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Welcome to the History Extra podcast.
It's the final instalment today of our four-part Sunday series exploring the Viking Great, Heathen Army and Alfred the Great, as Eleanor Barraclough and James Osborne explore whether or not Alfred really deserves the title Great.
And if you've enjoyed this series, don't forget to check back next Sunday when Emily Briffitt will be talking to Thomas Asbridge about the causes and consequences of the Black Death.
Don't miss that.
And if you have any suggestions for future topics we could be covering on our Sunday series, do let us know.
Just drop us a line at podcast at historyextra.com.
But for now, on with today's episode.
Alfred the Great's victory over the Vikings at the Battle of Eddington marked the end of the Great Heathen Army, but it was far from the end of the story.
I'm James Osborne and in this final episode of our four-part series on the Viking invasion of Anglo-Saxon England during the second half of the 9th century, I'm joined by Dr Eleanor Barraclough to discuss how the result of the Battle of Eddington shaped Anglo-Saxon England's future.
Eleanor.
We ended the last episode with Alfred's victory over the Viking war leader Guthrum at the Battle of Eddington this really decisive moment in the history of Anglo-Saxon England.
Before we move on, can you just give us a recap how we got to this moment, because there are so many ups and downs and twists and turns.
Okay, this is the test, right?
So, 865, Great Heathen Army, Mitchell Harrow or Harthen Harrow arrives on the coast of East Anglia.
From there, they sort of head off north and They head into Northumbria.
You know, they kill the two kings up there.
They head down via Mercia back to East Anglia.
869, they kill King Edmund of East Anglia.
And then, you know, they set off again.
We've got, we mentioned Torksey, the overwintering site up in Leicestershire.
That's 873 to 874.
Then we get to Wessex down in Leicestershire.
South and West England, 871, Alfred becomes king.
By that point, he's already engaging in a series of battles some successful, some not with his brother, who was the king up to that point.
871.
And then we come forward to January 878.
We have the attack on chippenham.
Possibly during the christmas celebrations, alfred and his war band flee into the marshes.
There's sort of breakdown of social order.
Anglo-saxon england looks like it's on the brink.
The final kingdom looks like it's about to be extinguished.
But then he calls the people that he can call his troops to Edgebert Stone.
May of 878.
They have the Battle of Eddington.
They beat back the Vikings to their stronghold now at Chippenham.
And there, Guthrum, tired, hungry, cold, despairing, defeated, surrenders to Alfred.
That brings us to Alfred and Guthrum, these two men who have been adversaries now for quite a substantial handful of years, with Guthrum leading the Great Heathen Army's attacks on Wessex.
But Alfred doesn't kill Guthrum.
I always feel that Alfred and Guthrum there should be some sort of romance fanfic written about them.
I feel that's the story that's untold in the source material.
You could write it, Eleanor.
I could write it.
Maybe that's where my millions lie.
So the really interesting thing, as you say, that happens here is that Alfred doesn't kill Guthrum.
He makes peace with him.
This actually makes total sense.
And we've seen this before.
So we've seen this much earlier on the continent, for example with the Franks in their dealings with the Vikings.
One of the most useful things you can do with the defeated Viking is to make them an ally.
Because if you make them an ally, not only are you cutting off that particular violence stream, You're also stopping others from filling the vacuum, because suddenly you've got someone who also is invested in not having more Viking attacks.
And the best way to do that from a Christian perspective and, as we know, Alfred is a very religious, devout man is to convert your enemy to Christianity.
And so this is what happens first.
Gudrum and 30 of his men come to a place near Athelni called Alla.
And there, a few weeks after that battle where they're defeated, Gudrum is converted to Christianity.
And it's actually more significant than that, because what we're told by Asser is that King Alfred sponsors him.
He's his godfather, and they feast together for days afterwards.
And so this is something not only of a political allyship, but start of What essentially is a personal relationship forming there.
And it's worth just reminding ourselves, Guthrum had nearly killed Alfred.
Guthrum had forced Alfred temporarily from the throne and into these marshes.
He was the person who had nearly secured this total Viking conquest of Anglo-Saxon England.
But Alfred manages to find a way. to set that aside and make peace, and it's for pragmatic reasons.
Yeah, well, Asser, as we'd imagine he might, gives Alfred very noble reasons for this.
He says it's about compassion.
He feels compassion towards his defeated enemy.
Christian forgiveness.
Christian forgiveness.
And knowing Alfred, maybe there was an element of truth there.
I mean, it's not beyond the realms of possibility.
Having said that, it's also a very canny political move.
And I think this is where we start to see, in a way, the real reasons why Alfred then later acquires that great in his name, because actually it's what he does after Eddington that is more significant in terms of securing a long term peace.
So that brings us then to the treaty.
Now, it's called the Treaty of Wedmore.
We don't have something that we know to be the Treaty of Wedmore that survives.
But what we do have is what is sometimes just called the Treaty of Alfred and Gudrum.
And this is really significant because there they agree the peace terms that will ensure something approaching or so they hope longer-term stability.
So what they are agreeing on in this treaty which is likely to come later, so we're not talking immediately at that period where the baptism happens but what's agreed on is territorial areas, the fact that Gudrum is now king of East Anglia, legal disputes, how to resolve legal disputes, how to make sure that the value of a person's life on each side of the boundary is equal, a promise that they won't allow their own people to join each other's armies, a promise that they won't harbour each other's runaway slaves, which again tells you that enslavement is a part of both sides of that boundary line.
And then the line of the boundary itself is drawn.
And this is significant.
This later is sometimes said to be the boundary of the Dane law.
But that idea of what the Dane law is and that term only comes in a lot later.
However, it does seem, broadly speaking, accurate.
So it's up the Thames and then across the Lee, and then along the Lee to its source and then in a straight line up to Bedford.
And so it's essentially cutting the country slightly diagonally across.
And so Alfred has Wessex and Gudrum has a sort of East Anglia plus area.
So I guess the way I understand this is that if Alfred had just killed Guthrum, Guthrum possibly might have just been replaced by another Viking leader who could have come in and caused trouble.
Instead, what he does is he forces Guthrum to integrate into his own political religious system.
And that's a way of managing him.
He can manage guthrum if guthrum is the king of east anglia, because you know, alfred has had relationships with the kings of east anglia for a long time.
What he can't manage is this constant viking attack.
So instead he strips him of his vikinghood and that's how he deals with it exactly.
And there's other really famous examples of this happening, not least sort of a.
So what happens there in 911 is a Viking, a raider called Rollo.
And remember this is a story that is taking place both sides of the channel and across the North Sea.
But a Viking called Rollo is given the land that becomes Normandy.
The Normans being Northmen, you know, they are the descendants of the Viking raiders.
But the clever thing about that is that once Rollo has a stake in the land, he no longer wants to see Viking attackers coming in and out.
So it's a poacher turned gamekeeper situation to some extent.
It's kind of paradoxical, isn't it?
Because you're giving someone power, permanent power, but actually...
In a way, you're really bringing them on side and you're dealing with them.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And you see that reflected once.
You know it's not just that he's baptized, he's given an Anglo-Saxon name.
He's called Athelstan from then on.
So then, when he dies in 890, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the death of Athelstan, who was Gudrun.
So it's very much this sense of, okay, we will do this.
I will give you pretty much what you want.
You want land, you want power, you want wealth, but I will give it to you on my terms.
And I guess that again gets to the heart of the difference between the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse, doesn't it?
It is structural, it is political, it is religious.
Those are the differences.
And by eliminating that, Alfred is also eliminating Guthrum as a threat.
Yeah, exactly.
It's a really, really clever strategy.
And you see then, for example, in the coins that are produced in East Anglia under Guthrum Athelstan, you see that they are in a way
They're copying the coins that we see in Wessex.
They're not as good quality.
Sometimes you have this wonderful thing.
Yeah, you have this all over the place.
But the Vikings are really good at this, where they write on their coins.
They have letters, but the letters are meaningless because whoever's making the coins doesn't actually understand what they're writing.
It's just a copying of something they know to be the right sort of thing to copy.
They're also not so.
Alfred has had this series.
He's reformed the coinage and he reforms many other things.
So alfred's coins are big and chunky and have a lot of silver and athelstan's coins are a little bit thin and you know they're not quite as good.
But the fact is he's in the system now and it's.
It doesn't mean there aren't attacks.
We have records again in the chronicles and the annals that talk of other viking attacks during the.
But it's easier to deal with when you have someone on the inside.
I want to focus on the conversion for a moment.
This seems like it is a moment of real significance for guthrum personally, who will have been officially relinquishing his old beliefs, which is the Norse paganism that everyone is so familiar with.
Do you think that his adoption of Christianity would have been genuine, or would it have been just pragmatic?
That's a really good question.
I mean, the short answer is don't think we can tell.
But one thing I really love about the Vikings and sometimes it comes up in really funny ways is the fact they are very good at being pragmatic when it comes to religion if it's to their advantage.
So you see this on the continent as well.
There's a form of baptism called prime signing, which is a sort of half in half out form, and what that meant was, if norse traders were prime signed, the christians, the frankish christians, would be happy to deal with them and trade with them.
And so as far as the norse are concerned, it's like right well fine, that that works.
For me i don't really care.
So you know, you have other examples.
You have soapstone moulds in Norse trading sites, places like Hedeby on the German-Danish border, where they've got little holes where you can make Thor's hammers or you can make Christian crosses.
And once again, you know the feeling there seems to be very much.
Well, as long as you pay me, I don't care what religion you have.
And so, in some ways Possibly ironically, given how much Norse religion and mythology paganism, is part of our perception of the Viking world, there are many, many examples that we can think of where The Norse are able to be extremely pragmatic when it comes to belief.
What that says about, you know, the windows into men's souls, we can't really tell.
But in a way, maybe that didn't matter.
It's more fluid, isn't it?
Whereas Christianity is such a rigid system in this time.
Yes.
The Norse paganism is much more loose.
Yeah, they have this idea of the white Christ.
It's like, yeah, add another god to the pantheon.
That's fine with us.
And again, yeah, it's hard to tell, isn't it?
So maybe you do sometimes see in the narratives, in the sagas for example, you do get this sense of some Norse who are really not happy to convert because Their religion is also the religion of their ancestors.
Eric the Red?
Eric the Red, case in point, yeah.
Also, if you're a poet, because of course poetry comes, according to Norse myth, from the god Odin.
So again, you don't want to mess up your relationship there by saying you don't believe in Odin anymore.
Generally speaking, when it comes to politics and when it comes to money, they're happy to turn a blind eye.
This tactic of forcing your opponents or various people to conform to your religion.
This is actually something that the Vikings later on adopt, isn't it when the Norwegian king, Olaf Tryggvason?
He is a big Christianising king, and he does that to consolidate power around himself, doesn't he?
Exactly, exactly.
So, particularly looking towards Iceland, he sends a series of missionaries up there and they don't behave very well, I have to say.
But it's the sense of exactly as you say.
It's bringing people into your political sphere and to your area of control.
So I think perhaps people might assume that the broader Norse diaspora might have looked upon Guthrum's conversion.
As you know, shameful giving up your religion.
But maybe it wasn't quite like that.
Maybe the shame more came from the fact that he was just militarily defeated.
Possibly so.
But also, I don't think we can say for sure, how people generally responded.
Because we have to think, Gudrun gets a throne.
He gets an entire kingdom.
I mean, that's a huge deal.
Can you imagine when they first come in, the Great Heathen Army in 865?
If someone's just handed them the throne of East Anglia and quite a lot of mercia, he wins as well.
Everyone wins.
It's a really interesting moment, politically speaking.
This pragmatism on both sides leads to a situation that I don't think they could have possibly imagined a few decades earlier.
The other component to this, as you said, is territorial.
This is the other part of what's agreed between Alfred and Guthrum.
And you said that this is a proto-Dane law.
So the Dane law?
This was the division of Anglo-Saxon England between parts that are under anglo-saxon control and parts that under scandinavian control.
Yeah exactly, and it is generally referred to as the dane law.
The slight hesitation is just that the term doesn't come in for a while, but it is very much referring to that area under norse scandinavian danish, whatever we call it jurisdiction, and it's really interesting because we can trace that there are these.
If you look at a map of the British Isles and Ireland, but in this case England, where you have little dots for Norse place names, you can really see they track quite closely to that area that we know to have been under Norse jurisdiction.
So place names that end with by, which simply means farm.
It's like by today in modern Norwegian, just means a town or city.
Place names that end with thorp, again.
So these are ones you'd expect to see In sort of the top of the East Midlands and certainly going into Yorkshire.
Thorpe is a sort of cleared area, a secondary site.
You have Norse personal names that end up in the place names.
So Grimsby, for example, Grimers Farm, very obvious one.
You also and I really love this you have examples where you have place names that have shifted places to reflect Scandinavian pronunciation.
So shipton, with that soft sh goes to skipton, so that hard sk that you get.
Or Cheswick, or you know, Chiswick in London as it is becomes Keswick or Keswick, you know.
So it's this idea of there's hardening of those consonants that very much reflect Scandinavian pronunciation at the time.
Yes.
And that is one of the really interesting things that results from this Danel, this division of land.
I mean, I'm from the Northwest England, Wirral specifically.
So I grew up surrounded by Greaseby, Frankby, Kirby, West Kirby.
Thingvor.
Yes.
So these incredibly Viking sounding place names.
And then I moved across to York.
And so I'm also surrounded by Bishop Thwaite and Grimsby.
You're basically just a modern day viking heathen army.
You're just, you're one roving around, roving around, hopefully not pillaging, just enjoying the place names.
Less pillaging, definitely less, but it is a really interesting marker of evidence of how much Viking influence there was on the future of Anglo-Saxon England.
This turns from Anglo-Saxon England to Anglo-Saxon England, with major Viking influence on the culture, on the place names, on so many aspects of life.
Is there any way to know what life might have looked like for these Anglo-Saxons who were living in places that have now become part of this Viking Danelaw territory?
Yeah, it's a really, really important thing to consider.
There's various ways we can approach it.
And yeah, you're right, it goes from Anglo-Saxon.
So the term we often say is Anglo-Scandinavian, and that is very much this area.
Archaeologically speaking, there seems to be a period where, immediately following this division, there's some social disjunction.
There's a sense that basically, there's a process by which Scandinavians are taking over some of these settlement sites.
Sometimes they move locations slightly.
It's There's just this moment of shift.
You can imagine there probably are quite a few Scandinavian settlers who are looking for land.
And at that point, if someone's already on the land, there is going to be some degree of displacement.
So sometimes you see the farms shifting locations slightly.
We're not trying to say it was all just a happy Scandinavian Anglo-Saxon bubble and there was never any problems.
There's something of a shift, but it's not as significant as we might think.
And one way we can look at that is through modern language, the fact that we have so many everyday Norse languages, words in modern English which come from this period of settlement.
So again, if you're seeing that, you're seeing significant amounts of interaction.
It's true that the languages are already quite similar.
But if you compare that, for example, to when the Normans come in the, And you don't see that same shift in that everyday language.
You see a shift in say, religious language and legal language, but you don't see that lower down so much with everyday words, with the Norse you do.
Egg husband glitter knife sky window.
You know really ordinary words, not just words, that you need in order to make sense of something that doesn't have terminology already in the language.
So there is this permanent Norse cultural influence on Anglo-Saxon England that comes directly stemming from this great heathen army and their arrival and those 13 years between their arrival and their defeat of the battle of eddington.
Moving back towards alfred, Do we have any idea what the story looks like for him following this moment?
And this is a really important part of the story, because we see things here that we wouldn't necessarily expect to see.
Some of these are in terms of sort of military organisation.
So we saw during the period of these raids and these overwintering parties, part of the problem is you have no standing army.
If you have no standing army, by the time you've called everyone together to fight, it's already happened and they've gone off again.
So Alfred does reorganize that, it looks like.
So he creates what's basically a feared situation, as it is known in Old English, where you have half the able-bodied men at any point, basically in the army.
He also has a process of Essentially sort of town planning is like the least sexy two words, I think, in the English language.
But it's really important here.
The sense of bergs that he creates, like B-U-R-H.
I think it's around 33, and it's basically defences.
And he makes it so...
Wherever you are in the kingdom, you are able quite easily to access one of these defended burrs in case of an attack.
So you have somewhere to go.
So these burrs are fortified market towns, essentially, aren't they?
The fortifications are built up again from earlier Roman fortifications.
So Bath is a good example of that.
There's a few where he's really saying, right, this place needs to be fortified.
People need to be able to get somewhere fast.
So militarily speaking, there's stuff that he puts in place.
But famously, there's also a really important program of literacy, literary reform.
And this is at the heart perhaps once he's sort of saved the kingdom, saved Wessex, all the rest of it, there's a sense of kind of greater political unity.
We start to see him using that term, king of the anglo-saxons.
He's uniting areas.
But then there is literacy and the learning, and this is at the heart of what i think makes alfred so extraordinary.
Past his military achievements, so much of his life has been dominated by this conflict with the Vikings.
And what we can see with the Burson stuff is that he's not complacent.
Even after Eddington, he's not complacent.
He's looking to the future.
He's looking for ways to fortify his land and Anglo-Saxon England from future attacks.
And, you know, You talk about the influence of Viking place names.
You see that word burr cropping up as a suffix in a lot of place names in England too, don't you?
Brombra, for example.
So this is part of what makes Alfred so great, isn't it?
He's both this immense military figure fighting these battles against the odds.
He's also intelligent.
He's also contemplative. humble, possibly.
He does really seem to be, I guess, a well-rounded and thoughtful ruler who is not complacent, who has been defined by this conflict and Exactly exactly.
And there are a couple of really interesting case studies we can use for this.
One of this is he's very keen on making sure that people can read throughout the kingdom and that learning isn't lost.
And so he starts this program of translation.
And Asser is very much, I think, within that context.
We have to understand what Asser is doing there.
One of the texts that he has translated is Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care.
And he adds a preface, which is really important because Alfred, explaining why he's doing what he's doing.
So he says.
I also remembered how I saw, before it had all been ravaged and burnt, how the churches throughout all England stood filled with treasures and books, and there were also a great many of god's servants, and they had very little benefit from these books, for they could not understand anything in them because they were not written in their own language.
As if they had said, our ancestors, who formerly held these places, loved wisdom, and through it they obtained wealth and left it to us Here.
We can still see their footprints, but we cannot track after them.
And therefore we have now lost both the wealth and the wisdom because we would not bend down to their tracks with our minds.
And so the really important thing there is he's already talking about the Viking depredations everything being ravaged and burnt.
We get a different sense of the scale.
But what he's also saying is No one can understand this stuff anymore, so he's going to have it translated from Latin into Old English and sent round the kingdom.
And so that gives us a sense of what he's doing.
There's a really wonderful, very famous artefact.
It's called the Alfred Jewel, and it's in Oxford in the Ashmolean Museum now.
And it was found very close to Atholni.
You know, the marshland fortification that we've talked about.
And it sits in your hand.
It's this wonderful sort of, you know, rounded shape, like a sort of computer mouse, as was.
And it has this human figure.
But what is so wonderful about this is around the edge is written the words Alfred Metsch Hecht.
So Alfred commanded me to be made.
And what it seems to be is an astel, a pointer.
You know that you would put a stick in, and then you trace the words along a page.
And we know again from this preface.
He says I will send a copy to every bishop.
See in my kingdom.
And in each book, there's an astle, you know, it's worth a huge amount of money.
And I command in God's name that no man take the staff from the book. nor the book from the church.
And this little potential, this astral, this jewel, still survives close to the marshes where we know that he spent so much time, close to where we know that Guthrum was then baptised afterwards.
And so this wonderful sense of Alfred, not only the warrior, not only the king, but Alfred the scholar, and Alfred the scholar who wants to make sure that learning isn't lost after these awful years throughout his kingdom.
It's fantastic to get a sense of him in his own words.
Yeah.
That's so rare.
For these Anglo-Saxon kings especially, it's so wonderful to get that insight.
And it really does paint a well-rounded portrait of him as yes, militarily able, but also thinking about the future.
And I'll tell you what, although, you know, as we talked about previously, no Guthrum saga, justice for Guthrum, etc., but...
Because of Alfred and what he did in his program of translation, we actually have, I think, the only one I can think of, a genuine, a written voice of.
A Scandinavian, a Norse person who visited Alfred's court.
We presume, after you know, all this had gone on.
Let's hope that Goodrum is now off in East Anglia.
This man is called Oktara and Oktara comes from Arctic Scandinavia, Arctic Norway.
And he travels all the way to the court of King Alfred and he has walrus ivory to give to the king.
And the reason we know about him is because one of the other texts that Alfred had translated was Orosius' history book from the 5th century.
Orosius from Spain.
And there, obviously, Oroseus didn't know anything about the Arctic.
And so in this Old English translation of Oroseus They insert Octora's account of the far north and it starts, which means Octora said to his lord King Alfred that he lived the furthest north of all northmen.
He comes from somewhere around what's modern day Tromsø.
And so again through Alfred, and this time nothing to do with the battles at his court, we have an Arctic traveller coming from that far north of Scandinavia, and we have his voice too.
And we have his voice, thanks to Alfred and his interest in literacy and translation.
Yes.
So throughout this, we haven't been referring to him as Alfred the Great, because that's not how he was known in his own time.
That was superimposed onto him.
However, he was pretty great, wasn't he?
Yeah, he was pretty great.
I know we don't want him to.
It's not that we don't want him to be great, but It's so often exaggerated, isn't it?
Exactly.
But honestly...
It's really hard not to say he was pretty awesome.
I think he stands much like you have George Washington standing as the archetypal president, neutral and militarily capable and wise to a degree.
Alfred is almost like the archetypal early English king.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And I suppose another way of putting it is not, Alfred couldn't possibly have been that great.
Oh, wait, he seems to have been.
We're really lucky in that we have, relatively speaking, a really rich body of textual source material through, for all its faults, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and through Asser.
And you know we look at other characters who have faded into myth.
You know Arthur being the famous one from that sort of post-fall of the Roman Empire in Britain.
And Maybe we need to think of it a different way.
We think no, history is full of really extraordinary people.
It's just that such are the vagaries of history that they very rarely survive in a record that we can access fully.
And so maybe that's the wonderful thing.
Alfred is extraordinary, but maybe there are other extraordinary people that we just don't know so well.
I think that's a really wonderful way to close this chapter.
But the final point I want to make is that this is a chapter, isn't it?
The story does continue.
The battle against the Vikings very much continues.
We know that from, you mentioned the Battle of Maldon.
This happens a hundred years later, and this is once again history repeating itself.
A Viking raid against the Anglo-Saxons.
We then have Harold Hardrada later on and, you know, Forkbeard and Canute in between that.
So the battle continues.
But nevertheless, this is really one of the pivotal moments, isn't it in the history of the Viking Age and in the history of Anglo-Saxon England?
Absolutely there.
Thank you for listening to these four episodes.
If you enjoyed this series and want to go beyond the podcast, you can visit the History Extra app, where I've curated a list of wider content that explores the intersection of the Viking Age with the world of the Anglo-Saxons, including more from Dr Eleanor Barraclough.
You can find a link to that in the episode description.
