The Vikings (35 page)

By 920 Edward was king of all England south of the Mersey and Humber. The entry in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
for that year sums up the result of ten years of ceaseless campaigning by Edward and Ethelfled:

In this year, before midsummer, King Edward went with the army to Nottingham, and ordered to be built the borough on the south side of the river, opposite the other, and the bridge over the river Trent between the two boroughs. Then he went from there into the Peak district to Bakewell, and ordered a borough to be built in the neighbourhood and manned. And then the king of the Scots, and Ragnald, and the sons of Eadwulf and all who live in Northumbria, both English and Danish, Norsemen and others, and also the king of the Strathclyde Welsh and all the Strathclyde Welsh, chose him as father and lord.
¹¹

When Ethelfled, known to admiring chroniclers as ‘the Lady of the Mercians’, died on 12 June 918, she left a daughter, Elfwynn. Now fully convinced of the possibility of a unified England under Wessex kingship, Edward received the submission of the Mercians and briefly allowed Elfwynn to continue in her mother’s role. The experiment lasted less than a year. In 919, three weeks before Christmas, she was removed from office and taken to Wessex. Her further fate is unknown, but it seems likely she entered a convent. The king’s action marked the definitive end of Mercia as an independent kingdom.

Edward was a talented maker of diplomatically rewarding matches and established good contact with the rulers of Flanders, as well as marrying his daughter, Eadgifu, to Charles the Simple. In other ways he showed himself a man of vision and foresight. The ‘Burghal Hidage’, a listing of the
burhs
dated to some time after 914, contains a conscription formula that reflects the military purpose behind these creations. But in time these
burhs
transcended their military origins and, with their garrisons, mints and trading populations, came to play a major role in the development of cities and townships in England, so that they can properly be entered on the long list of negative credits attributable to Viking violence. Edward brought new thinking to his enlarged kingdom. The new Mercian shires he created along with
burhs
took their names from towns, with the area administered from Gloucester being known as Gloucestershire, from Hereford as Herefordshire and so on.
¹²
The boundaries of these new shires cut across the traditional boundaries of the old kingdoms. In so doing they added impetus to the breakdown of familiar geographical regions and political institutions which Viking raiding and settlement had begun, accelerating and simplifying the way to the eventual creation of a single English kingdom.

Edward died at Farndon, on the Dee, on 17 July 924. In his translation of Augustine’s
Soliloquies
his father Alfred had noted the existence of men living pleasant lives, at ease in winter as in summer, adding ruefully ‘as I have not yet done’.
¹³
Edward might have echoed him. Yet Alfred had Asser to fill out and colour with personality the stark spaces between the terse reportings of his campaigns in the annals. With no biographer to give life and colour to it, the only impression we have of Edward’s life is that conveyed to us by the annalists, of a bleak and endless succession of days given over to fighting Vikings.

He was succeeded by his brother, Athelstan, who shared his skills as a maker of diplomatic marriages, and added his own remarkable ability to adopt talented children. Three future rulers of foreign countries were brought up at his court, including Håkon, known as Athelstansfostri, a son of the Norwegian king, Harald Finehair. One of his sisters was married to the future Otto I, another to Hugh, duke of the Franks, a third to a king of Burgundy.
¹⁴
Significantly excluded from his shield of protective alliances were the Danes and the Viking colonists in Normandy.
¹⁵

Early in 926 he gave his sister Eadgyth in marriage to Sihtric of York, having first issued the traditional demand that Sihtric convert to Christianity. According to Roger of Wendover, Sihtric soon followed the equally traditional Viking response of abandoning the new religion at the first opportunity, along with his new wife, and returning to his old gods. When Sihtric died in 927, his son by an earlier marriage, Olaf, attempted to succeed him with the support of a leader of the Dublin Vikings. Athelstan, wearied as so many Anglo-Saxon and Frankish Christian rulers had been before him by the casual attitude of Vikings towards conversion, drove him out and for the first time a Wessex king ruled directly over York. A small coin hoard unearthed on a farm in Harrogate has been associated with this particular period of unrest in the north-east.
¹⁶
One of the coins bears the Latin inscription
Rex totius Britannia
(King of all Britain), a claim Athelstan repeated in the charters of his reign, where he also styled himself ‘Emperor [using the Byzantine word
basilius
] of the English and of all the nations round about’. As the first Anglo-Saxon king to make such claims, Athelstan’s gestures show that his goal was indeed the unification of England under one king.

Yet his kingdom remained far from secure. Constantine, king of the Scots, challenged him in 934, and when that challenge failed Constantine allied himself with that Olaf whom Athelstan had driven out of York. They were joined by Owen, king in the Welsh-speaking kingdom of Strathclyde in the south-west of Scotland, and while Athelstan and his men were campaigning in the south of England, Olaf’s army of Irish-Norse Vikings and Northumbrian Norwegians raided and caused havoc in Mercia. In 937 Athelstan with his brother Edmund at the head of a large army marched north and confronted them in a great battle at Brunanburh, now identified with some certainty as Bromborough in the Wirral peninsula .
¹⁷
The battle lasted all day, and by the end of it the alliance was destroyed and the northern threat to the kingdom removed. Olaf made his way back over the sea to Dublin and Constantine returned to Scotland, abdicating in 943 after a reign of forty years to spend the last ten years of his life as a monk at St Andrews. Brunanburh was the outstanding event of Athelstan’s reign
¹⁸
and, as such, the stuff of literature. The battle was immortalized in a Latin poem from which William of Malmesbury quotes, and it was noted in a number of histories and annals, including the
Annals of Ulster
. Its most famous memorial is the Anglo-Saxon poem that is in its entirety the entry for that year in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
:

In this year King Athelstan, lord of nobles, dispenser of treasure to men, and his brother also, Edmund atheling, won by the sword’s edge undying glory in battle round Brunanburh. Edward’s sons clove the shield-wall, hewed the linden-wood shields with hammered swords, for it was natural to men of their lineage to defend their land, their treasure and their homes, in frequent battle against every foe. Their enemies perished; the people of the Scots and the pirates fell doomed. The field grew dark with the blood of men, from the time when the sun, that glorious luminary, the bright candle of God, of the Lord Eternal, moved over the earth in the hours of the morning, until that noble creation sank at its setting. There lay many a man destroyed by the spears, many a northern warrior shot over his shield; and likewise many a Scot lay weary, sated with battle.

The whole long day the West Saxons with mounted companies kept in pursuit of the hostile peoples, grievously they cut down the fugitives from behind with their whetted swords. The Mercians refused not hard conflict to any men who with Olaf had sought this land in the bosom of a ship over the tumult of waters, coming doomed to the fight. Five young kings lay on that field of battle, slain by the swords, and also seven of Olaf’s earls, and a countless host of seamen and Scots. There the prince of the Norsemen was put to flight, driven perforce to the prow of his ship with a small company; the vessel pressed on in the water, the king set out over the fallow flood and saved his life.

There also the aged Constantine, the hoary-haired warrior, came north to his own land by flight. He had no cause to exult in that crossing of swords. He was shorn of his kinsmen and deprived of his friends at that meeting place, bereaved in the battle, and he left his young son on the field of slaughter, brought low by wounds in the battle. The grey-haired warrior, the old and wily one, had no cause to vaunt of that sword-clash; no more had Olaf. They had no need to gloat with the remnants of their armies, that they were superior in warlike deeds on the field of battle, in the clash of standards, the meeting of spears, the encounter of men, and the crossing of weapons, after they had contended on the field of slaughter with the sons of Edward.

Then the Norsemen, the sorry survivors from the spears, put out in their studded ships on to Ding’s mere, to make for Dublin across the deep water, back to Ireland humbled at heart. Also the two brothers, king and atheling, returned together to their own country, the land of the West Saxons, exulting in the battle. They left behind them the dusky-coated one, the black raven with its horned beak, to share the corpses, and the dun-coated, white-tailed eagle, the greedy war-hawk, to enjoy the carrion, and that grey beast, the wolf of the forest.

Never yet in this island before this by what books tell us and our ancient sages, was a greater slaughter of a host made by the edge of the sword, since the Angles and the Saxons came hither from the east, invading Britain over the broad seas, and the proud assailants, warriors eager for glory, overcame the Britons and won a country.
¹⁹

Two years after the battle at Brunanburh Athelstan died, and Olaf returned from Ireland to press his claim to York once more. As coins from the mint at Derby show, this time he succeeded. Again Wessex found itself faced with a Viking kingdom spanning the north of England, with potential allies in the north-west and along the east coast, and with Dublin and the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea as strategically vital components. The union of Dublin and York under one ruler might have proved an irresistible military force had Olaf not died in 941. His cousin, Olaf Sihtricsson, inherited that same potential; but after a campaign by Athelstan’s successor Edmund he was compelled to accept Christianity and relinquish the territory gained by Olaf south of the Humber. The following year, in 944, the Danes of York rejected him, and the disintegration of the kingdom continued apace. After a short and provocative reign, Erik Bloodaxe, the oldest of Harald Finehair’s sons, had been driven from the throne of Norway by his brother, Håkon Athelstansfostri. According to his saga in
Heimskringla
, Håkon was helped in his campaign by ships and men provided by Athelstan, just as Athelstan had provided military and naval support for another of his foster-sons, Alan Barbetorte, in the campaign to reclaim Brittany that began in 936.
²⁰
The account given by Snorri of Håkon’s adoption by Athelstan
²¹
is obviously legendary and nothing is known of how the friendship between the English and Norwegian kings came about; by himself as by others, however, Athelstan was regarded as a very important king indeed in Europe at the time. William of Malmesbury, in the
De Gestis Regum Anglorum
, says that ‘foreign kings rightly considered themselves fortunate if they could buy his friendship either by marriage alliance or gifts’,
²²
and goes on to describe a visit paid to Athelstan after his recapture of York by two Norwegian emissaries, Helgrim and Osfrid, who brought with them a king’s gift of a ship from Harald Finehair to Athelstan, ‘which had a gold beak and purple sail, surrounded inside with a dense rank of gilded shields’. A passage in
Egil’s Saga
may provide evidence of a tradition of further ties between the Norwegian and English royal houses at this time, when a young Norwegian named Thorstein, involved in a property dispute back home in Norway, visits Athelstan’s court with a plea to the English king to ask his foster-son Håkon to intercede on his behalf in the dispute.
²³
The claim in the
Historia Norwegie
, that Erik Bloodaxe made his way to England after being driven out by Håkon, and was warmly received by the king, baptized and ‘appointed earl, commanding the whole of Northumbria’, likewise suggests continuing good relations between the royal families of England and Norway.
²⁴
The English king involved may have been Athelstan, but more likely it was later, during the reign of King Edred. Snorri Sturluson tells a similar story of Erik’s being baptized and given York to rule by an English king. Erik appears to have been an acceptable choice to the Northumbrians until the arrival of his wife, Gunnhild. The pair were driven out and Gunnhild returned to Denmark with her sons. Roger of Wendover says that Erik was betrayed, ambushed and killed as he made his way across remote Stainmore in Westmorland in 954. Two twelfth-century Norwegian sources, the
Historia Norwegie
and the
Ágrip
, tell a different story and make the intriguing claim that, after being driven from York, Erik set out on a Viking expedition to Spain and was killed there. Whichever story is correct, both describe the ignominious and lonely death of a nearly-man. Erik was known as ‘Bloodaxe’ during his own lifetime, after killing two of his own brothers who may have become a focus of discontent with his rule. Unfortunately for him, brother Håkon was out of his reach and had a powerful protector. The image of a short, broad sword on a silver penny struck during one of his brief reigns at York serves as a fitting epitaph to his violent and uncompromising character. Erik was the last independent king of York. With his death, the territories that had constituted the Danelaw were, after almost 100 years, in English hands once again.

 

Though the English repossession of York has the neatness and drama of concluding a ‘campaign’ to re-take lands lost to the invaders, the battle at Brunanburh in 937 seemed to contemporaries and near-contemporaries of greater significance. Another presence at Brunanburh on the English side was that of Oda, bishop of Ramsbury in Wiltshire. The poet does not mention him, but later stories place him there and credit him with miraculously restoring Athelstan’s sword.
²⁵
The legend adds interest to the otherwise bald account of the battle in the ‘F’ annals of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, which note only that Athelstan and Edmund triumphed ‘with the help of Christ’. That Christian legend should place this particular man on this particular field of battle has a cultural significance that probably equals the military significance of Athelstan’s victory, for Oda’s father was, in the whispered tones of one source, ‘said by certain people to have come to England with Ubba and Ivar’. He was, in other words, the son of a Heathen Viking.