Founder, Fighter, Saxon Queen: Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians

by Margaret C. Jones

Overview

The story of the daughter of Alfred the Great, who fought against Viking invaders and ruled a kingdom in the tenth century.
 
Alfred the Great's daughter defied all expectations of a well-bred Saxon princess. The first Saxon woman ever to rule a kingdom, Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, led her army in battle against Viking invaders. She further broke with convention by arranging for her daughter to succeed her on the throne of Mercia.
 
To protect her people and enable her kingdom in the Midlands to prosper, Aethelflaed rebuilt Chester and Gloucester, and built seven entirely new English towns. In so doing she helped shape our world today.
 
This book brings Aethelflaed's world to life, from her childhood in time of war to her remarkable work as ruler of Mercia. The final chapter traces her legend, from medieval paintings to novels and contemporary art, illustrating the impact of a legacy that continues to be felt to this day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526733979
Publisher:	Pen & Sword History
Publication date:	02/20/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Margaret C. Jones received her PhD from Purdue University in 1989. She has taught English literature – 'from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf' – at universities in the USA, Egypt and the UK. She is author of _Heretics and Hellraisers_, a study of American women radicals in the early twentieth century.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A Wartime Childhood

'You have hurled us back before the enemy. Our foes plunder us at will.'

Not long after the Christmas of AD 878, a young girl and her family find themselves refugees in a war zone, in flight from a ruthless invader.

For the household of King Alfred of Wessex, Christmas at Chippenham is usually a joyful time. Larder shelves at the king's hunting lodge sag under the weight of crocks of mead, half hidden behind a thicket of dangling joints of venison. At meals in the great hall the king's guests and noble retainers drink, sing, brag and roar with laughter, their blood warmed with the strong drink that flows freely. They nearly drown out the voice of a musician reciting heroic legends to the plunking of a harp. The king's wife Ealhswith sits surrounded by her ladies, all dressed, like her, in their finest silks and furs, sipping imported Gaulish wine. Freed from adult surveillance, children run out laughing into the yard to pelt one another with snowballs.

They have just celebrated Twelfth Night, the last night of the Christmas season. Everyone attended Mass for the feast of Epiphany, when the three Magi were said to have brought gifts to the newly born Christ Child in the manger at Bethlehem. For those enjoying the feasting and fun, the holiday can't go on long enough. For the cooks and other household servants, on the other hand, an end to the holiday means a lifting of their burden of extra chores. Anyone who works the land thinks already of the ploughing and sowing in the weeks ahead, once melting snow has softened the ground.

For the king's eldest child, nearly 9 years old, the end of Christmas signals a return to work on her embroidery, overseen by Ealhswith her mother, and to the poems and passages in books of religious devotion Aethelflaed is expected to learn by heart with her tutors. King Alfred has always regretted not receiving more formal education in his youth, and is keen his children should be better taught.

The musician is nearing the end of his recital. His audience, well fed and sleepy with drink, have settled down and are listening quietly, if drowsily, to the rhythmic chant of the tale – now brutally cut short by screams from outside the hall.

Abruptly sobered, the guests sit rigid, all straining to listen. They hear shouts out there in the yard, but not what is being shouted. Then the clash of weapons. Terrified small children run back inside to cling to their mothers. A kitchen boy dashes in, yelling something about a storeroom, a fire. The guests look at one another in alarm, trying to make sense of it all. Chippenham is a fortified place, shielded too by a bend in the river. The bridge over the Avon is guarded at all times – where are the guards?

One word makes itself clear through the general uproar, and is taken up by others. 'Vikings'.

The Vikings are in the yard – nearly at the door. Strong arms snatch up the small girl Aethelflaed, and rush her outside. She finds herself hoisted up on the back of someone's horse. With sharp instructions to hold on tight to his belt, the rider, one of her father's thegns gallops away with her at unnerving speed. He slows down only when at a safe distance from the fighting that seems to have broken out all around the palace. Fire is coming from a roof somewhere, lighting up the sky with a lurid glow.

Here in the dark protection of the woods, horses jostle around her in the darkness, treading uneasily, their rumps bumping against the behind of the horse she sits on. Urgent muted voices surround her, full of doubts, questions – what to do now, where to go? Her father is here with them now, her mother too, and a nurse, cradling her little brother Edward wrapped up in a blanket, shushing him to keep him from crying.

It might have happened like that – a surprise attack during an evening's feasting; when the attackers knew the company wouldbe relaxed and off-guard, their heads befuddled with heavy food and strong drink, their weapons stacked outside the hall, out of immediate reach, as both law and custom required. It has even been suggested that some enemy within the palace arranged to open the way for the Vikings. Or did the attack come in the small hours, while everyone was asleep? All the historical record tells us, is that shortly after Twelfth Night a large force – a so-called 'raidingarmy' – that had been encamped in Gloucester for the winter, made a sudden surprise assault on the royal residence at Chippenham. There are no eyewitness accounts. What we can be sure of, is that it generated terror.

The Vikings were the bogeymen of their time. Whenever their swift longships sailed in from Scandinavia to harry the English coasts, or travelled up English rivers, they left a trail of destruction in their wake. Everyone knew what Vikings on the rampage could do. They plundered, raped, killed unarmed men and women, or carried them off as slaves. They set fire to farms and churches, stole or smashed holy icons, broke open royal tombs in hopes of finding treasure. 'Be quiet and go to sleep now, or the Vikings will get you', one imagines a Saxon mother telling a restless child.

The Viking raid of 793 on the Northumbrian community of Lindisfarne and the slaughter of unarmed monks there, was just the beginning.

That horrific attack was still talked about almost a century later. A Northumbrian chronicler, Simeon of Durham, recorded the grim events:

they reached the church of Lindisfarne, and there they miserably ravaged and pillaged; they trod the holy things under their polluted feet, dug up the altars. And plundered all the treasures of the church. Some of the brethren they slew; some they carried off with them in chains; the greater number they stripped naked, insulted, and cast out of doors, and some they drowned in the sea.

At the time of the raid, an English monk named Alcuin was living at the court of the emperor Charlemagne in Aachen; but the terrible news reached him even there. Alcuin expressed not only dismay, but disbelief, that the peace in his homeland could be shattered like this – and by people coming from overseas:

It is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as this we have now suffered at the hands of the heathen. Nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sea could be made.

Alcuin found a kindred spirit in the ancient words of Jeremiah. The Hebrew prophet not only knew all about the terror of sudden foreign invasion, but was able to make sense of the catastrophe in terms of divine judgement: 'Is it not your desertion of the Lord your God that brings all this upon you?' Like Jeremiah, Alcuin interpreted the onslaught of merciless enemies as God's punishment. The Viking massacre could only be God's instrument of divine retribution upon a sinful people. Alcuin was not alone in seeing the hand of God behind the Viking raids. All Anglo-Saxons tended to view the raids in apocalyptic terms, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles for 793 bear witness:

This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully ... immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter.

An Irish chronicler, writing two centuries later, drew similar conclusions. The churches in Ireland had, he claimed, been saved from Viking raiders who were burning and looting them and terrorising whole communities, by the fasting and prayers of a godly man named Céle Dabaill. The raids had been visited on the unfortunate people, the annalist believed, 'on account of the Lord's anger against them'.

All over Europe, in those days of terror, the inhabitants of peaceful communities prayed much the same prayer: 'Deliver us, God, from the savage race of Northmen which lays waste our realms.'

In 869, nine years before the assault on Alfred and his people in Chippenham, the pious king Edmund of East Anglia had been captured by invading Vikings, under the leadership of one Ivar, 'the Boneless'. According to the legends told about him many years later, Edmund knew he was militarily unprepared and outnumbered. He chose martyrdom at the hands of the Danes, rather than accept their demands for submission to them as overlords. His thegns, his personal entourage of loyal fighting men, had been killed with their families while they slept. He had no wish to live on as a puppet ruler of the Vikings. He would die with his people, and keep his Christian faith:

This I desire ... that I should not be left alone after my dear thegns, who have been suddenly slain in their beds by these seamen, with their children and their wives. It has never been my custom to take to flight, but I would rather die, if I must, for my own land; and almighty God knows that I will never turn aside from His worship, nor from His true love, whether I die or live.

The Vikings who surged into Chippenham were, like those who had murdered King Edmund nine years earlier, Danish. 'Viking' was simply a nickname given them by those on the receiving end of their violence, the raiders being famous for the 'wics' or temporary camps they set up, as they roved in search of new plunder. To 'go viking' was an activity, not an ethnic group. Skilful seamen, Danes and Norsemen out viking crossed the North Sea in their shallowdraft longships, capable of carrying forty to fifty men at a time. They travelled up the great waterways of England – Thames, Humber, Severn – and entered the heartlands. They had the advantage over their Anglo-Saxon victims, of being unrestrained by any fear of Saxon reprisals against their families and farms, safely left behind in Scandinavia. No doubt they behaved no worse than many other armies invading a foreign land distant from home – including, it may be, the Anglo-Saxons when they had arrived in England and met with local resistance, some four centuries before the Vikings; or in more recent years, when Saxon armies were subduing uncooperative Celts on the Welsh borders. But this can have been small consolation to unfortunate people who found themselves trapped in the Vikings' path.

More invaders kept arriving. In ad 850 they brought 350 ships to moorings at the Isle of Thanet in Kent. They raided Canterbury, then London. Most disturbingly, they did not go back home, as in previous years, once the pillaging was done. This was to be the first of many years in which Vikings settled down in England for the winter. They were making plans for the long term.

In 851, Alfred's father Aethelwulf, aided by his son Aethelbald, routed a Viking force, after it crossed into Surrey – but the respite was only temporary. This particular 'raiding-army' might have suffered a reverse; but others were on their way.

Viking attacks on English territory were moving inland with Viking forces growing in size. It was no longer a matter merely of pirate raids, where the raiders stayed just long enough to plunder and pillage, before sailing home with the spoils. What communities all across England now faced was what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle termed the 'micel here', the 'great raiding-army'. It was not so much an army of raiders, in fact, but an invasion force, or rather successive waves of invaders, bent on conquest of territory. After torturing and killing King Edmund, the Vikings seized the whole kingdom of East Anglia. By 878 and the attack on Chippenham, the kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria had fallen too. A Danish base established at York quickly became a centre of Viking power in the northeast. Now, it seemed, it was the turn of Alfred, and of Wessex.

The Saxon defenders were out-manoeuvred by the Viking invaders at every turn. From a military point of view, the latter had several advantages over those they invaded. They operated in semiautonomous war bands, each under the leadership of its own chief, or 'jarl'. They could travel fast across great swathes of country, seizing horses as they went. Wherever they went they set up bases, fortified garrisons and storehouses, seizing from terrified local people whatever they needed by way of supplies.

The Vikings were organised for war – the Anglo-Saxons in Wessex in the late ninth century, anything but. True, each great Saxon lord had his band of well-trained armed thegns, and the peasantry could be conscripted to fight at short notice. But these conscripts probably saw little point in getting too far from home, or in defending other men's crops and families, even with the promise of profit from looting slaughtered Vikings. When their term of service ended, provisions ran out, or the crops needed harvesting, they were apt to melt away.

Like their neighbours in East Anglia and Mercia, the West Saxons, overwhelmed by the ferocity and suddenness of acts of aggression for which they were wholly unprepared saw no choice but to buy off the Vikings by 'making peace' – paying their enemies to leave their territory; sometimes even supplying them with horses to go and raid someone else's land. This response to a ruthless and determined enemy was counterproductive, however. At best, it might buy the victims a little breathing space between raids. Finding 'making peace' an easier way of getting plunder than fighting for it, the raiders were all too likely to come back later for more.

Already, by the mid-800s, the kings of Wessex and neighbouring Mercia, long in rivalry, had begun to sink their differences to face the common threat. In 853 King Aethelfwulf of Wessex married off his daughter Aethelswith to the Mercian king, Burgred, to cement a military alliance between the two kingdoms. After Aethelwulf died in 858, it would be left to Aethelwulf's sons – Aethelbald, then his brothers Aethelberht, Aethelred and finally the youngest, Aethelflaed's father Alfred, to carry on the fight.

In 865 the largest army yet, a true 'micel here', arrived in southern England. The following year, having been bought off by the king in East Anglia, they went north and took York.

In 868, after an appeal for help from King Burgred, a 19-year-old Alfred rode with his older brother, King Aethelred of Wessex, to do battle against the Vikings in Mercia. A joint Wessex-Mercian force unsuccessfully besieged the Viking-held fortress at Nottingham. Then Alfred's brother Aethelred, who had succeeded to the throne of Wessex, was defeated by combined Danish forces at Reading. Aethelred died in 871, and Alfred (now married, and the father of a girl-child named Aethelflaed), succeeded him as king of Wessex. Alfred's victory over a Viking army at Ashdown in Berkshire shortly after his accession to the throne was followed by a crushing defeat at Wilton. It was a year of such defeats, King Alfred's friend and biographer Bishop Asser would say of it later. The warriors of Wessex were, he wrote, in the course of eight major battles, 'virtually annihilated to a man'. Even allowing for a degree of exaggeration on Asser's part, it's clear that Alfred had a grim struggle on his hands. His little daughter grew up knowing her father might be called out to fight at any time, and that he might not come back.

Aetheflaed would have been about 5 when, in 874, her aunt Aethelswith's husband king Burgred of Mercia, was overthrown in a Danish Viking invasion. Burgred went into exile, and his wife with him. The Danes appointed a puppet king in Burgred's place.

In the winter of 876, when Aethelflaed was 7 or 8 and her father had been king for five years, the Vikings brought a massive invasion force into Wessex. They captured Wareham in Dorset, spreading out from there to plunder all across Dorset and Devon. Like other Saxon rulers before him, Alfred saw no alternative to 'making peace', by paying the invaders to go away. It was a 'peace' that lasted a few months only. When the Vikings seized control of Exeter, the king rode down to besiege them at the fortress they had established in the town.

Here luck, or providence, intervened. A sudden violent storm off Swanage in Dorset destroyed 120 of the Viking army's ships that had been moored there. So devastating was the loss for the invaders that Alfred was able to persuade them to leave Wessex, and retreat into Mercia. They set up camp for the winter in Gloucester, outside Wessex territory, but still uncomfortably close to the Wessex border. When they returned to the attack just weeks later, Chippenham was only thirty miles away.

How the raiders got there from their winter base in Mercia, is unknown. The seemingly most direct route, in a straight line from Gloucester, would be overland, a distance of roughly twenty-eight miles. That, however, would require travelling over the steep and thickly wooded Cotswolds – not impossible, but slow and heavy going in ice and snow. Or they might have sailed down the Severn from Gloucester, and up into the Avon. That would have taken them at least as far as Bath, before they came to frozen marshland that would have made it impossible to sail further. From Bath it was a fifteen-mile march northeastwards to reach Chippenham. However they got there, they attacked in dead of winter, a time when most military activity normally came to a halt. They would have taken the Saxons completely by surprise.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Founder, Fighter, Saxon Queen"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Margaret C. Jones.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations,
Preface,
Acknowledgements,
A Note on Names,
Chapter One A Wartime Childhood,
Chapter Two Aethelflaed and Her Sisters,
Chapter Three Marriage,
Chapter Four Remaking Mercia,
Chapter Five Lady of the Church,
Chapter Six Alfred's Daughter,
Chapter Seven Aethelflaed's (Missing) Daughter,
Chapter Eight Legend and Legacy,
Where to Find Her,
Notes,
Bibliography,