Part 8

It is not hard to make out the main causes of the ineffectiveness of the resistance which the English kingdoms offered to the invader; they were much the same as those which were to be seen in the Frankish empire on the other side of the British Channel—the want of any central organisation for combined defence—the want of any large bodies of professional fighting-men, fully equipped with the best arms of the day—the scarcity of fortified places—the non-existence of a war-fleet. In respect of the first of these matters the English were in some ways more unfortunate, in others happier, than the Franks. On the Continent the Vikings were confronted by a vast empire which was beginning to drop to pieces from its own weight; the realm of Charlemagne would have split up into national kingdoms even if there had been no invaders from outside to hasten the process. Particularism and heritage-partition were the order of the day; it was impossible to hope that the numerous descendants of the great Carling house would loyally aid each other against the external enemy, or that their heterogeneous subjects would care much for the woes of their neighbours. In England, on the other hand, the national evolution of the times was tending towards union. Even before the effects of the Danish invasions began to be felt, the states of the Heptarchy were already beginning to draw together into larger units. Offa the Mercian (755-794) had been suzerain of all England in a far truer sense than any of the early “Bretwalda” kings that were before him. He had annexed kingdoms like Kent, Essex, East Anglia, instead of merely making their monarchs do him homage. These states rose again for a short space at his death; but when Egbert won the supremacy for Wessex a few years later, the same tendency was apparent: that great warrior was able to incorporate the old realms of Kent and Sussex with his ancestral dominions, nor did they ever again free themselves from dependence on the house of Cerdic. It was clear that England was tending to group itself into no more than three or four large states: the smaller tribal nationalities were beginning to be absorbed in the greater. Thus, though Egbert and his successor Ethelwulf were kings south of Thames alone, and only enjoyed a precarious suzerainty north of it, yet there was some hope for the future. The fatal disruptive tendencies visible among the Franks were not paralleled on this side of the Channel.

In the second point wherein the old Christian kingdoms were at a disadvantage when struggling with the Dane—the want of a large and well-armed body of trained fighting-men—England was probably in a worse condition than her continental neighbour. Both possessed two classes of warriors—a small body of wealthy landed vassals of the king, bound to him by special oaths of allegiance, and the general levy of the country-side, torn from the plough when necessity demanded. The former were more or less professional warriors: the English “_gesithcund_ man holding land,” if he neglected his lord’s summons to join the host, forfeited his estate and paid a crushing fine as well: the ordinary peasant, the “ceorlish man,” only suffered pecuniary punishment for the same offence. The _gesiths_, or _thegns_, as they were now beginning to be called, a wealthy, well-armoured military class, were the core of the national host. The rude masses of the half-armed country folk were a far less efficient part of the military forces of the realm. But in England the thegnhood does not appear in the ninth century to have reached nearly the same stage of relative importance as had the Frankish vassals. They would seem to have been less numerous in proportion to the size of the states, and less powerful in the realm. As a combatant body, too, they were inferior, for the Franks had taken to fighting on horseback, and every vassal came to the host not only well armed, but well mounted. The English were still fighting on foot like their ancestors: they did not, indeed, learn cavalry service till the eleventh century. In contending with an active and rapidly moving enemy like the Dane, this want of horsemen was a terrible drawback to the English host.

The third source of weakness which we have named—the scarcity of well-fortified strongholds—was felt both on this and on the other side of the Channel. Neither Frank nor Anglo-Saxon had made any systematic attempt to keep up the great fortresses which they had inherited from the Romans. But here again the English were at a greater disadvantage than their continental neighbours. They had neglected scientific fortification even more than the Franks. They mostly dwelt in open towns and villages; even the ancient Roman walls of great cities like London and York had been allowed to fall into decay. At most they surrounded important positions with a ditch and a stockade; of the building of an actual wall we hear only at one place, the Northumbrian capital of Bamborough. The Franks, among whom city life was far more important than in England, seem to have done somewhat more in the way of keeping up the old Roman _enceintes_ of their great towns. They had also taken of late to the building of strongholds destined to hold down conquered territory. Charlemagne had warred down the obstinate Saxons mainly by rearing line after line of _burgs_ among their heaths and forests. No great English king had yet tried to maintain his control over his vassal-states by such an expedient. Even if the Frankish _burgs_ were but concentric rings of ditch, mound, and palisade, they were by no means lacking in importance in the day of danger.

In the matter of naval defence, on the other hand, there was more hope for England than for her continental neighbours. The Saxons and Angles had always been seafarers: the Franks had never taken to the water. Neither of the nations possessed any regular war-fleet, but in the one the national genius was favourable to its creation; in the other it was not. We hear, indeed, long before Alfred’s day, of intermittent attempts of English kings to do something on the seas. The most notable was the assault on Ireland which the Northumbrian Ecgfrith made in 684. In the days of Alfred’s own father, Ethelwulf, there was at least one endeavour to meet the Danes upon the water: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells how the Kentish alderman Ealhere “fought in ships” at Sandwich, and “took nine ships of the heathen, and put the rest to flight” (851). It is possible that the same chief was engaged in a second naval battle two years later, for in an unsuccessful attempt which he made to turn the Vikings out of Thanet “there was much slaughter and many men _drowned_ upon both sides.” Thanet being then separated from the Kentish mainland by a broad estuary, it is conceivable that there was some fighting on shipboard on this occasion also.

But any small naval resources which England possessed in the second half of the ninth century seemed hopelessly inadequate to impose the least check on the Danes. The invaders came in squadrons numbered by the hundred vessels. Even after Alfred had begun to take in hand a scheme for building a regular fleet, the English ships were only counted in tens or scores. In our own days a power possessing some few vessels, and expecting invasion, would turn them to use by setting them to watch for the enemy, discover him, and give early knowledge of his approach, or to follow his course and divine his intentions. But such tactics demand vessels that can keep the sea for long spaces of time and in any weather. Neither English nor Danish galleys were suited for such work: they preferred coasting voyages, and touched the shore frequently, creeping from cape to cape and from isle to isle. The only voyage across a broad and open sea was that which was made when a Viking fleet ran straight across from the southwestern cape of Norway instead of coasting along the Danish and Frisian shore. The Scandinavians were daring seamen, but their skill and pluck was shown rather by the way in which they felt their way along dangerous, rock-bound coasts, like those of the Hebrides or Western Ireland, than by passages across the high seas. For such crossings they waited for long spells of fine weather, in order to run the least possible risk. This was only natural, for their ships were but long, light, undecked vessels, depending mainly on their twelve or sixteen oars a side, and only using their sails when the wind set fair. To face a really serious Atlantic storm they were wholly unfitted, and even the rough weather of the Channel could be too much for them. In 877 a whole fleet of a hundred and twenty ships was wrecked near Swanage on the cliffs of the Isle of Purbeck. It was no wonder that they preferred to pick their weather, and to hug the shore, in order that they might run into the nearest haven when a tempest seemed at hand. The seamanship of the English was undoubtedly inferior to that of the Scandinavians in the ninth century, and we may guess that in handiness as well as in numbers they were wholly unable to vie with their enemies before Alfred’s day.

The years 840-880 were the darkest period in the dismal century of the Viking raids. Neither in England nor on the Continent had there been found any effective way of resisting the invaders, nor any great warrior who could inspire his subject with the energy and courage that was needed to face the ever-growing evil. Kings like Ethelwulf or Charles the Bald, however good their intentions, were wholly inadequate to the task. Their warlike sons, Louis III., the victor of Saucourt, and Ethelred, the victor of Ashdown, were cut off in the prime of their years, just when they were beginning to win themselves a name. The Danes went where they would, no longer taking to their ships when the national levy came out against them, but stockading a camp and defying the owners of the soil to evict them from it. Almost always the assaults made on these strongholds ended in disastrous failures: it is hard to say whether the repulse of Charles the Bald at Givald’s Foss (852), of Ethelred at Reading (871), or of Charles the Fat at Ashloh (882), was the more heart-breaking to the landsfolk. It seemed impossible to burst through the bristling line of stakes and ditch manned by the veteran axemen of the heathen bands.

The fact was that the rank and file of the Viking hosts were individually superior to the peasant-levies that strove to overwhelm them. In a Frankish or an English army only counts and aldermen, thegns and wealthy vassals, wore the steel helm and the ring-mail byrnie: the masses that followed them to the field had no more than spear and shield, possessing no defensive armour whatever. The Vikings, on the other hand, were professional fighting-men, armed not only with the “war-nets” that their own smiths could make, but with the spoils of a hundred victorious fights. It was no wonder that they could hold out against very superior numbers of the raw, half-armed militia of the English _Fyrd_ and the Frankish _Ban_. In the ages when personal skill with axe and sword and trained agility of body counted for so much, one practised warrior was worth two farmers fresh from the plough. It required a vast preponderance of force, or a very skilled and fortunate leader, to enable the Christian host to inflict a really crushing defeat on the invaders.

When Alfred was a child the problem seemed growing more hopeless day by day. Even the greatest cities of Western Christendom were falling a prey to the heathen. London had been taken and sacked in 851, Tours in 853, Paris in 857, Winchester in 860. The invading hordes, now carried in fleets of three or four hundred sail, came ashore where they would, seized horses in the country-side and rode across the land, plundering far and wide, to some appointed spot to which their fleet came round and joined them. Or they would draw their ships ashore at some convenient estuary, set a guard over them, and send the rest of the host to make a circular raid, which finally took them back to their camp and their vessels. The former plan was the better, since if the ships ran out to sea after throwing ashore the landing force, the defenders of the realm did not know where the march of the enemy would be directed; while if the fleet was immobilised on some ness or island, it was easy to intercept the raiders, who were bound to make their way back to their base.

The lowest pitch of despair seemed to be reached when in many regions rulers and people ceased to try to defend themselves against the Danes, and merely strove to procure a precarious respite from their oppressors by bribing them to depart and transfer their ravages to other shores. This was done in 865 by the Kentishmen, in 866 by the East Angles, in 869 by the Mercians. Of course the expedient was futile; the news that one Viking host had received a handsome tribute only drew down another, set on obtaining similar booty.

Finally, there came the last step of all: not content with plunder and blackmail the invaders began to think of taking up their permanent residence in the land and making its unfortunate inhabitants their subjects. The idea had already occurred to Jarl Thorgils in Ireland, but his ephemeral kingdom had disappeared at his murder. Now it was renewed in England in 868, after the battle of York, the most fearful disaster which had yet befallen any of the Christian kingdoms. The Danes had stormed the Northumbrian capital: they had slain the two rival kings, Osbert and Ella, who combined to attack them: all the thegnhood of the northern realm had perished. Taking up their quarters in the ancient city of Edwin and Oswald, the conquerors began to parcel out the neighbouring region among themselves as a permanent possession.

It was in the year after this terrible downfall of the Northern Kingdom that Alfred made his first campaign. He was now nineteen, and had just married his Mercian bride, Ealhswith, the daughter of Alderman Ethelred. The enterprise in which he was engaged was one of a very typical character—a dozen expeditions with the same unfortunate end could be cited from the English and Frankish annals of the third quarter of the ninth century. A large Viking host had entered Mercia and forced its way up the Trent as far as Nottingham. King Burgred sent to Wessex to beg the aid of his brother-in-law Ethelred, who marched to his help, taking his brother Alfred with him as second in command. The united hosts of the two English realms were too large for the Vikings to dare to face them in the open field. They stockaded themselves in a great camp on the banks of the Trent and waited to be attacked. The landsfolk laid siege to the stronghold, and strove to storm it; but they utterly failed to break their way in. After lying some time before it, they dispersed in despair: Ethelred and Alfred went home: the unfortunate Burgred then asked for terms, and got rid of the Vikings for a short space by paying them a large tribute. The Danes returned to York, lay there for one year, and then threw themselves upon the East Angles. They slew King Edmund, “the Martyr,” scattered his army, sacked the towns and monasteries of Norfolk and Suffolk, and made themselves masters of the whole realm (870).

Next year the turn of Wessex came: the Mercians had at least bought two years of respite by the treaty of Nottingham. Marching from East Anglia the “Grand Army” of the Vikings crossed the Thames, seized Reading, and stockaded a great camp in the angle between the Kennet and the Thames to serve as a base for their ravaging parties. But in spite of a dozen disasters suffered during the last forty years at the hands of the same enemy, the spirit of Wessex was not yet quenched. Its shire-levies loyally answered King Ethelred’s call, and gathered in great strength opposite the Danish camp. The Berkshire fyrd even succeeded in bringing to bay and destroying at Englefield a large plundering party headed by a Jarl. But the main body of the Vikings was not so easily disposed of. A general attack on their stronghold, headed by Ethelred and Alfred, proved wholly unfortunate. When the assailants had wearied themselves in vain attempts to hew their way through the stockade, and drew off repulsed, the enemy made a sudden sortie: “bursting out of the gates like wolves,” they fell on the shattered ranks of the men of Wessex, drove them away, and held possession of the battle spot. Thinking apparently that the English were disposed of so far as further fighting was concerned, the Vikings now started for a raid westward along the Thames valley: the camps at Sinodun and Pusey, both large and formidable structures, possibly represent their halting-places on the first and second nights of their advance. The third day took them to Ashdown, in the “Vale of the White Horse.” But they found there was still heavy fighting in prospect: the untiring Ethelred and Alfred had rallied their beaten host, and were now hanging on the invaders’ heels and making it impossible for them to scatter after plunder. The heathen kings Halfdan and Bagsceg thereupon determined to take the offensive, and to attack and scatter the men of Wessex before proceeding farther with their raid. They were encamped high on the ridge of the Berkshire Downs, while Ethelred and Alfred lay at some distance below them.

Two such warriors as the sons of Ethelwulf were not likely to decline a fair battle in the open. When the Danes drew up in front of their camp in two heavy bodies, the English arrayed themselves in two corresponding masses. It is now that we get our first concrete and personal notice of Alfred as warrior. His brother the king, pious even to superstition as his father had been, lingered behind in his camp hearing the mass. News was brought him that the Danes were on the move, but he swore that he would not leave his tent till the priest had finished the last word of the service. Alfred meanwhile, not less pious but more practical than his brother, was in his proper place at the head of his division. He waited long for Ethelred, but the king came not, and meanwhile the Danes were drawing near, moving downward in good order along the hillside. If they struck the English host while it stood idly halted on the lower slope, it was certain that they would bear it down by their mere impetus. Then Alfred, taking all the responsibility upon himself, ordered the men of Wessex to advance up the ridge. The four hostile divisions met with a great crash on the down-side, where a single stunted thorn was long pointed out as the actual spot of collision. The struggle was long and fierce; but Alfred, “pushing uphill like a fierce wild boar,” broke the Danish line, and finally the invaders gave way and fled. King Bagsceg and five earls, two Sihtrics, Osbiorn, Fraena, and Harald were slain, with many thousands of their men. Ethelred only arrived in time to urge the pursuit, which was continued for two days, till King Halfdan and the wrecks of his host succeeded in sheltering themselves behind the palisades of their camp at Reading.

Western Christendom had won few such victories over its invaders; yet all the fruits of the success vanished unaccountably in a few weeks. How it came to pass we cannot say, but only fourteen days after Ashdown another fight took place at Basing, a dozen miles south of Reading, and this time Ethelred was defeated. Two months later the war was still lingering on the borders of Berks and Wilts, and a battle was fought at Marton, near Bedwyn, in which Ethelred and Alfred were thoroughly beaten, and the king mortally wounded. He died at Eastertide, and his decease was at once followed by his brother’s election to the throne (871).

Hitherto, save at Ashdown, it has been impossible to separate Alfred’s doings from those of Ethelred. We may guess that much of the untiring energy shown by the men of Wessex was due to the activity of the Etheling rather than to that of his pious elder brother; but we can prove nothing. When, however, Alfred begins to reign in his own right, we can at last make him personally responsible for the conduct of the war.

At first, it must be confessed, we can detect little more than mere courage and perseverance in the young king’s conduct. Of generalship we find no evidence. His first battle was a disaster. The victors of Marton, strengthened by a large new “summer-army” from over-seas, pressed deeper into Wiltshire. Ere Alfred had been a month on the throne, he met them near Wilton, but his army was small. The spirit of Wessex had begun to fail after a year in which eight engagements with the invaders had already been fought, four of which had been bloody defeats. The thegnhood was terribly worn down in numbers, the shire-levies so discouraged that they came to the muster in number far smaller than usual. But Alfred nevertheless offered battle. Taking up a strong position on a hill, he repulsed the Danes with great slaughter when they attacked him. But his army, carried away by their ardour, charged down from its favourable post to cut up the defeated enemy. The Vikings rallied, and turned on their scattered pursuers, whom they finally drove from the field. Thus inauspiciously began Alfred’s independent military career. But in spite of their victory the Danes, who had suffered almost as much as the English in this year of battles, consented to retire from Wessex on receiving a moderate sum of money. Alfred paid them, though he must have been aware that he was only buying a short respite. Time, however, was all-valuable to a king who wished to reorganise his exhausted realm.

For the next four years (872-875) there was comparative peace in Wessex: the enemy was employed partly on the Continent, partly in the conquest of Mercia, whose eastern half they annexed in 874, handing over the western part as a vassal kingdom to “an unwise thegn named Ceolwulf,” who fondly thought that it was possible to settle down as a vassal of the greedy Northmen. Alfred’s main endeavour in these years was to develop a navy; he “built galleys and long-ships,” and exerted himself to find trained crews for them, hiring “pirates”—converted Danes, we may suppose—to teach his own men seamanship. The beginnings of this national fleet must have been modest, for the chronicler thinks it a fact of note that the king’s galleys were able in 875 to attack seven Viking ships, take one, and chase the rest out to sea. Two years later, however, the squadron, as we shall see from its doings, must have developed to a more formidable strength.