Part 9

It was not till 876 that Alfred’s reorganisation of his realm was put to the test. In that year a great Viking host under the kings Guthrum, Oskytel, and Amund made a sudden dash into Wessex, appeared in Dorsetshire, and seized Wareham, where they stockaded themselves between the Frome and the Trent in one of their usual water-girt camps. Alfred was soon upon them with the whole levy of Wessex, and held them so tightly blockaded—he made no attempt to storm their works after the experience of Reading—that they asked for terms, gave hostages, swore their greatest oath, and promised to depart. But when the king was off his guard all that part of the host that was provided with horses made a sudden sally, slipped through the English lines, and rode day and night till they reached Exeter, which they took by surprise. There they again stockaded themselves, and lay entrenched for the winter of 876-877. The indefatigable king followed them, again drew lines round their camp, and beleaguered them till they were oppressed with famine. They were depending for their relief on a squadron which was to run down the Channel and join them at the mouth of the Exe; but Alfred sent his fleet, such as it was, to intercept the incoming pirates. There was an engagement somewhere off the south coast, from which the Danes retired without winning a victory, and immediately after a great storm cast their vessels on the cliffs of the Isle of Purbeck. A hundred and twenty galleys, with all their crews, are said to have perished near Swanage. Reduced to despair by this news, the Danes at Exeter asked for terms, and departed for Mercia before the summer was out.

This campaign had been such a complete success for Alfred that the events of the next year are a perfect surprise to us—as indeed they were to the contemporary observer; “slay thirty thousand of these heathen in one day,” says Asser, “and on the next sixty thousand will appear.” In the first days of January 878 the main army of the Vikings, starting from Mercia, made a sudden and unexpected descent on Wiltshire, cutting the West-Saxon realm in twain. From a central camp at Chippenham they raided east and west into Hampshire on the one side and Somersetshire on the other. At the same time a separate pirate fleet which had spent its Yule in South Wales crossed the Bristol Channel and threw itself upon North Devon. It must have been the sudden and unexpected character of such an attack at mid-winter which for a moment seemed to have crushed Wessex. The king, who appears to have been in the west at the time, threw himself into the Isle of Athelney with a small band of his thegns and personal retainers, and there built his famous stockade in the marshes of the Parret. Elsewhere there was panic: many men of note fled over-seas to the Franks: large districts offered tribute and submission to the Danish king Guthrum.

But the worst of the panic only lasted a few weeks: before Easter the men of Devonshire rallied and cut to pieces at Kenwith the army from South Wales, slaying its leaders, Ingwar and Hubba, and 1200 of their followers, and capturing their famous Raven standard. Somewhat later the levies of Somerset, Wilts, and Hampshire assembled in the forest of Selwood under the king in person and marched against the Danish camp at Chippenham. The invaders, thinking they were strong enough to fight in the open, moved out to Eddington to meet the advancing English. There they were routed in a battle of which we know no details, save that the king’s men fought in one dense mass—not in two, as at Ashdown—and that the fight was long and desperate. The defeated host fled to its stronghold at Chippenham, on the east bank of the Avon. Alfred followed hard upon them, and, pushing up to the very gates of the stockade, built a camp almost in actual touch with it, so as to make any sortie well-nigh impossible. The Danes were quite unprepared for a siege; they had fondly imagined that Wessex was their own, and had accumulated no stores. In fourteen days they were starved out, and concluded with the king the famous pact which is often, but inaccurately, called the Peace of Wedmore. King Guthrum and thirty of his chiefs consented to receive baptism, did homage to Alfred, and undertook to withdraw from his realm and to trouble him no more. These conditions, it is surprising to find, were punctually fulfilled; the Viking became a Christian, and withdrew his host first to Cirencester in Mercia and then to East Anglia, where they all settled down and gave no trouble for some years. A great fleet which had come up the Thames as far as Fulham, and had been harassing Kent and Western Wessex, lingered some months after Guthrum’s defeat, but gave up its enterprise in the spring of 879, sailed off eastwards, and set itself to ravage Flanders.

The peace of 878 is rightly taken as the turning-point of Alfred’s reign. He had so thoroughly impressed upon the Vikings the notion that in Wessex they would meet hard blows and small plunder that for some years they gave his realm a wide berth, and devoted their main attention to the Frankish kingdoms, where the imbecile Charles the Fat was just about to start upon his disgraceful career. It was more profitable to blackmail realms whose kings shirked battles and proffered rich tribute than pay a visit to the indefatigable ruler of Wessex. The events of 872-878 had made Alfred thoroughly well acquainted with every wile of Danish warfare; he was not likely again to be taken by surprise, or caught unawares by an attack in time of truce or negotiation. In the numerous wars of his later years he shows a mastery over his opponents which he was far from possessing in the days of Reading or Wilton. In especial the great struggle of 893-896, when he had to face dangers quite as complicated and pressing as those of 872 or 878, found him so well prepared that its issue was never seriously in doubt, though the seat of war was perpetually shifting over every region between Kent and Chester, Essex and Exeter.

The first occupation to which Alfred seems to have devoted himself after the peace of 878 was the further development of his fleet. In 882 he actually went out with it in person and destroyed a small Viking squadron. In 885 he took the more daring step of sending it northward into hostile water. The East Anglian Danes having, after seven years of peace, broken their pact with him, he sent a squadron from Kent all up the Essex coast, and destroyed sixteen long-ships at the mouth of the Stour. Unfortunately his victorious vessels were intercepted by the whole force of the Danelagh ere they could return, and suffered a disastrous defeat. It was not till some years later, and when his last great war on land was over, that Alfred tried his final naval experiment, building “long-ships that were nigh twice as large as those of the Danes, some with sixty oars, some with more. They were both steadier and swifter, and also higher than others, and were shaped neither as the Frisian nor the Danish ships, but as it seemed to himself that they would be most handy.” The natural result was the destruction of more than twenty Viking ships along the south coast in the sole summer of 897.

The second expedient which Alfred took in hand was the systematic construction of fortifications. Not only were the towns encouraged to surround themselves with strong ditches and palisades, but “burhs”—moated mounds girt with concentric rings of ditch and stockade—were erected at strategical points. London, recovered from the East Anglian Danes in 886, was made far stronger than it had ever been before by the patching up of its ancient Roman walls. It was filled with a new colony of warlike settlers, and became an outpost of Wessex to the north of the Thames. The consequences of the fact that the larger English towns were no longer open but well fortified are clearly seen in Alfred’s later wars. The Danes cannot capture important places at the first rush, as they had done with York, Winchester, and London thirty years before. They have to lay siege to them in full form, and always before the siege is many days old the indefatigable king appears with an army of relief. The invaders had then either to fight, to take to their ships, or to stockade themselves in their entrenchments and suffer a leaguer themselves. Generally they chose the second alternative, as at Rochester in 886, when they abandoned their horses, their stores, and all their heavy plunder, and sailed off the moment that the army of succour came in sight. The same scene occurred at Exeter in 894. The importance of fortified places in keeping the Danes employed till the fyrd could assemble can hardly be exaggerated. The only stronghold which did not serve its purpose was a certain “work only half constructed in which there were some few countryfolk” near Appledore in Kent. This fell before an attack of the “Great Army” in 893.

It would seem that the system by which Alfred’s “burhs” were maintained was not unlike that which Henry the Fowler employed in Germany a generation later. To each stronghold there was allotted, as it would appear, a certain number of “hides” of land in the surrounding region. All the thegns dwelling on these hides were responsible for the defence of the burh. Probably they were bound to build a house within it, and either to dwell there in person, or to place therein a substitute equally competent with themselves for military purposes. It would seem that the “cnihten-guilds” of London and several other places were the original associations of these military settlers whom Alfred and his immediate successors placed in their burhs. Of the local distribution of the fortresses we have a precious relic in the “Burgal Hidage,” a document belonging to the very early years of the tenth century, which gives a complete list of all the land dependent on the burhs of Wessex, and certain materials for the regions north of Thames also, where Edward the Elder was beginning to encroach on the Danelagh by means of his new foundations. That the system started with Alfred rather than his son seems to follow from two passages in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, where, under the year 894, we hear of “the king’s thegns who were at home in the fortresses,” and again of the fyrd being “half in the field and half at home, beside those men that held the burhs.”

One of Alfred’s devices of fortification deserves a special mention, as being new on this side of the Channel, though some partial precedents for it can be found in the wars of the Franks. In 896 the main body of the Viking invaders had concentrated at the Thames mouth, and then pushed up the river Lea to a spot fifteen miles from London, dragging their fleet with them. Noting the narrowness of the river, Alfred built two formidable burhs, one on each side of the Lea, just below the Danish camp, and then obstructed the stream—probably by palisades and floating booms—between the two forts. The hostile fleet was so securely “bottled up” that the Vikings had to abandon it when they moved off on land, and the Londoners were able to bring back the whole of the galleys to their city when the enemy was gone.

Beside the building of a fleet, and the systematic use of fortification, we have strong evidence that Alfred employed the third means of strengthening his realm that we indicated in the beginning of this chapter—that of increasing the numbers of the thegnhood, the professional military class. We are unfortunately not able to separate his work from that of his successor, Edward the Elder; but as Alfred was a man of far more original genius than his son, we may fairly suspect him of being the originator of the scheme. It took the shape of enlisting in the ranks of the thegnhood all the more wealthy and energetic of the middle-classes both in the country-side and in the towns. Every ceorl who “throve so that he had fully five hides of land, and a helm and a mail-shirt, and a sword ornamented with gold,” was to be for the future reckoned “gesithcund,” or as another law phrased it, “of thegn-right worthy.” A second draft of the first-quoted document even allows a ceorl who has the military equipment complete, but not fully the five hides of land, to slip into the privileged class. The same privilege was given—as a premium for energy among town-dwellers—to “the merchant who had fared thrice over the high seas at his own expense.”

In return for their promotion in the social scale, ceorl and merchant alike were of course bound to follow the king to the field in full mail when he raised his banner, and no longer got off with the less arduous service expected from mere members of the shire-levy. We cannot doubt that such measures caused a large increase in the numbers of the thegnhood, and thereby provided the king with a more efficient and better armed core for the national host than his predecessors had ever possessed.

The campaigns against Hasting and the “Great Army” in 893-896 give, as we have already said, the best test of the efficiency of Alfred’s reorganisation of his realm. The invaders came ashore in two places, Appledore in Kent and Milton by the Thames mouth. Each host found itself at once observed by a strong force, and unable to disperse for plunder. The king “encamped as near to them as he had room for the wood-fastnesses and the water-fastnesses, so that he might reach either if they might seek a field. Then they tried to go through the weald in troops, on whichever side there might not be a force. But each troop was sought out by a band from the king’s host, and also from the burhs.” At last the whole host at Appledore broke up and tried to march northward. Alfred stopped them at Farnham, took all their baggage, and drove them in disorder over the Thames. The survivors joined part of Hasting’s army at Benfleet in Essex: the pirate king himself was absent with the rest. Following hard on their heels, the English stormed the camp, captured Hasting’s wife and sons, and took a vast booty. But Alfred was not in person with this army: a third Viking host of a hundred ships had laid siege to Exeter, and he had flown westward to deal with it. On his approach the Vikings took to their ships and sailed up to the Channel and round the North Foreland to Shoeburyness in Essex, where they picked up the remnants of the force that had been routed at Benfleet, and some other reinforcements from the East Anglian Danes. Swelled to a large host by these accretions, the army that had failed at Exeter marched across Southern Mercia to the Severn, and “wrought a work” at Buttington.[23] Here they were at once beset by Alfred’s son-in-law and most faithful servant, Ethelred Alderman of the Hwiccas, who had with him the levies of Somerset, Wilts, Gloucester, and Worcester. Expelled by him from the Severn valley, the Vikings retired to their kinsmen in Eastern England. There they again gathered reinforcements, and returning to the west, seized the empty walls of Chester—desolate since Ethelfrith had sacked the old Roman town in 606—and tried to establish themselves there. But again they had no rest: the forces of English Mercia, aided by the kings of North Wales, laid siege to the place. Starvation finally compelled the Vikings to abandon it. They went back through the friendly territory of their Northumbrian kinsmen, and returned to East Anglia (895). Their last effort was made in the following year, and consisted in the advance up the Thames and Lea which we have already had occasion to describe. There King Alfred assailed them in person, and captured their fleet by the device of blocking the river by his two burhs. Deprived of their vessels the Danes made their last march: pressing overland, they for the second time entered the Severn valley and “wrought a work” at Quatbridge.[24] Alfred followed them with the bulk of his host, and lay opposite them as the winter set in. It was impossible to get away from this untiring pursuer, and in the next spring the “Great Army” broke up in despair: “some returned to East Anglia and some to Northumbria, and those that were moneyless got themselves ships and went south over sea to the Seine. Thanks be to God, the army had not broken up the English race” (896).

These splendid campaigns, known to us, alas! only in outline, are the finest testimony to Alfred’s powers of organisation that could be given. Wherever the Vikings appeared they were at once met by a sufficient force and held in check. Their strong camps could not defend them as of old: sometimes the palisades were stormed, sometimes blockade did the work, and the host had to depart in order to save itself from starvation. Three years of perpetual disaster tired out at last even the obstinacy of the battle-loving Northmen. They dispersed and sought other scenes of activity and enemies less formidable than the great king of Wessex.

For the last four years of his life Alfred was undisturbed save by trifling raids of small squadrons, which he brushed off with ease by means of the new fleet of “great ships” which he had built. The work of defence was done: Wessex was saved, and with Wessex the English nationality. In a few years the king’s gallant son, Edward the Elder, was to take the offensive against the old enemy, and to repay on the Danelagh all the evils that England had suffered during the miserable years of the ninth century. That such triumphs lay within his power was absolutely and entirely the work of his great father, who had turned defeat into victory, brought order out of chaos, and left the torn and riven kingdom that he had inherited transformed into the best organised and most powerful state in Western Europe.

ALFRED AS A GEOGRAPHER

BY SIR CLEMENTS MARKHAM

ALFRED AS A GEOGRAPHER

The single-minded devotion of King Alfred to the service of his people is shown in every action of his life; and one of the greatest, certainly the most remarkable undertaking for that end, was the conveyance of knowledge to them in their own language, through paraphrased translations. It was thus that he strove to disseminate some acquaintance with theology, moral philosophy, history, and geography. It is a very striking and suggestive fact that a ruler who surpassed all others that the world has ever seen in wisdom and insight, as well as in complete abnegation of every selfish thought in his dealings with his people, should have given so high a place to geography. Alfred knew by experience that an acquaintance with the relative positions of places on the earth’s surface was the necessary foundation of the kind of knowledge required equally by the statesman, the soldier, and the merchant; and he therefore gave its due place to geography in his grand scheme for the enlightenment of Englishmen. In this he was centuries in advance of his age, and even now the standard in this, as in other respects, is below that of the wisest of our kings.

Alfred, as was his wont, when he had resolved to bring knowledge on any particular subject within the reach of his people, diligently sought out the best authority on geography. Ptolemy, Strabo, and Pliny were unknown to his generation, still hidden away in dark repositories and not to be unearthed until the dawn of the Renaissance. In the ninth century the best geographical work was that of Paulus Orosius, who had lived in the days of the Emperor Honorius. He was a native of Tarragona in Spain, and took orders in the Christian church. Perplexed by the controversies in his own country, the young Spanish deacon undertook a voyage to Africa, to receive the solution of his doubts from the famous Bishop of Hippo. Orosius secured the friendship of St. Augustine, who sent him to Palestine on two occasions before A.D. 416, and gave him opportunities for study. The result was a work intended to refute the pagan opinion that the sack of Rome by Alaric was due to the anger of the ancient gods. It, however, contained much more than mere polemics, and was in fact a summary of the world’s history from the creation to the days of Honorius, with a sketch of all that was then known of geography.

Alfred brought high qualifications to the task of translating and editing Orosius.[25] In his boyhood he had twice made journeys to Rome, which, as regards danger and hardships, may be compared to an expedition to Lhasa at the present day. In after life he had become very intimately acquainted with the topography of his native island, from the Humber to the shores of the Channel, and from the Severn to the East Anglian coast. As a military tactician he knew each river, valley, hill range, and plain; as an administrator he had examined the capabilities of every district; and as a naval commander, the harbours and estuaries, the tides and currents were familiar to him. So far as his personal knowledge extended, Alfred was a trained geographer. He was also in a position to increase the information derived from his own personal experiences by diligently collecting materials from those foreigners who frequented his court, and by reading. He had the gift of assimilating the knowledge thus acquired, and he studied most diligently. Above all, he was eager to investigate unknown things for the great end he always had in view—the good of his people.

Alfred’s design was to collect the best and most extensive geographical information, without confining himself to the text of Orosius. Thus he commences his geographical work with a very lucid account of the peoples of central Europe and of their relative positions, which is not in the work of Orosius, but was composed by the king himself from his own sources of information. It is the only account from which such details in that age can be derived.