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Welcome to the History Extra podcast.
It's the third part today of our Sunday series in which Dr Eleanor Barraclough and James Osborne discuss the Viking Great Heathen Army.
And we rejoin the story today, as things look bleak for Alfred, but his fortunes were soon to experience a dramatic reversal.
In this episode, you'll hear James and Eleanor make mention of the Norns.
Now, the Norns are three female figures from Norse mythology who were believed to shape the destinies of men and gods alike.
And they were usually depicted as weaving the threads of fate across past, present and future.
So with that in our minds, it's on with today's episode.
As the Viking Great Heathen Army stormed past the borders of Wessex, its conquest of Anglo-Saxon England looked nearly complete.
But Alfred had other ideas.
I'm James Osborne and in this third episode of our four-part series on the Viking invasion of Anglo-Saxon England in the later half of the 9th century, I'm joined by Dr Eleanor Barraclough to discuss Alfred the Great's ascent to victory at the Battle of Eddington.
Eleanor, we ended the previous episode by talking about Guthrum's surprise attack against Alfred at Chippenham in the year 878 and Alfred's flight.
Why is this such an important moment?
This is the point I think, and again not wishing to be sort of too hyperbolic about it, but if Anglo-Saxon England were going to collapse, I think this is the point where you'd almost expect that to be the narrative.
This is how it plays out.
The last king standing flees to the marshes and the Vikings have total control.
And I think, because it's one of these sliding doors moments, in a way, the fact that this isn't how the story ends makes it even more exciting.
Having said that, we have to remember that we have bits of the story and sometimes it seems like we have more bits than we actually have because we have these complete textual narratives in the form of Asa's life, of King Alfred, and also the Anglo-Saxon chronicles and various versions but We have to remember there's other things going on that we necessarily aren't.
So we're seeing out the corner of our eyes, perhaps.
And one of examples of those is Asser refers to another Viking force, or a bit of this Viking force that lands in Devon having, I think, overwintered in Wales.
And actually, the West Saxons, this is again early 878.
And so Alfred is presumably in the marshes.
And yet another West Saxon force is able to destroy them and defeat them.
This is when they captured the famous raven banner.
You know, you want a good Viking army.
You can't have a good Viking army without having one of these raven banners.
Sometimes they're cursed.
This sense that sort of, you know, you're under the protection of Odin.
And the reason this story survives is possibly because the Raven banner is taken and the force is wiped out.
And that tells us there are other people.
It's not like Alfred is single handedly responsible for mounting the defense.
However, without him, things do look pretty bleak.
Yes.
So at this moment.
Wessex effectively has no leader because Alfred has been removed from court, he's hiding and there are these scattered bands of resistance, but there is no overall sense of control.
Yeah, I mean it's a really interesting point this, and I don't know how much we'd be able to tell about what it actually is like to live In Wessex at this point.
We've got to remember it's only for a few months, you know, we're talking January to May, where essentially there is no head of the kingdom, certainly from an Anglo-Saxon perspective.
And in that sort of timeframe it's not like we'd expect the Vikings to have sort of plugged into that network and taken full control, and so I'd imagine it was probably really quite a scary time, quite an uncertain time, a time where again, because we're talking winter and spring the armies that were in there, the Viking armies, would be raiding a lot.
They'd be looking for supplies.
The local population would have been really quite heavily affected by what was going on.
But then, on the other hand, we've got to remember that for most people, life wasn't dependent on the monarch.
And so then that the question is How much would have changed for them day by day in these months?
There could have been some people who wouldn't even be aware.
Oh, very much.
I suspect so.
I mean, we just have to look at the famous story of Alfred and the swineherd and the swineherd's wife when he's in the marshes on Athelni.
And again, they don't know who he is.
Yes, this brings us to the marshes.
So you said it's probably a scary moment for a lot of the West Saxons.
It also would have been a scary moment for Alfred because he's just fled for his life.
Him and his remaining war band have fled into these marshes.
What do we know about this moment?
Yeah, so most of what we know here comes from Asser, and it does seem pretty desperate from Asser's telling of it.
He says Alfred had nothing to live on except what he could forage by frequent raids, either secretly or openly, from the pagans as well as from the Christians who had surrendered to the authority of the pagans.
Again, that tells us maybe something about the politics, the social situation at that time.
And so Alfred is desperate.
It's almost a sort of guerrilla hideout situation.
These marshes are so swampy.
It's really hard, I think, for us to remember what a lot of these low-lying landscapes would have been like.
The same with East Anglia in this period because, you know, marshes at this point were impassable and dangerous and you know, if you don't know the paths through, it's really hard to get anywhere safely.
Yeah, these are the fens, aren't they the fens that are mentioned in the likes of beowulf, that aren't really present in england anymore?
They've been drained exactly.
And so athelny within that context, athel means like it's sort of like you Prince's Island you know noble islands is the sense of this high point from which Alfred can start to build fortifications and then start to work out?
Is there a way back to power, to the throne, to save his people?
Okay, so you mentioned a swine herd.
And this brings us to the story of Alfred burning the cakes.
And this is a moment when he's hiding in the marshes.
What is this story?
And also, why is it significant?
Why is it something that we remember?
Yeah, okay.
So the basic story goes that Alfred takes shelter with a swineherd and his wife, you know, while he's on Athelni.
And one day he's just there staring despondently into the fire, trying to work out how he's going to rectify the situation.
And the woman says oh well look, if you're just sitting here moping, do you mind just watching my when we say cakes?
We're not talking sort of muffins.
We're talking sort of little bread rolls.
Oh, cakes.
Exactly.
So, you know, flat cakes, whatever it is.
I've just put them in the oven.
If you could watch those for me.
Thank you very much.
And off she goes.
And the story goes that he's so busy contemplating the future of his people that he doesn't watch the cakes.
And then by the time she gets back, they're burnt to ashes and she whacks him around the head and she tells him off and she doesn't know who he is.
But we have to look for the significance of it, the source material, and that also gives us a clue as to how much we can trust something like that.
Now, it first appears in a 10th century source, so not that much later.
It's the life of St.
Neots.
It's about 100 years after Alfred, and Then it's one of those sort of slightly far-travelling stories.
I think, because it is complicated, it gets inserted into a 12th century text, the Annals of St Neot, which kind of draw on this.
Now then we cut to the 16th century, and Archbishop Matthew Parker, who's very into all this old stuff, makes an edition of Asser's Life of St
Alfred.
And it looks like he inserts this story from the annals into the life of King Alfred, which makes it then look like Asser wrote it.
And the problem is that actually, although this was copied In its original version, it no longer survives.
I think it was burnt or lost or something.
And so what that means is for a long time, it looked as though Asser had written this story down and he hadn't.
Having said that, if it does go back to the 10th century.
It's a bit like, you know, the stories that spring up around St.
Edmund of East Anglia that we talked about in previous episodes.
There is very much this sense of OK well, maybe there is some kernel of truth, but alternatively, maybe the story is trying to tell us something about the nature of who King Alfred is, someone who is human and fallible, in the same way that we've talked about his illnesses and how that actually is an important part of who he is as a character.
But also, at the same time, someone who is ultimately concerned for the welfare of his people above all else.
And also yeah, humble and human and able to be hit around the head by a swineherd's wife without.
It's really tricky.
If I had to bet, I would probably not be betting on it being...
But I think there are plenty of historians who would bet on it being true for those same reasons.
So who knows?
I guess what I'm thinking it says about him is that, A, he hasn't given up.
He is actively thinking and contemplating. you know, what comes next.
And he's not just kind of totally given up and given up the cause and is pretending he's not the king of Wessex.
He's still interested in this.
He's still determined.
It's also telling me that he is a contemplative person.
Yes.
He is a thinker.
So I guess whether or not it is literally true, it does speak to who Alfred was as a person.
It's an important insight into that.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
And I think there is this thing where sometimes what we expect from sources is that they tell us The absolute truth in that very literal way.
And sometimes sources can tell us different sorts of truth.
Who knows what form of truth this actually is.
So this is Alfred, I would say, at his lowest ebb.
He has very little.
He's being hit on the head by a farmer who doesn't know he's the king.
How does he begin to rebuild his resistance?
You mentioned that there are still West Saxon forces who are still fighting.
This is not a case of total viking control by guthrum of wessex.
Is it by connecting with those forces that he's able to rebuild?
Yeah, it looks like.
I mean so we we can't tell because our sources are really limited for this event, for this part, but yeah, it certainly.
I think it's important to remember that other force that manages to defeat the Vikings with their raven banner, because that gives us a sense of what's going on here.
It's exactly as you say.
There are other.
I think maybe we'd even say more than pockets of resistance the structure, that social structure that would mean that when Alfred was king, he could call up something approaching an army, a defensive army.
That thing is not it's not it's not completely invisible, you know, and it's still there.
And of course, the question then is, OK, well, how did he have access to that?
And we don't quite know, but we know he's there with his war band.
So we can assume that you know people are being sent out and we have to remember this is a few months away.
And although that doesn't feel like a very long period, possibly it is enough.
Well, as it turns out, it definitely was enough to get the troops assembled that he would need.
And what we're told is that early May 878, he goes to Edgbert's Stone, Edgbert being his grandfather.
And a really important figure, because it's Edgbert who basically founds the Wessex dynasty that he's now part of.
You know, he's the successor of.
So he tells the men he's managed to muster come to Edgbert Stone.
Where Edgbert Stone is, is another question.
We don't know.
There are lots of instances, aren't there, where we...
Something is mentioned and we just don't know actually where it happened.
Including the big battle that's about to happen.
Yeah, exactly that.
So it's almost stranger when you do find that archaeological evidence.
It's such a nice surprise because often there are various locations.
Certainly true of the big battles.
And in this case...
Probably true of Edgebert Stone.
So the most likely place would be Selwood Forest, which is sort of on the Dorset-Wiltshire border.
It's near the Salisbury Plain, basically.
But we're told that he met all of the peoples of Somerset and Wiltshire and part of Hampshire.
You know, so it's very much...
He has summoned people to come to his aid from quite a large.
You've got to think.
Wessex is a really.
It goes all the way up to basically, the Thames in London.
So, even though we don't know where it is now, this must have been somewhere that everyone knew where it was.
Yeah, absolutely.
It would be the absolute, both practically, in terms of sort of you know somewhere.
You know because it's a big stone in the landscape and you can see it, but also ideologically, in terms of what it meant historically.
This is a big rallying call.
It could have been like a Neolithic standing stone.
Absolutely, it could have been, yeah.
So the point is, wherever this takes place Alfred, from this really low ebb, has regathered all the remaining forces of resistance in Wessex around him, at this stone.
I want to pause there.
Mm. i want to shift back to the viking perspective and primarily guthrum's perspective because now he's the one who's taking control of east anglia he's the one who's thinks he's defeated alfred really as you said this is a moment where it looks like anglo-saxon england might is on the precipice in fact the vikings control almost all of it almost all of what would become england this is to me a bit of a precursor to when we get in later centuries the invasion of svain forkbeard and then he becomes king very briefly and then canute the great another great he becomes king as well and you have this viking rule of what was anglo-saxon england this seems a bit like a precursor to that a few months what might this have been like would people anglo-saxon people have thought now we are under viking control would it have been as conscious of that as that yes it's a good question i think for some people absolutely maybe to some extent it would I would say it would depend how high up the pecking order you are, because often who's sort of the top dog matters much more if you are only a couple of rungs below that because you're having to deal with them.
Having said that, of course, given that we know that the Viking armies are off raiding and they're having to find supplies throughout this whole period and we have some of that
In the source material.
Yeah, it may have been something that people at all levels of society were much more aware of, because it was impacting them on a really direct, quite scary level.
It's hard to tell.
One thing we can do, I suppose, is we can see OK, in the areas that stay under Norse control, what happens there.
And it's not necessarily a scary story, but in a way that's coming in later.
What we do have in the anglo-saxon chronicle we have entries that talk about the point where the norse start dividing up the land and plowing the land, and i think that's the point where you are going to realize that you are in a different world order now.
It's a massive moment, isn't it?
Exactly.
Because it means we're here to stay.
Exactly.
Or they think we're here to stay.
Yeah.
And that is going to affect people on all levels, I think.
Yeah.
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I do think, from the Viking perspective and I'm thinking about their very loose leadership structure which we've talked about it would make sense to me if they think job done brilliant, and maybe over those months where Alfred is regathering his forces, perhaps
It's impossible obviously, to go back and look at the psychology of someone, but perhaps it would make sense if there was a degree of complacency that now begins to creep in.
It's tricky, isn't it?
Because again, we're looking back with the benefit of hindsight and it's really hard then to say
You know, sometimes it's just a case of luck, which way it goes for you.
And you can be as battle-hardened and as prepared as you want and it still doesn't go your way.
I guess it's that thing of looking back and trying to make something understandable.
Yeah.
And that's not always possible.
Sometimes it's literally just a matter of luck.
Exactly, exactly.
And both the Anglo-Saxons in Old English and the Norse in Old Norse.
They have versions of pretty much exactly what you've said that phrase,
It's weird, bitful, rad, like fate goes the way it will go.
And there is very much in both cultures, this sense of.
Yeah, you can't change your weird.
You can't change your fate.
What's going to happen is going to happen.
The Norns.
The Norns.
Always comes back to the Norns.
Love those Norns.
And I guess when we're saying, you know, maybe this wouldn't have been absolutely awful for all of the just ordinary Anglo-Saxons who are under Viking occupation at this moment,
Maybe that's because again, as we've spoken about, these are, at their root linguistically historically, quite similar and interconnected people, despite some big differences.
Yeah, it's possible.
I think certainly that helps to explain some of what happens later in terms of the settlement, possibly at this point when it's all still very militarized.
I think you don't really care what language the person on the other end of the swords is speaking if they're holding the pointy end towards you.
And I do wonder whether we're still at that level.
This is a period of violence and coercion I think to some extent that sometimes it's easy to forget simply because we know what happens next we know from the perspective of the sources the goodies triumph and so maybe it's yeah it's important I think to just rest on that moment of uncertainty.
Yeah.
Now, going back to Alfred, back at Edgbert's stone, he has mustered all his forces around him.
Guthrum thinks he's won.
Alfred has gone from this really low ebb to this moment where he's on the cusp of battle, once again ready to fight.
It's a very mythic moment.
It very much reminds me of the Lord of the Rings.
Specifically, I'm thinking about Aragorn and his journey from heir to the throne to a ranger in the marshes.
And then he comes back and is again at the position where he's ready to take the throne back.
Which is possibly... Now, I don't know that specific example.
If Tolkien drew on that, it's possible he did.
But Tolkien, yeah, he's like professor of Anglo-Saxon.
This is his absolute bag.
He knows this stuff.
And he's drawing on, exactly as you say, those mythic and legendary elements of both the history and the literature to make his lord of the rings world.
Yeah, completely.
Do you want to know a nerdy theory?
Yes obviously, okay.
So alfred anglo-saxon name comprised of two parts.
Yeah elf, elf red, counseled or advised.
So alfred.
This is going.
Oh my god, can you right?
So alfred is means advised by the elves.
I think he's very similar to aragorn in his story.
Aragorn yes, he is literally advised and raised by the elves in his formative years.
Oh, that's so.
You should write a really dry academic paper about that or just spread the word, because that is the best theory ever.
That needs to be true.
Yes, Aragorn equals Alfred.
I is, that's my personal theory I love.
I have to say I think Aragorn's probably slightly sexier In my book.
Yes.
Definitely the Viggo Mortensen version.
Yes, possibly.
I couldn't possibly comment.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that this is a really mythic moment, imbued with a lot of heroism and kind of saga-esque myth and legend.
It's so heroic.
This moment of him at the stone, commanding all his forces, having come back from this low ebb.
It makes me doubt it.
I know.
I have that.
Right.
And it's really tricky because, as we say, we know that source material has a bias.
Of course it does.
And it's on Alfred's side.
Absolutely.
But we also know that the beats that are there are the beats you know.
Even if we think OK, there's other people on the edges of this who aren't necessarily given their moments.
You know, if we know that maybe he had more help, you know, whatever it might be.
We know those basic beats are still the basic beats.
We have the treaty that Alfred then signs with Guthrum very shortly in our narrative.
We know that happens.
I completely agree.
I live in mild nerd fear of something being discovered that means that our whole picture of Alfred is basically shattered, and it's not to say he is perfect but, as you say, there is something almost mythic in his greatness that's actually really hard to break down.
And I guess if we had all the sources we have are from the Anglo-Saxon perspective, almost from Alfred's perspective.
I guess if we had the Viking side of this story, if this wasn't an oral culture, maybe we would have a picture that is closer to the literal reality of what happened.
Maybe, but I think what the Vikings tend to do is, well, it's the Norse.
These sagas again.
They just big up and mythologize their heroes in ways that often have layers of truth underneath definitely, but i think we just end up with more larger than life heroes.
It would just be even more mythic.
You know so and i don't know.
I i get the sense.
You know you look at what happens afterwards.
The good room is is sort of.
You get the sense that, for example, you look at Gudrum's coins once he becomes king of East Anglia.
We're sort of jumping forward slightly and we'll jump back again.
But he is echoing Alfred's style of kingship as well.
And so once again, it's not the sense of, oh, that Alfred over there.
It's not that at all.
Yeah, i agree, he's too good to be true.
It's, i'm gonna i'm, i'm just gonna go with it.
I'm gonna believe it for now, because it's all we have and you know, what else can you do?
It's too cool to not.
It's too cool.
That's it.
Yeah okay, so that takes us from egbert stone with alfred and his forces to the battle of eddington.
Yes, this is one of the most pivotal decisive definitive, you know all the superlatives moments in Anglo-Saxon English history, especially the history of early Proto-England.
Alfred and his forces come up against Guthrum again, and his forces, what happens?
Well, they beat them.
They beat them back to their fortress at Chippingham, essentially.
So it's a really weird one because it's all the things you've just said.
And yet we don't even know for sure where it took place, this battle.
So it's this strange...
I don't want to say anti-climax, maybe that's too extreme, but it's a bit.
Like you know, you look at other sort of the Battle of Mons Graupius or the Battle of Brunnenberg.
It's like with these ones, we don't know where.
And so you're left with this sort of this bubble with nowhere to, or maybe several places to place it.
You know, it's like Arthur, it's all the rest of that.
Right.
Eddington, we know that they, you know it's probably I don't know sort of estimates vary, but you know a few thousand troops that Alfred's managed to muster.
Three, four, five thousand, you know, that sort of thing.
But a goodly number.
And yeah, they beat the Viking forces.
The Viking forces won, flee back to Chippingham, and then they are besieged by the Anglo-Saxons, by Alfred's forces.
The tables have turned.
Well, exactly, the tables have turned.
And you know, I always think it's really interesting.
And again, we don't know how true this is, but Asser has a really human way of describing Gudrun at this point where they realize, oh yeah no, this is not gonna.
We know what this is.
The jigs up and Asa says he's Gudrun, he's like thoroughly terrified by hunger and cold and fear and, By the end, despair.
Gudrun seeks peace is how Asa puts it.
And again, I think it's really interesting.
It's like this is a story that we would expect to end in the death of at least one of the leaders.
And it doesn't.
And we'd expect, OK, if not death, then certainly enmity.
And it doesn't.
So again, just at that point where you think you know how this story is going to go, once again the rug is pulled from under you.
Okay, so it's a really significant moment.
And conversely, we know so little about it.
We know what happened.
We know Alfred and his forces won guthrum, lost.
He's pushed back.
We don't know how, we don't even know where.
But i guess i i do want to focus, if we can, on that human experience, these battles i'm imagining, you know, i've read bernard cornwall's the last kingdom.
I absolutely love it.
So i'm imagining shield walls and i'm imagining lots of awful screaming and shouting and killing, the human experience on that day.
How should we have that in mind?
That's a really good question.
It's really tricky because often unfortunately, the best evidence we have for that is the people who didn't survive the battles and the sorts of injuries that they had, and they are brutal.
It's really.
It's a really nasty thing.
I say nasty form of warfare, like any warfare is nice.
But, you know, it is close range chopping.
It's not nice.
Literally hacking and slashing.
Yeah, absolutely horrible.
Terrifying.
Yeah.
And you mentioned the shield wall.
That's something that I think.
To the best of my knowledge, both sides have this idea of the shield wall.
You know very much.
This linking of shields, I think is how they put it.
But I think it's quite interesting how often though certainly the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to some extent ASSA they talk about both sides fleeing.
You know, so it's not this case of.
Every last man standing has to fall before the battle is over.
There is a lot of retreating to a point of safety.
There are these sieges.
You know, it's maybe a more complicated form of warfare than we might immediately think.
But we don't know.
Yeah, we don't know.
You know, for this period, it's really hard to.
To work out things like numbers, for example, and because we don't have, you know it's like so some, for example going back centuries, the Battle of Teutoburg in the first decade of the first century CE, up in sort of what the Romans called Germania, where three legions are wiped out.
Very recently, sort of within the last couple of decades, they found the battlefield, and then you see the scale of the destruction.
But we've already said for Eddington, there is no battlefield that we can identify.
And that's often the case for warfare in this period, which means that sense of what that was like on the ground is actually really hard to to conceptualize.
I'd say an addition to that.
So one thing to add to that.
To come forward to the century afterwards, we have the Battle of Molden.
Again it's Anglo-Saxons versus Vikings, this time East Anglia, where they're fighting across this causeway, And there we have the poem that survives, and it's very bloody and very immediate.
And we have the names of men who fell, and we know a lot more about it.
So really, we have to look to the literature to give us that sense of the humanity.
I guess the point is, there's so much we don't know.
What we do know, Alfred has... reclaimed his position in Wessex.
Guthrum has been pushed back and forced to the point of surrender.
In the next episode we will look at what that surrender looked like, its impact and its significance.
