dorset raid is uncertain. It occurs in the Chronicle in conjunction with a note on the marriage of King Brihtric to the daughter of King Offa of Mercia in 789 and is the only Chronicle reference to Brihtric who ruled Wessex from 786 to 802. The chronicler simply notes that the Dorset attack took place during Brihtric's reign, and his evidence may not be reliable since the Chronicle was probably not compiled until the end of the ninth century when precise details of the attack had been forgotten. Although all these raids were no more than isolated incidents in themselves, they were the start of a pattern of incursions by marauding Vikings across northern Europe during this period. In 795, Vikings who had established a base in the Shetlands sailed round to the western side of Scotland and attacked Iona, another significant monastic site, while from the end of the century, attacks from Scandinavia along the northern coast of mainland Europe, particularly on the Low Countries, then part of the extensive Franco-German empire, became so numerous that the emperor Charlemagne established a regular coastguard to police his realm.
Reports of Vikings in Christian writings from the period almost exclusively concern their raids, raids which initially were driven by mixed motives, and certainly developed, in part, out of commercial expeditions. Given the nature of the settled lands along the coastlines in Scandinavia, the inhabitants were adept seamen, and consequently for a time were the greatest traders of Europe. The Chronicle report of 789 notes that the Dorset reeve had gone initially to the Viking ships to take the sailors to the king to impose the appropriate taxes on them, assuming that they were traders. Lawful trading by Vikings, in fact, continued throughout the ninth century, and this trading was with England as well as with the rest of Europe. There were Viking traders at the court of King Alfred at the end of the ninth century, even during the period when the country was harried with renewed Viking invasions. In the early period it was probably difficult on some occasions to distinguish between Vikings engaged on trade and those who were intent on rape and pillage, although contemporary accounts (largely deriving from the Church) tend to equate the term 'Viking' with 'pirate', and hence shape our present-day view.
In the north, Scandinavian colonies spread from Shetland around the Western Isles of Scotland and to all coastal parts of Ireland. Indeed, by 830, Dublin and the surrounding area was to all intents and purposes a Viking state. The Orkneys and Faroe Islands were occupied at much the same time, and so too, by the end of the ninth century, Iceland. Vikings from Ireland sailed south to the Loire, to modern Portugal and southern Spain, and into the western Mediterranean. Swedish Vikings, meantime, had sailed across the Baltic and followed major river routes to Moscow and into the Arab world, and via Kiev to Constantinople. Whereas we tend to refer to peoples moving westwards from Scandinavia as Vikings, those travelling east became known as Varangians (hence the Varangian guard which was employed by the emperor at Constantinople), or as Rhus or Rus (our Russians), perhaps stemming from the Finnish word for the Swedes. All of these people travelled initially for purposes of trade, but it must soon have become apparent to many that in parts of western Europe, trade could be facilitated by the picking up of goods along undefended coasts. These included not only valuables such as furs and silver but also in some cases people, who could be traded in markets as slaves. All of these valuables – including books, and men and boys – were freely available in monasteries such as that at Lindisfarne.
Early sporadic raids and the westward spread of Vikings for settlement appear to have been wholly by men from Norway. From the 830s, however, Danes were also involved, and soon functioned in a more organised way than the small groups emanating from Norway. In 840 with the death of Louis the Pious, successor to Charlemagne, the Carolingian empire was split by civil war and the Danes took advantage of this dissention, forming themselves into large armies that moved into the mouths of rivers along the empire's northern coast. The pattern of attack now changed from short raids for plunder, limited to the summer months, with ships returning to Scandinavia for the winter, to more longterm attacks, with armies using local forced labour to build semi-permanent fortified camps for the winter months and forcing the payment of winter sustenance as tribute. Such camps were frequently on islands in river deltas, and these became the hall-mark of Viking strategy: camping on easily defended islands, with ships as a recourse in the event of a large land-based attack, and exacting tribute by posing a threat to the district. As far as England was concerned, the Chronicle reports raids of this kind on the Isle of Sheppey in the 850s and in Thanet in 865. The pattern was to be repeated in the later tenth-century Viking attacks, with which this book is principally concerned.
From the middle of the ninth century, the Danish army was engaged in campaigns throughout Europe, as far south as the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean, across Provence and Tuscany in the late 850s and early 860s, before turning its attention to England. According to Abbo of Fleury's Life of St Edmund, composed in the tenth century supposedly from an eyewitness account, the Danish army which landed in England in 865/6 was led by men named as Ivar the Boneless and Hubba or Ubbi. They first attacked Northumbria and laid waste to it. Then half of the army led by Ivar sailed to East Anglia and overran that kingdom, eventually killing its king, Edmund (later canonised), in 869. Although we know from Norse sources that Ivar himself died at much the same time as Edmund, Danish leaders ruled Northumbria and East Anglia for the next half-century, and place-names show that Danish settlement throughout those areas was widespread even though the majority of the population was English. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also gives details of this invasion, but it has them landing in East Anglia and then riding into Northumbria the following year, returning to East Anglia in 869 and killing Edmund. Abbo's account is probably less reliable than the Chronicle entries, for his concern was primarily with the death of Edmund rather than the wider historical event, whereas the Chronicle, which itself was composed circa 890, is generally reliable for events in the second half of the ninth century. The latter also reports that rather than sailing to East Anglia, the army passed through Mercia, establishing winter quarters at Thetford in the very heart of East Anglia. Attacks on Mercia added to existing political problems in that kingdom which worsened as the century wore on. In 874 Burgred, the last legitimate Anglo-Saxon king of Mercia, was finally forced to flee and spent his remaining years in Rome. The Vikings established a puppet, Ceolwulf, to rule Mercia on their behalf, and with half of England now under Scandinavian domination, they turned their might on Wessex.
According to the Chronicle, Wessex had already felt the Viking threat, in the 830s, 840s and 850s. In 868, with the Vikings established in Nottingham, Burgred had asked for West-Saxon help, but although it was given, he was forced to buy the Danes off. In 871 the Danish army had ridden to Reading and after a bloody encounter defeated the West Saxons led by their king, Æthelred, and his younger brother Alfred. Four days later, a second encounter between the same two armies led to an English victory. But just two weeks after that, the two forces met again at Ashdown in Berkshire where the Danes were successful again, although many were slain, including, according to the Chronicle, a number of named Viking leaders. Two weeks later the forces met at Basing in Hampshire, and many other similar large encounters followed. Clearly the Viking forces were highly mobile, and it would appear that they were able to outrun any significant army that the English could muster. Effectively they now had the freedom of Wessex, and the Chronicle suggests that all that the English leaders under Alfred could do was to harry them, while the king moved his army into positions where he could force them into battle. Most of these encounters occupied the length of the day before either reaching a stalemate or with the English obliged to retreat. This situation changed, however, in April when the king died and Alfred succeeded him. His accession was to prove the turning point in the fortunes of the English state as a whole.
King Alfred the Great, as he became known – the soubriquet deriving immediately from that of Charlemagne and more distantly from Alexander's – ruled Wessex and Kent from 871 to 899. In medieval terms this was a long reign, although Alfred's biographer, Bishop Asser, tells us that the king suffered from severe illnesses all his life, including piles which, although not life-threatening, was hardly something that a medieval king who spent much of his time on horseback would have relished. The length of his reign was not due, however, to the fact that Alfred was exceptionally long lived but that he came to the throne at a young age, being probably no more than twenty-two when he succeeded his brother. The Chronicle entries for the last three decades of the ninth century are a catalogue of Alfred's military and naval successes, though these successes did not come easily at first. Though not overtly stated, it is implied in the Chronicle that for the first few years of his reign Alfred was assisted by two circumstances. On the one hand, the Danish army went north to Northumbria, and to the countries to the north and west of it, i.e. Strathclyde and the kingdom of the Picts. At the same time, Alfred seems to have bought a temporary peace for Wessex by paying tribute to the invaders. This is suggested, for instance, by the comment in annal 876 that Alfred made peace with the Vikings in return for oaths sworn on a sacred ring, but since the Vikings were then still heathen at this time, such oaths would mean little without a price having been paid for them to leave Wessex.
Although he had some minor successes in the very early years of his reign, such as in the naval battle of 875 when he defeated seven Viking ships, capturing one and forcing the others to flee, it was not until 878 that Alfred's first major victory occurred. After having suffered a number of setbacks at the beginning of the year, forcing him, as the chronicler puts it, to creep about with few followers in woodland and marshes, he called to him all the men of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire, the heartland of his kingdom, and joined battle with the Vikings at Edington in Wiltshire. The Vikings were comprehensively defeated, and subsequently were forced to sue for peace. This was granted in return for them leaving Wessex and, more importantly in the long run, accepting Christianity. No doubt this was a nominal acceptance at first, and it was certainly accompanied by Alfred's loading their leader Guthrum, king of East Anglia, with treasure as he stood as sponsor for him at baptism. But it was an important symbolic act. According to the Chronicle, Mercia had been divided during the previous year between Ceolwulf ruling in the west and the Danish army in the east. Alfred accepted this division in the settlement of 878 with Ceolwulf continuing to rule 'English' Mercia west and south of the line of Watling Street (the road from London to Chester), while the Danes ruled north and east of it. Alfred himself remained king of Wessex and Kent only at that time. Ceolwulf, however, died in 879, and in 880 Alfred moved north of the Thames into the old kingdom of the East Saxons, Essex, and in particular into its capital, the now derelict Roman site of London. By 886 he had rebuilt London and fortified it. At some point between these two dates, the de facto ruler of western Mercia, an ealdor-man called Æthelred, submitted to Alfred in London, and the contract between them was underscored by Æthelred accepting Alfred's daughter, Æthelflæd, the so-called Lady (in our terms Queen) of the Mercians, in marriage. Alfred's charters subsequently style him 'King of the Anglo-Saxons' rather than merely king of the West Saxons, and it is clear that effectively Alfred ruled both kingdoms from that point, with Æthelred as his local administrator, although the Thames remained a significant political boundary until at least 1035. These developments were not necessarily symptomatic of Alfred's political ambitions but of the exigencies of defending the English, and particularly the West Saxon kingdom, against the Danish threat. The victory in 878, in other words, was a turning point in the history of England. Ultimately the Viking incursion into Wessex and the defeat of the invaders at Alfred's hands led to the unification of England as we know it today. The formation of the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons, or 'greater Wessex', under Alfred's successors began in short with the battle at Edington.
Alfred's fortification of London was part of a series of similar defences built at the king's instigation to secure the kingdom from further attack. In 874, shortly after his accession and while Wessex was still under threat of falling under Scandinavian domination, like all the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, a large group of Vikings wintered in Mercia at a major Anglo-Saxon royal church at Repton on a bluff over-looking the river Trent, having rowed their ships up the river a hundred miles from the sea. By using dykes to link either end of the church to the river, they had built an extensive, impregnable position inland, very different from the island defences on which they usually depended. Alfred was an adaptable military commander, willing to draw ideas from any source including the tactics of his enemies, and he was quick to grasp the potential of this species of fortification. Although he may have learnt of the efficacy of fortresses from either Roman or Carolingian sources, it seems more than probable that he used such precedents near at home. In the course of his reign, he chose a series of natural or man-made sites to provide a ring of fortifications around his kingdom, some old Roman walled towns which controlled the Roman roads (Winchester and Chichester, besides London itself), where existing ruined walls could be rebuilt with the dressed Roman stone, some like Wallingford at other strategic sites. A number of these forts have now disappeared, but most became the foundation of medieval towns where the original Anglo-Saxon grid-plan street pattern can still be seen. The primary purpose of these forts was, of course, defensive, to provide security for the surrounding rural population in the event of external or internal attack, but their ultimate importance was to provide a basis for urban living. Merchants began to assemble within the new walls, and markets grew up, which in turn offered kings an opportunity for regular taxation. The Old English word for such forts is burh, later spelt buruh, which gives 'borough' in present-day English, the history of the word paralleling the history of the settlement, i.e. a defensive site becoming an urban space. The forts were maintained by a system of taxation whereby the labour of the building and the costs of garrisoning were linked to the granting of land. For each hide of land, a hide being a family holding varying in acreage, one man's service might be required, though in practice the requirement was probably less. Inevitably the nature and structure of these forts varied with the terrain. Old Roman sites had their walls repaired and may have been strengthened with wooden palisades, while natural hill-sites or other geological features may have had wooden defences alone. At significant river crossings such as Wallingford on the Thames, however, where there was neither natural defence nor preexisting fortifications, the work had to be built from scratch. In addition to developing his physical defences, Alfred created a standing army, not an easy thing to accomplish in an essentially agrarian society. The Chronicle reports that in 893 Alfred divided his army into two, except for those engaged in garrisoning the forts, and he thus ensured that half his men were always on active service while the rest were at home cultivating the land. His final military achievement was the strengthening of the navy when, in 896, he ordered the building of a new design of ship, twice as long as the Viking boats to include more fighting men, but shallow-keeled for speed and manoeuvrability within the confines of the river estuaries that they were designed to defend. It was from this project that the tradition of the king as founder of the English navy derives, and it is interesting to note that the song 'Rule Britannia', with its refrain 'Britain rules the waves', comes from an eighteenth-century masque on the life of Alfred.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
About the Author,Acknowledgements,
Prologue,
1 Pillage and Settlement,
2 The Boats,
3 The Return of the Vikings,
4 The English Response,
5 The Battle of Maldon,
6 The Aftermath of the Battle,
Further Reading,