From the peaceful labours which had occupied him for the last seven years, Alfred was recalled to the weary work of war by tidings of the return of the dreaded here to the English coast. During those seven years the chronicler had been nervously noting the deeds of “the army” beyond seas. They had been fighting chiefly in the north of Gaul, pressing up the rivers Somme, Seine and Marne, and even laying close siege for ten months (November, 885, to September, 886) to the city of Paris itself, a siege which the Emperor Charles the Fat had raised, not by arms but by the ignominious payment of tribute. It is easy to trace a connexion between these vehement attacks on Frankish territory and the resistance which, in our own country, from Athelney onwards, had been so valiantly offered by Alfred. But now the process was reversed, and the Northmen, severely handled by a Frankish king, were thrown back upon England. In the year 887 Charles the Fat, who had disgusted his subjects by his ignominious treaty with the Danes, was deposed from his imperial dignity, and Arnulf, his nephew, was chosen king by the Franks east of the Rhine, by whose aid he won for himself, nine years after, the grander title of emperor. In 891 he won a great victory over the Danes near the modern city of Louvain. Hereupon the Scandinavians, recognising that “Francia” was for the present closed against them by the might of this new German king, decided to try their fortune once more on the other side of the channel.
The operations of the five years that followed (892–896147) are described by the Chronicle in great detail and with unusual vividness and vigour. A recent editor148 calls the six or seven pages devoted to these campaigns “the most remarkable piece of writing in the whole series of chronicles”. It is allowable to conjecture that such a narrative, if not from Alfred’s own pen, comes from some person in the immediate neighbourhood of the king. Fresh and vivid, however, as the narrative is, it is not easy to discover therefrom the precise sequence of events. Different bands of Danes are seen to be operating in different parts of the kingdom, and the difficulty which they probably felt in combining their efforts meets also the historian who seeks to combine their narratives. Here it will be sufficient to indicate some of the principal stages of the contest.
The invasion of 892 seems to have been made by two bodies of Danes, acting to some extent independently of each other. “The great army” which had been defeated by Arnulf at Louvain, went westwards from Flanders to Boulogne, embarked from the latter port “with horses and all” in a fleet of 250 ships, and sailed across to the Kentish coast. According to their usual custom they made use of a river channel to penetrate into the interior; but the river up which they fared and which probably entered the sea at Lymne, has long since disappeared in that region of silted-up streams. Up the river they towed their ships for four miles, and there they found a “work” half finished and defended by a few rustics. Their capture of this work well illustrates a remark of Asser’s that “of the many forts which Alfred ordered to be built, some were never begun and others, begun too late, were not finished when the enemy broke in upon them by land and sea,” causing tardy repentance and shame on the part of the disobedient builders. The Danish army then constructed for themselves a “work” at Appledore, some twenty miles west of Hythe. The nature of these “works,” of which we hear so much at this point of the history, is explained to us by the Frankish chronicler who describes the Emperor Arnulf’s victory in 891, and who tells us that the Northmen “had according to their usual manner fortified themselves with wood and heaped-up earth”.149 The description points to a mound crowned with a palisading, such as the Romans had used to protect their encampments.
Meanwhile another horde, not so large as the first, and fleeing, not so much from the conquering sword of Arnulf, as from the famine which waited upon their own destructive footsteps, having crossed the channel with eighty ships, had entered the Thames and made a “work” in Kent near the Isle of Sheppey. The leader of this band was the far-famed Haesten or Hasting, a pirate who had sailed up the Loire to ravage Central Gaul in the year 866, and in the twenty-six years which followed had not often rested from the work of devastation. Between these two invading armies Alfred took up a position (893) in the great Andredesweald which stretched along the whole length of Kent and Sussex dividing the two counties, and from thence or from the burhs or fortresses which he had erected, forays were constantly made with some success on the unwelcome visitors. So things seem to have remained through the winter. At Easter the larger host, having broken up from Appledore, wandered through Hants and Berks, ravaging as they went. The young “Etheling” Edward, son of Alfred, being informed of their movements, and having collected his troops, pursued the spoil-laden plunderers and came up with them at Farnham. He fought them and gained a complete victory; the booty was all recovered and the robbers in their desperation swam the Thames without waiting to find a ford, and made their way up the little stream of the Hertfordshire Colne to the river island of Thorney. There apparently Edward was forced to leave them, for the fyrd was divided into two parts, each bound to serve for six months only. The time for relieving guard had now arrived, and while one half was marching “thitherward” (to the front) and the other half homeward, the favourable moment passed away for pursuing the Danes, whose king had been wounded in the late encounter. Some of the enemy penetrated to the coast, collected a hundred ships and sailed westward to make a raid on Devonshire, whither Alfred was forced to follow them.
Leaving “the great army” for a time, we turn to follow the fortunes of Hasting. It seems that he had pretended to imitate the example of Guthrum (who had died three years before, at peace with Alfred), and had expressed his willingness to become a Christian. He gave hostages, swore oaths of peace and friendship, and was probably baptised along with his two sons, the godfathers being Alfred and his son-in-law Ethelred of Mercia, his stout ally in all these campaigns. But some turn in the fortunes of war, perhaps the disloyal attitude of the Danes of Northumbria and Mercia, who were hungering for war, sent Hasting again into armed opposition. He made a “work” at Benfleet in the south-east corner of Essex, and as soon as it was finished he began, as the chronicler says with indignation, to harry that realm of Mercia which Ethelred, his godfather, was bound to defend. Alfred, who had been summoned to Exeter by the tidings of another Danish raid, now returned rapidly to London where a strong burh had been built, a stout-hearted body of citizens having been sworn to defend it. Marching forth with these and with his own troops, he assailed the “work” at Benfleet and carried it by storm. Great spoil was found there as well as many women and children—a sure token that the Northmen had come to settle in the land. All the treasure was gathered within the safe shelter of London-burh, but Alfred, recognising the obligations of spiritual kindred, though Hasting had so soon forgotten them, restored to the old pirate his wife and her two sons. After this the two Danish armies seem to have united and to have made a great “work” at Shoebury in Essex, not far from the abandoned Benfleet. Hasting henceforward fades out of the narrative, possibly unwilling to continue to fight against his generous foe.150
The avowed union of all the men of the “Danelaw” (as the district settled by the Danes was now called), both in East Anglia and Northumbria, gave a new character to the war. It was no longer a mere descent of sea-rovers on Kent or Devonshire; it was a terrible internal struggle, and all along the Watling Street, the boundary between the two kingdoms, the shuttle of war flew swiftly. Leaving their camp at Shoebury, the Danes marched up the valley of the Thames and across the country to the Severn. But now the whole forces of the kingdom were collected for the contest. Not only Ethelred of Mercia but “the Ealdormen of Wilts and Somerset and such of the king’s thegns as were then at home at the works, gathered together from every town east of the Parret, from both sides of Selwood, from the north of the Thames and the west of the Severn, and with them came also”—a memorable addition—“some part of the North Welsh race”. Evidently the Welshmen had learned by experience that there were worse enemies than the Saxons, and probably also the righteous rule of Alfred had won their confidence. The army thus collected marched after the Danes and came up with them at a place called Buttington on the Severn. For many weeks the two armies sat watching each other, the river flowing between them. At last, after the Danes had eaten most of their horses, they sallied forth and crossed the river to fight. The battle which followed was a bloody one, many of the king’s thegns falling; but the slaughter on the Danish side was greater, and victory remained with the English. Back into Essex fled the beaten remnant of the army, but having ere winter gathered to them many helpers from the Danelaw, and having entrusted ships and wives and property to the care of the East Angles, they once more followed the Watling Street into Cheshire, which for some reason or other (possibly connected with the Danish conquest of Ireland) they persistently made the objective of their campaign. Day and night they marched, till they came to the estuary of the Dee. Here, still surrounded by its grass-grown walls, lay the silent and ruined city which had for near four centuries resounded to the shouts of the twentieth legion, “Valerian and Victorious”. In its desolation it yet bore the name of “the camp of the legions” (lega-ceaster), but it was “a waste Chester”. A Chester it is still, by its picturesque medieval architecture pre-eminent above all others of its kind, but happily no longer waste. The fyrd hastened with all speed after the here, but failed to overtake them ere they had taken refuge in the ghostly city. They had, therefore, to be satisfied with destroying all the cattle and corn in the neighbourhood, slaying some straggling Danes and leaving nought but a hungry wilderness round the survivors. The blockade of Chester (894) was not a strict one; before long the Danes, urged by famine, broke out of the city, and escaping into the friendly Danelaw marched across the country to the island of Mersea at the mouth of the Blackwater, not far from their old winter quarters in Essex. At the same time the invaders who had been troubling Devonshire sailed homeward, but on their way harried the west of Sussex, until the burg-ware (townsfolk) of Chichester issued forth to battle, routed them, slew many hundreds, and captured some of their ships. Throughout this second Danish war, the martial ardour of the inhabitants of the burhs built or refortified by the king is very conspicuous.
It was now apparently 895, the fourth year since the great scip-here had appeared off the coast of Kent. The Danes who had wintered in Mersea, still hankering doubtless after the spoil of London, sailed round to the estuary of the Thames and towed their ships up the sluggish waters of the Lea, which now forms the boundary between Essex and Middlesex. Here, about twenty miles above London—that is, probably in the neighbourhood of Bishop Stortford—they wrought a “work,” and remained encamped for six months. When summer came a multitude of the burg-ware of London marched forth to storm the Danish work. This time, unfortunately, civic valour did not triumph. The burg-ware were put to flight, and four of the king’s thegns, who had been acting as their leaders, were slain.
Autumn was now approaching and it was important that the men of Essex should not be attacked while they were gathering in their harvest. Accordingly Alfred encamped in the neighbourhood of London. One day he rode up the Lea to reconnoitre the Danish position, and something in the course of the river suggested to his mind, fertile in expedients and enriched by the study of ancient historians, that it might be possible so to obstruct it as to hinder the escape of the Danes. The scheme ripened; he set two bodies of troops to erect works above and below the station of the ships. Ere the works were finished the Danes saw that their position was being made untenable; they abandoned the ships—probably by night—and marched off, still no doubt through the friendly Danelaw, till they came to Bridgnorth on the Severn, where they again wrought a work and fixed their winter quarters. While the fyrd rode after them towards the north, the men of London-burh came out and captured the ships, some of which they broke up and others, the more serviceable, they towed down stream to London. Such was the strange campaign of the Lea. Any one who knows the Lea in its present conditions, who has seen the sleepy bargemen gliding along from lock to lock, the anglers sitting all day on the banks which Izaak Walton has made classic ground, all the indescribable restfulness and tranquillity of the scene, will feel the contrast between this peaceful Present and the days when Alfred’s men were toiling at their noisy labours and when the heathens howled forth their execrations on finding their passage barred by the Saxons.
In the following summer (896) “the here went some to East Anglia, some to Northumbria, and those who were moneyless got them ships and fared over sea to the Seine. Thus had the army,” says the chronicler, “not utterly broken all the English race. But they were more fearfully broken during those three years by pestilence both of cattle and of men, especially because the most eminent of the king’s thegns died in those three years.” The chronicler then gives the name and rank of the chief victims of the plague: the bishops of Rochester and Dorchester, the ealdormen of Kent, Essex and Hants, a king’s thegn of Sussex, the town-reeve of Winchester, a grand constable (king’s horse-thegn) and many others.
Though the great land invasion was thus defeated, the king had still to deal with a harassing swarm of sea-pirates, whose long ships named “ashes,” built of the wood of the ill-omened ash tree, were constantly appearing off the southern coast, often manned by insurgent Danes from East Anglia and Northumbria. In order to grapple with these pestilent enemies Alfred turned shipbuilder. He may have already taken some steps towards this end, but the following entry in the Chronicle for the year 897 (= 896) is the earliest definite information that we receive as to the beginnings of England’s navy: “Then King Alfred bade build long ships against the ashes; they were full nigh twice as long as the others. Some had sixty oars, some more. They were both swifter and steadier and eke higher than the others. They were not built on Frisian nor yet on Danish lines, but as he himself thought that they might be most serviceable.”
An engagement of no great importance, which is, however, described in great detail by the chronicler, took place between the pirates and nine of the new ships which had been despatched by Alfred to stop their depredations, and had sealed them up in some estuary or land-locked bay (such as Brading harbour) in the Isle of Wight. While the tide was high the crews of the big English ships captured and slew to their hearts’ content, but when the tide ebbed they were left aground, as the chronicler says, “very inconveniently” half on one side of the estuary and half on the other, with the Danish ashes, also aground, between them. At dead low water the shore was firm enough for the Danish pirates to climb down out of their ship, paddle across the sands and challenge a fight with the crews of the three English ships nearest to them. For such small contending forces the battle seems to have been a bloody one. One hundred and twenty Danes fell and sixty-two English, but among these latter were many men of high rank, a king’s reeve and a king’s companion (geneat), and also many of the Frisian captains and sailors whom Alfred, knowing their nautical skill, had attracted to his service. When the battle was ended, in came the flowing tide, on which the Danish ships could float out to sea while the larger ships of the new navy were still lying “very inconveniently aground”. So the three pirate ships escaped for the time, but they were sorely strained and damaged, so that they could not all sail round the coast of Sussex. Two were wrecked on that coast, and their crews being brought to Winchester and led into the king’s presence, were ordered by him to be hanged. This order was not like the usual clemency of the king, but he probably felt that it was necessary to repress with a strong hand movements which were now no longer warfare but mere brigandage. The third ship escaped both the winds and the English pursuers, and landed her crew, a troop of sore-wounded and weary men, on the East Anglian coast.
Not more than four years of rest seem to have been granted to Alfred after the repulse of this last invasion before death ended his labours. There can be little doubt that some part at least of that plentiful literary harvest which was described in the preceding chapter belongs to these closing years. Especially interesting is it to note that, according to the judgment of the most careful modern inquirers, the king’s metrical translation of Boethius should be referred to this period. The proem to that translation alludes to “the manifold worldly cares that oft troubled him both in mind and body” when he was turning it from Latin into English prose, and then again to the cares, apparently the yet heavier cares, “that in his days came upon the kingdom to which he had succeeded,” but which did not prevent him—so high was his value for the great Consolatio—from “working it up once more into verse” as the reader may now behold it. All these cares were now at an end, and ended, too, all his noble toil for the defence, the enlightenment and the guidance of his people. He died on October 26, 900,151 in the fifty-third year of his age, and was buried in St. Swithun’s monastery at Winchester. In 903, however (according to the legend told by William of Malmesbury), as “the delirious fancies of the canons” declared that the king’s ghost, resuming possession of his corpse, wandered at night through their cells, the royal remains were transferred to the New Minster, founded by his son in fulfilment of a plan which Alfred himself had formed and had confided to his friend and spiritual adviser, Grimbald the Frank. In the reign of Henry I. the monks of New Minster migrated from their narrow domain within the city to a large and convenient site called Hyde Mead, on its northern side, and in their migration they took with them the body of the king. At the suppression of the monasteries Hyde Abbey fell into decay, and near the close of the eighteenth century the Hampshire magistrates purchased the site for the purpose of erecting thereon a county jail. The tombs were ruthlessly opened, the stone coffins were turned into horse troughs, the lead which covered a coffin, presumably Alfred’s, was sold for two guineas, and apparently the dust of the great king himself was scattered to the winds. No leader of the Danish army could have shown greater zest in the work of desecration. This New Minster at Winchester was consecrated by one of Alfred’s friends, Archbishop Plegmund, and numbered another of his friends, Grimbald, as first on its list of abbots. Its records, known as the Liber Monasterii de Hyda, furnish us with some valuable information concerning the reigns of Alfred and his sons.
As for the great king himself, several of the chroniclers, especially his kinsman, Ethelweard, and Florence of Worcester, have celebrated his praises in fitting terms, but his best epitaph is contained in three simple words of an unknown scribe of the twelfth century, “Alfred, England’s Darling”. His fame and the glory of his noble character have grown brighter as the centuries have rolled by, and at this day he is really nearer to the hearts of Englishmen than all, save one, of his successors.
The political boundaries of the Danish state recognised after the Peace of Wedmore have been sufficiently indicated by historians, and it may be said that for all practical purposes they nearly coincide with the old Roman road called the Watling Street, the sphere of Danish influence lying to the north and east, that of Saxon influence and rule to the south and west of that line, which, as previously remarked, coincides very nearly with the line of the London and North Western Railway. There is, however, another question both interesting and important: “To what extent did the Danish population fill up the district thus assigned to them?” In other words, “How far did the ethnological coincide with the political boundary?” This is a question which we have not as yet sufficient materials to answer fully or accurately. Much study and much patient research on the part of our local antiquaries, study of dialects and research in sepulchral tumuli, will probably be needed before we can say with certainty: “Here the old Anglian population remained preponderant, and here the Danish or Norwegian immigrants so filled the land as to make it practically a Scandinavian district”. But in the meantime some help is gained from a consideration of the place-names in the several districts of England; only we must beware of looking at the conclusions thus arrived at as final and irreversible.
Broadly, however, we may say with some confidence that place-names ending in ton, ham, yard and worth are Saxon or Anglian; those ending in by, thorpe and toft are Danish; in thwaite, garth, beck, haugh, and fell, Norwegian; in borough, probably Anglian; in wick or wich, if inland, Saxon, if near the sea-coast, Danish. Applying these tests we find evidence of considerable Danish settlements, but no Danish preponderance, in Norfolk and Suffolk. The great fen district round Peterborough seems to have been an impassable barrier, and we find no Danish names to the west of it; on the other hand, the Humber and the Wash must have been constantly visited by the ships of the vikings, for their shores swarm with Danish names. As has been said by Mr. Isaac Taylor,152 “A district in Lincolnshire, about nine miles by twelve, between Tattersall, New Bolingbroke, Horncastle and Spilsby, would appear to have been more exclusively Danish than any other in the kingdom. In this small space there are some forty unmistakably Danish village names, such as Kirby, Moorby, Enderby, etc., all denoting the fixed residence of a Danish population.” “The Danish local names radiate from the Wash.153 In Leicestershire, Rutland, Northamptonshire and Yorkshire the Danish names preponderate over those of the Anglo-Saxon type; while Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire and the adjacent counties, protected by the fens, present scarcely a single Danish name.” There can be no more striking proof of the absolute preponderance of the Danish element in the north-east corner of Yorkshire (where probably the influence of the invaders radiated from the estuary of the Tees) than the fact that Streanæshalc itself, the Anglian sanctuary, home of St. Hilda and meeting-place of the great Paschal Synod, meekly bowed its head to the alien yoke and accepted the Danish name of Whitby.
In the midland counties the most striking proof of the numerical superiority of the Danes was exhibited by the powerful confederation of the five boroughs, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford and Derby. It is true that only one of these bore an unmistakably Danish name, but the part which they played politically, their strong offensive and defensive alliance, seems to confirm the generally accepted conclusion that the five boroughs were essentially a Danish confederation. Going further north we find very slight indications of Danish settlement in Durham and Northumberland. This part of Northumbria the invaders seem to have visited only for ravage, not for settlement, being satisfied to leave it under the rule of some subservient earl, who might or might not be of their own race. Further north still, across the Scottish border, Danish names die out altogether; but when we go far enough we find abundant traces of the other great stream of Scandinavian invasion, the Norwegian, and about this a few words must be said in reference, not to Scotland (Shetland, Orkney, Hebrides, etc.), but to the western coast of England.
The place-names of Cumberland and Westmorland must always have arrested the attention of careful philologists. While the names of mountains and rivers, such as Helvellyn, Blencathra, Glaramara, Derwent, are for the most part of Celtic origin, we find a great number of names of villages and some also of hills and streams which evidently are Scandinavian rather than Celtic. Such are all the multitudinous thwaites and ghylls, the garths and haughs, and the frequently recurring beck for a stream, and fell for a high hill. Mr. Robert Ferguson called attention to the fact that this multitude of non-Celtic terminations—so remarkable in a country which actually bears the name of the Cymri—pointed to a large immigration of Scandinavians, not, however, of the Danish but of the Norwegian type. Of such immigration we have scarcely a hint in the chroniclers, but the philological evidence adduced by Mr. Ferguson154 is so strong that his conclusion has been generally accepted by ethnologists. As to the date of this migration, his theory is that after the Saxon king Edmund in 945 had overrun the district of Cumbria and had left it wasted and bare of people, the Norwegians from their stronghold in the Isle of Man, discerning their advantage, covered the Solway with their ships, and pouring into that land of mountains and lakes and long stream-watered valleys—a land so like their fatherland—settled there and made it their own. This migration he would therefore place in the latter part of the tenth century, between the just mentioned Cumbrian campaign of Edmund (945) and the similar campaign of Ethelred (1000) which was undertaken, Henry of Huntingdon says, against “the Danes” yet involved the ravaging of Cumberland.
However this question of the date may hereafter be settled, there can be little doubt that the race which peoples these two most picturesque counties of England is pre-eminently of Norwegian origin. There seems to have been two other settlements of Scandinavians which deserve remark. One was in that curious peninsula of Cheshire, called the Wirral, between the estuaries of Dee and Mersey, a region which teems with Norse names; and the other, an exceptional instance of a Norse settlement south of the Watling Street, was in the promontory of Pembrokeshire, where a number of towns and villages, of which the best known is the watering-place of Tenby, attest by their names their Danish origin.