Alfred the Great – 3

Foolish king’s thanes, turned into King Popinjays by pagans and left to play at government on such terms, are not pleasant or profitable objects in such times as these of one thousand years since.

Continuing Alfred the Great’s Reign,
with a selection from Life of Alfred the Great by Thomas Hughes published in 1869. This selection is presented in 10.5 easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Alfred the Great’s Reign.

Time: 871-901
Place: Wessex

Foolish king’s thanes, turned into King Popinjays by pagans and left to play at government on such terms, are not pleasant or profitable objects in such times as these of one thousand years since — or indeed in any times, for the matter of that. So let us finish with Ceolwulf, just noting that a year or two later his pagan lords seem to have found much of the spoil of monasteries and the pickings of earl and churl, of folkland and bookland, sticking to his fingers, instead of finding its way to their coffers. This was far from their meaning in setting him up in the high places of Mercia. So they strip him and thrust him out and he dies in beggary.

This, then, is the winter’s work of the great pagan army at Repton, Alfred watching them and their work doubtless with keen eye — not without misgivings too at their numbers, swollen again to terrible proportions since they sailed away down Thames after Wilton fight. It will take years yet before the gaps in the fighting strength of Wessex, left by those nine pitched battles and other smaller fights, will be filled by the crop of youths passing from childhood to manhood. An anxious thought, that, for a young king.

The pagans, however, are not yet ready for another throw for Wessex; and so when Mercia is sucked dry for the present and will no longer suitably maintain so great a host, they again sever. Halfdene, who would seem to have joined them recently, takes a large part of the army away with him northward. Settling his head-quarters by the river Tyne, he subdues all the land and “ofttimes spoils the Picts and the Strathclyde Britons.” Among other holy places in those parts, Halfdene visits the Isle of Lindisfarne, hoping perhaps in his pagan soul not only to commit ordinary sacrilege in the holy places there, which is every-day work for the like of him but even to lay impious hands on and to treat with indignity, the remains of that holy man St. Cuthbert, who has become, in due course, patron and guardian saint of hunters and of that scourge of pagans, Alfred the West Saxon. If such were his thoughts, he is disappointed of his sacrilege; for Bishop Eardulf and Abbot Eadred — devout and strenuous persons — having timely warning of his approach, carry away the sainted body from Lindisfarne and for nine years hide with it up and down the distracted northern counties, now here, now there, moving that sacred treasure from place to place until this bitterness is overpast and holy persons and things, dead or living, are no longer in danger and the bodies of saints may rest safely in fixed shrines; the pagan armies and disorderly persons of all kinds having been converted or suppressed in the mean time; for which good deed the royal Alfred — in whose calendar St. Cuthbert, patron of huntsmen, stands very high — will surely warmly befriend them hereafter, when he has settled his accounts with many persons and things. From the time of this incursion of Halfdene, Northumbria may be considered once more a settled state but a Danish, not a Saxon one.

The rest and greater part of the army, under Guthrum, Oskytal and Amund, on leaving Repton, strike southeast, through what was “Landlord” Edmund’s country, to Cambridge, where, in their usual heathen way, they pass the winter of 875.

The downfall, exile and death of his brother-in-law in 874 must have warned Alfred, if he had any need of warning, that no treaty could bind these foemen and that he had nothing to look for but the same measure as soon as the pagan leaders felt themselves strong enough to mete it out to him and Wessex. In the following year we accordingly find him on the alert and taking action in a new direction. These heathen pirates, he sees, fight his people at terrible advantage by reason of their command of the sea. This enables them to choose their own point of attack, not only along the sea-coast but up every river as far as their light galleys can swim; to retreat unmolested, at their own time, whenever the fortune of war turns against them; to bring reinforcements of men and supplies to the scene of action without fear of hindrance. His Saxons have long since given up their seafaring habits. They have become before all things an agricultural people, drawing almost everything they need from their own soil. The few foreign tastes they have are supplied by foreign traders. However, if Wessex is to be made safe the sea-kings must be met on their own element; and so, with what expenditure of patience and money and encouraging words and example we may easily conjecture, the young King gets together a small fleet and himself takes command of it. We have no clew to the point on the south coast where the admiral of twenty five fights his first naval action but know only that in the summer of 875 he is cruising with his fleet and meets seven tall ships of the enemy. One of these he captures and the rest make off after a hard fight — no small encouragement to the sailor King, who has thus for another year saved Saxon homesteads from devastation by fire and sword.

The second wave of invasion had now at last gathered weight and volume enough and broke on the King and people of the West Saxons.

The year 876 was still young when the whole pagan army, which had wintered at and about Cambridge, marched to their ships and put to sea. Guthrum was in command, with the other two kings, Anketel and Amund, as his lieutenants, under whom was a host as formidable as that which had marched across Mercia through forest and waste and sailed up the Thames five years before to the assault of Reading.

Thomas Hughes begins here. John R. Green begins here.

More information here and here, and below.

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