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

  Sailing away in 879, these Vikings established a base in Ghent and spent the next several years slaughtering and plundering the surrounding monasteries and convents. Æthelstan, however, stayed true to the vows of his baptism and pulled his own troops away from the northern border of Wessex, leaving Cirencester to march back to East Anglia, where he settled into life as a Christian king, ruling over the people of East Anglia.

  Though it may be difficult to be entirely rid of suspicions about the sincerity of Æthelstan’s faith, the evidence indicates that Æthelstan was the good seed, fallen on fertile soil and yielding a bountiful harvest. He refused to join the Viking raiders in their planned attack on Wessex, and throughout the years, he maintained the peace between himself and Alfred, entering into several treaties with the Wessex king. After his baptism, he never gave reason to believe that he was anything other than a sincere Christian.

  When the East Anglian king later minted his own coinage, it was his Christian name—Æthelstan—that appeared on every coin, rather than his former Viking name, Guthrum. During the following decades, however, the coin to become the most popular coin in all of Danish East Anglia was the Saint Edmund penny, a silver coin that had been minted to commemorate the martyrdom of Edmund, the Christian king of East Anglia who had been struck down by the pagan chieftains Ubbe and Ivar, Guthrum’s former comrades. What a tremendous irony that within two decades of Edmund’s martyrdom, his murderers would be converted to his faith and would begin issuing commemorative coins to remember his death.

  Ten years later, when King Æthelstan died, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded his death and described him as the northern king, whose baptismal name was Æthelstan, the godson of Alfred. No mention was made of his life as a Viking or his years of waging war against Wessex. He was simply Alfred’s godson.

  The departure of the Viking force that had been encamped at Fullham, together with the new alliance formed with Æthelstan, left Alfred and his weary kingdom with an unexpected respite from military campaigns. Alfred understood that this peace would only be temporary, since other Northmen seeking plunder would inevitably come to try their luck at despoiling the wealth of Wessex. Therefore, this respite from the Viking-inflicted bloodshed could not be spent in peaceful rest and relaxation, feasting and drinking in the mead hall, and enjoying the intensely refreshing English summer. Rather, this was a surprising lull in the storm that offered a brief, but much needed, chance to rethink the organization of the defenses of Wessex and to better prepare the Saxon military for fighting off future invasions. If Alfred was to hold together the last Anglo-Saxon nation against future Viking onslaughts, then the Wessex military needed to be restructured to better respond to the Danish threat, and this moment of peace offered the king of Wessex time to accomplish just that.

  The necessary military reforms required Alfred to give some thought to the strengths of the Viking armies and how they had managed to exploit the weaknesses of the defenses of Wessex. It was now clear that the real strength of the Vikings was not necessarily their ferocity in battle. The Wessex army had regularly been able to hold their shieldwall while facing down their Viking enemies. The problem the Saxons repeatedly encountered was the swiftness and cunning of the Viking armies.

  Between the inexhaustible network of rivers criss-crossing the British countryside—which the Danes were able to exploit with their shallow draft boats and expert seamanship—and the still-functional Roman road system that afforded great mobility to mounted Danish troops, the Vikings were able to move at a speed that no Saxon fyrd could match. They struck and plundered the easily gained wealth of undefended towns and then moved on long before any military aid could be sent to defend the victims of the raid. Then, on the rare occasions when the Saxon fyrds were able to respond quickly enough to actually corner the Viking raiders, the Danes merely fortified whatever town had last fallen victim to them and waited for the Saxons to tire of the siege and resign themselves to paying the danegeld.

  If Wessex was to resist future Viking assaults, then it was imperative that Alfred construct a defensive system capable of countering the incredibly swift mobility of the Viking troops, a system that would rob the Danes of the ability to wait out a protracted siege only to be rewarded with a payment of danegeld.

  The king had always maintained a small force of professional soldiers attached to his court who were capable of responding quickly to military threats. These were the men who dwelt in Alfred’s hall, drinking his mead and pledging him their blades. They were a stouthearted troop—faithful, intrepid, and sword-savvy. But this force of loyal thegns numbered less than two hundred men and thus was far too small to face the larger raiding armies of more than one thousand Northmen, which had begun to plague England during Alfred’s reign.

  The larger voluntary shire fyrds, which formed the bulk of Wessex’s military might, were drawn from the landowning noblemen and other freemen of Wessex. They could be a fierce force when they stood defending the farms, homesteads, and villages of their native land, but they could be painfully slow to mobilize, often requiring weeks to wrap up their obligations at home and finally prepare themselves for battle. When they were finally mobilized, the work that had been left undone on the farms and in the shops back at home, as well as the families that had been left unguarded, weighed heavily on their minds. Thus their loyalty to the ongoing military campaign would frequently begin to wane when the campaign dragged on indefinitely during the siege of a Viking fortification and kept them from fulfilling their duties at home.

  Rectifying this problem would require that Alfred effect a massive reform of the Wessex military. To quickly field an army large enough to fend off the Viking armies, Alfred could no longer rely on the sluggish response of the traditional fyrd. Instead, he would need to maintain a large standing army of soldiers skilled in war craft who were ready to respond to an invading army at a moment’s notice.

  Alfred divided the entire Wessex fyrd into halves and insisted that each half take turns mobilizing and preparing for combat. This left each town with half of their combat-eligible noblemen and freemen overseeing the work in the fields and other necessary chores, while the other half provided the necessary military service, waiting battle-ready to respond to any possible Viking attacks. Although this put a heavy strain on the local economies by permanently absenting half of the landowners, it guaranteed that, even in moments of national emergency, no more than half of the leading men would be called away for fyrd service. Since the rotation between working at home and standing ready in the fyrd was scheduled and predictable, the disruption of the work schedule was much more easily mitigated.

  The men in this new standing army were divided into two sections. One portion became a highly mobile army, camped in the fields of Wessex and waiting for news of any possible threat to the Saxon peace. The men of this army were required to provide their own horses, as well as enough food for sixty days, giving this large army the ability to travel the length of the nation in several days and to wage war at a moment’s notice. The other portion of the standing army was assigned to guard a collection of fortified cities and towns spaced evenly across the breadth of Wessex. This division of the military provided Alfred with a highly mobile offensive force, which could travel quickly to confront any intruding threat, as well as a defensive garrison guarding each of the fortified cities. Thus Alfred ensured that no matter where he moved his mobile force, the cities of Wessex were protected.

  By keeping a defensive force in these cities, Alfred robbed wandering Viking armies of the ability to easily seize an unprotected city and fortify it against the Saxon army. Additionally, the knowledge that there was another army guarding the families and farms left behind gave peace of mind to the soldiers serving in the mobile army and the ability to more resolutely pursue their enemies far and wide. And, since the military also acted as the Anglo-Saxon “police force,” the presence of an organized force throughout the nation significantly improved the law and order of the cities, towns, a
nd villages of Wessex.

  Alfred’s innovations in organizing the garrisons that would defend the fortified cities of Wessex constitute probably the greatest administrative accomplishment of his reign. First, the king carefully selected thirty Wessex cities to receive garrison forces from the rotating fyrd. Each of these cities was positioned within around twenty miles (or one day’s march) of one another, forming a network of fortified cities that covered the extent of Wessex.

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  Some of these cities, such as Bath, Chichester, Hastings, and Winchester, had long histories that reached back to the Roman occupation of Britain. The unusually regular grids of the ancient streets provided a helpful footing upon which Alfred built, exploiting the firm foundations the Roman ruins offered as well as maintaining the efficiency of the older city layouts. Some cities, like Cissanbyrig, Brydian, and Halwell, were built on the ancient Iron Age hill-forts taking advantage of the defenses offered by their lofty heights and still-standing earthwork walls. Other city-fortresses were built as entirely new constructions, where no significant settlement had previously stood. Each city’s location was carefully chosen to ensure that all the major passages through Wessex, both by road and by river, were guarded by not just one but several of Alfred’s new fortresses. Roads connecting these cities were constructed and maintained to ensure that each garrison could swiftly send news, supplies, or reinforcements to neighboring garrisons, allowing the nation as a whole to respond swiftly to any attempted invasion.

  Next, Alfred ordered that each of these cities be fortified with a defensive wall capable of withstanding an assault by Danish attackers. The construction of these defenses transformed a selected city into a burh, the Anglo-Saxon word for a fortified dwelling. Many English towns still carry the remnants of this designation in their names; the suffixes -bourgh or -bury indicate their former classification as an ancient burh.

  Though the Romans and the Iron Age tribes who inhabited southern Britain many centuries before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons had often fortified their cities with earthwork defenses of moats and dykes, as well as wooden and occasionally stone walls, the defenses erected in Wessex during Alfred’s reign were the first defensive fortifications built in Wessex throughout the Anglo-Saxon era. A deep moat and a newly constructed wall encircling the city defended each of the thirty burhs.

  Where possible, the Saxons used ancient Roman or Iron Age moats and walls, rebuilding the ancient stone walls and deepening the defensive ditches. But many of the new burhs lacked any preexisting fortifications and required that the entire ditch and wall structure be built fresh. In these cases, the Saxons opted primarily for the swifter method of building with wood, rather than stone. The burh walls included a fighting platform circling the inside of the palisade, from which the defenders could fire arrows or even stones on an attacking force. Many of the walls were also equipped with defensive towers and gatehouses.

  After the walls were constructed, Alfred devised a unique method of calculating the troops to be stationed within each burh at any given time. The wall of each burh was measured in “poles,” an Anglo-Saxon unit of length that corresponded to approximately five and a half yards. One pole of fortified wall required four men to properly defend it. Each of these men represented one “hide” of the surrounding farmland. A hide covered approximately 120 acres. Thus, it was considered reasonable to expect that 120 acres’ worth of farmland, or one Anglo-Saxon hide, could supply one man, suited for combat, to defend the fortified walls of the burh. This created a convenient formula for coordinating the size of a burh’s wall with the number of men expected to defend that wall, as well as the amount of surrounding farmland necessary to support such a force.

  A manuscript dating from shortly after Alfred’s reign, known as the Burghal Hideage, preserves the total hides prescribed for each of the Wessex burhs. As many of the old city walls of Alfred’s burhs have been discovered and measured out, it is shocking how closely these measurements, when run through the formula described above, correspond to the number of hides assigned in the Burghal Hideage. For instance, the Saxon walls of Alfred’s capital city, Winchester, have been measured recently at 3,318 yards. The Burghal Hideage assigned 2,400 hides to the city, requiring that the city wall be defended by the same number of soldiers. At four men per pole, this suggests a total wall length of 600 poles. If each pole stood for 5.5 yards, then the walled perimeter would need to measure a total of 3,300 yards. When compared to the 3,318-yard measurement calculated by modern archaeologists, the numbers listed in the Burghal Hideage are remarkably close.

  The much smaller burh of Porchester offers a similar testimony. The archaeological evidence suggests a measurement of 697 yards for the original perimeter of the ancient walls. The Burghal Hideage assigned 500 hides to Portchester, or 500 men for the burh’s defenses. These men could guard 125 poles of city wall, or 687.5 yards.

  Alfred set about reworking the network of roads and public places inside the walls with an eye toward ensuring that the burhs would be well prepared to respond swiftly and efficiently to the unpredictable attacks of a besieging army. The king took his inspiration for these new city plans from the pattern used by ancient Roman camps, a pattern still apparent in the road layout of many of the Saxon cities with a Roman history.

  Each burh was equipped with one wide street that ran across the diameter of the city, the “high” street, which allowed for the quick movement of troops from one side of the city to the other in order to respond swiftly to the changing tactics of the attacking army. Smaller streets were constructed running parallel or at right angles to the high street, offering quick access to each segment of the wall. Another street was built along the perimeter of the city wall.

  This network of roads ensured that a commander could quickly reposition his troops along the city wall to maintain a wall that was properly fortified at all the key points. And though Alfred’s thoughts were all of gory battles and bitter sieges when he conceived this layout, the efficiency of his new system became more evident in the mundane daily tasks than it did in any particular combat engagement. It was in the everyday routine of gathering at the carefully planned marketplace or in the weekly habit of walking to Sunday morning worship in the burh minster, that the sensible road pattern became evident. Alfred’s layouts are still used in numerous cities, testifying to the efficiency of his plans.

  Much like Alfred’s new street layouts, the system of defensive burhs, described in the Burghal Hideage, was first conceived as a military innovation. But after it had been implemented, it was discovered that this new system radically improved the efficiency with which the king could administrate his kingdom. The network of burhs and the roads that connected them provided travelers and traders the ability to move across Wessex, stopping every night at a walled and garrisoned burh where peace and safety could be guaranteed.

  With the safety afforded by the defenses of the burhs, the surrounding areas naturally gravitated toward bringing their produce and wares to the well-protected and well-governed markets. In later generations, kings of Wessex required that all trade occur within one of the designated burh markets, where the king’s reeves could ensure that proper taxes were paid to the crown on all sales. An alternative Anglo-Saxon word for burh was tun, a term that also referred to a fortified or walled settlement. To this day, an English town, or tun, must feature a town marketplace in order to qualify as a “town.” Without this marketplace, it can only be considered a “village.” (After a town has a cathedral, it has earned the distinction of “city.”)

  Under Alfred and the protection that the Burghal Hideage ensured, trade and industry began to thrive in Wessex. Seeing the importance of this element of the economy, Alfred also undertook a major renovation of the Saxon currency. When he came to power, only two mints could be found in the nations of the Saxons, one in London and the other in Canterbury. And these two mints produced an extremely crude coin, boasting a severely debased silver content of 20 perc
ent. A thriving industry of trade would require that these deficiencies be fixed. Soon Alfred was giving his attention to these problems.

  By the time of Alfred’s death, the number of mints under the control of the Wessex crown had more than quadrupled. The new silver pennies that Alfred had ordered to be produced were almost pure silver and, even with this much higher degree of purity, still significantly outweighed the previous coinage. In order to mint these new silver pennies, four of the earlier pennies needed to be melted down to provide enough silver for one new penny. The cost was substantial, but the king believed that a restored confidence in the currency would attract the attention of Europe’s traders and eventually would bring a much greater amount of wealth to the nation.

  In addition to this penny, Alfred also introduced the half-penny to the English currency. This smaller coin gave merchants the ability to more conveniently sell smaller items. Altogether, Alfred’s innovations had a tremendous impact on the economy of Wessex, catching the attention of merchants throughout Europe who were drawn to the wealth of the newly thriving English nation.

  Although the years following Alfred’s victory over Guthrum were characterized by peace within the borders of Wessex, this was only relative to the earlier years of constant Viking occupation. Alfred still had to contend with regular raiding parties of freebooting Danes striking quickly along the coasts and rivers of the Anglo-Saxons, searching for easy plunder. In the year 882, the king received word of one such fleet of Vikings sailing off the coast of Wessex, hunting for easy spoils. Alfred moved quickly to intercept the Viking naval force and engage the invading pirates in ship-to-ship combat.