Offa and the Mercian Wars (18 page)

After subjugating the new Mercian king, Wiglaf, Ecgberht marched unopposed through Mercia as far as Dore near Sheffield, where he accepted the submission of the Northumbrians. In 830 he was in Wales, where the rulers again offered him tribute, but his triumph proved ephemeral, for the Chronicle entry for the same year says that ‘here Wiglaf obtained again the kingdom of Mercia.' As Stenton observes, this is unlikely to have been as a result of Ecgberht's generosity, despite a much later assertion by Roger of Wendover, or the pro-West Saxon Chronicle would have said so. Probably the annal refers to an otherwise undocumented Mercian revolt against the domination of Wessex, which resulted in the heartland of the kingdom quickly reverting to Wiglaf's control. He seems also to have recovered the London area, granting land in Middlesex in a charter of 831, and in 836 he was secure enough to be able to invite the Archbishop of Canterbury to a conference at Croft in Leicestershire. King Aethelstan of East Anglia resumed the minting of his own coins around 830, which suggests that he was also able to take advantage of the Mercian victory to throw off West Saxon rule. Meanwhile Ecgberht's fortunes continued to deteriorate. In 836 he was defeated by the Danes in what the Chronicle admits was a ‘great slaughter' in Somerset, and although he routed a combined Cornish and Danish force at Hingston Down in Cornwall in 838, he died a year later.

The locations of Ecgberht's last battles illustrate how, in the first decades of the ninth century, the forays of the Vikings had been diverted away from eastern England towards the north and west. Northumbria had been repeatedly ravaged, but most of the longships had sailed around the north of Scotland to pillage and settle the Shetland and Orkney Islands, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, North Wales and Ireland. Mercia had enjoyed nearly half a century of respite, but this was now coming to an end. In 840 Wiglaf was succeeded by Beorhtwulf, and two years later the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes ‘a great slaughter in London, in Quentovic, and in Rochester'. Quentovic, situated just across the Straits of Dover, was one of the main commercial centres of the Frankish Empire. Only one agent could have been responsible for this mayhem on both sides of the English Channel, and other Chronicle entries confirm the sense of growing menace as the Vikings tightened their grip on the seas around Western Europe. Later in 842 what was probably the same fleet, having sacked Nantes at the mouth of the River Loire, settled for the winter on the island of Noirmoutier, ‘as if they meant to stay for ever', in the words of a Frankish chronicle. This was the first time that a Viking army is recorded as wintering in its southern raiding grounds, but the experiment was successful, as the Franks made no attempt to storm the island stronghold and the raiders were able to resume their operations as soon as the weather improved.

Under the year 850, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the first appearance in England of this sinister new development: although temporarily defeated by a West Saxon army in Devon, ‘the heathen men stayed in Thanet over the winter.' At that time it seems that the ‘Isle' of Thanet at the north-eastern tip of Kent, where Margate and Ramsgate now stand, was a genuine island, offering the same sort of security against attack as Noirmoutier. King Alfred's biographer Asser, writing half a century later, claims that the raiders' base was Sheppey, a similar island closer to the mouth of the Thames, though the Chronicle dates the first overwintering in Sheppey to four years later. It is of course possible that both places were occupied at different stages of the same campaign.

Kent had remained under West Saxon control and was now permanently outside Beorhtwulf's sphere of influence, but London was still a Mercian city, and was clearly at risk from a Viking fleet based no more than fifty miles to the east. The king responded by raising an army and marching to its defence, but he was too late. In the spring of 851 a Danish fleet, which the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle estimates at 350 ships, sailed into the mouth of the Thames, sent a landing party to sack Canterbury, then descended on London.

At this point it is necessary to confront a longstanding problem in early medieval military history. Is 350 ships a plausible total, and if so how many fighting men does that represent? And more generally, how large were these Viking armies, against which the great powers of Western Europe seemed so helpless? Naturally their victims thought that their numbers were incalculable. The ‘Annals of Ulster', for example, describes how ‘the sea spewed forth floods of foreigners', so that the country was ‘submerged by waves of Vikings and pirates'. This idea was strengthened by the raiders' seaborne mobility, because the same group could attack targets many miles apart in quick succession, giving the impression that there were many such bands operating simultaneously. It has been argued that the smallest ships mentioned in the tenth-century Norwegian ‘Leidang', or national levy, had twenty benches for oarsmen, which assuming two men per bench, one rowing on each side, would give a minimum of forty warriors per ship. Other vessels were much bigger – the crew of Olaf Tryggvason's Long Serpent at the Battle of Svoldr in the year 1000 has been estimated as over 500 strong (Heath).

However, it is generally agreed that statistics from internal Scandinavian wars, which took place in coastal waters, are not relevant to the long-distance raids of the ninth century, on which the vessels also had to carry supplies and even livestock and could not have risked compromising seaworthiness by overloading. The ship excavated at Gokstad in Norway, believed to date from around the time of the attacks on London, has often been taken as typical of the vessels used in these campaigns. It is seventy-six feet long, built of oak, with sixteen benches each housing a pair of oars. Allowing for a captain, a steersman and a few other supernumeraries, an average figure of thirty-five crewmen per ship would seem reasonable. So if there really were 350 such ships in the fleet which attacked London, it could have carried as many as 10,000 men.

A counterargument has been put forward by P. H. Sawyer, who has claimed that even large Viking armies should be numbered not in thousands, but in hundreds. He reminds us of Ine's dictum that a ‘here' or raiding army could be anything from thirty-five men upwards. It is unlikely that any chronicler had the opportunity to count the huge fleets of hundreds of ships mentioned at critical points in the campaigns, and their numbers may have been exaggerated by popular rumour. Even if the count is roughly correct, it might include large numbers of smaller boats, either brought over from Scandinavia as ships' boats or requisitioned locally. And we should remember that the primary method of propulsion of the longships was sail, with oars used mainly in emergencies or for manoeuvring in the confined spaces of rivers and coastal waters. So they could have operated effectively with smaller crews than the number of benches provided would suggest, and may routinely have done so. On the other hand it is possible to overemphasise the small size of Viking armies. If the 260 or more bodies excavated at Repton (see page 169) are really casualties from the Great Army of 874, it was obviously possible for such a force to sustain losses of this magnitude and still remain in the field. A total strength of at least 1,000 can be assumed on this basis, but this was an exceptionally big army, recognised as such by the chroniclers on both sides of the English Channel.

Some explanation other than sheer numbers must nevertheless be sought for the success of the Viking armies in England and elsewhere. Tactically they enjoyed no decisive superiority over the English on land, as is proven by the number of defeats which they suffered. Their armament, in fact, was very similar to that of their Mercian and West Saxon enemies. Mail armour and iron helmets may have been more common among the invaders, but we have no reliable data on the proportion of men on either side who were so equipped, so it is hard to reach a firm conclusion. The long-handled two-handed axes associated with eleventh-century Danes and used by English huscarles on the Bayeux tapestry seem to have been unknown in the ninth century. It has been argued that Viking swords were made of better quality iron than English ones, and their more tapering blades and heavier counterweighted pommels made them better balanced (Loades), but this can only have provided a marginal advantage in the press of a ‘shieldwall' fight, though it might have been more useful in individual combat. The Scandinavians made considerable use of the bow, but as has been argued above (page 110) it cannot be proved that the English were not also effective archers. Similarly Viking battlefield formations can be shown to have been fairly sophisticated, at least if the late evidence of Saxo Grammaticus is accepted as relevant, but it is hard to believe that the English, with their long experience of internal wars, were not just as capable.

What the men who attacked Beorhtwulf's London almost certainly did have, however, was a psychological advantage. As seaborne raiders, whose movements were unpredictable and their numbers apparently huge, they would have been frightening enough to the levies of landlocked Mercia; their heathenism and their ferocious attacks on churches and monasteries as well as peaceful settlements must have added to the terror. On the other hand, the invaders would have consisted of the most desperate and warlike elements of their home countries, motivated by the desire to win their fortunes and by the knowledge that defeat so far from their homes was likely to result in their ignominious destruction. They were also largely immune to the logistic problems which the English encountered when raising large armies, and so they did not need to restrict their campaigning to particular seasons. The Vikings did not need supply trains as they were prepared to live off the land, indifferent to the damage this caused to the local economy, and in any case their ships were available to store and transport their loot. Paradoxically for such relentless aggressors, the one strategy which the invaders used time and again, and which their enemies found almost impossible to counter, was a defensive one. They would retire across the sea, or into fortified camps on islands, and then return to the attack when their enemies least expected them.

The notice in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is as usual too brief to reconstruct Beorhtwulf's 851 campaign in detail, but his army evidently attacked the enemy somewhere in the London area north of the Thames, only to be ‘put to flight'. This implies that the Mercians did not put up much resistance, but subsequent events show that they had fought hard enough to divert the Vikings southwards, and quite possibly to weaken them seriously. The Chronicle goes on to record that the Danish army crossed the Thames into Surrey, where King Aethelwulf of Wessex and his son Aethelbald brought them to battle at a place known as Aclea. The site has not been certainly identified but was probably at Ockley, six miles south of Dorking. Here the West Saxons gained the victory, and in the words of the Chronicle ‘made the greatest slaughter of a heathen raiding army that we have ever heard tell of.' The same entry records a perhaps even more significant development, for the West Saxons and their Kentish allies were now learning to take the fight to the enemy at sea: ‘And the same year King Athelstan [another son of Aethelwulf, and his viceroy in Kent] and ealdorman Ealhhere fought in ships, and struck a great raiding army at Sandwich, and captured nine ships and put the others to flight.'

This series of events seems to have marked a decisive turning point for Mercia. As well as defeat at the hands of the Vikings, the kingdom was being torn apart by internal faction fighting. In 849, according to the later ‘Life of Saint Wigstan' (Jennings), Wigstan, a grandson of Wiglaf and so presumably a rival for the throne, was assassinated by Beorhtwulf's son Beorhtfrith at a council meeting, along with three of his companions. Beorhtfrith had until then been the heir apparent, but he disappears from the sources thereafter, perhaps exiled by his father for the murder. Around that time the area which is now Berkshire passed – apparently peacefully – under West Saxon control, though its Mercian ealdorman, a certain Aethelwulf, retained his position. Beorhtwulf continued to undertake aggressive campaigns in Wales, and his troops were presumably the ‘Saxons' whom the Welsh Annals record as killing King Meurig of Gwent, also in 849.

After Beorhtwulf's death in 852 the kingdom adopted an increasingly subordinate role to the rising power of the West Saxons. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records how in the following year his successor, an ealdorman named Burhred, asked Aethelwulf for help in subduing the Welsh, who had obviously tried to throw off their allegiance in the wake of the Mercian succession crisis. The army of Wessex marched through Mercia, and together the allies managed to restore Burhred's authority among the Welsh kingdoms. Asser reports that Aethelwulf then returned home – but for a Mercian king to require West Saxon help to restore order in his own back yard was a new and worrying phenomenon. The alliance was cemented immediately afterwards by Burhred's marriage to Aethelwulf's daughter Aethelswith – celebrated, says Asser, at the West Saxon royal estate of Chippenham.

From this time onwards Mercia has often been seen as a mere vassal of the West Saxon kings, reversing the position of Offa's reign, but there is evidence that the kingdom remained genuinely independent, even though the alliance with Wessex had come to dominate its foreign policy. In 865 the Mercians attacked Gwynedd without West Saxon help, advancing successfully as far as Anglesey, and when, at around the same time, the coinage of the two countries was standardised, it was Burhred's designs which were adopted in Wessex (G. Williams, in Brown and Farr).

The same year, however, saw the beginning of a new and infinitely more serious threat from across the sea. The Danes had been temporarily diverted from south-east England by their defeat at Aclea, but they and their Norwegian cousins continued to prowl around the coast of Britain, striking wherever opposition was weak and on occasion penetrating far inland. One of Burhred's charters refers to events in 855, when ‘pagans' were in the country of the Wreocensetan, around the Wrekin in present-day Shropshire. This area is fifty miles from the open sea, and that the Vikings could appear even there indicates that few regions even of inland Mercia were entirely safe. It is likely that this was the same raiding army that attacked North Wales in 856 and was destroyed on Anglesey by Rhodri ap Merfyn, otherwise known as ‘Rhodri the Great', the king of Gwynedd. In 860 a great raid from the sea destroyed Winchester, before being defeated by the men of Hampshire and the former Mercian province of Berkshire under their ealdormen Osric and Aethelwulf. But in 865 the enemy finally arrived to stay.