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

  The Saxons arrived at the Danish stronghold when Hastein was out on a raid. However, the Viking chieftain had taken only a small contingency of his plundering Northmen with him on this particular raid, leaving the bulk of the Viking raiding army behind at Benfleet. The Saxon attack was ruthless and fierce. The warriors of Wessex crashed through the Danes’ defenses in one powerfully punishing charge, overwhelming the startled Vikings and smashing their resistance in a moment. Soon the Northmen had fled entirely from the onslaught, and the Saxons were left in possession of the remains of the fortress, together with everything the Danes had abandoned in their frantic retreat. All of the plunder that had been hoarded by the Vikings was recovered by the Saxons, a reward for their combat. The victorious warriors then took their pick of the Viking longboats and sailed their captured plunder back to London and Rochester. The rest of the ships were either smashed up or burned. Edward also ordered the fortress completely destroyed, leaving the Vikings no ready-made defenses for future invasions.

  Along with the plunder and longboats, many of the wives and children of the Danish warriors had also been left behind by the fleeing Vikings, including the family of Hastein. What the Danish chieftain had so casually deserted, Edward carefully collected and guarded. As soon as possible, Edward sent these captives to London to await his father’s judgment on how they should be dealt with.

  When news reached Hastein that the Benfleet fortress had been overthrown and his family taken away captive, the Viking chieftain was undeterred. Moving his camp ten miles east to Shoebury, the Dane continued his campaign of plunder. Soon the Viking camp received a wave of new recruits from the Danelaw, as floods of fresh warriors from East Anglia and Northumbria streamed south to join the Viking chieftain’s campaign. It had seemed to the settlers of the Danelaw that Alfred’s kingdom must be on the brink of collapse. In the hopes that they had finally found the opportunity to break the resistance of the last Anglo-Saxon king, the kings of the Danelaw continued to send a seemingly unending supply of fresh warriors to join in Hastein’s campaign. How much longer could the king continue to repulse such an unceasing invasion?

  Thrilled by the sudden supply of fresh recruits and paying little mind to the loss of his family, Hastein pressed on with his plunder. The Vikings, however, were beginning to hold the warriors of Wessex in higher esteem and to search for a less formidable opponent. With this in mind, the Danes marched the length of the Thames, carrying on up the tributaries of the river until the army finally reached the Severn River. The Danes were cutting deep into Mercia, all the way to the Welsh border.

  Since Alfred was still in the west hunting the raiding armies that had struck Devon, it remained up to the other British rulers to deal with this new attack. Æthelhelm, the ealdorman of Wiltshire, upon hearing of Hastein’s raid, gathered his mounted army and rode in hot pursuit of the Vikings. Meanwhile, the king’s son-in-law, Ealdorman Æthelred, joined forces with Æthelnoth, the ealdorman of Somerset who had been Alfred’s faithful companion throughout his dark days at Athelny, and the two of them marched their combined armies north as swiftly as possible.

  Soon the joint forces of the three ealdormen overtook the Vikings at Buttington, a Welsh village beside the Severn river. Here the Vikings attempted to dig in and wait out the siege. However, the Anglo-Saxon army—helped out by the Welsh who were equally uninterested in a visit from the Danes—were much better prepared than the Vikings to outlast a lengthy siege. The food stores of the Viking army quickly ran out, and the hunger of the Danes began to drive them to desperation. Overwhelmed by the pains of starvation, the Vikings slaughtered and ate the horses the raiding army had brought along, though little sustenance could be gotten from the emaciated beasts.

  Eventually, as the numbers of Vikings dead from starvation began to mount, the Danes saw the impossibility of their predicament and hazarded a frantic attempt to break through the Saxon lines, striking out suddenly to the east. But the combined armies of the three ealdormen stood their ground and violently repulsed the Danish drive. The battle was gruesome and cost the lives of a number of Saxon noblemen. Nevertheless, the Vikings were completely defeated. And though a portion of the Danish forces escaped (Hastein among them), the bulk of the Viking army was slaughtered. A mass grave discovered in the nineteenth century revealed the remains of a portion of these fallen warriors—hundreds of skulls and a few skeletons in a series of circular pits, all testifying to the extent of the carnage on that bloody day.

  Once again, Alfred’s defensive innovations had successfully repulsed the Viking attacks, but this particular siege revealed something new about the real extent of Alfred’s success. Not only were the fortified burhs ably withstanding the Danish sieges and not only were the fyrds swiftly and efficiently responding to the summons for warriors, but in this particular siege, the noblemen of Wessex had shown initiative, courage, and a devotion to their people, demonstrating that the king had truly achieved his goals in raising up a generation of principled leaders to govern the Anglo-Saxons.

  The three ealdormen, in the king’s absence, had identified a threat to the people and had worked swiftly and selflessly to deliver the nation from this danger. It would have been very easy for Ealdorman Æthelred to have excused himself from this particular campaign since he had been continuously and tirelessly fighting for nearly a year and had surely earned a brief respite. But the ealdorman saw that he was still needed and unquestioningly threw himself back into the gory combat for the sake of his nation. An entire generation of English leaders, men who had been trained in the courts of Alfred to understand wisdom, justice, righteousness, and the true duties of a ruler, had been raised up, and the battle of the three ealdorman stood as proof of Alfred’s success.

  The Vikings, however, were not yet prepared to concede ultimate defeat. Hastein’s army, resupplied one more time with fresh recruits from the Danelaw, attempted one last attack on the western reaches of Mercia. Marching day and night, the Vikings crossed to the northern Welsh border well ahead of any Saxon pursuers. By the time the Anglo-Saxon army was able to catch up with the Danish marauders, the Vikings had already found the ruins of an abandoned Roman fortress in Chester and fortified the position against the coming Saxon attack. The Danes had chosen well, as the ancient Roman walls, even in their ruined condition, ringed the Viking raiders with an impermeable shield of defense.

  Rather than waste their manpower in a costly assault on the walls of Chester, the ealdormen chose to employ a scorched-earth tactic to besiege the Danes. The Saxons rode down and slaughtered all the Vikings found outside the city walls, removed all of the cattle from the nearby fields, burned up all the corn, and set their beasts to devour all the nearby pastureland—leaving the Danes, once more, stranded and starving. This time the Vikings understood their predicament much more quickly and fled without a fight into the kingdom of Wales, where they were able to plunder much more freely. When, at the end of their rampage through Wales, the Danes returned heavily laden with booty, they carefully traced a high arc across the island of England, staying well inside the Danelaw for the entirety of their journey and cautiously avoiding Alfred’s kingdom.

  Alfred, meanwhile, was finally successful in dislodging the two raiding armies that had been working up and down the coasts of Devon. The Vikings finally abandoned their hopes of toppling Alfred’s kingdom and returned home, sailing back along the southern coast of England, the same way they had come. However, along the way, the Danes decided to make one quick raid on an English coastal town, fill their ship holds with treasure and booty, and give their mission some semblance of success.

  The longboats landed on the coast of Sussex, near Chichester, where the Vikings spilled out of the ships and began searching the region for any wealth they could seize easily. Once more, the Danish campaign proved ill-fated. Chichester had been another of Alfred’s fortified burhs and was completely prepared to handle this sudden raid. The soldiers garrisoned in the Chichester burh were chomping at the bit to play their par
t in the great war against the Danish invaders. Once word reached the burh of the beached longboats, the garrison poured out of the fortress battle-hungry. Overtaking the Vikings in the coastal countryside, the Saxons slaughtered hundreds of the startled Danes. The rest were chased all the way back to their longboats, with many more cut down along the way. Needless to say, those who escaped made no more stops along the British coast in their hurry to reach the safety of the Danelaw.

  With the western reaches of his kingdom finally freed from danger, the king traveled to London where an important matter waited for him to settle. Upon his arrival in the city, the wife and two sons of Hastein were presented to the king in order for him to determine their fate. The situation was not unlike Alfred’s earlier encounter with Guthrum, when the Viking king had been captured after his great treachery. However, what Guthrum had done, he had done as a pagan. And Alfred had forgiven this treachery when he welcomed his enemy to the Christian faith.

  Hastein had been different. Hastein had committed his offenses as a Christian man, and his treachery had been a treachery against his own baptism and the baptisms of his family members. Alfred would have been completely justified, in the eyes of the noblemen who sat awaiting his decision, if he had given harsh sentence and sent Hastein’s family to their grave or, at least, to slavery. But the king reminded his people that the two young men had become his spiritual kinsmen. He and Ealdormen Æthelred had stood as sponsors at their baptism and had become godfathers to these two Danes. And whether Hastein considered this baptism binding or not was irrelevant to the Saxon king. Alfred considered the baptism binding and would stand by it.

  The king embraced Hastein’s family as his own. They feasted and once more were showered with gifts by the ring-giver. Then, once they had been loaded down with tokens of Alfred’s sincere fondness and reminded of the significance of the oath they had made before God, Alfred provided for their travel, ensuring that they would return safely to Hastein. It is difficult to say exactly how the Viking chieftain took this unexpected kindness. With his family returned, the Dane returned to Europe, never to set foot on England’s shores again, leaving the remaining Viking forces to fend for themselves.

  For a brief moment in the summer of 894, Alfred’s kingdom was entirely freed from Viking invaders, and the king was able to return in peace to his home in Winchester. The Danes continued in their determination to topple Alfred’s kingdom and were resolved to make one more try, despite the loss of Hastein’s leadership. The remaining Viking fleet, harbored just inside the Danelaw at Mersea Island, set out once more, sailing up the Thames, turning north at the river Lea, and continuing twenty miles north of London. Here the Vikings, in the early winter months, built another fortification and settled in for the winter. One would think at this point that the Vikings’ plan was obviously hopeless. All of their efforts to overthrow Alfred’s kingdom had failed miserably, and their persistence in what had clearly become an impossible venture seemed flat-out maniacal. It is worth remembering that sixteen years earlier, a Viking raiding army seizing the northern town of Chippenham in the early months of the winter had been able to almost entirely overthrow the last Anglo-Saxon nation. This latest attack employed a strategy that had worked before.

  An attempt to drive out the Danes early in the summer by the force garrisoned in the London burh failed to dislodge the Vikings from their fortress and resulted in heavy losses on the side of the Saxons. Seeing the difficulty the men of London were having with this army, Alfred returned to London to carefully consider the situation and help devise a more effective strategy.

  First, the king dissuaded the Saxon garrison from attempting another assault on the Vikings’ fortress. This would only give the Vikings the upper hand by allowing them to fight from within a fortified position. Next, with autumn approaching, the king brought out a large army that camped near the Danes’ position, allowing the Saxon farmers to harvest all of the crops in the region under the protection of the Saxon fyrd. These crops were then taken into the burhs, where they were entirely safe from the plundering of the Vikings, who had been expecting to live through the oncoming winter off of this harvest.

  Next, anticipating that the starving Danes would soon be fleeing from their fortification, Alfred looked downriver from the Vikings’ position for the right place to build a double-burh. This was a tactic that had been used with great success against the Vikings by the Carolingians. By building a fortress on either side of the river and connecting the two fortresses by a bridge spanning the waters, the Saxons could make the river a death-trap for any Danish longboats traveling down the river. Not only had Alfred avoided fighting the Danes on a battlefield that would have favored the Vikings, he was now starving the Vikings out of their position and forcing them into his own trap.

  The Danes had seen up close the effectiveness of the double-burh defenses and knew exactly the predicament into which they had fallen. Exasperated with what had now become three years of failure, the Danes abandoned their longboats and fled. First, the army marched across Mercia and camped at Bridgnorth, on the river Severn, near Wales. As the fyrd followed this raiding army, the men of London seized the abandoned Viking longboats and destroyed the defenses of the Danish camp. The raiding army encamped in a fortified position in Bridgnorth for the rest of the winter, surrounded by the Saxon fyrd, who kept a close eye on the Danish marauders. During this time the Vikings finally came to the realization that their campaign against Alfred had become hopeless. And, just as spring came to the island of Britain, shaking loose the icy grip of a bitter winter, the Danish warriors abandoned their hopes of conquering, or even plundering, the Anglo-Saxon people and resolved to return home.

  By the summer of 896, the Vikings had entirely ended their attack on the Anglo-Saxons. Some of the Danes, sick of the life of rapine and slaughter, found opportunities within the Danelaw to purchase land and begin their own settlements, quite literally beating swords to ploughshares. The rest of the Vikings, who still longed for a life of plunder and theft, banded together and returned to northern Europe, hoping to find the Frankish resistance less indomitable than the Anglo-Saxon spirit. However, of the two hundred fifty longboats that had originally landed on the shores of Kent three years before, not to mention the countless reinforcements that had joined the Viking campaign throughout those years, the Danes who returned to France in 896 could scarcely fill five longboats. Truly, the spirit of the Vikings had been broken by the kingdom Alfred had built.

  Three years later, in the year AD 899, six days before All Hallows’ Day, King Alfred died. Having reigned twenty-eight and a half years, he died at the age of fifty. What may sound like a short life to the modern reader would actually have been considered a long and full life to Alfred’s contemporaries. Asser, Alfred’s friend and biographer, related how, especially in these later years, Alfred was often severely tortured by the pains of some unknown illness. Thus it is likely that Alfred’s death was neither unexpected nor untimely. The king was buried in the Old Minster of Winchester, though his bones would be repeatedly moved during the following centuries.

  After Alfred’s death, the holdings of the king of Wessex were steadily expanded by Alfred’s son, Edward, and his grandson, Æthelstan, until soon the throne of Alfred came to rule over the entirety of the island of Britain. Even though Æthelstan is often referred to as the first king of England because all of England was first united under his reign, the accomplishments of Æthelstan and Edward were really just the natural culmination of the reforms first established during Alfred’s reign. Alfred truly was the great king of England, the one monarch who rightly understood the needs of the nation and unrelentingly gave all he had to supply those needs.

  England, and the many nations descended from her, still have Alfred to thank for a substantial portion of the heritage and freedoms that they enjoy today. The title “Alfred the Great,” so strangely offensive to the modern ear, was well deserved by the Anglo-Saxon warrior-king. Of course these words of unreserved pr
aise are all in need of much qualification. Alfred was, after all, a mere mortal and 234 certainly had his fair share of foibles. Nevertheless, he was a fierce warrior, a devout Christian ever thirsting for wisdom, deeply committed to justice, a lover of mercy, and a king who gave himself for his people. He was practically a myth and a much-needed reality. He was the king of the Whitehorse—Alfred the Great.

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  Acknowledgments

  This book is the fruit of my studies for an MA in English literature at the University of Idaho, under Dr. Rick Fehrenbacher. Although utterly unlike my dissertation for that degree, a translation and commentary on Alfred’s version of Augustine’s Soliloquies, most of my appreciation for Alfred flows from my research for that project, as well as from Dr. Fehrenbacher’s infectious love for Anglo-Saxon literature. Many thanks to Aaron Rench for getting me into this. And many more thanks to my wife and children, who have richly blessed me throughout this work.

  All translations, and any silly mistakes, are my own.

  About the Author

  Benjamin R. Merkle is a Fellow of Theology and Classical Languages at New Saint Andrews College and a contributing editor to Credenda/Agenda. He received an MA in English literature from the University of Idaho and an MSt in Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford, and is currently pursuing his doctorate at the University of Oxford.

  Annotated Bibliography

  GENERAL ANGLO-SAXON HISTORY

  The Anglo-Saxons, James Campbell, Penguin: New York, 1991.