The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great Page 2

  It is unlikely that they met any resistance as they approached. No barrage of arrows and spears. No shieldwall. Not even an armed guard. After gaining an easy entrance, the raiding party plundered the monastery of whatever portable wealth could be found, hacking to pieces whatever feeble resistance the monks may have made. Gold, silver, and jewels were seized and hauled back to the beached longboats, as well as any captives who might be sold on the slave market. They struck swiftly and ruthlessly, and then they quickly fled before any counterattack from a neighbouring village could be mounted. Throughout their time in Anglo-Saxon England, the secret to the Viking success would be the cunning selection of weak but wealthy targets and the hasty retreats, avoiding confrontation with the consistently slow-to-mobilize military forces.

  Early descriptions of Viking attacks seized on the fact that Vikings made religious communities their targets of choice. According to the historians of the time, these marauding Northmen were pagan enemies of God, demonic forces at war with the Christian church. Some contemporary accounts describe the raiding Viking armies merely as “pagans” or “heathens.” They coated the walls of the holy places with the blood of the saints and had no regard for the sacred things of the Christian church. Modern scholarship has felt burdened to counter this bias with an attempt toward a more impartial verdict. Now it is often pointed out that the Viking’s selection of monasteries and churches for a prey was purely economic pragmatism. Christian churches simply provided the greatest possible gain at the lowest possible cost. The Viking attacks were driven not by a hatred of Christianity but by a cool and calculated evaluation of the Anglo-Saxon economy. So, considered from the perspective of the Northmen, who were not aware that the sacking of Christian holy places might be “taboo,” these were perfectly viable targets.

  It is unlikely, however, that the monks of Lindisfarne were unaware of this “other perspective.” The role of the pagan raiding 11 army had been played once before on the island of Britain when, several centuries before the Viking raiders, the Angles and the Saxons themselves had crossed the English Channel. Unconverted and bloodthirsty, these once-pagan tribes had abandoned their homes in modern northern Germany and Denmark in the fifth and sixth centuries and had crossed over to the isle of Britain preying upon the weaknesses of the natives who had been left vulnerable by retreating Roman troops.6

  It was the establishment of the Christian church that turned the Anglo-Saxons away from a worldview that had been every bit as ruthless and cruel as the worldview held by the Viking raiders. The missionaries sent by Rome to Christianize the various warring Anglo-Saxon tribes had preached against and even given their lives in the fight against this very worldview.

  Even after an Anglo-Saxon church had been firmly established, the English constantly had to fight the temptation to slip back into its own barbaric past, a godless past ruled by the worship of raw power. Threads of this old world-view remained woven throughout the poetry and songs of the Anglo-Saxons. There can be no doubt that when the Anglo-Saxon church named the Viking raiders pagan, they did not mean “people who have a different value system than we do.” They meant pagan in 12 its most proper sense: these raiding armies were full of warriors who acted like men without the gospel. It was a worldview known all too well to the men who named it as such, and it was a worldview they had rejected.

  News of the sacking of Lindisfarne spread quickly. Alcuin, a native of Northumbria who was serving abroad in the court of Charlemagne, heard of the tragedy and wrote to Æthelred, king of Northumbria. In his letter, Alcuin took his inspiration from the prophets of the Old Testament who warned Israel to turn from her sins before God sent an even greater judgment.

  For nearly 350 years we and our fathers have dwelt in this most beautiful land, and never before has such a terror appeared in Britain, such as the one that we are suffering from this pagan nation. Nor was it thought that a ship would attempt such a thing. Behold the church of Saint Cuthbert, splattered with the blood of the priests of God, plundered of all its treasures, a place more venerable than anywhere in Britain is given over to pagan nations for pillaging . . . the heritage of the Lord has been given over to a people who are not his own. And where the praise of the Lord once was, now is only the games of the pagans. The holy feast has been turned into a lament.

  Carefully consider, brothers, and diligently note: lest this extraordinary and unheard of evil might be somehow merited by the habit of some unspoken wickedness. I am not saying that 13 the sin of fornication never appeared before among the people. But since the days of King Ælfwold, fornications, adulteries, and incest have inundated the land, such that these sins have been perpetrated without any shame, even against nuns who have been dedicated to God. What can I say about greed, robbery, and perverted judgments? When it is clearer than daylight, how much these crimes have flourished everywhere and it is witnessed by a plundered people.

  Alcuin wrote a second letter to Higbald, the bishop of Lindisfarne. Again his letter sternly admonished the Christians of Lindisfarne that a disaster of this magnitude must be answered first and foremost with repentance, lest further catastrophe follow.

  What confidence can there be for the churches of Britain, if Saint Cuthbert, with such a great number of saints, does not defend his own? Either this is the beginning of some much greater anguish or the sins of the inhabitants have demanded this. Clearly it has not happened by chance, but it is a sign that this was well deserved by someone. If there is anything that must be set right in your Grace’s behavior, correct it swiftly.

  But whatever response the Anglo-Saxons mounted, it was far too little and too late. The Vikings had tasted the undefended plenty of England and would soon return in greater and greater numbers. Rather than an unheard-of tragedy, “the church of Saint Cuthbert, spattered with the blood of the priests of God,” would soon become an all-too-common scene throughout ninth-century Britain.

  The year after the sacking of Lindisfarne, Vikings struck Jarrow, another monastic community farther down the coast, to the south of Lindisfarne. The next year Iona was plundered. And so on.

  Initially the raiding parties consisted of small Viking bands traveling in as few as two to three ships, but occasionally parties came in larger fleets numbering as many as several dozen. The design of the Viking warship—perfected during the eighth century by northern sailors and shipwrights while transporting trade cargo along the Scandinavian coasts—played a significant role in the success of the raids. In the nineteenth century, the excavation of a burial mound on a Norwegian farm in Gokstad revealed the remains of a mid-ninth-century Viking ship, giving a likely example of the kind of vessel that prowled the Anglo-Saxon shores. The Gokstad ship has a length of seventy-six and a half feet and a width of seventeen and a half feet. The ship was clinker-built, meaning the hull was formed out of overlapping oak planks, joined with iron rivets and sealed with a caulking of tarred animal hair. Each layer of oak plank is called a strake, and the Gokstad ship was built of sixteen strakes. The nine lowest strakes would have been submerged when the ship was afloat. Though the draught of the ship was deep enough that the vessel could maintain a steady course in the heavy gales of the open seas as it sailed to Britain, the Gokstad ship would have generally required no more than a depth of three and a half feet of water to float freely. This meant that, in addition to being able to safely cross the North Sea loaded with plunder, the ship could be rowed up the shallow rivers that pierced deep into England’s countryside without running aground. The fourteenth strake held sixteen oar holes per side, for a total complement of thirty-two oarsmen. Rowing would have been resorted to only occasionally, however, as the boat depended primarily on its sail for propulsion.

  © MUSEUM OF CULTURAL HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF OSLO, NORWAY / UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER

  The men of the ninth-century Viking raiding party could leave their Scandinavian homes after the crops had been planted and the ice on the seas had melted. Then, traveling under the power of sails, their ships would reach the
British shores within a matter of weeks. They could begin plundering along the coastline or could pierce deep into the heart of England, searching out the tributaries of the larger rivers like the Umber or Thames, switching to rowing when the winds failed. The Vikings would beach their ships just outside the walls of their target (rarely looking for targets very far from the waterways, which offered a hasty retreat). After striking their target and seizing whatever portable wealth could be found, they would then return to their ships and vanish, long before any force could be mustered to strike back. The Vikings then returned triumphant, 16 laden down with booty and plunder, just in time to harvest their now fully grown crops.

  Soon the stories of these horrific raids were reported throughout all of England. Every monastery and abbey, every marketplace, and every mead hall heard the haunting tales of the savage Viking attacks. Even Alfred, the young prince of Wessex, could not have been unaware of the nightmarish accounts of the pagan barbarians and their bloody raids. Nevertheless, Alfred’s earliest years were relatively unaffected by the intermittent Viking raids. The story of the savage Northmen was just another thrilling feature of life growing up in the royal court of Wessex. More likely than not, the gory accounts of the Danish attacks added more to Alfred’s daydreams than to his nightmares.

  Alfred’s biographer, a Welsh monk named Asser, later wrote that Alfred’s parents had a particular fondness for him, an affection that exceeded their love for their other sons. Since Alfred was probably around twenty-five to twenty-six years younger than his oldest brother, this would imply that his mother, Osburh, was well into her forties when Alfred was born. At a time when the average person did not live past the age of thirty-two, Osburh must have felt like Sarah from the Bible: “old and well stricken in age, ceasing to be after the manner of women” (Genesis 18:11). It is quite likely that Alfred, the son of her old age, did hold a special place in the affections of his mother. His company was enjoyed enough that he was included in all the journeys of the royal court, a fairly exceptional practice at 17 that time. The young boy’s zeal for Anglo-Saxon poetry must have also endeared him to his mother.

  In the year AD 853, at the age of four, Alfred was sent by his father on a lengthy pilgrimage from Wessex to Rome—the Holy City and the threshold of the apostles. Despite the prince’s youth and the fact that he was fifth in line from the throne, Æthelwulf hoped the appearance of his young son in Rome would win the favor of the pope for the king and his nation. This trip must have had a lasting impact on Alfred, even at the age of four. The journey took the young boy across the English Channel, crossing from Canterbury to Calais.

  In Calais was the beginning of a well-traveled path known as the via francigena. This route was formed by a series of connected roads leading pilgrims all the way to Rome, a road that Alfred’s company most likely followed. This path broke the journey into some eighty stages, with each stage requiring a journey of approximately thirteen to fifteen miles. The trip was treacherous. Danes were raiding up and down the Frankish river systems, and Saracens had only recently been driven away from the gates of Rome. When travelers were not avoiding enslavement and slaughter at the hands of large pagan armies, they were running from smaller murderous bands of robbers who hunted the pilgrims’ paths for easy wealth.

  The route led all the way south through modern France, crossing the Alps in Switzerland, and then into Italy. Travelers along the via francigena stayed in a series of hostels, inns, churches, and monasteries, which had sprung up along the route to serve the needs of tired travelers. One of these small monastic communities in northern Italy ran a hostel in the town of Brescia. The monks of this particular monastery maintained a record of the various guests who 18 had been given lodging in the hostel, a record preserved to this day with the scrawled signature “Alfred” among its ninth-century Anglo-Saxon guests.

  After the several-months’ journey of more than one thousand miles, Alfred and his noble company arrived in Rome, “the threshold of the apostles,” a city of dazzling wealth, sophistication, and architecture far beyond anything Alfred had seen in Wessex. Here stood the Pantheon, the Coliseum, and countless other architectural relics of the Roman Empire, awe-inspiring even in their decay. But another Rome had risen out of those pagan ruins—the Christian city. And this city was still very much alive. Here Alfred could worship in the basilicas of Saint Peter or Saint Paul, both built over the graves of their respective apostles. Both basilicas rose more than one hundred feet and must have dwarfed any of the Anglo-Saxon buildings Alfred had ever seen. Saint Peter’s Basilica had been the site of Charlemagne’s crowning as emperor a little more than fifty years before.

  But there was yet another Rome that must have caught Alfred’s eye. Only ten years before Alfred’s visit, Rome had been sacked by Saracen invaders who had plundered the city, including both the basilicas of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. As a result of this, Pope Leo IV had begun to refortify the city. The old city defenses had left the basilicas outside of the city’s protective walls, making them easy targets for plundering. During the last Saracen invasion, the altar of Saint Peter’s had been stripped of more than two hundred pounds of gold. Only a couple of years before Alfred’s arrival, a new defensive wall had been completed, surrounding the city and providing protection for the vulnerable basilicas. This new wall marked off what would become known as the City of Leo, named for the pope who had constructed the new defenses. As the boy Alfred was shown through the city and the new city walls were pointed out to him, the daydreams of fortifying a city against hostile invaders were planted in his imagination.7

  Alfred’s stay in Rome was brief. Once their task was accomplished and they had met Pope Leo IV, who confirmed him, taking him as a spiritual son, the company of Anglo-Saxons was soon heading north, back up the via francigena.

  By the year AD 854, Alfred had returned to Wessex and had suffered a terrible loss. Death had taken his oldest brother, Æthelstan, and his mother, Osburh. The death of his brother was not a significant blow for Alfred. Æthelstan was more than twenty years older than Alfred and had already been serving as a subking, in place of his father, over the kingdoms of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Essex. He had been absent for all of Alfred’s life, so Alfred was not terribly attached to him. But the death of his mother, Osburh, must have shaken the boy Alfred profoundly.

  At this time, Alfred’s father, Æthelwulf, began to turn his mind to more eternal questions. The death of a son and of his wife, as well as his own advancing years, focused his thoughts on his mortality. As he considered his impending death, he was gripped by questions about the state of his soul. It was time to sort out a few things. During an Easter feast at the royal estate in Wilton, in AD 854, Æthelwulf announced a significant gift—an unprecedented royal tithe. In front of his four surviving sons, a handful of bishops and other churchmen, and a collection of his noblemen, the king of Wessex declared that he would give one-tenth of all his properties to the church “for the praise of God and his own eternal salvation.” Then, spurred on by the stories that his youngest son had related, Æthelwulf announced his intentions to make a pilgrimage to Rome.

  Æthelwulf made the necessary preparations for his journey and arranged for the governing of his kingdoms in his absence. Æthelbald, now the oldest of the sons, would rule Wessex. Æthelberht would rule the regions that Æthelstan, his now deceased older brother, had ruled as a subking—Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Essex. It is not clear what role Æthelred, Æthelwulf ’s fourth son, played. But, as further proof of his favored status, Alfred was selected to stay by his father’s side and to travel with his father on a pilgrimage to Rome, once again.

  Once they entered the kingdom of West Francia, they were welcomed and entertained by the king of the West Franks, Charles the Bald. Charles also appointed a guide to lead them on the remainder of their trip, a monk named Markward, who accompanied them all the way to Rome. From Charles they passed to his brother, Emperor Lothar, and from Lothar to Rome. Only a few months before their arrival
in Rome, however, Pope Leo IV had died, and all of Rome had fallen into a bitter dispute about his legitimate successor. The clergy of Rome had appointed Benedict III, while the Carolingian Emperor Lothar had appointed a man named Anastasius. Alfred and Æthelwulf arrived in the midst of this ecclesiastical feud and the rioting that it inspired, although Benedict III was finally recognized as the legitimate pope shortly after their arrival.

  This time, the party of Anglo-Saxon pilgrims stayed in Rome for an entire year. There were more than one hundred churches to visit and countless architectural feats to admire. And even though he was a young boy at the time of this visit, Alfred would still recall the buildings of Rome decades later and mention them in his writings. Æthelwulf, as king of Wessex, recognized his own particular responsibility for the Schola Saxonum and worked to restore the buildings that had been damaged in a recent fire. And, of course, Æthelwulf spent time paying his respects to the newly installed Benedict III.

  The king of Wessex knew how to demonstrate his affections for the pope. He gave Benedict a golden crown weighing four pounds, bowls, beakers, various garments, and a beautiful sword crafted in the Anglo-Saxon style, with gold inlaid into the blade in a mesmerizing pattern. After presenting these gifts, Æthelwulf then went out and threw gold and silver coins to the crowds. This scene, the image of a king as a munificent gift-giver, became a foundational picture for Alfred of what true royalty looked like. It confirmed everything he had heard in the poetry of his native tongue about the importance of being a generous lord, a “ring-giver,” as the poems would describe the legendary masters of old.