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.
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.