The Viking Wars: War and Peace in King Alfred’s Britain: 789–955

457 Pages·2017·60.76 MB·English

by  Max Adams

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