The Unknown Warrior (11 page)

In terms of the man's clothing, one hobnailed shoe was found, along with twenty-one of the studs of the other, and a bronze fibula was also located. The man had an iron ring with a glass paste setting of a male head wearing a helmet, perhaps Mars or some other deity venerated by the military (Morel and Bosman, 1989: 170).

THREE

Heroes of the Chronicles and Sagas: Anglo-Saxon and Viking Warriors

Their mail-shirts glinted,
hard and hand linked; the high-gloss iron
of their armour rang. So they duly arrived
in their grim war-graith and gear at the hall,
and, weary from the sea, stacked wide shields
of the toughest hardwood against the wall,
then collapsed on the benches; battle-dress
and weapons clashed. They collected their spears
in a seafarers' stook, a stand of greyish
tapering ash. And the trips themselves
were as good as their weapons.

(
Beowulf
, 321–30, in Heaney, 1999: 12)

Although there was no standing army in the Anglo-Saxon period, men were expected to provide military service to those in the upper levels of society. The stratification of Anglo-Saxon society gave specific roles to specific class ranks. For example, the
gesith
was a man, well-born in status, who had military obligations, and an
ealdorman
was a regional official. The war gear (
heriot
) of such men showed that the individual was offered the gift of weaponry by a lord to one entering his service – returnable on the man's death unless this was in battle (Reynolds, 2002a: 59). Reynolds (
ibid.
: 59) reveals the
heriot
of a tenth-century
ealdorman
as being ‘four armlets of 300 mancuses of gold, and four swords and eight horses, four with trappings and four without, and four helmets and four coats-of-mail and eight spears and eight shields'.

The ordinary freeman (
ceorl
) was also expected to perform military duties. According to the epic poem ‘The Battle of Maldon', one such
ceorl
was fighting as part of the retinue of the Saxon Earl Byrhtnoth against the Vikings in this battle in Essex in 991. Nicolle (1984: 14) believes that the role of the
ceorl
differed depending on where in the country they lived: ‘The early role of the low class
ceorl
varied between Wessex, where he seems always to have been both farmer and fighter, and Northumbria, where he probably had no military obligation.'

Anglo-Saxon warriors seem to have been exclusively infantrymen, even though they possessed horses – these were used as a means of transport to the battle rather than a fighting platform. Norsemen, given the epic voyages they undertook, used ships as their major means of transport. A number of examples have survived and are displayed in museums, such as those from the fjord at Roskilde in Denmark, and the Oseberg, Gokst and Tune ships in Oslo, Norway.

It must be remembered that there were occasions when Vikings sought to avoid combat if they could, accepting payment (
Danegeld
) rather than fighting. Although much work has been done to dispel the ‘rape and pillage' reputation of the Viking lifestyle, a martial element was nonetheless present in their lives and can be traced in the archaeological record. The raids and their effects might show up in the presence of weaponry, or bodies of those engaged in the fighting, or in particular layers of destruction. The effects might also be seen, as Reynolds's work (2002a: 93) suggests, in the presence of warning beacons to raise the alarm when a Viking raiding party was detected, one example being seen at Yatesbury, Wiltshire.

With all of the elements discussed below – armour, helmets, swords, spears and suchlike – as with most infantrymen, what made the Anglo-Saxon or indeed Viking warrior successful was the closeness or
esprit de corps
of the war band: ‘For in the final analysis, men did not and do not fight for king or country but for the small group of men around them' (Underwood, 1999: 148).

WEAPONRY

In this period, Underwood (1999: 145) believes that, although there were some variations in usage, ‘the basic weapons were enduring: spear and shield for the rank and file, sword, spear and shield for higher ranking warriors. Only the very richest wore a helmet or body armour.'

This period saw some major battles, including some which have become enshrined in the British psyche, such as the Battle of Hastings in 1066. It is thus probably surprising that so little has been recovered from battlefield sites, perhaps as a result of long-term scavenging. For example, the paucity of material from Hastings – only one iron axehead was supposedly recovered from the field – leaves a large gap in what we are actually able to say about the weapons used in combat and their method of employment. We have recourse to skeletal material that has weapon wounds and we have the finds of weapons in grave contexts, but there is nothing quite like Kalkriese (see
Chapter 2
). The Bayeux Tapestry portrays men with armour, such as footsoldiers and their formations, which may be useful for our study, but should, like a document, be treated with a degree of caution, as it was created by one side to celebrate its victory.

Iron spearheads are the most common type of weapon in Anglo-Saxon graves, comprising 85 per cent of all such examples found (Underwood, 1999: 39). The spear, with a wooden shaft up to 2m long, was used in conjunction with a round shield to form a very strong formation known as the shield wall or shield fortress (
scyldburh
). Spears were used both as throwing and thrusting weapons, as they had been in the Bronze Age (see
Chapter 1
). ‘The Battle of Maldon' refers to an encounter in which a man finds his own spear being thrown back at him after his initial salvo. To avoid such an event, Anglo-Saxon technology continued the Roman
pilum
encumbrance principle: barbed spears, which could not easily be removed from shields they had hit and then be thrown back, have been found – a 52.5cm-long example having been uncovered in Abingdon, Berkshire (
ibid.
: 25). ‘Slaves were denied the right to bear arms; consequently ownership of a spear defined a man as free and a warrior in Germanic Society' (
ibid.
: 39). Spears have been found on sites throughout Britain – recent work on the Bronze Age burial mound of Barrow Clump, on Salisbury Plain, being just one example (Jonathan Last, pers. comm.).

If spears were a relatively common weapon type, finds of swords are more unusual and thus they were probably used by senior warriors. At their most basic, Saxon swords were forged from several pieces of iron and were, correspondingly, weak. At the top of the range, pattern-welded blades were made by twisting together strips of mild steel and wrought iron during the forging process. The resulting blade had both a hard edge and a herringbone-patterned, lustrous appearance. These were works of art, as well as being intended for a deadly purpose, yet their efficacy is indisputable – the cut wounds to the skulls of the deceased at Eccles in Kent, which we shall discuss later, being a case in point. Examples of Anglo-Saxon swords have been found in several burials, including Barrow Clump, Buckland in Kent and Westgarth Gardens in Suffolk (Underwood, 1999: 52–5). Underwood (
ibid.
: 54) points to the fact that some swords bore runic inscriptions – a sixth-century example from Gilton, Kent, bears the legend
EIC SIGIMER NEMDE
(‘Sigimer named this sword'). Such weapons were prestigious, precious items. Saxons also used a large knife (
seax
), both in hunting and everyday life, as well as, perhaps, in combat.

Vikings also had swords, as witnessed by the burial of the presumed warrior at Repton, examined below, and examples found in the River Thames in London. Although probably depicting Doomsday, the commemorative stone from Lindisfarne may well have been inspired by the terror of a Viking raid. The warriors portrayed on this carving were armed both with sword and axe (Cunliffe, 2001: 483). As with their Saxon counterparts, some of these Viking swords were also marked by their makers – inscriptions include
INGELRII
, from the River Thames (Peirce, 2002: 80–8), and
ULFBERHT
. The number of blades with the ‘Ulfberht' inscription may mean that more than one individual was forging the swords (Oakeshott, in Peirce, 2002: 7). ‘Viking craftsmen often added their own elaborately decorated hilts, and many swords were given names, such as leg-biter and gold-hilt' (see Ager, 2001). These swords had leather sheaths for protection, such as those found at York, Durham and Gloucester (Siddorn, 2000: 84).

Another Viking sword was excavated by Bersu from Jurby, Ballateare, on the Isle of Man, in 1946 (Richards, 2001: 104). This ninth-century example had been deliberately broken into three pieces by those who put it in the grave. As swords were given names and identities, so were they imbued with their own powers. This, perhaps, ended on the death of the warrior, or their owner and, as with Bronze Age examples (see Pryor's work on Flag Fen, 1991: fig. 11), they were destroyed on deposition. It was an important act, because swords were prestigious items. The sword from Ballateare was not a gift to the gods, but rather something that the person inhumed could take to the afterlife. The Viking practice of destroying swords is also found outside the British Isles – a late ninth- to tenth-century example from Vestre Berg in Norway being a case in point. Here, the sword had been bent into an ‘S' shape and was interred in a grave along with two arrows, another small sword, an axe, two shield bosses and other items (Peirce, 2002: 87).

If the spear was the main Anglo-Saxon weapon, the battleaxe was the weapon of choice for the Viking warrior. An eleventh-century Anglo-Danish example of the war axe has been recovered from London (Nicolle, 1984: 20) and a further group of early eleventh-century iron spears and axeheads were recovered from the Thames near London Bridge (Gravett, 1999: 36). The axe was also used by Saxon forces, as depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry of the Battle of Hastings. Sixth- to seventh-century Saxon battleaxes have been found at Petersfinger and Howlett's in Kent (Nicolle, 1984: 20).

Although weapons found in burials – both Saxon and Viking – are a good source of information on the equipment available to the warrior, if not of pieces actually used in combat, it is possible that these graves do not belong to the men and women who fought in the battles, but that there is simply a martial portrayal in the burials. The rich grave goods given to the probable Saxon king in his burial at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk – a pattern-welded sword, mail coat, battleaxe, shield, spears and, most famously, a Scandinavian-style helmet – illustrate the panoply of arms, but their context is most unusual (Reynolds, 2002a: 55).

A further weakness of the archaeological record is the paucity of material relating to archery. We know from all manner of written sources, such as chronicles and epic poems (‘The Battle of Maldon' for one), from pictorial representations, including the Franks Casket and Bayeux Tapestry, that the bow and arrow was a weapon used by Saxon infantry, yet there is little in terms of excavated material that would back this up; only 1 per cent of Anglo-Saxon graves holding arrowheads (Underwood, 1999: 26). A bone bracer or wristguard not too dissimilar to those of the Beaker package (see
Chapter 1
) was found at Lowbury, Berkshire (
ibid.
: 30), and arrowheads were found at sites such as Empingham, Rutland (
ibid.
: 33). This, perhaps, should serve as a cautionary tale that material gained from archaeological excavations may not give the full picture of the infantry at times.

ARMOUR

The most frequently occurring element of protective equipment from this period to be found in the archaeological record is the shield, or, at least, the metal shield boss. The shield and spear were essential accoutrements of the Saxon infantryman. According to Underwood (1999: 77), almost a quarter of Anglo-Saxon male burials contain evidence of a shield. Furthermore, there are a number of possible graves of females that also have shield parts. At Beckford A, Worcestershire, grave number A2 seemed to have a sharp weapon wound to the skull resulting from an oblique blow. This skeleton was initially thought to be female but, on discovery of the grave goods of spear and shield boss, was reassigned as male. Shepherd (1999: 232) points out the problems in assigning the sex of the individual purely on the basis of the perceived ‘sex' of the grave goods. Grave B5 from Beckford B, some 550m away, also contained the body of a possible female along with spear and shield boss (
ibid.
: 237).

Shields were circular throughout much of this period, changing to the kite-shape, as depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry, in the eleventh century. These shields were composed of wooden boards and had a central iron boss. From impressions of burials in the soil, it seems that most Anglo-Saxon shields were 0.46–0.66m in diameter (Underwood, 1999: 79). We suspect that such shields were painted, but, as of yet, do not have the archaeological evidence to back this up.

Shield bosses, being metal, are the major surviving component of the shield and their form varies dramatically from the flattened cones of the fifth and sixth centuries to the dramatic ‘sugar-loaf ' bosses of the seventh century. Shield grips have been found on occasion, too, including the example from Morning Thorpe cemetery, Norfolk, where traces could be seen of the leather strips that covered the grip that in turn enclosed a wooden handle (
ibid.
: 87).