A History of the Vikings
Chapter 8
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ENGLAND
BY the end of the ninth century two great Mercian kings, Æthelbald and Offa, had established a political ascendency that made the rulers of Mercia the dominating personalities in English affairs, even though the realm of Wessex and the once mighty state of Northumbria still held themselves aloof. It was during this period of Mercian supremacy that the first recorded viking raids, the sporadic plunderings of Norwegian pirates (p. 4 ), took place; but after the appearance of vikings near Dorchester and the attacks upon Lindisfarne and Jarrow, England knew no more of the pirates for a period of forty years, and when they began once again to plague this country the power and territories of the English kingdoms had altered. Northumbria remained a rich but sorry state, enfeebled by a turmoil of civil wars; the great kingdom of Mercia had dwindled to only half its former size; Wessex had expanded to a large and prosperous realm that now embraced all of England south of the Thames. The men of Essex had also submitted to the West Saxons; but the East Anglians, who had broken away from Mercia, were ruled by their own king as an independent realm.
The man who had accomplished this aggrandizement of Wessex, who had conquered West Wales (Cornwall and Devon), routed the Mercians, and put his own son to rule over the subkingdom of Kent, was the ætheling Ecgbert, son of one of the petty kings of Kent. He had been driven out of England by Offa and Beorhtric of Wessex, but on the death of Beorhtric in 802 he returned to be elected king of Wessex in his place. It was in 825 that Mercia collapsed and the growing power of the southern kingdom was transformed into an assured supremacy.
The viking attacks begin again in 834. It was the year of a great Danish attack upon Frisia (p. 194), and many of the Danes who set out then, and later, to harry that country and the French coast also determined to try their fortunes in England. They first appeared at the Thames mouth, where they ravaged the island of Sheppey, but two years later there was another raid,
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carried out by a detachment of thirty-five ships from a Danish fleet that had been operating against Frisia, and this time the landing was made on the Dorset coast. Ecgbert himself opposed them and fought the pirates at Charmouth, (1) but the English were worsted in the encounter, though luckily the vikings soon afterwards made off without doing any notable plundering. In 838 there was a third raid, and now the landing was made in Cornwall. Once more Ecgbert marched to meet the invaders, and though the discontented Cornish had risen in arms to join them, he overthrew the united forces of the vikings and the rebels at Hinxton Down near Callington.
Ecgbert died in 839 and Æthelwulf, his son, succeeded him as lord of Wessex. In the year after the accession of this much weaker, though devout and well-intentioned king, the Emperor of the Franks, Louis the Pious, died and the disruption of his great empire began. This was the signal for a renewed outburst of viking activity, and just as the Franks were now to know the full terrors of the Danish invasions, so too in England from this time onwards the raids became more frequent and the menace of the Danish attack grew more and more serious. In 840 a fleet of thirty-three viking ships was defeated at Southampton with a great slaughter of the pirates, but in another raid, directed against Dorset, the Danes won a big victory at Portland. In 841 others of the Danes won a fight in Romney Marsh on the south coast of Kent, and in that same year they ravaged not only on the south coast, but in Lincolnshire and East Anglia. In the following year the Danes of the celebrated Quentovic fleet (p. 199 ) pillaged London, and, after the sudden dash across the Channel to the unhappy town of Quentovic, these same Danes returned to plunder Rochester.
During the next decade the Danish pirates were so fully occupied with their increasingly audacious raids into the heart of the western Frankish kingdom and so greedy for the easily obtained plunder from the rich monasteries of the Continent that they left England in peace. But towards the end of 850 a Danish fleet of 350 ships, returning from a continental plundering, arrived off Thanet and wintered there, and in the beginning of the next year the crews began to ravage the country. The great horde of pirates first took Canterbury, and then captured London, putting Beortwulf, the king of Mercia, to flight. After
1. Or at Carhampton, in which case the vikings landed in Somerset or N. Devon.
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this they crossed the Thames and invaded Surrey; but this was the end of their adventures, for at Oakley (1) they were met by Æthelwulf and the West Saxon army and there they suffered an overwhelming defeat. In the same year the men of Devon defeated a viking band, and another Danish force was put to flight at Sandwich in Kent, losing nine of its ships.
Yet these victories over the Danes did not check the viking invasion. In 853 the united levies of Kent and Surrey were called out to fight the pirates in Thanet; in 855 one party of vikings made a daring raid into Mercia and went plundering in the upper Severn valley; in the same year the Danes wintered in Sheppey. In 861 a great fleet that had been operating on the Somme landed a pirate force on the Hampshire coast, and, marching inland, this army took Winchester by storm; but the men of Hampshire and Berkshire rose up against them and the Danes were soon driven out of the country. Four years later another band of vikings took up their quarters in Thanet and began to negotiate for a peace with the men of Kent who were now prepared to bribe the Danes not to attack them; but before a bargain was struck the vikings lost patience and forthwith ravaged East Kent far and wide.
This, for the time being, was the end of the sporadic raids on Wessex, but England was now confronted by a much graver peril than these occasional viking attacks, however serious the pillaging and destruction that resulted from them. The new danger was nothing less than a great and purposeful invasion that had as its objective the conquest and settlement of the land, and it was a danger that was all the more urgent in that the blow fell not upon the strong kingdom of Wessex, that might have successfully resisted the attack, but on the weaker realms of East Anglia and Northumbria. The few years' respite from Danish attacks that gave Wessex breathing-space after the final expulsion of the Thanet pirates in 865 were years wherein a storm was gathering on the borders of the kingdom, a storm so fearful that when it broke over Wessex, as inevitably it had to, it was only the courage and tenacity of a hero-king, Alfred the Great, that saved England from passing completely under Danish dominion.
The large army of Danes that in 866 established itself in East Anglia was, according to Scandinavian tradition, a force
1. I am adopting here the usual identification of Oakley with Ockley, south of Dorking, but I believe the site of the battle is as likely to have been Oakley on the Thames near Gravesend. For the claims of Ockley Wood near Merstham, Surrey, see Surrey Arch. Collns., XXV, 136.
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made up of the followings of the three sons of Ragnar Lodbrok (p. 203 ), namely Halfdan, Ivar, who had arrived from Ireland, (p. 279 ), and Ubbe; and a further tradition, though it is scarcely to be believed, tells that they had come to avenge the death of their father, who is said to have been killed in an earlier raid on Northumbria. That these three chiefs were indeed the sons of Ragnar is probable enough, but as to the motive that inspired this great invasion it is more likely that they came with the plain intention of winning land for themselves and their men. For this is certainly what they set themselves to do. The first action of the Danes after they had made themselves secure in East Anglia was to obtain horses, and when they were properly equipped as cavalry for a cross-country expedition, they made a circuit round the fens and then moved northwards across Lindsey into the province of Deira. As usual in this period of her political and military decline, Northumbria was in a state of civil war, and in 867 the Danes captured York without meeting any serious opposition. The two rival kings, Ælle and Osbeorht, were now uncomfortably aware that there would be no English kingdom of Northumbria for them to fight for if they did not at once make common cause against the invaders; so they patched up a peace and marched off together to recapture York. But it was too late; the attempt failed and both the English kings were killed in the fighting.
The Danes made York (Jórvik it was now called in place of the English name Eoforwic) their stronghold, and soon all Deira lay under their dominion. Nor was it long before they were in a position to extend their conquests. Bernicia, to the north, did not attract them, and so was allowed to remain for a time under the rule of its English princes; but to the south-west lay the richer lands of Mercia, and thither a large force of the Danes advanced. Their route took them down the valley of the Trent to Nottingham, and seizing that town, they remained there for the winter. In the meantime the king of Mercia, Burhred, appealed to Æthelred, the fourth son of Æthelwulf and now king of the West Saxons, for help, and the Wessex king, with his brother Alfred, marched with an army to join Burhred in an attempt to win back Nottingham. The English laid siege to the town, but there was no pitched battle and in the end the Mercians bought a peace, the viking host thereupon retiring to York. For a year the whole Danish force remained in Deira, but late in 869 a Danish army rode south, burning the fenland monasteries and plundering recklessly on all sides, until it arrived at Thetford
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in East Anglia, where it made preparations to pass the winter. There Edmund, King of East Anglia, met them in battle, but the English force was decisively beaten, Edmund himself being captured by Ivar the Boneless and Ubbe and, it is said, cruelly put to death at Hoxne because he would not become the vassal of a pagan. The exact circumstances of Edmund's death are unknown and the familiar story of his martyrdom cannot rank as more than legend, but there is no reason to doubt that some cruel and cold-blooded act of Danish barbarism attended the death of this unfortunate petty king; for, insignificant though he was, few events in the whole of the history of the viking wars so profoundly impressed a horror-struck Christendom. The memory of Edmund, henceforward Saint and Martyr, was soon venerated not only by the vanquished Anglians, but throughout all England; the stream of pilgrims to his shrine, the jealous protection of his relics, and the very naming of him, perpetuated the shame of his murder and made of Edmund's martyrdom a constant reproach to the Danes, even to Cnut, the great Danish king who ruled in England in the eleventh century.
After the fall of Edmund, East Anglia had perforce to submit to the heathen invaders, and now the greater part of the eastern plain of England was held fast in the grip of the Danes. The time had come when central and southern England was to tremble lest it shared a similar fate. Halfdan and a chief by the name of Bagsecg were the commanders when the Danes next advanced, this time to attack Wessex. Their object was to surprise Æthelred by a winter attack, and it was late in December of 870 when they marched into the Thames valley and descended upon Reading, where they made for themselves a fortified camp at the confluence of the Kennet and the Thames. In January of 871 there was a skirmish with a small English force at Englefield, six miles west of Reading, in which the Danes were worsted, but four days later when King Æthelred and his brother Alfred together assailed the Danish stronghold at Reading the English were beaten off. Another four days passed, and then a second battle took place between Æthelred and Alfred and the whole force of the Danes who were drawn up on the slopes of Ashdown, (1) some 25 miles to the west of Reading. The result of the battle was a big victory for the English, and Bagsecg and many of the viking chieftains were slain; but Æthelred did not follow up his success, and only a
1. The exact site of the battle is uncertain. See H. J. E. Peake, The County Archaeologies: Berkshire, Ch. XI.
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