Return of the Vikings: The Battle of Maldon 991

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Prologue

It was early August in 991. The millennium was approaching and many superstitious men feared its coming, expecting that it would bring the end of the world, but in the village of Sturmer on the northern border of Essex, Leofson was untroubled. It was a warm Sunday and he sat outside with a few friends, tenant farmers like himself, contemplating his lot. He found that it was good. He had a wife and young family, and was well able to keep them in comfort. The forest which pressed in upon the village on all sides offered good wood for building and fires, as well as mast for his two dozen pigs. His sheep had bred well that year, nearly eighty of them now, and that meant that his dairymen had provided a fine supply of cheese for the winter with the salt he had bought from Maldon, and during the summer his flock had supplied him with a heavy weight of wool for which he had got a good price from the Ipswich merchant who regularly bought from him. Like most of the farmers he knew, he kept few cattle, just enough to provide him with the team of oxen which were amongst his most precious possessions. The eight oxen which he was working at the moment were strong enough to cultivate all of his land without his having to use his slaves to pull a hand-plough, as many of his fellow-farmers, smallholders who were less fortunate than himself, had to do. This meant that even in spring two of his four slaves could be released for other duties as only two were needed for the ploughing. One was an excellent bee-keeper, his three hives working the forest so successfully that the whole household had honey for sweetening and preservative all winter. As long as he could remember, the farm had had a surplus, which he took to market down in Maldon or Colchester. He preferred Maldon. Colchester was too large, too noisy, for a man used to the quiet of the countryside as he was. It would be time to take some pigs soon and perhaps the male calf that was born last spring, now well grown and needing to be killed before the winter came when the fodder in the hay-barn must be reserved for his newly expanded flock of sheep. His doves too had bred well this year, and there would be good eating to be had from them in the spring when other meat was exhausted, though he himself preferred rook pie to one made from pigeon meat. He had a man who was adept at bringing down with his slingshot the birds that were in the large rookery at the edge of the wood, where the numbers would expand significantly with the early spring hatchings, supplying many tender young rooks for cooking. Yes, he would sell as many of the doves as he could.

Best of all, he thought, as his mind revolved around his good fortune, his land was productive, and he was well served by his lord. He leased the twenty acres of his manor from Byrhtnoth, the ruler of Essex, who was a just and honourable man and had been a good friend to him. In turn, he offered without question the services which he was bound to as a tenant, riding duties occasionally and, in time of need, service in the army on behalf of the village. The latter need had never arisen in his lifetime. The old king had ruled the land with a firm hand, so firm that no foreign man had dared to invade as they had in the time of his predecessors. Since his day – it must be sixteen years ago now since his death – there were rumours of difficulties far away in Wessex, but Lord Byrhtnoth had maintained order in Essex and Cambridgeshire, and he had heard of no problems in nearby Suffolk. No, he counted himself fortunate. Last week the villagers had celebrated Lammas, the harvest festival, in the little stone chapel that he could see across the meadow, and harvest was in all of their minds as they prepared to cut the hay. But it was the lake that they had been talking of just then, the huge lake near the village, the source of the River Stour, which was a rich source of fish and eels all year round and which would be full of ducks and geese, bitterns and rails, woodcock and snipe next month to add to the partridges in the forest in providing excellent hunting. Yes, he thought, his life was good.

Suddenly he was on his feet, his reverie broken. Everyone around him was up too, straining to hear more sounds of an approaching rider. They had all heard the trumpet blast which heralded his coming from afar. When he galloped into sight, his horse foaming with the effort of a long ride at speed, he made straight for Leofson, whom he recognised from their training days. Pausing only to pant out his message, that there was a general call to arms, and that Leofson was to ride to Colchester fully armed immediately because, it seemed, the Danes were invading the country and had already sacked Ipswich, he dug in his heels and rode on north towards the next village of Kedington. Leofson quickly called instructions for his brown cob to be saddled while he went to dress for his journey. The crowd scattered, only to reassemble shortly afterwards in greater numbers to watch him embrace his wife and children and mount his horse. He was dressed now in a thick woollen tunic and tight stockings, despite the warm weather, with black leather ankle boots, and had stuck a long knife into his girdle. He had dispensed with the cloak that he normally wore for riding. As he sat in the saddle behind the bundle of throwing spears that were strapped across its front, his servants passed up his long spears which he held upright in his right hand, before Godric, the slave who had been with his family longest, lifted up with an effort his heavy, wide, round shield of wood covered with oxhide and bound with a thick metal rim. Leofson slid his left arm through the metal ring behind the heavy central boss, and lifted it in salute to the freemen and women, villagers and slaves, who stood around him. He called out with a steady voice, ‘My friends, I vow that when you see me again, you will have no cause to taunt me that I fled one foot’s length from the struggle and came home without honour. I will avenge my countrymen in battle, or else spear and sword will take me.’

To a roar of encouragement from the village which drowned out the sounds of weeping of those dear to him which he did not want to hear, Leofson clapped his heels to his mount abruptly and, with his blood racing, rode off to war.

1

Pillage and Settlement

Viking attacks on England began two centuries earlier than 991, long before England existed as a single political unit. Early Anglo-Saxon England consisted of many independent kingdoms. Gradually the smaller were absorbed by the larger, until by the beginning of the ninth century, the land was divided into four: Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia and Wessex (see Map 59). The relative power of these kingdoms lay largely in the strength of their individual kings. As one king grew in strength, others became weaker and had to wait for the death of their rival in order to regain some of the power enjoyed by their predecessors. Nonetheless, these four had survived for many generations and retained a good part of their independence from one another when the ninth century began in 800. The largest in area was Northumbria, consisting of all the lands north of a line stretching from the Humber estuary in the east to the Mersey in the west and extending as far as modern Edinburgh. South of the Humber, the dominant kingdom at the very beginning of the ninth century was Mercia, covering the whole of the midlands. Whereas at an earlier period both East Anglia and Northumbria had had their turns of over-lordship of the south-humbrian kingdoms, during the eighth century Mercia had grown in strength, subjugating earlier, smaller adjoining kingdoms like Essex, and gaining major influence in East Anglia and Wessex as well. In the first quarter of the ninth century, it was the turn of Wessex to dominate. Having begun as a relatively small kingdom south of the Thames, it first absorbed Kent and the Celtic areas of Devon and Cornwall, and then extended its influence north of its traditional border of the Thames to Wales and Mercia. Wessex was thus the last of the great kingdoms of the country to achieve prominence in England as a whole, but its domination was ultimately to prove the most enduring.

The story of the rise of Wessex is intimately tied to the first wave of Viking attacks against English shores, yet the most infamous of those early attacks was not against Wessex itself but against the eastern seaboard of Northumbria. Small groups of Vikings began raiding lightly defended settlements on the coast of England at the close of the eighth century, and the most poorly guarded settlements of all, as well as potentially the most rewarding in terms of the treasure they contained, were monasteries. What the church saw as the most barbarous act of Viking aggression was the sack in 793 of the celebrated monastery of Lindisfarne, now Holy Island, near Berwick-on Tweed. Lindisfarne had been founded in the early years of English Christendom in the late sixth century and was venerated later as the seventh-century home of St Cuthbert who died in 687. Thanks to the writings of churchmen, the effects of this attack reverberated through Christian Europe, and quickly became the symbol of Viking barbarism. An equally significant raid in the following year involved another north-eastern monastery, usually assumed to be Jarrow, home of Bede until his death in 735, while the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which in its early years was written entirely from the point of view of Wessex, records the first attack by the Vikings on English shores under the annal for 789 when three ships from Norway attacked Portland in Dorset and killed the king’s reeve. Although this date appears to contradict the tradition that the Lindisfarne raid signalled the start of major Viking attacks, the precise year of the Dorset raid is uncertain. It occurs in the Chronicle in conjunction with a note on the marriage of King Brihtric to the daughter of King Offa of Mercia in 789 and is the only Chronicle reference to Brihtric who ruled Wessex from 786 to 802. The chronicler simply notes that the Dorset attack took place during Brihtric’s reign, and his evidence may not be reliable since the Chronicle was probably not compiled until the end of the ninth century when precise details of the attack had been forgotten. Although all these raids were no more than isolated incidents in themselves, they were the start of a pattern of incursions by marauding Vikings across northern Europe during this period. In 795, Vikings who had established a base in the Shetlands sailed round to the western side of Scotland and attacked Iona, another significant monastic site, while from the end of the century, attacks from Scandinavia along the northern coast of mainland Europe, particularly on the Low Countries, then part of the extensive Franco-German empire, became so numerous that the emperor Charlemagne established a regular coastguard to police his realm.

Reports of Vikings in Christian writings from the period almost exclusively concern their raids, raids which initially were driven by mixed motives, and certainly developed, in part, out of commercial expeditions. Given the nature of the settled lands along the coastlines in Scandinavia, the inhabitants were adept seamen, and consequently for a time were the greatest traders of Europe. The Chronicle report of 789 notes that the Dorset reeve had gone initially to the Viking ships to take the sailors to the king to impose the appropriate taxes on them, assuming that they were traders. Lawful trading by Vikings, in fact, continued throughout the ninth century, and this trading was with England as well as with the rest of Europe. There were Viking traders at the court of King Alfred at the end of the ninth century, even during the period when the country was harried with renewed Viking invasions. In the early period it was probably difficult on some occasions to distinguish between Vikings engaged on trade and those who were intent on rape and pillage, although contemporary accounts (largely deriving from the Church) tend to equate the term ‘Viking’ with ‘pirate’, and hence shape our present-day view.

In the north, Scandinavian colonies spread from Shetland around the Western Isles of Scotland and to all coastal parts of Ireland. Indeed, by 830, Dublin and the surrounding area was to all intents and purposes a Viking state. The Orkneys and Faroe Islands were occupied at much the same time, and so too, by the end of the ninth century, Iceland. Vikings from Ireland sailed south to the Loire, to modern Portugal and southern Spain, and into the western Mediterranean. Swedish Vikings, meantime, had sailed across the Baltic and followed major river routes to Moscow and into the Arab world, and via Kiev to Constantinople. Whereas we tend to refer to peoples moving westwards from Scandinavia as Vikings, those travelling east became known as Varangians (hence the Varangian guard which was employed by the emperor at Constantinople), or as Rhus or Rus (our Russians), perhaps stemming from the Finnish word for the Swedes. All of these people travelled initially for purposes of trade, but it must soon have become apparent to many that in parts of western Europe, trade could be facilitated by the picking up of goods along undefended