Table Of Content

THE VIKING WARS WAR AND PEACE IN KING ALFRED’S BRITAIN ________789–955___________ MAX ADAMS PEGASUS BOOKS NEW YORK LONDON For my cousins CONTENTS List of maps Author’s note Introduction PART I The tiger in the smoke, 789–878 TIMELINE 1: 789-878 Forespæc 1 Landscape with figures 2 Central places 3 The incoming tide 4 The End of Days PART II Newton’s cradle, 879–918 TIMELINE 2: 879–918 Forespæc 5 The balance of power 6 Arrivals and departures 7 Fragmentary annals 8 Politics by other means PART III Going native, 919–955 TIMELINE 3: 919–955 Forespæc 9 Innate affinities with ambiguity 10 Lawyers, guns and money 11 A house of cards 12 The illusory prize APPENDIX Regnal tables Rulers of Wessex 802–955 Rulers of York 867–955 Rulers of Mercia 757–924 Rulers of Pictavia; Dál Riata; Alba 839–955 Rulers of the Welsh 808–950 Abbreviations, sources and references Notes Bibliography Picture credits Acknowledgements Index LIST OF MAPS North West Europe Viking Age travel map Viking Age travel map The estates of the community of St Cuthbert in the ninth and tenth centuries A BEAST OF THE IMAGINATION, from a cross shaft at Kirk Braddan old church, Isle of Man AUTHOR’S NOTE Æ LFRED’S BRITAIN IS INTENDED AS A COMPANION volume to my previous Early Medieval histories, The King in the North and In the Land of Giants. Many of the themes, people and places encountered here refer back, one way or another, to those two books. I leave the reader to make the connections. The word ‘Viking’ is problematic, and much has been written about its origins, meanings and familiarity to those who found themselves on the wrong end of a Scandinavian raid. Suffice it to say that it is safe to think of ‘viking’ as an activity: hence, to ‘go a-Viking’. It should carry no particular ethnic or national badge—although, inevitably, it is frequently used as a convenient shorthand for a raider of Scandinavian origin. I have tried to avoid using it as an ethnic label. A few words are required on spelling and pronunciation. I have tried as far as possible to render spellings in their original language for the sake of authenticity. In Old English, readers will come across letters like the ligature or grapheme Æ, or æ, which should be pronounced like the ‘a’ in ‘hat’ (it comes from the runic letter called æsc, or ash, after the tree with which it was associated in the runic alphabet). Less familiar, perhaps, is the thorn, written þ and pronounced with a soft ‘th’, as in ‘think’. The eth symbol ð is a harder ‘th’ sound, as in ‘that’, and appears as Đ when it occurs at the beginning of a word. Anglo-Saxon spelling was itself inconsistent, and it is generally modernized by scholars and translators. Where I have quoted from their work, I have kept their rendering. Old Norse has its own distinct accents and conventions. Most notably, names like Rögnvaldr have a final ‘r’ which is silent, and entirely absent in the possessive. So: Rögnvaldr, but Rögnvald’s. In Old Irish his name is rendered Ragnall; in the Latin of the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto he is Regenwaldus. The derivations of place-name forms and meanings are overwhelmingly taken from Victor Watt’s magnificent Cambridge Dictionary of English Place- Names. All quotations from translations of the original sources are most gratefully acknowledged. To have almost all of our Early Medieval sources in fine, accessible translations is a monumental scholarly achievement. Two outstanding resources, without which the modern researcher would be stranded, are worth mentioning: the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE), a searchable database of all the recorded inhabitants of England up until the eleventh century; and the Electronic Sawyer, an online database of surviving 1 charters from the Anglo-Saxon period. The Viking travel maps started as an aide-memoire to understand how Scandinavians were able to penetrate the remote corners of the island of Britain so effectively, and why it was so hard to stop them. The two versions, early and late, have proved helpful to me; I hope they are equally useful to the reader in making sense of this half-familiar, half-exotic world. INTRODUCTION A S THE EIGHTH CENTURY DRAWS TO ITS CLOSE, BANDS of feral men, playing by a new set of rules and bent on theft, kidnap, arson, torture and enslavement, prey on vulnerable communities. Shockwaves are felt in the royal courts of Europe, in the Holy See at Rome. The king’s peace is broken. Economies are disrupted; institutions threatened. In time the state itself comes under attack from the new power in the North, a power of devastating military efficiency and suicidally apocalyptic ideology. It seems as if the End of Days is approaching. Out of the chaos come opportunities to shuffle the pack of dynastic fortune, to subjugate neighbouring states, to exploit a new economics and re- invent fossilized institutions. The economic strengths that made Britain such an attractive target lay in the exploitation, by an organized, self-knowing élite, of abundant resources: its cattle, sheep, grain, timber, minerals and the labour to harvest and process them. The ease with which people and goods were able to move through the landscape, and the institutions which evolved to benefit from that wealth, rendered Britain uniquely wealthy, but also uniquely vulnerable. No king or counsel saw the disaster coming; only, perhaps, the wise and Venerable Bede, wagging a 1 warning finger at the future from his writing desk in 734. After the first shock, a little before the year 800, a century—four generations—passed before effective state strategies tamed the wild beast and a new European culture, vibrant, energetic and ambitious, began to take shape. Accommodations were made between native and incomer. In Britain grand projects were conceived: to unify peoples under the banners of kingdoms that came to be known as Scotland, Wales and England. It is not so clear who conceived those projects; even less so that they were successful. The first notice of a new-dawning reality comes to us from an entry in the

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A history of Britain in the violent and unruly era between the first Scandinavian raids in 789 and the final expulsion of the Vikings from York in 954.In 865, a great Viking army landed in East Anglia, precipitating a series of wars that would last until the middle of the following century. It was i