Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (9 page)

At this point disaster struck twice. The Vikings were reinforced by the arrival of ‘the great summer army’. And in mid-April 871 King Æthelred, still only in his twenties, died. The body was taken to Wimborne Minster in Dorset for burial and the great men of the
witan
, gathered for the funeral, met once more and confirmed Alfred as king. He was just twenty-two or -three. There is no suggestion of a coronation. Perhaps in view of the crisis there was neither the time nor the inclination.

The crisis soon got worse. Only a month after his accession Alfred, seemingly caught off guard and with only a small force, was defeated at Wilton. The victorious Vikings were within twenty miles of Wimborne and Alfred had to sue for peace.

It was not a good start to a reign.

But, once more, events elsewhere in England gave Wessex respite. Faced with more pressing concerns, ‘the great army’ withdrew from Reading, first for London and then for the north, to deal with the Northumbrian revolt against their Viking overlords. Its suppression, and the ensuing partition of Mercia, occupied ‘the great army’ till 874–5. Then it split into three divisions. The leader of one was ‘King’ Guthrum. And he had decided to carve out a real kingdom for himself – in Wessex.

First Guthrum struck south, cutting right across Wessex to Wareham on the south coast, which he held in 875–6. Then he turned west to Exeter, which he occupied for the following year. For three years, that is, Guthrum marched the length and breadth of Wessex, pillaging, burning and living off the land as he went. Alfred, for his part, was able to bottle Guthrum up in both Wareham and Exeter. But he was not strong enough to take them and, in both cases, had to agree terms. These the Vikings negotiated with almost flamboyant bad faith. That Alfred seems to have taken their worthless promises at face value means either that he was naive – or, more likely, that he had no choice.

After slinking out of Exeter under cover of night and with the solemn promise to Alfred, sworn ‘on [his] holy armlet’, that ‘they would speedily depart from his kingdom’, Guthrum took up winter quarters at Gloucester. Alfred shadowed him up to the northern border of Wessex, where he spent Christmas at his royal hall at Chippenham in Wiltshire. But on 6 January 878, the last day of the Christmas festivities known as Twelfth Night, Guthrum appeared before Chippenham. He had marched fast and in the depths of winter. Alfred was taken by surprise and had no choice but to flee. Guthrum now occupied the heartland of the defenceless kingdom and Wessex seemed about to go the way of the rest of Anglo-Saxon England.

II

In his flight, Alfred was accompanied only ‘by a little band’ and he deliberately avoided centres of population, seeking instead the cover of the forests and uplands of Wiltshire (‘the woods and fastness of the moors’). Gradually, he moved south and west towards the Somerset fens and Athelney. Here at last he began to feel safe.

Athelney means ‘royal island’, and Alfred chose it as his fastness because the area at the confluence of the Rivers Parret and Tone was then an island. It was well screened in the middle of the marshes, and the water which flooded the fenlands in winter made it even more difficult to attack. His time here was the nadir of Alfred’s fortunes. Later, in one of his writings, he seems to recall the self-examination it provoked:

In the midst of prosperity the mind is elated, and in prosperity a man forgets himself; in hardship he is forced to reflect on himself, even though he be unwilling.

By this or other means, Alfred regained confidence in his own capacity. But the power of a king is not simply personal. It is also political or collective. Alfred understood this too. ‘A man cannot work without tools,’ he wrote in another of his works. And, he continued:

In the case of a king, the resources and tools with which to rule are that he have his land fully manned. He must have praying men, fighting men and working men … without these tools no king may make his ability known … nor can he accomplish any of the things he was commanded to do.

In the adjacent kingdom of Mercia, these collective ‘tools’ seem to have consisted of little more than the king’s war-band, which is why Mercian power was so vulnerable to challenge whenever the strong hand of an effective king, like Offa or Cenwulf, was removed. But in Wessex, luckily for Alfred, power was both more diffuse and more ‘popular’. This meant, paradoxically, that it was more durable and could survive even such a debacle of royal power as Twelfth Night 878.

Which is where, perhaps, the story of Alfred and the cakes fits in. The king, the story goes, had taken refuge, incognito, in the hovel of a swine-herd, where he found himself upbraided by the man’s wife for letting her bread-cakes burn as he dreamed in front of the fire of regaining power. The story is, of course, a legend. But it is a very old one since it dates from Alfred’s own lifetime or shortly thereafter. It also points, once again, to the closeness of monarch and people which would be the salvation of Wessex.

Alfred, as soon as he was able, moved to invoke these powers. At Easter, which fell very early that year on 23 March, he further strengthened Athelney’s natural defences by building a fort. He was helped to do this by the
ealdorman
or governor of Somerset, while the men of ‘that part of Somersetshire which was nighest to it’ also joined in the raids against the Viking occupiers which the king now launched from his island fortress. But these raids were a mere morale-boosting exercise to prepare the way for the full-scale counter-attack which Alfred began to organize.

And the key to the counter-attack was, once again, the shires. Historic Wessex (that is, the kingdom before its expansion under Alfred’s grandfather, Egbert) was divided into five ‘shires’ or, as we would now say using Norman-French rather than Anglo-Saxon, ‘counties’: Somerset itself, Devon, Wiltshire, Dorset and Hampshire. The shires were further subdivided into ‘hundreds’, so called because, in theory though rarely in practice, they contained a hundred ‘hides’ or parcels of land each sufficient to maintain a family. We do not know when the shires and hundreds began. The former are first mentioned in the seventh century and the latter in the eleventh. But they are clearly much older. Perhaps indeed they are immemorial and go back to the folk-moots of the first Saxon settlers in western
Britannia
. This would explain why their meetings took place in the open air, at traditional assembly points that were often marked by a prehistoric monument, like a tumulus or barrow. One such is Swanborough Tump in the Vale of Pewsey in Wiltshire. Here, as we have seen, Æthelred and Alfred had met with the
witan
to settle their affairs on the eve of the Viking attack. And here, on a much humbler scale, the free men of the Hundred of Swanborough met once a month to settle their affairs.

These meetings, and the less frequent but more important shire assemblies, which took place twice a year, were later called ‘courts’. They did indeed try legal cases, both criminal and civil. But they did much more. They kept the peace; levied taxes and raised troops. Finally, their sworn testimony, later systematized as the jury, supplied the basic information about property rights and inheritance without which royal government could not function: even William the Conqueror, in all his power, would depend on such juries to produce the myriad facts on which the Domesday Book was based.

For the hundred and shire were also, whatever their folk origins may have been, the agencies of royal government. It was one royal official, the reeve or bailiff, who presided over the Hundred Court, and another, much greater one, the
ealdorman
, who chaired the Shire Court. The
ealdorman
was the leading man in his shire and one of the greatest in Wessex. He commanded the shire levies, acted as intermediary between the court and the county, and used his authority to settle most local disputes.

Indeed, the
ealdorman
was so powerful that it was easy for him to forget that he was the king’s servant and to aspire instead to become a territorial magnate in his own right. Alfred was well aware of the temptation and, in a well-judged interpolation in one of his translations, he denounced the
ealdorman
who turned his delegated authority (
ealdordome
) to lordship (
hlaforddome
) and caused ‘the reverence of himself and his power to become the regular custom of the shire he rules’.

Alfred fought this tendency. So did his successors. So too, perhaps, did the people. The result was that the paths of government in Wessex and
Francia
started to diverge. In
Francia
, the nobility, like Alfred’s ambitious
ealdorman
, soon took over the king’s former powers in the localities and privatized justice, taxation and the raising of troops. In so doing, they interposed themselves between king and people: the people of a district were now their lord’s, not the king’s. In Wessex, this never quite happened. Here, instead, the partnership between king and people, into which rough and ready egalitarianism of the early Saxon settlers had developed, held. This partnership, with its sense of all being in it together, would make it easier for Alfred to impose heavy demands on his people as the crisis drew out over years and decades. It also provided, in ‘the self-government at the king’s command’ of the shires and hundreds, and the collective self-consciousness which they fostered, the means for Alfred to begin his fight-back against Guthrum.

III

The planning of the campaign, once again, started at Easter. Over the following weeks Alfred sent out messengers from Athelney in all directions. They went to lords in their halls and to meetings of the common folk at their outdoor Hundred Courts. Seven weeks after Easter (11 May) all was ready and the signal was given. Alfred himself set out from Athelney and marched east towards the rendezvous at Egbert’s Stone. There he was met ‘by all the people of Somersetshire, and Wiltshire and that part of Hampshire which is on this side of the sea [that is, excluding the Isle of Wight]’. These were the forces of three out of the five shires of Wessex. It is unclear why the other two, Devon and Dorset, failed to send troops. Dorset may have been incapacitated by taking the brunt of the Viking occupation. But the Devonians were probably assigned to coastal defence. Earlier that year, Viking reinforcements had tried to land in Devon.The
ealdorman
Odda had driven them off with heavy losses and captured their sacred raven banner. But other landings must have been anticipated.

Alfred had chosen the rallying point carefully. Egbert’s Stone has been recently identified as yet another prehistoric tumulus, high on the hills above the River Deverill on the edge of Salisbury Plain in western Wiltshire. It is close to the spot at which Somerset, Wiltshire and Dorset all meet, and it was here that Alfred’s grandfather, Egbert, had marched his soldiers after a decisive and final victory over the British people of Cornwall. But Alfred was not just evoking Wessex’s past glories. His campaign was also a kind of crusade: he was a Christian king and his enemies were pagans. Hence the launch of the campaign around Easter. This suited military realities. But it coincided as well with the most important feast of the Christian year, the feast of resurrection. The coincidence was not lost on his troops:

when they saw the King, receiving him not surprisingly as if one restored to life after suffering such great tribulations, they were filled with immense joy.

The day after the rendezvous, Alfred struck camp at dawn. The army followed the course of the river north-east beyond its confluence with the Wylye to Iley Oak, the traditional site of another Wessex Hundred Court. It lies in a bend in the river and offers ample room for a force of about three thousand to bivouac. In the morning they would go out to meet Guthrum and his Vikings, marching up over Battlesbury Hill on to the high ground of Salisbury Plain.

For Guthrum had moved his forces to another royal estate at Edington (
Ethandun
). And it was there, probably on the hill above the village, that the two armies met. We cannot be sure, because there has been no systematic excavation of the site. But chance finds have turned up a number of bodies of the right date, some of them badly mutilated. That is not surprising. For the battle was to be both savage and bloody. There was too much at stake on both sides for it to be anything else. Guthrum knew that, for his takeover of the kingdom of Wessex to succeed, he had to kill Alfred outright. As for Alfred and the men of Wessex, they knew that this was probably their last chance of independence: if Guthrum won, Viking domination of Wessex and England would be complete. So both sides were hoping for a decisive result. They were not to be disappointed:

Fighting fiercely with a compact shield wall against the entire Viking army, [Alfred] persevered resolutely for a long time. At length he gained the victory through God’s will [and] destroyed the Vikings with great slaughter.

Alfred’s victory at Edington was complete, and decisive. The broken remains of Guthrum’s army fled back to their fortified base at Chippenham. Alfred pursued them, cutting down the stragglers on the way. Then he laid siege to the fort. After two weeks, the Viking leader surrendered. But this time Guthrum was in no position to equivocate. He promised to withdraw from Wessex and he confirmed his promise by agreeing to be baptized. The baptism occurred three weeks later. Alfred stood as Guthrum’s godfather, which made the Viking his moral and political dependant. And the ceremony took place at Aller in Somerset, only three miles east of Athelney, which avenged Alfred’s darkest hour.

The battle of Edington was the turning point in Alfred’s life and one of the great turning points of English history. Alfred, fighting at the head of the shires, had established himself as a great war leader. And Wessex was saved, for the moment at least. But the future of the rest of England still hung in the balance.