The Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons: The Wars of King Alfred 865–899

By Paul Hill

This ninth century history of Alfred the Great’s leadership is “a work of extraordinary scholarship that reads with all the narrative style of a novel” (Midwest Book Review).
 
In this compelling military and political history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Paul Hill explores England’s birth amidst the devastation and fury of the Danish invasions of the ninth century.
 
Alfred the Great, youngest son of King Æthelwulf, took control of the last surviving Anglo-Saxon kingdom, bringing Wessex and the “English” parts of Mercia together into a new “Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons.” This is a story of betrayal and of vengeance, of turncoat oath-breakers and loyal commanders, of battles fought and won against the odds.
 
But above all, this is the story of how England came into being.
 
Warfare in Alfred’s England changed from attritional set-piece battles to a grander strategic concern. This is explored, demonstrating how defense-in-depth fortification networks were built across the resurgent kingdom in the wake of Alfred’s victory at Edington in 878. The arrival of new Danish armies into England in the 890s would lead to campaigns quite unlike those of the previous generation.
 
This is a human, as well as a military story: how a king demonstrated the importance of his right to rule. Alfred sought to secure the succession on his son Edward, who led his own forces as a young man in the 890s. But not everybody was happy in Alfred’s England. Despite the ever-present threat from the Danes, the greatest challenge facing Alfred arose from his own kin, centered deep in the heart of ancient Wessex. Alfred knew his was not the only branch of the family who claimed a right to rule.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526782502

Paul Hill

Paul Hill, formerly curator of Kingston Upon Thames Museum in Surrey, is well known as a lecturer, author and expert on Anglo-Saxon and Norman history and military archaeology, and he has written several books on these subjects, among them The Age of Athelstan: Britain's Forgotten History, The Viking Wars of Alfred the Great and The Anglo-Saxons at War 800-1066.

Book preview

Introduction

All is troublesome

in this earthly kingdom,

the turn of events changes

the world under the heavens.

The Wanderer

In a time of almost apocalyptic upheaval when ancient kingdoms were destroyed by ruthless men, the foundations of a country we now know as England were laid. This is the story of how England began. At the heart of it is another story, that of the most influential family to have ever lived in England. In recent centuries, Georgian and Victorian scholars, politicians, playwrights, artists and sculptors all showed their fascination with Alfred the Great, king of Wessex (871–99). They ascribed to him, in various ways, a vision and wisdom which inspired the rebuilding and enlargement of a kingdom all but destroyed by the Danish invasions of the ninth century. In some ways Alfred’s achievements are a little more prosaic than the way in which they have been portrayed over the centuries, but the almost feverish manner in which the cult of Alfred has been pursued is understandable. Alfred is still rightly regarded as the architect of England, a sort of spiritual father to the nation. Despite this being a seemingly quaint notion, any arguments to the contrary (of which there have been many over the years) do not seem to hold water for long.

Less celebrated, however, are Alfred’s children and grandchildren and their roles in making his vision a reality. They built upon the political, spiritual and physical foundations of the remnants of the English kingdom of Mercia and of the kingdom of Wessex, extending their influence into a region which had become dominated by a Danish and later Anglo-Danish elite. This book will look at how Alfred the Great rose to power against a backdrop of warfare, betrayal and devastation, to provide the springboard for his children and grandchildren’s own remarkable achievements. The volumes which follow on from this book will then look at the history of the same dynasty during the subsequent two centuries, with an emphasis on the impact of the warfare which characterized the age. Archaeologists, numismatists, etymologists, historians and anthropologists have all uncovered important evidence to help tell the story, and so too has the metal detectorist. In his darkest hour in 878, Alfred was famously bottled up in the Somerset marshes at Athelney, a place which flickers in and out of early English history like a half-remembered dream. The king, a fugitive in his own kingdom, on the run from the Danes, somehow turned the tide of his family’s fortunes against his enemy. By this time, however, Wessex was on its knees. Control of Mercia was divided between Dane in the north and the east and Englishman in the south and south-west. But during the years which followed, a new cultural and political identity was formed under Alfred and his cosmopolitan court. It was a grand idea, heralded by a leading historian in recent times as a ‘kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’, no less.

Two of Alfred’s children in particular, a powerful prince and his remarkable older sister, take centre stage as Alfred’s reign progresses. These were on the one hand the girl Æthelflæd, and on the other, the boy Edward. Alfred’s firstborn surviving child Æthelflæd would go on to dominate political and cultural life in the heart of Mercia and both the brother and sister can be said to have made a lasting impact upon England’s history and landscape.

But not everyone was happy in Alfred’s wider family. Nor were they comfortable in his new country. We shall see why family antagonisms dominated the behaviour of so many men and women. One of the central themes of this volume and those which follow it in the series, is the notion of how memories died hard in Anglo-Saxon England. Old English literature is full of reminiscences, of melancholic yearnings for a return to better days. Even Alfred himself would write of a time when learning and literature had been widely practised across the country and he would decry the lack of it in his own day. But his was not just a sentimental nostalgia. For Alfred, the revival of learning in his kingdom would be of singular importance to the running of the kingdom and the triumph of Christianity. But memories in these days also worked in another way. To the aristocracies of the kingdoms of ninth-century Anglo-Saxon England, it was all about families. In fact, it was all about branches of families, to be precise. Leading families were particularly concerned with their dynastic links and were forever looking backwards for ancestral legitimacy, whether it be to justify their current positions of power, or to establish a right to land or property. The family of Alfred was no different. Put simply, the fact that we read and write about them even today shows that they were very good at it indeed.

Alfred’s practical concern for much of his reign was how to unite Wessex and the English remnant of Mercia, whose leaders had often been at loggerheads within living memory. Even against a common enemy in the form of the Danes, this would prove to be a difficult task, so deep were the memories of the men and women whose own family histories had been touched by the age-old struggles of kingdom versus kingdom. Some of the Mercian aristocracy, for example, would have remembered the great King Offa (757–96) whose seat at Tamworth was, in Alfred’s time, on the front line of the Danish wars and no longer at the beating heart of Mercian government. They would have remembered how Offa had built a great dyke which bordered Mercia against the Welsh kingdoms in the west, and in places even sliced those kingdoms’ ancient territories in two. The Mercian people must also have remembered how in 786, their renowned king had received the first papal legates to come to England since the days of St Augustine in the late sixth century. And yet, by the late ninth century, across the northern parts of their once-mighty realm were destroyed churches, abandoned saintly relics and scattered communities.

Before we look at how things unfolded, we must empty our minds of two tyrannical concepts. By mentioning them there is, of course, a risk that they will take control once again. However, these two things are so firmly planted in the minds of the people of the modern English-speaking world that we need to attack them at the root. The first of these ideas concerns the term Viking. This term is rarely explicitly used in the contemporary sources during the period covered by this book. For example, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has it at the years 879 and 885 where it seems to be used in preference to the more common ‘Dane’ or ‘heathen’ which are more or less interchangeable terms. The word Wicenga/Wicinga as it is used in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle probably implies a role for these seafarers as independent piratical raiding groups distinct from the main body of Danes and Norsemen seeking political power and land in ninth-century England, although the lines may very well have been blurred at first contact. The Old English term incidentally, even pre-dates the ‘Viking’ age. The West Norse term víking/víkingr is also thought to imply piratical activity, and the suggestion has been that the pirates themselves emanated from the víks (bays or creeks) of Norway. The term is also said to be linked to the Oslo Fjord region of Norway where the specific place name vík is in evidence. The point is, that it is misleading to refer to the Scandinavians who settled in Britain in the ninth and tenth centuries merely as ‘Vikings’. This is probably why the commentators of the time rarely do this. We, in the modern age, seem not to share the same scruples. However, in this book, we will use the terms Dane, pagan, heathen, and Norseman and viking, when and where the ancient writers used those terms, with a general preference towards the ‘Dane’ when dealing with groups who appear to be largely Danish in origin with the following caveat: evidence is now emerging that even the term ‘Dane’, widely used at the time, is in itself misleading. For example, the Great Heathen Army, members of which we will encounter soon, appears to have been drawn from a wider Scandinavian diaspora (see page 130).

There is, however, another concept so pervasive that it influences even modern political thought in England, niggling away at our understanding of our own early history. It has to be completely dismantled if this book is to make any sense. As far as we are concerned, for the purposes of this book, the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 has not happened. Nor is it even conceivable. The Danes who were granted land in northern France in return for a form of protective military ‘service’ at the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in the autumn of 911 would go on to produce the tenth-century counts of Rouen and then later, the first dukes of Normandy. Throughout the period covered by this book, there was not the remotest hint that one of these future dukes would, centuries later, sail across the English Channel and fight his way to the throne of England. And so, however challenging the proposition, we must forget all about it.

The dominant theme in Alfred’s age was warfare. There is no getting away from it. It was cruel, gruesome and barbaric. Today in the Western World we have brave servicemen and women whose commitment to national defence is an entirely professional matter. Modern Western civilians are thus, for the most part, mercifully spared the grim reality of fighting a war. In Alfred’s England, all of society felt the effects of war, especially when the king instituted his military reforms. This was a remarkably violent age, arguably the most violent of all the periods in England’s colourful and bloody history. Central to our story are the strategic and carefully planned fortifications which were built across Wessex and Mercia in the late ninth century. Behind the wooden and stone walls of these places, the first campaigns which laid the foundations for an England we might all recognize were conceived.

Warfare was not the only dynamic operating in this age. Religion, or in its wider sense faith, here Christian and there pagan, played a huge part. It may seem surprising that there were any grey areas, and yet in some cases it is notable how easily leaders switched from one belief system to another, simply to legitimize a political cause, often to the violent disapproval of others. However, some men and women stood rigidly by the faith which defined them, most notably in the case of Alfred and his children. Here, the commitment to Christ was as steadfast as it was useful.

Alfred the Great is by far the most written-about king in all of early English history. And yet there is much we do not know. This book will take the largely ‘traditional’ course through Alfred’s life, but it is well worth remembering that even some of the fundamental traditional ‘truths’ are not as robust as they might appear. Several key things which appear problematic will be referred to during the course of the volume. Principal amongst these are the question marks around Alfred’s ‘legitimacy’, his actual date of birth, the status of his mother, his age when he visited Rome as a child, the meaning of that trip, and the seemingly cyclic subject of the authenticity of the biography of the king written by Bishop Asser in the late ninth century, to which we will refer many times. But all these questions are inevitable, after an eleven-century gap between Alfred’s death and our modern age. Interpretations and re-interpretations of contemporary material, which was hardly impartial to begin with, is also inevitable. People have differing ideas about the problems and answers, and their differences exist even at the very highest levels, so we must always be aware that there may forever be questions to be answered. With obstacles like this, it may seem difficult to construct a general narrative about events in the period, but there is still a story to be told, however many challenges in the evidence are encountered. What cannot be challenged, however, is the importance of Alfred and his family in the story of the formation of England.

Ninth-century England was a place dominated by deadly dynastic rivalries, a time of devoted lordship bonds and broken promises, and of power lost and gained and then held against the odds. The story is not just about the one family, either. There is just enough evidence for us to get to understand the many groups of people involved in the story, their motives, passions and perhaps even their sentimentalities and aspirations. So, let us begin by unwinding the years and turning our attention to the days when a dreadful fear first fell upon English shores. Alfred’s numerous brothers, his father and his grandfather, all experienced the fury of the Northmen long before he did. So too had many other rulers across early medieval Britain, Francia (France) and Ireland. For many of them, and for the great churchmen of the age, what was happening around Britain and beyond, was nothing less than a judgment from on high. It was a cruelly delivered punishment for the sins of Christians handed out at the sword’s edge by men of no faith in Christ, who practised barbaric rituals. But, as these ungodly pagans roared in from the swollen sea, even they could not have foreseen just how their kinsmen would change the course of English history.

PART ONE

THE FIRST DANES

When I was with you your loving friendship gave me great joy. Now that I am away your tragic sufferings daily bring me sorrow, since the pagans have desecrated God’s sanctuary, shed the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope and trampled the bodies of the saints like dung in the street. I can only cry from my heart before Christ’s altar: ‘O Lord, spare thy people and do not give the Gentiles thine inheritance, lest the heathen say, Where is the God of the Christians?’

Alcuin of York, Letter to Higbald, trans.

by S. Allott, Alcuin of York (York, 1974).

Chapter 1

The Great Suffering

For many hours each day it is not possible to travel on the causeway from the mainland to Lindisfarne. It all depends on the tide: the waters are deceptive and move quickly. Many people still get caught, which is why there is an elevated safety shelter along the way. Once you cross to Lindisfarne though, any feeling of danger dissipates. This beautiful, rugged and windswept place off the coast of Northumbria is one of the key spiritual homes for early Christianity in northern England. The ‘Holy Island’ is still an ideal place for the contemplative life. Close to the rising tide, when you cross from the main island to the small outcrop of rock and grass known as St Cuthbert’s Island, the arms of the sea meet one another behind you and a feeling of isolation takes hold, as the water quickly rises and bubbles around the rocks, sealing you in. Cuthbert himself would have felt it.

Saint Aiden (d. 651) established a community at Lindisfarne, coming in 635 from his base at Iona on the west coast of Scotland at the request of King Oswald of Northumbria (634–42). Later that century St Cuthbert (d. 687), Northumbria’s patron saint, became bishop of Lindisfarne. Both Cuthbert and Oswald would have a part to play in later Anglo-Saxon history long after their deaths. But as Alcuin of York, the expatriate Northumbrian scholar writing from the court of Charlemagne in Francia, so eloquently lamented, the peace here at Lindisfarne was shattered in 793 by pagans. For Northumbria, the sorrowful suffering had begun.

Fig. 1:Carving of an apostle from the coffin of St Cuthbert. (Durham Cathedral)

Since at least the end of the eighth century there had been a seaborne menace emanating from Scandinavia, and the attack on Lindisfarne had not been the only example of Scandinavian violence on English shores. An entry for 789 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells of ‘three shiploads’ of raiders, with some later versions of the chronicle telling of a geographical origin for these ships. They came from Hordaland, a district around Hardanger Fjord in West Norway. This had occurred ‘in his days’ says the chronicler, referring to the reign of King Beorhtric of Wessex (786–802).

Other writers recorded the newcomers as ‘Danes’, just as the earliest version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had done. The Annals of St Neots, which says they were ‘Northmen, that is Danes’, adds that they had landed in the island of Portland, this being the southernmost point of the modern English county of Dorset. Near to here was the West Saxon royal estate at Dorchester. A later tenth-century chronicler Æthelweard, to whom we will return many times, tells us that it was a reeve called Beaduheard who went to the harbour with some of his men having been alerted about the arrivals, believing them to be merchants. Usually, such visitors might be Frankish, Frisian or other traders, familiar with the protocols to be observed at their port of landing and with their requirement for accountability. But there was nothing ‘usual’ about this little flotilla. Their ships were fitted out with gaudily-striped sails and their prows were fashioned like dragons’ heads. Beaduheard was keen to have the intruders brought to King Beorhtric’s town of Dorchester, or more probably, to the nearby ‘Kingston’, a royal settlement where the king could deal with them. Unsure of who they were, he knew at least that ‘merchants’ from afar often brought news of the world they travelled in. The king would surely be keen to hear of it. Also, the reeve would need to be sure that he took a head count of the ‘merchants’ so that he and his king knew how many men had come to do business in the kingdom. Beaduheard gave orders for the men to be seized and brought to the king. Anyone looking down from the highpoint of the promontory overlooking Portland will have seen the three ships drawn up on the shore and the men and horses of the king’s reeve as they approached the occupants. The drama which then unfolded will have shocked any observer. Beaduheard, we are told by Æthelweard, spoke to these new arrivals ‘haughtily’. In cold blood, they slaughtered the reeve and his companions on the spot.

1. Holy Island (Lindisfarne) causeway safety shelter at low tide.

Marchlanders

The original Mercian heartlands lay north and south of the Upper Trent. However, the early history of this mainly Anglian kingdom is one of expansion, particularly to the south and west. The northern boundary of Mercia in the west eventually followed the line of the Mersey (the name mæres ea means ‘boundary river’, just as the related Mierce indicated ‘the march dwellers’ or ‘Mercians’). Other earlier Mercian boundaries may well have been in the central Midlands adjacent to Celtic groups. To the north of the Mercians were the Northumbrians.

The dates for the early rulers of Mercia are unclear, with the genealogies only giving more reliable names and dates after the time of Penda (whose reign began in 626/32). A king called Creoda held power, probably around 585. His son was Pybba (c. 593–c. 606/16) who was followed by Cearl (fl. c. 610–c. 625, about whom little is known), who was then followed by Pybba’s famous pagan son Penda (who reigned to 655). According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Penda’s lineage went back five generations to the semi-legendary Icel of the sixth century, who as ruler of Angeln led his people into Britain over the North Sea. According to legend, Icel was descended from the god Woden and he gave rise to the line of the Iclingas, who continued in Mercia up to the reign of Ceolwulf I (d. 823).

Penda’s reign was long and eventful. In 628 a campaign against the West Saxons at Cirencester resulted in his enemy ceding the territory of the ancient kingdom of the Hwicce to Mercia. In 633 he participated in campaigns leading to the downfall of Edwin of Northumbria. It was Penda’s forces who killed the pious Oswald of Northumbria in c. 642 whose cult grew in importance during the tenth century. It was also Penda who drove out the West Saxons again in 645 and it was probably Penda who killed Anna of the East Angles in 654. Penda himself would be the last pagan king of Mercia.

The Tribal Hidage

The Tribal Hidage lists thirty-five Anglo-Saxon tribes in central and southern England and reads to some like a Mercian tribute list (though to others, like a Northumbrian invention re-defining Mercian groups). It rated each group in terms of ‘hides’, that is, the notional unit of land needed to sustain one family. One grouping is described as ‘the first land of the Mercians’ and is assessed at 30,000 hides. It is thought to comprise Staffordshire, parts of Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Other groups include the Wrocensæte of Shropshire, the Pecsæte of the Peak District and the Arosæte who lived along the River Arrow north of the Hwiccian territory. The Magonsæte, who were based just north-west of Hereford, are not listed but it is known that an early king was Merewalh, a possible son of Penda.

The peoples of Middle Anglia were brought under Mercia’s sway by Penda who made his son Peada king over them in 653, but who died within a few years. Penda also subjected the kingdom of East Anglia to Mercia. But Penda was killed by Oswiu of the Northumbrians at the Battle of Winwæd in 655. Peada, Penda’s son and successor (who died in 656 at the hands of his Northumbria wife) ruled only over southern Mercia with Northumbria taking the northern part, its dividing line being the Trent.

Whatever the West Saxon king Beorhtric thought of the carnage on his coastline can only be guessed. It was hardly Beaduheard’s fault that he enquired of the newcomers their intention. Nor was it particularly common for a reeve on the king’s business to approach such matters as a shrinking violet. His ‘haughtiness’ was merely part of the job. After all, Beaduheard’s chief concern was what these men could provide for his king either by income, information, or if a threat was posed, by elimination. But on this day, he rolled poor dice. Three shiploads of warriors simply overwhelmed him and his men.

Beaduheard’s king, Beorhtric, ruled over the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. However, the main power in England at the time of these first Scandinavian incursions lay with a Mercian king, Offa (757–96). This remarkable king, later described by Alfred’s biographer Asser as a ‘tyrant’, was long remembered in central England, and to some extent still is. He had expanded Mercian control beyond its traditional borders by taking control of Kent in the 760s and Sussex in 771. London had already come under his sway and from here he issued a new coinage. Moreover, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia and Essex also felt the reach of Offa’s power at its height.

Offa’s achievements in Mercia were profound. For example, he is traditionally credited with the introduction into Mercia (and by association, England) of the silver penny, although there is a debate as to whether he may have copied some Kentish types. Also, both the Frankish ruler Charlemagne (d. 814) and Pope Hadrian I (772–95) were involved in securing the rare visit to England in 786 of papal legates. Pope Hadrian was also involved in another matter, the short-lived creation of the archbishopric of Lichfield, a development probably linked to Canterbury’s refusal to back Offa’s bid to secure the royal succession for his son Ecgfrith. Offa also traditionally founded St Albans Abbey, which became a great seat of learning to rival any south of the River Thames or north of the River Humber. Offa’s influence and power were well noted: he was called ‘an extraordinary man’ by the chronicler Æthelweard, writing some two centuries later. There were doubtless many contemporaries as fearful as they were impressed. The Welsh kings could scarcely ignore Offa’s Dyke, the gigantic monument to the Mercian kingdom’s organizational capabilities which stretched for some 64 miles along their eastern borders.

Beorhtric married the daughter of King Offa. This woman’s name was Eadburh. The evidence would suggest that she was a fascinating, influential and dangerous character. We will encounter her entertaining, though rather sorrowful, contribution to English history in due course. Suffice it to say, that Beorhtric had apparently assisted his father-in-law by driving out of England his main rival for the throne of Wessex, one Ecgberht. This West Saxon exile, Alfred’s grandfather, spent several years in Francia patiently waiting to return whilst no doubt learning much from his Carolingian hosts. The length of time for the exile is generally thought to have been three years but could well have been thirteen instead, as it is argued an ‘x’ may be missing from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s record of the years. In a twist not mentioned elsewhere, however, William of Malmesbury, writing in the twelfth century, says that Ecgberht spent some time at King Offa’s court because he had found out that Beorhtric was plotting to kill him. It was the result of Beorhtric’s pressure on Offa, says William, which led to Ecgberht’s Frankish exile.

2. Offa’s Dyke. Traditionally associated with King Offa (757–96), it may be the cumulative product of numerous Mercian rulers over time. Parts still stand today as testimony to the organizational capabilities of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

The Mercian Ascendancy

By 665 Peada’s brother Wulfhere (658–74) had restored some independence to Mercia after the disastrous defeat at Winwæd ten years earlier, where Penda was killed by the forces of Oswiu. During his time Christianity continued to flourish and a Bernician monk named Chad came from the north and was appointed bishop of Mercia in 669. He moved his seat from Repton to Lichfield.

Wulfhere, although more of a diplomat than an expansionist warrior, was not averse to campaigning. He raided as far south as the Isle of Wight in 661 and handed it to the king of the South Saxons. He drove the West Saxons, the Gewisse, out of their homelands in the Upper Thames Valley. He also extended Mercian control over the Hwicce, but he was defeated in 674 by the Northumbrians. His brother Æthelred married a Northumbrian princess and succeeded Wulfhere in Mercia in 675. Æthelred raided into Kent and won a victory over the Northumbrians at the Battle of the Trent in 679. Importantly, this returned the kingdom of Lindsey (roughly the area of modern-day Lincolnshire) to Mercian control. But by 704 Æthelred decided to abdicate. His Northumbrian wife Osthryth (who was strongly associated with the cult of St Oswald) had been murdered in 697 and this seems to have turned the king’s world upside down. He became a monk at Bardney, a monastery they had founded together, and was buried there.

Coenred (704–09), son of Wulfhere, was also a pious man, and he also abdicated. He fled to Rome on pilgrimage. Coelred succeeded him. In 715 or 716 he fought against the West Saxon king Ine but little is known of the campaign. Then Æthelbald (716–57), a great-nephew of Penda, was next on the throne. In 733 he captured Somerton in Somerset from Wessex. In 740, after a long period of peace with Northumbria, he raided across its border. In the same year there were campaigns against Wessex. However, Æthelbald also received help from Wessex against the Welsh, although there were more campaigns against Wessex in 752. Then, in 757 Æthelbald was dramatically killed by his bodyguards at Seckington, not far from Tamworth. He was interred at Repton. His successor Beornred, whose ancestry is not known, did not survive on the throne long. He was ousted by Offa (757–96) and with this new and powerful king, the period of Mercian supremacy over the other kingdoms of the old Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy continued.

By the early ninth century, however, Mercian dynasties began to compete for the throne against a backdrop of the rising power of their West Saxon neighbours. These families are sometimes referred to as the ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘W’ dynasties due to the alliteration in their names. Their support for Mercian kings, including elevating candidates of their own, was a dominant feature of the early ninth century.

Domestic dynastic politics seems not to have been greatly affected by the early Scandinavian attacks. However, as we have seen, one incident in particular at Lindisfarne had sent shock waves around all of Western Christendom. Alcuin’s eloquent words were not the only ones to be written about it. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also dramatically records the raid. The heathens, it says, ‘miserably devastated God’s church on Lindisfarne Island by looting and slaughter’. The report is presaged by ‘terrible portents which overcame Northumbria’. Flashes of lightning and fiery dragons were seen in the sky, says the chronicler, and then a famine immediately followed. By presenting it like this, not for the first or last time, the chronicler added gravitas to his account and gave it an overwhelming sense of foreboding.

The language is no less dramatic elsewhere. In material drawn from a set of early Northumbrian annals amongst a compilation usually attributed to Symeon of Durham (Historia Regum LVI), though probably originating much earlier at Ramsay, the ransacking of Lindisfarne is given a very human consequence: ‘they killed some of the brothers, took some away with them in fetters, many they drove out, naked and loaded with insults, some they drowned in the sea’. Altars, it was said, were dug out, silver and relics were stolen and monks sold into slavery. This latter category of prize, the slave, must have lived a mournful existence. Across Europe, and in the eastern world of Byzantium and the Islamic Caliphate, there was clearly a huge market for slaves, each with a personal story to tell. Usually, the raiders who stormed the monasteries chose the young ones, if Alcuin’s letters are anything to go by. Alcuin hinted that because he had the ear of Charlemagne, he might just be able to ask his lord to intervene in such evil trading when he returned from his campaigns. It was perhaps an indication that the Frankish ruler may have had some influence even beyond his borders with the homeland Danes: ‘When our lord King Charles returns from defeating his enemies, by God’s mercy, I plan to go to him, and if I can then do anything for you about the boys who have been carried off by the pagans as prisoners or about any other of your needs, I shall make every effort to see that it is done.’

According to the evidence, the religious communities in particular found themselves vulnerable and easy prey for the invaders. This is certainly true, but is probably only part of the story, due to the fact that the historians of the age were themselves members of such communities. The devastation visited on secular settlements is also likely to have been widespread, yet unrecorded. However, the military response – when it could be summoned – was not entirely impotent. The year after the attack on the Holy Island, another assault on Northumbria saw the minster at Jarrow at the mouth of the Don looted and one of the invading warlords killed. Then, their ships were broken up by bad weather and the men who struggled ashore were slain ‘at the river mouth’ says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Historia Regum says this happened the year after the attack on Lindisfarne and involved the same group of pagans, in what may be an example of a pagan force over-wintering in the region. It also makes explicit that there was a battle against local forces. It has been argued that this early episode perhaps gives the lie to the notion that all such Scandinavian visitations on the coasts of European countries at this stage were simply ‘smash and grab’ raids. But of course, the problem for the Anglo-Saxon nobility whose job it was to deal with such ‘raids’ was in finding their enemy and eliminating the threat in time. The elements of surprise and naval mobility practised by the newcomers is often said to have given them the upper hand against potentially superior English numbers. And on this occasion, the Northumbrians had responded to the threat in time.

3. The Lindisfarne Stone. Picture taken in 1957. Depicting either the Danish attack on Lindisfarne at the end of the eighth century, or the End of Days and the Last Judgment.

It was barely any different elsewhere amongst the British Isles and Ireland. In 795 Rechru, two islands with monastic foundations off the north-east Irish coast, suffered the torches of the heathens, reports the Annals of Ulster. Saint Patrick’s Island near Skerries was attacked in 798, where the local cattle tribute was stolen and shrines destroyed (a move, it is thought, which implies a degree of Scandinavian settlement, as to organize the tribute would have taken some time). The annals also add that they made ‘great incursions in both Ireland and Britain’. Iona was again the target in 802 when it was burnt and was attacked yet again just four years later, when sixty-eight of its community were cut down. In 807 the monastic island of Inishmurray near Sligo in the north-west was attacked and so too was an inland church at Roscommon, deep into Connacht. The Irish would continue to suffer at the hands of the pagans for many decades, but as in England, there would