The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great Read online

  When the Danes received danegeld from King Burgred in Mercia and King Edmund in East Anglia, they sensed a weakness begging to be exploited in the rulers. They returned soon after with such a show of strength that both Mercia and East Anglia immediately crumbled with very little military resistance.

  If Alfred was to defeat his enemy, he needed to teach his noblemen to be cunning but principled, crafty as serpents and innocent as doves. His men had to become deathly shrewd and able to trump the Vikings in guile and deception. But at the same time, they had to sense the deep need for leaders who understood the principles of nobility. They had to despise the nearsighted purchasing of today’s peace with tomorrow’s freedom and see it for the cowardice that it was. They had to prefer to die a gory death in a hopeless combat than to live a craven life having betrayed the king and the people of Wessex. The pagan invaders could not have conquered a nation led by noblemen who understood true nobility.

  Living these few months under Guthrum’s authority had already taught a good deal of this second lesson. The continued looting and pillaging of the Wessex shires, the ransacking of the churches and farms, the raping and kidnapping, had all exacted a heavy toll from the people of Wessex. Anyone who had thought that life under the Vikings would be preferable to a campaign against them had been thoroughly corrected. It was now clear that freedom would have been worth continuing to fight for.

  The cunning that Alfred had lacked, he began to learn in Athelney. From here he tracked the Viking king, learning to predict his movements and how to react effectively and counter his tactics. He practiced moving his own men unseen throughout Guthrum’s newly occupied territory. He also began to construct an effective but entirely secret network of communication between himself and the ealdormen who were still loyal to him among the shire fyrds of Wessex.

  By Easter, Alfred had constructed his own hidden fortress at Athelney, guarded by a watery seclusion and the few faithful thegns who had followed the king into hiding. A mile northeast of Athelney, Alfred was able to post a lookout on Burrow Mump, a prominent peak rising several hundred feet above the desolate surrounds that offered, on a clear day, a view for hundreds of miles in all directions. From here, Alfred could easily track from afar any movement of the Danish troops, offering him even greater opportunities to harass Guthrum’s uneasy troops.

  For Guthrum the situation had become surprisingly more and more difficult. He had been a master at commanding an invading army, but occupying a foreign nation while being savagely harassed by a resolute underground force was a skill in which he was terribly unpracticed. To truly control Wessex, Guthrum needed to conquer Alfred and his small band of guerrilla warriors, who seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. Fighting this ubiquitous menace required that virtually all of his troops be held back either in the shire of Somerset searching out Alfred or in Wiltshire protecting Guthrum’s base at Chippenham. But this left the southern shires of Dorset and Hampshire untouched by the Viking occupation, as well as the other far reaches of Wessex. Alfred’s continued attacks from Athelney were keeping Guthrum from driving his conquest home. The one chance Guthrum had of finding assistance had been lost when the ealdorman of Devon, Odda, had routed the newly arrived Ubbe and his men at the failed siege of Countisbury.

  Alfred realized it was critical that the southern shires remain free from the desperate grip of Guthrum. Had Ubbe been successful in his earlier invasion of Devon, the fate of Wessex would have been sealed. Therefore, even though it would have been very helpful if the strong Saxon fyrds of Dorset and Devon were to come to the north to help wage battle against Guthrum, it was necessary that they remain at home to defend the coasts of Wessex. This left Alfred depending on the men of Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire to fill out the army he was secretly gathering. The ealdorman of Wiltshire, Wulfhere, had betrayed Alfred, however, and pledged his faithfulness to Guthrum. Gathering the men of Wiltshire to his side without the leadership of the shire’s ealdorman would not be easy for Alfred. But Wulfhere’s duplicity had been a betrayal of his own people every bit as much as it had been a betrayal of the Wessex king. During the months since Guthrum’s attack on Chippenham, the men of Wiltshire had come to loathe their perfidious lord, a loathing that made them all the more passionately devoted to their outcast king and his cause.

  In the middle of the month of April, when the men of Wiltshire received a secret communication from Alfred summoning them for battle, they received the call to arms with intense joy and thanksgiving at the chance to rid themselves of the pagan oppressors. The call was passed on to Somerset and Hampshire as well, shires whose ealdormen had remained faithful to Alfred throughout Guthrum’s conquest. At the village level, the leading men regularly gathered together at a meeting called the “folk-moot,” where local business was conducted and word from the ealdormen and king was regularly announced. Additionally, each village would send leading men to meet at the “shire-moot,” a similar meeting convened to conduct shire business. These governing bodies provided the means for Alfred to summon the men of Wessex to battle easily. These bodies also provided natural assembly points for each village and shire.

  As the countryside of Wessex shook off the death grip of the English winter, as the frost and bone-biting chill fled from the climbing sun and lengthening days, as the floor of the woods sprang to life with the budding of the daffodils and bluebells, as all of nature declared with finality the death of winter, every man of Wessex capable of carrying a weapon into combat began his preparations for one more perilous clash with the Viking hordes. The following days were filled with the necessary task of equipping themselves for the fight, a task made all the more difficult by the need to hide the preparations from the Danish occupiers. Swords and axe-blades were sharpened, chain byrnies mended, spears fashioned, and hearts hardened. The message that had been passed on commanded the fyrds to gather at Egbert’s stone on the southern border of Wiltshire, east of Selwood Forest.

  Timing was, of course, critical to the success of Alfred’s plans. It was essential that the Wessex shires move swiftly and quietly to this meeting point, giving the Danes as little forewarning as possible. But there was an additional significance to the timing of Alfred’s summons. The Vikings had regularly exploited the Christian holy calendar to strike the Saxons at moments when they were least prepared. Now Alfred, in a perfectly poetic irony, chose to use the Christian calendar against the pagan invaders and appointed Whitsunday as the day of meeting. Whitsunday, or Pentecost, comes seven weeks after Easter and commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit onto the disciples of Jesus, empowering them to preach the kingdom of Christ throughout Israel and beyond.

  By gathering the fyrds of Wessex at Egbert’s stone on Whitsunday, Alfred drew from the sense of hope and divine purpose that the season from Easter to Whitsunday regularly evoked among the Christian churches. By this point, most of the men of Wessex had not seen the king for some time and had only been aware of his continued resistance against the Vikings through the legends and fanciful tales about the king’s exploits that were being circulated throughout the Wessex villages. When the noblemen and their assembled armies finally gathered together at Egbert’s stone and saw the king in person, it was, as one of Alfred’s friends and biographers put it, as if the king had been restored to life after a terrible tribulation.

  Despite the deep joy of seeing their king once more, as well as Alfred’s corresponding elation in finding that he still commanded an undying faithfulness from the warriors of Wessex, there was little time for celebration at this meeting. The gathering at Egbert’s stone turned quickly to the grim business at hand. An army of four to five thousand men, as Alfred had assembled for this Whitsunday reunion, could not be kept in the field without quickly attracting Guthrum’s attention. In fact, it was entirely likely that even then, as they welcomed their seemingly resurrected king, Guthrum had already received word of this new threat and was assembling his own forces for an attack. Alfred wasted little time in giving his orders to the comm
anding ealdormen. They were to spend one night at Egbert’s stone, and early on the following morning, they would break their camp and immediately march north, straight toward Guthrum’s stronghold in Chippenham. On the following day, the Wessex armies marched as far as Iley Oak on the edge of Warminster, where they made camp once more. By now Alfred had received word that Guthrum, too, was on the move.

  Guthrum had indeed been alerted to the gathering fyrds of Wessex and had ordered his armies to prepare to intercept the approaching Saxon throng. Though the Viking king was surprised to hear that the outcast ruler had suddenly surfaced, and even more astonished to learn that Alfred was leading a full-strength army out of the Wessex wastelands, there was a corresponding relief that he would finally be able to face the king in open battle instead of endlessly searching the fens of Wessex for the elusive warrior. Guthrum hastily summoned his men to Chippenham and then, once a large enough force had been mustered, led them south to intercept the Wessex fyrds. After a day’s march south, Guthrum took the hill fortress of Bratton Camp, an Iron Age fortification whose earthen ramparts still stood, offering the Viking army an easily defended outer wall. More importantly, Bratton Camp offered a strategic position for cutting off the approach to Chippenham.

  Bratton Camp sat fourteen miles south of Chippenham and two short miles from the Saxon village of Edington, the site of one of Alfred’s royal estates. Because of Bratton Camp’s proximity to this village, the descriptions of the battle that would soon ensue would regularly refer to this as the battle of Edington. The ancient fortress of Bratton Camp sat on the northern edge of a long, flat ridgeline that terminated at the Bratton Downs. On three sides, the Danish camp was protected by a steeply dropping slope, whose incline was much too steep to serve as an approach during an attack. This left the southern edge of the camp as the only possible access, where the ridgeline offered a broad and easy path to the camp.

  Though the ancient fortifications could have been defended should Alfred have decided to lay siege to Guthrum, the lack of any water supply within the old earthen ramparts made Bratton Camp a less-than-ideal fortification for resisting a prolonged siege. Had Guthrum wanted to wait Alfred out, he would have been better off waiting in Chippenham where the fortifications, provisions, and water supply enabled the Vikings to be more prepared for a long siege. Instead, Guthrum, confident in his ability to crush this last bit of Wessex’s resistance, had chosen to march his men to Bratton Camp because he wanted to cut off Alfred’s advance north and force the king to face him in battle on the open fields before Edington.

  By the time Alfred reached Iley Oak, he had already received word that Guthrum had left the walls of Chippenham and had begun moving south to halt the advance of the fyrds. There was now no chance of simply laying siege to the Vikings in Chippenham in order to bargain for their surrender and peaceful withdrawal. Like the Vikings who had already settled down in Northumbria and Mercia and had begun planting crops, Guthrum was no longer interested in a quick seizing of the danegeld of Wessex; he wanted to rule the kingdom unrivaled.

  From Iley Oak, it would only take a short march the next morning before the Wessex warriors reached Bratton Camp, where the shieldwall of the Danes stood waiting for them. Thus, when the Saxon men laid down to sleep that night, under the early summer sky, they slept the uneasy sleep of men who knew they would face combat in the morning. That evening found the Saxon camp occupied with the business of preparing for battle—the last sharpening of the blades, a final checking over of the armor, and extended periods of private prayers. Many of the soldiers would also take a bit of time to bury or hide any wealth they might be carrying. By burying their coins, they robbed the enemy of the chance to grow wealthy from the plunder of the battlefield, should the Saxons fall in the fight. As they hid their wealth, however, they were sure to mark their hiding spots well so that, if they were to survive the morning’s combat, they would be able to locate and reclaim their small hoards.

  Early the next morning, the Saxon warriors were roused by the unrelenting revelry of spring—from the cacophony of birds’ songs that sounded in the trees above them announcing the break of day to the cruelly early spring sunrise that set the horizon on fire and shone brightly in the squinting eyes of the still-groggy wakers. By mid-May, the horizon was already blazing at five o’clock in the morning. Shortly, the dew-drenched warriors had risen, eaten a final breakfast, and begun their last solemn march north. Within a few short hours, they were drawing near to Bratton Camp, the Viking stronghold.

  Curiously, modern visitors of this battle site will notice that on the steep western slope, just below the still-discernable earthen ramparts of the old fortress, is another enormous white horse, cut into the hillside. Standing around one hundred feet tall, the Westbury White Horse towers over the valley below. The design of this horse, though definitely more horse-like than the elegantly iconic white horse that watched over the battle of Ashdown, seems much more static and stiff.

  Much of the stiffness of the shape of the Westbury horse comes from the fact that in the early twentieth century the entire horse was filled in with concrete and then painted. Before the arrival of the concrete, the Westbury horse had been a chalk horse, whose image had been cut into the hillside in 1778 by George Gee. However, Gee had been motivated to design this new horse by another, older horse that had already been cut into the hillside. Apparently Mr. Gee did not feel that this older horse looked horse-like enough and replaced it with the figure now frozen in concrete below the ruins of Bratton Camp. The age of this earlier horse is difficult to discern. The earliest printed description of it can be dated as far back as only a century befor Mr. Gee. It is also possible that it dates back as far as the Anglo-Saxon period. Eighteenth-century depictions of the earlier figure reveal an image too Anglo-Saxon in shape for the idea to be dismissed easily. It is difficult to answer this question with anything more than speculation, but the appearance of a white horse on possibly two of Alfred’s most renowned battlefields is surely a strange coincidence.

  © TERRY MATTHEWS CREATIVE

  As Alfred led the Saxon army up the ridgeline, the fortified ruins of Bratton Camp finally came into view. In front of those ditchwork defenses stood the Viking army, already formed in their menacing shieldwall, hungrily beckoning the Wessex king forward to try one last time to drive them from his borders. Alfred halted the march and gave a hasty command to his men to draw their weapons and take their places in the Saxon shieldwall. As the Wessex soldiers clamored into their attacking formation, the king earnestly exhorted his men. He oversaw the formation of the wall, ensuring the shields of the front line were tightly overlapped and firmly held.

  But knowing that the strength of the shieldwall depended on more than strength of grip, he sought to strengthen their courage and resolve with his words. He reminded them of their vows to their ring-giver and exhorted them to stand true to their bold promises. He derided the cowardice of every man who had ever run from a shieldwall. He extolled those faithful thegns who preferred to lie slain on the field of slaughter rather than to be found among those who broke the shieldwall and ran. He promised wealth and glory to the men who stood resolutely by his side in the coming onslaught. And he urged them to place their deepest trust in their merciful and mighty God. After thus exhorting his men, Alfred locked himself into the tightly woven shieldwall and advanced with his men toward the gore-hungry Viking army.

  Neither the Vikings nor the Saxons brought any sort of mounted force to the combat, and so there would be no cavalry charge. Both armies tended to use archery only for hunting and left their bows behind when coming into battle. This meant that the shieldwalls had to move quite close before any actual combat began. But there was another sort of warfare that began long before any blows were landed—the psychological warfare of intimidation. Even as the Wessex army first began to form their shieldwall, they could hear the Viking warriors beating out a chilling challenge, rhythmically striking their spears upon the rims of their shields, drumming o
ut an ominous cadence that rolled down the ridgeline and summoned the Saxons to the place of slaughter.

  Once their arrangement was complete and the Wessex shield-wall began to advance toward the pagan host, they were greeted by an eruption of screaming taunts and jeers. This signaled the start of the first formality of the battle, the flyting—the exchange of insults, an element well practiced by the Viking warriors. The Danish throng began to shout across the open ground between the two closing shieldwalls, screaming out their prophecies of a coming Viking victory. They recounted their exploits throughout the already conquered shires of Wessex and related their opinion of the Saxon women. They promised to feed the flesh of their fallen adversaries to the hungry ravens circling overhead, the emissaries of their god Odin. For King Alfred, all the hopes of Wessex depended now on his ability to keep the Saxon shieldwall bound tightly together and the courage of his thegns resolute and unflagging. He urged his men on with confident defiance, spurning the Viking taunts.

  Once the two lines had come within forty paces of one another, they were vulnerable to spear attacks. Although most of the Anglo-Saxons left their bows at home when coming to war, each Saxon warrior would have been expected to bring a small collection of spears. One of these spears, slightly longer than the rest, was reserved for thrusting once the two shieldwalls had made contact. The rest of the spears, up to three in number and held in the shield hand, were brought for throwing while the enemy was still some distance away. These throwing spears were slightly smaller than the thrusting spear and had descended from the older Roman pilum. They measured around six feet in length and were fitted with a very long and slender barbed iron head.