The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (9 page)

In 787 with great pageantry and ceremonial King Offa’s daughter Eadburgha was married to Beohtric, the King of the West Saxons. The marriage brought even more of the West Saxons’ territory within Offa’s orbit: he had already annexed all the West Saxons’ land north of the Thames. Such was Offa’s prestige that he could persuade the pope to split the see of Canterbury in two in order to give Mercia its own archbishopric at Lichfield in Staffordshire. However, despite King Offa’s unique position abroad and at home it was during his reign that an external force of far greater magnitude first began to threaten England.

Shortly after his daughter’s magnificent nuptials in Wessex, three enormous ships appeared off the Dorset coast, each of them almost eighty feet long and seventeen feet wide–the size of a large house or hall. The ships, which had sailed from Denmark, put in to the harbour at Portland, full of strange, grim men from the north. Instead of responding civilly when one of King Beohtric’s officials asked them to accompany him so that they could be registered in the nearest town of Dorchester, as was the practice in those peaceful times, the foreigners turned on the customs official and killed him. ‘These’, says
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
ominously, ‘were the first ships of the Danishmen which sought the land of the English nation.’ There were many more to come.

Those three ships are the first mention in English history of a fearsome Scandinavian people called the Vikings. For the next 200 years they would destroy much of the newly erected structure of medieval Christendom by their lightning raids. The Vikings’ name came from the old Norse word
vik
meaning creek or fjord and they themselves were land-hungry young men from the creeks of Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Brilliant sailors at a time when the nations of north-west Europe had forgotten the art of seamanship in favour of agriculture, the Vikings were also enthusiastic traders and adventurers who roamed the seas, bartering hides from their own countries with whatever took their fancy in foreign ports. But they also had the bloodlust that Christianity had damped down in the Angles and Saxons. The Vikings sacrificed to their cruel old gods of Thor and Odin with death and destruction, believing that only by bloodshed would they reach the afterlife.

For some time in the early years of the ninth century rumours had been sweeping the Scandinavians that Charlemagne’s conquest of the Frisians, the north German policemen of the Baltic, meant that there were no longer any Frisian warships protecting western seas. Very rich pickings were to be had there. At the same time there had been a rapid increase in the numbers of Scandinavian people, something of a population explosion. The Vikings were landless young men who took to raiding to feed themselves as there were not enough fields to support them beside their narrow Norwegian fjords. Self-sufficient and independent, used to ruling themselves in their isolated hamlets and lonely forests, they were irked by the strengthened powers of the monarchy under powerful kings in Denmark and Norway, like Harold Fairhair, the first King of Norway. Pastures new were what they needed, and these they sought with a vengeance. The coasts of eastern England and the north coast of the Frankish Empire, as Charlemagne’s sprawling lands were known, were now at the mercy of any Viking expedition strong enough to overcome resistance at the point where they landed. And again and again they would come, from the icy capes of the Baltic to Britain’s fertile and warmer shores.

Fifty years earlier in 732, western Christendom had just succeeded under Charlemagne’s grandfather Charles Martel in defeating the Muslim warriors who had conquered Spain, beating them in the Pyrenees and throwing them out of France. But now Christian European civilization was in danger again as the Viking ships harried the north European coasts.

The 300-year era when the Vikings overran Europe displays many similarities to the earlier ‘Dark Ages’. Once again, particularly during the ninth century, much of the learning which had been cultivated so painstakingly to replace the devastation of the German migrations vanished. The light given to Europe by Christianity flickered and very nearly went out. Today it would be as if all our public libraries and publishing houses and schools were burned to the ground systematically, with never enough time to rebuild them.

Unfortunately for England many of her most important monasteries which were centres of learning like Lindisfarne were especially vulnerable to the Norsemen, owing to their founders’ wish for solitude. Situated on unprotected promontories jutting out to sea, or on islands far away from the king’s soldiers, they were sitting ducks. The Vikings had no sense of their sacredness but thought only of the chapels’ famous gold chalices and jewelled ornaments.

The Norsemen’s shallow-draught boats were designed to travel swiftly up rivers and estuaries. Their longboats with their vast striped single sails, their snapping dragon-head prows, their shields hung out over the side and huge chainmailed warriors became the sight on the horizon most dreaded by coastal dwellers. The Vikings were stealthy fighters and often moved by night. They would put down their oars, take up their broadswords, disembark and kill the helpless monks even if they were at prayer, before seizing all the gold and silver which the monasteries had collected over two centuries. They would then be off, leaving buildings in flames behind them and despair among the survivors.

Ninth-century Vikings in England and Ireland were responsible for the loss of very nearly all of the priceless monastery libraries, built up by monks painstakingly copying manuscripts by hand. Before printing was invented that was the only way to make a copy of a book. Thousands and thousands of illuminated manuscripts whose great initialled letters occupied a whole piece of vellum and took a year for a monk to paint, became ashes beneath the fallen masonry. Only a tiny number of early manuscripts survived the onslaught of the Vikings, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the eighth-or ninth-century
Book of Kells
, which was probably made on Iona but carried over to Ireland. Both are now on display in the British Library. Lindisfarne itself, the great centre of English religious life for two centuries, was destroyed in a Viking raid in 793 and the helpless monks slaughtered. It was followed a year later by Jarrow, birthplace of Bede, and the next year by Iona.

It is hard for us to imagine today how frightening the Viking threat seemed. But the thought of their ships lurking offshore began to prey on the confidence of the peoples of England and France. To the terrified inhabitants of England the burning of Lindisfarne was a sign that God was angry with them, for Lindisfarne was an especially holy place. Why had He let it be destroyed? The Viking plague and their barbaric ways–‘Where we go the ravens follow and drink our victims’ blood!’ they sang as they disembarked in their horned helmets–made them bogeymen to the Christian nations. It was no wonder that the Mass each Sunday began to include the heartfelt prayer: ‘From the fury of the Vikings, save us O Lord!’

There were three kinds of Vikings and they moved in three separate directions. While the Swedish Vikings swept east in their thousands under their chief Rurik to found the Kievan Rus or first Russian state, the Norwegian Vikings sailed west and founded Greenland. Two centuries later, about the year 1000, they would discover North America, putting in at what is now New England, which they called Vinland. They sailed down the west coast of Scotland and across to Ireland, where they founded Viking cities like Dublin and Cork and laid waste almost all the wealthy monasteries in the north of the country. They descended on the Orkneys, Caithness, Ross, Galloway, Dumfries, the Isle of Man, Cumberland, Westmorland, Cheshire, Lancashire and the coast of South Wales. Whirling their double-headed axes, against which there was no response, they carried many of the inhabitants into slavery.

The third kind of Viking, known as the ‘inner line’, concentrated their unwelcome attentions on the southern coast of England and the north coast of continental Europe. These Vikings were Danes from Denmark, whose ancestors had moved into the districts left empty by the Angles when they went to England in the fifth century. At first the Danish Vikings came only in small bands, for during the first thirty years of the ninth century a strong Danish monarchy and the remnants of Charlemagne’s diplomacy protected southern England and France from the worst of danger. But the collapse of the Danish monarchy with the death of King Horik removed the last constraint, and the mid-ninth century saw the high tide of Danish Viking expansion, spearheaded by Ragnar Lodbrok (Ragnar Hairy Breeches) and his myriad warrior sons.

As the Vikings became more successful, their fleet on the high seas grew dramatically. At the height of their power in the 860s it numbered 350 ships. With one hundred fighting men on board each craft and the experience of thirty years of warfare, the Danish Vikings were a lethal striking force and increasingly daring and aggressive. From merely being coastal raiders, who in a sense could be lived with, the Vikings of the mid-ninth century started to spend the winter in the countries they raided, showing their utter contempt for the local community.

Vikings began to anchor large fleets in the loughs and estuaries of Ireland and build forts on her eastern shore. Their intention was not just to raid, but to drive out the native population and settle. It was on Holy Saturday 845, the day before Easter, that the full extent of Viking ambitions were understood. On that Easter eve even the most notorious Viking of the ninth century, the fearsome chief Ragnar Lodbrok, sailed up the Seine and sacked Paris. The citizenry fled and the churches were abandoned. Ragnar Lodbrok had successfully struck at the heart of the kingdom which had dominated Europe so recently under Charlemagne. Before the appalled eyes of the Frankish king Charles the Bald, Ragnar Lodbrok hung 111 citizens from trees and let another hundred go only when he was paid 7,000 pounds of silver. Then, his red beard glinting in the pale spring sun, he made a sarcastic bow to the terrified king and took himself off to the open seas once more. But there was no doubt among the watching crowds where power lay. It was certainly not with the king.

From now on Danish Viking armies took up more or less permanent quarters on the Rhine, the Scheldt, the Somme, the Seine, the Loire and the Garonne. In 859 Vikings were fighting in Morocco and carrying off prisoners to their Irish bases. The sons of Ragnar Lodbrok sailed to Luna in Italy and captured it under the illusion that they had come to Rome itself. The Vikings now had all but encircled Europe with their raids, for in the year 865 the Swedish Vikings who founded Russia laid siege to Constantinople.

It was against this background in 849 that the man was born at Wantage in Berkshire who was to save England from the Vikings. He is known to history as Alfred the Great, and he was a prince of the royal house of Wessex.

Wessex was the kingdom of the West Saxons. According to folk memory its founders were chieftain Cerdic and his son Cynric in 495 when they landed at what is now Southampton but which they called Hamwic. (The suffix ‘wic’ comes from the Latin word
vicus
meaning a place, hence Ipswich and Norwich.) The eighth-century supremacy of the Mercian kings had put an end to Wessex occupying the valley of the lower Severn, but this kingdom–which began in the lush and rolling pastures of Hampshire–still ended at Bristol to the north, and incorporated all of Dorset and Somerset. The West Saxons were not only good military strategists. They were a reflective and organized people. One of their most important kings was Ine, who at the end of the seventh century had issued a code or accumulation of the West Saxon laws.

By the third decade of the ninth century the Mercian supremacy in England had yielded to that of Wessex as, benefiting from vigorous rulers, the kingdom continued to grow rapidly. In 825 Alfred’s grandfather Egbert decisively defeated the Mercians at the Battle of Ellandune and thereafter the old Mercian tributaries of Kent, Essex, Surrey and Sussex became permanently part of the kingdom of Wessex and had no further separate existence. Egbert, who ruled for thirty-seven years, also finally put an end to the West Welsh or Cornish as an independent power by occupying Devon up to the Tamar; henceforth the Cornish paid Wessex an annual tribute. Only East Anglia, Mercia, Wales and Northumberland remained separate from the kingdom of Wessex but acknowledged Egbert as their overlord. And when Egbert obtained Kent he became the protector of English Christianity because it was the seat of the Primate of all England.

The expansion of the Wessex kingdom was played out against the background of the increasingly daring raids of the Danish Vikings. As we have seen, they were beginning to pose a real threat to the peace and security of the whole of England from the 830s onwards; over the next thirty years there are records of at least twelve attacks, and there were probably many more. But as the records were mainly chronicles kept by monks they tend to be incomplete because so many were destroyed during the raids. In the 840s Vikings devastated East Anglia and Kent, attacked Wrekin in Mercia and in 844 killed the king of Northumbria. But at least they went away again, taking their booty with them.

Ten years later the situation was worse. The Vikings were moving in greater numbers, operating in concert with one another, as opposed to the single-ship raids of earlier years. To contemporaries they had taken on the appearance of a ‘pagan army’. In 851 King Ethelwulf, father of Alfred the Great, defeated a fleet of Vikings several hundred ships strong attacking Canterbury and London which had driven King Beorhtwulf of Mercia into exile. Another Wessex prince, Ethelbert, one of Alfred’s brothers, who ruled Kent for his father, defeated a Danish army off the coast at Sandwich. Despite these successes, in 855 a large Viking fleet took up permanent winter quarters on the Isle of Sheppey, menacingly close at the end of the Medway to the mouth of the River Thames. The Vikings began building forts there. Many Londoners feared that, just as the Vikings had sailed straight up the Seine to Paris, it was only a matter of time before the Vikings sailed up the Thames and took London. As a result of his family’s victories over the Danes, the Wessex that King Ethelwulf handed on to his sons was the most important kingdom in England. But the whole country continued to live in the shadow of another Viking invasion. Ten years later what had been feared for so long came to pass. In 865 a ‘Great Army’ of Danish Vikings landed in East Anglia with the obvious intention of conquering and settling the whole of Anglo-Saxon England and making it a Danish Viking kingdom.

Although there had been isolated raids on England the Viking attack on Jarrow in 794 had not been an altogether triumphant experience as it had resulted in the death by torture of the expedition’s leader. This may have made the Vikings more wary of England. Certainly for much of the ninth century they tended to concentrate their larger numbers on France and Ireland. In about 855 Ragnar Lodbrok, who had forced the French king Charles the Bald to hand over 7,000 pounds of silver, at last fell into the hands of Aelle, the King of Northumbria. Ragnar Lodbrok had been raiding Northumbria with impunity, and seeking ever greater speed (according to legend) had built two boats so large that they proved unmanageable. Cursing his folly, the greatest Viking of them all was wrecked off the coast.

Ragnar Lodbrok was captured, tortured and thrown into a dungeon where he died a lingering and painful death among poisonous snakes, humiliated by the mocking faces of the Northumbrian court who came to gloat over the giant red-headed Viking. But even as he wasted away on his filthy palliasse and the Northumbrians congratulated themselves on their capture of the man who had terrified half Europe, Ragnar Lodbrok would not expire quietly. From his prison deep below the castle walls the old sea king could be heard roaring terrible songs of death and glory and prophesying the reign of terror that would begin when his sons came for his murderers. ‘Many fall into the jaws of the wolf,’ he sang, ‘the hawk plucks the flesh from the wild beasts.’ But while he would soon be enjoying feasts in the halls of Valhalla, ‘where we shall drink ale continually from the large hollowed skulls’, his sons would soon be drinking from the Northumbrians’ skulls. Meanwhile, as the snakes rustled beneath him, he called on his sons to avenge him: ‘Fifty battles I have fought and won. Never I thought that snakes would be my death. The little pigs would grunt if they knew of the old boar’s need.’

And the little pigs did more than grunt as they grew up. Ten years later those little pigs, Ivar the Boneless, Halfdan and Ubba arrived at the head of the Danish Great Army and exacted a terrible price for the death of their father. Landing on the coast of East Anglia in 865 they laid waste the countryside until they had obtained provisions and horses from the terrified farmers. Then they galloped north up the Roman Ermine Street, which still ran so conveniently along the east coast of England, to York, the capital of Northumbria. By 867 the whole of Northumbria, its government already weakened by civil war, was in the hands of the Danish Great Army. They had their revenge, killing both King Aelle and his rival and eight of their military leaders or ealdormen. A puppet king named Egbert was put in to rule the former kingdom of their father’s executioner.

But Ivar the Boneless and Halfdan were not content just with Northumbria. Now the Great Army, which was many thousands strong, wheeled about, crossed the Humber and went south to take possession of Nottingham, the capital of once powerful Mercia. Although an army came up to help from Wessex, because the Mercian king Burghred was married to Alfred’s sister Ethelswith, the Danes cunningly refused to come out from their defensive earthworks. In the end the Mercians had to agree to pay them to go away. After wintering again in York and causing misery to its citizens, the Great Army moved back south to East Anglia. On the way the Vikings destroyed the beautiful and ancient monastery at Medeshamstede (Peterborough), killing the abbot and monks and burning the celebrated library. In East Anglia the brave young King Edmund led an army against them. But he was taken prisoner and then horribly murdered at Hoxne, twenty-five miles east of Bury St Edmunds: he was tied to a tree where he was used for archery practice before being beheaded. The abbey of the town of Bury St Edmunds was erected in the murdered king’s honour over his burial place. East Anglia too was now another kingdom of the Vikings.

In five years three of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, all the land north of London–that is Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria–had fallen to the Danes like ripe apples off a tree. Only Wessex remained Anglo-Saxon. The others were now in effect a huge Danish kingdom run according to Danish law. Thanks to poor and haphazard military organization and no fleet to protect their coasts they had been easy meat for any enemy with a standing army and an urge to conquer. Although the fyrd required men to spend forty days a year fighting, it was unpopular and its call often ignored. Of those who did respond most of its members preferred not to fight beyond their kingdom’s boundaries. Rather like jury service today the forty days might come at the worst possible moment, perhaps when the peasant farmer was desperate to bring his harvest in before it rained.

If the isolated raids earlier in the century had been terrible, the permanent presence of the marauding Danish Great Army gave daily life the oppressive feel of a never-ending nightmare. The Trewhiddle Hoard, an important collection of early church silver (now in the British Museum), was hidden in a tree by a priest who never came back for it. It is a mute memento of the continuous slaughter that took place and the destruction of a culture which had developed over two-and-a-half centuries. There is a chronicle written by an eyewitness, a monk of Croyland in the Fens, which gives a typical account of the arrival of a Viking war-party as it was experienced throughout England and describes how the soil shook beneath the pounding hooves of the heathen Danes’ armoured horses as they travelled from Lincolnshire to Norfolk. The abbot of Croyland and his monks were at their morning prayers when a terror-stricken fugitive ran in to tell them that the Vikings were on their way. Some of the monks took to their boats and rowed away from the monastery praying that in the mists and marshes of the Fens they would not be found. But the rest were slaughtered where they stood.

By the autumn of 870 the Danes decided to conquer the last of the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England which remained independent, namely Wessex. But they had finally met their match. Although the present king of Wessex, Ethelred, was not gifted with determination and was more concerned with his spiritual life than with preserving the safety of the kingdom, his younger brother and co-commander Alfred, who was soon to succeed him, was the heir to all the best qualities of West Saxon kingship. Alfred was the fourth and youngest son of King Ethelwulf, who had passed on to him a strong sense of his duty to resist the destruction of Christendom by the Vikings. Ethelwulf had also inspired Alfred with memories of the most constructive sort of Christian kingship handed on to him by his own father Egbert, who had spent his early life at the court of Charlemagne. Alfred was taken to Rome by his father at least twice on pilgrimages to invoke God’s goodwill towards Wessex and protect her from the Viking plague. Reflecting fears among the West Saxons that Christian civilization might die out in England because of the repeated attacks of the Danes, Ethelwulf had designated one-tenth of his kingdom’s revenues to be given to the Church to ensure that learning continued.

The sense of learning’s almost irreversible decline, now that so many monks and priests had been killed, was a subject which would obsess Alfred himself. Once king he would embark on an extraordinary programme to re-educate the English. In later years he would remember that during his childhood ‘there was not one priest south of the Thames who could understand the Latin of the Mass-book and very few in the rest of England’. As a result Alfred himself did not learn to read until the age of twelve, and then only by his own efforts because there were no monks left to teach even a king’s son.

Alfred’s dictum, ‘I know nothing worse of a man than that he should not know’, reminds us that as a result of four decades of Viking raids knowledge could no longer be taken for granted. Latin was the language of learning but as there was no one to teach him Latin–Alfred only learned it when he was forty–much was lost to him, as it was to many other English people. The Welsh monk Asser, who became bishop of Sherborne, wrote a famous contemporary life of Alfred in which he relates that the king told him ‘with many lamentations and sighs’ that it was one of the greatest impediments in his life that when he was young and had the capacity for study he could not find teachers.

Thus when the Danish army decided to turn their unwelcome attentions on Wessex by capturing the royal city of Reading at Christmas 870 they encountered resistance to the death, for to Alfred this was a battle to save English civilization. But it was touch and go. Just when the actual king of Wessex, Ethelred, ought to have been marshalling the attack on the Danes on the Ridgeway in Berkshire, he insisted on listening to the end of the Mass. While Alfred was lining up his part of the army in the famous Anglo-Saxon battle formation called the shieldwall, Ethelred refused to come out of his tent, declaring that as long as he lived he would never leave a service before the priest had finished. Meanwhile the terrifying Danish army were hurling their javelins at the Wessex men below their ridge and keeping up a deafening noise by banging their shields. Ethelred continued to listen to the incantations of the priest as the twenty-one-year-old Alfred took the offensive and charged up the escarpment. His men fought so fiercely around a stunted thorn tree that quite soon, despite their mail shirts, many leading Vikings lay dead on the ridge. The rest soon fled.

Although this was far from being a conclusive engagement (it would be many years before the tide finally turned for the English under Alfred), it was the first time that the Danes had been beaten in open battle. When Ethelred died in his twenties and Alfred became king in 871 he bought time to recover from the Danes by signing a peace treaty. The Danes themselves were glad of a temporary lull. They were exhausted by the ferocity of Alfred’s attacks whenever they ventured out of the fortress they had built at Reading. Fortunately the Great Army was then distracted by a revolt in their northern possessions and, having put it down and hammered the kingdom of Strathclyde in south-west Scotland, half of its soldiers under their leader Halfdan decided to tangle no more with Wessex. They would remain in the north and make it a proper Danish kingdom instead of ruling through a native puppet. Under Halfdan as king the Danish Vikings took over much of the old kingdom of Northumbria, corresponding approximately to Yorkshire today (as is shown by the concentration of Danish place names in that county: the suffixes ‘-wick’, ‘-ness’, ‘-thorpe’, ‘-thwaite’ and ‘-by’ are all indications of Scandinavian settlements). Danish soldiers became farmers. They made their capital at Yorvik and organized the land for taxation purposes in the Danish way by
wapentakes
instead of by hundreds as in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.