The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great (16 page)

Timing was, of course, critical to the success of Alfred’s plans. It was essential that the Wessex shires move swiftly and quietly to this meeting point, giving the Danes as little forewarning as possible. But there was an additional significance to the timing of Alfred’s summons. The Vikings had regularly exploited the Christian holy calendar to strike the Saxons at moments when they were least prepared. Now Alfred, in a perfectly poetic irony, chose to use the Christian calendar against the pagan invaders and appointed Whitsunday as the day of meeting. Whitsunday, or Pentecost, comes seven weeks after Easter and commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit onto the disciples of Jesus, empowering them to preach the kingdom of Christ throughout Israel and beyond.

By gathering the fyrds of Wessex at Egbert’s stone on Whitsunday, Alfred drew from the sense of hope and divine purpose that the season from Easter to Whitsunday regularly evoked among the Christian churches. By this point, most of the men of Wessex had not seen the king for some time and had only been aware of his continued resistance against the Vikings through the legends and fanciful tales about the king’s exploits that were being circulated throughout the Wessex villages. When the noblemen and their assembled armies finally gathered together at Egbert’s stone and saw the king in person, it was, as one of Alfred’s friends and biographers put it, as if the king had been restored to life after a terrible tribulation.

Despite the deep joy of seeing their king once more, as well as Alfred’s corresponding elation in finding that he still commanded an undying faithfulness from the warriors of Wessex, there was little time for celebration at this meeting. The gathering at Egbert’s stone turned quickly to the grim business at hand. An army of four to five thousand men, as Alfred had assembled for this Whitsunday reunion, could not be kept in the field without quickly attracting Guthrum’s attention. In fact, it was entirely likely that even then, as they welcomed their seemingly resurrected king, Guthrum had already received word of this new threat and was assembling his own forces for an attack. Alfred wasted little time in giving his orders to the commanding ealdormen. They were to spend one night at Egbert’s stone, and early on the following morning, they would break their camp and immediately march north, straight toward Guthrum’s stronghold in Chippenham. On the following day, the Wessex armies marched as far as Iley Oak on the edge of Warminster, where they made camp once more. By now Alfred had received word that Guthrum, too, was on the move.

Guthrum had indeed been alerted to the gathering fyrds of Wessex and had ordered his armies to prepare to intercept the approaching Saxon throng. Though the Viking king was surprised to hear that the outcast ruler had suddenly surfaced, and even more astonished to learn that Alfred was leading a full-strength army out of the Wessex wastelands, there was a corresponding relief that he would finally be able to face the king in open battle instead of endlessly searching the fens of Wessex for the elusive warrior. Guthrum hastily summoned his men to Chippenham and then, once a large enough force had been mustered, led them south to intercept the Wessex fyrds. After a day’s march south, Guthrum took the hill fortress of Bratton Camp, an Iron Age fortification whose earthen ramparts still stood, offering the Viking army an easily defended outer wall. More importantly, Bratton Camp offered a strategic position for cutting off the approach to Chippenham.

Bratton Camp sat fourteen miles south of Chippenham and two short miles from the Saxon village of Edington, the site of one of Alfred’s royal estates. Because of Bratton Camp’s proximity to this village, the descriptions of the battle that would soon ensue would regularly refer to this as the battle of Edington. The ancient fortress of Bratton Camp sat on the northern edge of a long, flat ridgeline that terminated at the Bratton Downs. On three sides, the Danish camp was protected by a steeply dropping slope, whose incline was much too steep to serve as an approach during an attack. This left the southern edge of the camp as the only possible access, where the ridgeline offered a broad and easy path to the camp.

Though the ancient fortifications could have been defended should Alfred have decided to lay siege to Guthrum, the lack of any water supply within the old earthen ramparts made Bratton Camp a less-than-ideal fortification for resisting a prolonged siege. Had Guthrum wanted to wait Alfred out, he would have been better off waiting in Chippenham where the fortifications, provisions, and water supply enabled the Vikings to be more prepared for a long siege. Instead, Guthrum, confident in his ability to crush this last bit of Wessex’s resistance, had chosen to march his men to Bratton Camp because he wanted to cut off Alfred’s advance north and force the king to face him in battle on the open fields before Edington.

By the time Alfred reached Iley Oak, he had already received word that Guthrum had left the walls of Chippenham and had begun moving south to halt the advance of the fyrds. There was now no chance of simply laying siege to the Vikings in Chippenham in order to bargain for their surrender and peaceful withdrawal. Like the Vikings who had already settled down in Northumbria and Mercia and had begun planting crops, Guthrum was no longer interested in a quick seizing of the danegeld of Wessex; he wanted to rule the kingdom unrivaled.

From Iley Oak, it would only take a short march the next morning before the Wessex warriors reached Bratton Camp, where the shieldwall of the Danes stood waiting for them. Thus, when the Saxon men laid down to sleep that night, under the early summer sky, they slept the uneasy sleep of men who knew they would face combat in the morning. That evening found the Saxon camp occupied with the business of preparing for battle—the last sharpening of the blades, a final checking over of the armor, and extended periods of private prayers. Many of the soldiers would also take a bit of time to bury or hide any wealth they might be carrying. By burying their coins, they robbed the enemy of the chance to grow wealthy from the plunder of the battlefield, should the Saxons fall in the fight. As they hid their wealth, however, they were sure to mark their hiding spots well so that, if they were to survive the morning’s combat, they would be able to locate and reclaim their small hoards.

Early the next morning, the Saxon warriors were roused by the unrelenting revelry of spring—from the cacophony of birds’ songs that sounded in the trees above them announcing the break of day to the cruelly early spring sunrise that set the horizon on fire and shone brightly in the squinting eyes of the still-groggy wakers. By mid-May, the horizon was already blazing at five o’clock in the morning. Shortly, the dew-drenched warriors had risen, eaten a final breakfast, and begun their last solemn march north. Within a few short hours, they were drawing near to Bratton Camp, the Viking stronghold.

Curiously, modern visitors of this battle site will notice that on the steep western slope, just below the still-discernable earthen ramparts of the old fortress, is another enormous white horse, cut into the hillside. Standing around one hundred feet tall, the Westbury White Horse towers over the valley below. The design of this horse, though definitely more horse-like than the elegantly iconic white horse that watched over the battle of Ashdown, seems much more static and stiff.

Much of the stiffness of the shape of the Westbury horse comes from the fact that in the early twentieth century the entire horse was filled in with concrete and then painted. Before the arrival of the concrete, the Westbury horse had been a chalk horse, whose image had been cut into the hillside in 1778 by George Gee. However, Gee had been motivated to design this new horse by another, older horse that had already been cut into the hillside. Apparently Mr. Gee did not feel that this older horse looked horse-like enough and replaced it with the figure now frozen in concrete below the ruins of Bratton Camp. The age of this earlier horse is difficult to discern. The earliest printed description of it can be dated as far back as only a century befor Mr. Gee. It is also possible that it dates back as far as the Anglo-Saxon period. Eighteenth-century depictions of the earlier figure reveal an image too Anglo-Saxon in shape for the idea to be dismissed easily. It is difficult to answer this question with anything more than speculation, but the appearance of a white horse on possibly two of Alfred’s most renowned battlefields is surely a strange coincidence.

© TERRY MATTHEWS CREATIVE

As Alfred led the Saxon army up the ridgeline, the fortified ruins of Bratton Camp finally came into view. In front of those ditchwork defenses stood the Viking army, already formed in their menacing shieldwall, hungrily beckoning the Wessex king forward to try one last time to drive them from his borders. Alfred halted the march and gave a hasty command to his men to draw their weapons and take their places in the Saxon shieldwall. As the Wessex soldiers clamored into their attacking formation, the king earnestly exhorted his men. He oversaw the formation of the wall, ensuring the shields of the front line were tightly overlapped and firmly held.

But knowing that the strength of the shieldwall depended on more than strength of grip, he sought to strengthen their courage and resolve with his words. He reminded them of their vows to their ring-giver and exhorted them to stand true to their bold promises. He derided the cowardice of every man who had ever run from a shieldwall. He extolled those faithful thegns who preferred to lie slain on the field of slaughter rather than to be found among those who broke the shieldwall and ran. He promised wealth and glory to the men who stood resolutely by his side in the coming onslaught. And he urged them to place their deepest trust in their merciful and mighty God. After thus exhorting his men, Alfred locked himself into the tightly woven shieldwall and advanced with his men toward the gore-hungry Viking army.

Neither the Vikings nor the Saxons brought any sort of mounted force to the combat, and so there would be no cavalry charge. Both armies tended to use archery only for hunting and left their bows behind when coming into battle. This meant that the shieldwalls had to move quite close before any actual combat began. But there was another sort of warfare that began long before any blows were landed—the psychological warfare of intimidation. Even as the Wessex army first began to form their shieldwall, they could hear the Viking warriors beating out a chilling challenge, rhythmically striking their spears upon the rims of their shields, drumming out an ominous cadence that rolled down the ridgeline and summoned the Saxons to the place of slaughter.