ALFRED AS WARRIOR

By Charles Oman

ALFRED AS WARRIOR

Of all the aspects of Alfred’s many-sided life there is none more interesting, yet more baffling, than his military career. We know its outlines: his lot fell in the direst time of storm and stress that had ever come upon the English; he weathered the tempest which had so sorely buffeted his father and his brothers, and steered the ship of the state into calmer waters. We have a not inconsiderable bulk of records concerning his campaigns, yet again and again the why and the wherefore of triumph and defeat elude us. The all-important details which would explain why things went ill in 872 and well in 878, why Basing saw a disaster and Buttington a victory, are withheld. The unwearied king marches east and marches west, now with a large army, now with a mere handful of men; he reaches his foes and brings them to bay; then “the heathen are put to flight,” or, on the other hand, “after great slaughter on both sides the Danes hold possession of the place of battle”; but whether superior tactics, or superior numbers, or superior endurance won the day is concealed from us. It is seldom that even the most vague and general features of the fight are narrated: of really important engagements like Ashdown or Eddington, or the struggle on the Lea, we know only just enough to make us desire to know more.

Fortunately we are able to make out a good deal more about the strategy than about the tactics of Alfred’s campaigns. His itineraries are generally preserved, and the natural features of hill and vale and marsh and wood can easily be ascertained. Similarly there is a certain amount to be recovered concerning his work as a military organiser, though here our authorities give us hints rather than facts, and make it very hard to disentangle his reforms from those of his worthy successor, Edward the Elder.

When Alfred first looked upon the face of war, the English had been already engaged for some seventy years in their great struggle to drive off the Vikings, and were prospering little in the attempt. The period during which the invaders had contented themselves with sporadic descents on the towns and monasteries hard by the sea, was long over. They were now cutting their way deep into England from every side, and prolonging their stay more and more every year. While Alfred was still a child by his mother’s knee, a yet more threatening stage had been reached: instead of returning to their homes by the Danish and Norwegian fiords, when autumn drew to an end, the enemy had begun to fortify some ness or island by the English shore, and to abide there all the winter months. The period of objectless plunder was drawing near its end, and that of settlement and conquest was approaching.

It is not hard to make out the main causes of the ineffectiveness of the resistance which the English kingdoms offered to the invader; they were much the same as those which were to be seen in the Frankish empire on the other side of the British Channel—the want of any central organisation for combined defence—the want of any large bodies of professional fighting-men, fully equipped with the best arms of the day—the scarcity of fortified places—the non-existence of a war-fleet. In respect of the first of these matters the English were in some ways more unfortunate, in others happier, than the Franks. On the Continent the Vikings were confronted by a vast empire which was beginning to drop to pieces from its own weight; the realm of Charlemagne would have split up into national kingdoms even if there had been no invaders from outside to hasten the process. Particularism and heritage-partition were the order of the day; it was impossible to hope that the numerous descendants of the great Carling house would loyally aid each other against the external enemy, or that their heterogeneous subjects would care much for the woes of their neighbours. In England, on the other hand, the national evolution of the times was tending towards union. Even before the effects of the Danish invasions began to be felt, the states of the Heptarchy were already beginning to draw together into larger units. Offa the Mercian (755-794) had been suzerain of all England in a far truer sense than any of the early “Bretwalda” kings that were before him. He had annexed kingdoms like Kent, Essex, East Anglia, instead of merely making their monarchs do him homage. These states rose again for a short space at his death; but when Egbert won the supremacy for Wessex a few years later, the same tendency was apparent: that great warrior was able to incorporate the old realms of Kent and Sussex with his ancestral dominions, nor did they ever again free themselves from dependence on the house of Cerdic. It was clear that England was tending to group itself into no more than three or four large states: the smaller tribal nationalities were beginning to be absorbed in the greater. Thus, though Egbert and his successor Ethelwulf were kings south of Thames alone, and only enjoyed a precarious suzerainty north of it, yet there was some hope for the future. The fatal disruptive tendencies visible among the Franks were not paralleled on this side of the Channel.

In the second point wherein the old Christian kingdoms were at a disadvantage when struggling with the Dane—the want of a large and well-armed body of trained fighting-men—England was probably in a worse condition than her continental neighbour. Both possessed two classes of warriors—a small body of wealthy landed vassals of the king, bound to him by special oaths of allegiance, and the general levy of the country-side, torn from the plough when necessity demanded. The former were more or less professional warriors: the English “gesithcund man holding land,” if he neglected his lord’s summons to join the host, forfeited his estate and paid a crushing fine as well: the ordinary peasant, the “ceorlish man,” only suffered pecuniary punishment for the same offence. The gesiths, or thegns, as they were now beginning to be called, a wealthy, well-armoured military class, were the core of the national host. The rude masses of the half-armed country folk were a far less efficient part of the military forces of the realm. But in England the thegnhood does not appear in the ninth century to have reached nearly the same stage of relative importance as had the Frankish vassals. They would seem to have been less numerous in proportion to the size of the states, and less powerful in the realm. As a combatant body, too, they were inferior, for the Franks had taken to fighting on horseback, and every vassal came to the host not only well armed, but well mounted. The English were still fighting on foot like their ancestors: they did not, indeed, learn cavalry service till the eleventh century. In contending with an active and rapidly moving enemy like the Dane, this want of horsemen was a terrible drawback to the English host.

The third source of weakness which we have named—the scarcity of well-fortified strongholds—was felt both on this and on the other side of the Channel. Neither Frank nor Anglo-Saxon had made any systematic attempt to keep up the great fortresses which they had inherited from the Romans. But here again the English were at a greater disadvantage than their continental neighbours. They had neglected scientific fortification even more than the Franks. They mostly dwelt in open towns and villages; even the ancient Roman walls of great cities like London and York had been allowed to fall into decay. At most they surrounded important positions with a ditch and a stockade; of the building of an actual wall we hear only at one place, the Northumbrian capital of Bamborough. The Franks, among whom city life was far more important than in England, seem to have done somewhat more in the way of keeping up the old Roman enceintes of their great towns. They had also taken of late to the building of strongholds destined to hold down conquered territory. Charlemagne had warred down the obstinate Saxons mainly by rearing line after line of burgs among their heaths and forests. No great English king had yet tried to maintain his control over his vassal-states by such an expedient. Even if the Frankish burgs were but concentric rings of ditch, mound, and palisade, they were by no means lacking in importance in the day of danger.

In the matter of naval defence, on the other hand, there was more hope for England than for her continental neighbours. The Saxons and Angles had always been seafarers: the Franks had never taken to the water. Neither of the nations possessed any regular war-fleet, but in the one the national genius was favourable to its creation; in the other it was not. We hear, indeed, long before Alfred’s day, of intermittent attempts of English kings to do something on the seas. The most notable was the assault on Ireland which the Northumbrian Ecgfrith made in 684. In the days of Alfred’s own father, Ethelwulf, there was at least one endeavour to meet the Danes upon the water: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells how the Kentish alderman Ealhere “fought in ships” at Sandwich, and “took nine ships of the heathen, and put the rest to flight” (851). It is possible that the same chief was engaged in a second naval battle two years later, for in an unsuccessful attempt which he made to turn the Vikings out of Thanet “there was much slaughter and many men drowned upon both sides.” Thanet being then separated from the Kentish mainland by a broad estuary, it is conceivable that there was some fighting on shipboard on this occasion also.

But any small naval resources which England possessed in the second half of the ninth century seemed hopelessly inadequate to impose the least check on the Danes. The invaders came in squadrons numbered by the hundred vessels. Even after Alfred had begun to take in hand a scheme for building a regular fleet, the English ships were only counted in tens or scores. In our own days a power possessing some few vessels, and expecting invasion, would turn them to use by setting them to watch for the enemy, discover him, and give early knowledge of his approach, or to follow his course and divine his intentions. But such tactics demand vessels that can keep the sea for long spaces of time and in any weather. Neither English nor Danish galleys were suited for such work: they preferred coasting voyages, and touched the shore frequently, creeping from cape to cape and from isle to isle. The only voyage across a broad and open sea was that which was made when a Viking fleet ran straight across from the southwestern cape of Norway instead of coasting along the Danish and Frisian shore. The Scandinavians were daring seamen, but their skill and pluck was shown rather by the way in which they felt their way along dangerous, rock-bound coasts, like those of the Hebrides or Western Ireland, than by passages across the high seas. For such crossings they waited for long spells of fine weather, in order to run the least possible risk. This was only natural, for their ships were but long, light, undecked vessels, depending mainly on their twelve or sixteen oars a side, and only using their sails when the wind set fair. To face a really serious Atlantic storm they were wholly unfitted, and even the rough weather of the Channel could be too much for them. In 877 a whole fleet of a hundred and twenty ships was wrecked near Swanage on the cliffs of the Isle of Purbeck. It was no wonder that they preferred to pick their weather, and to hug the shore, in order that they might run into the nearest haven when a tempest seemed at hand. The seamanship of the English was undoubtedly inferior to that of the Scandinavians in the ninth century, and we may guess that in handiness as well as in numbers they were wholly unable to vie with their enemies before Alfred’s day.

The years 840-880 were the darkest period in the dismal century of the Viking raids. Neither in England nor on the Continent had there been found any effective way of resisting the invaders, nor any great warrior who could inspire his subject with the energy and courage that was needed to face the ever-growing evil. Kings like Ethelwulf or Charles the Bald, however good their intentions, were wholly inadequate to the task. Their warlike sons, Louis III., the victor of Saucourt, and Ethelred, the victor of Ashdown, were cut off in the prime of their years, just when they were beginning to win themselves a name. The Danes went where they would, no longer taking to their ships when the national levy came out against them, but stockading a camp and defying the owners of the soil to evict them from it. Almost always the assaults made on these strongholds ended in disastrous failures: it is hard to say whether the repulse of Charles the Bald at Givald’s Foss (852), of Ethelred at Reading (871), or of Charles the Fat at Ashloh (882), was the more heart-breaking to the landsfolk. It seemed impossible to burst through the bristling line of stakes and ditch manned by the veteran axemen of the heathen bands.

The fact was that the rank and file of the Viking hosts were individually superior to the peasant-levies that strove to overwhelm them. In a Frankish or an English army only counts and aldermen, thegns and wealthy vassals, wore the steel helm and the ring-mail byrnie: the masses that followed them to the field had no more than spear and shield, possessing no defensive armour whatever. The Vikings, on the other hand, were professional fighting-men, armed not only with the “war-nets” that their own smiths could make, but with the spoils of a hundred victorious fights. It was no wonder that they could hold out against very superior numbers of the raw, half-armed militia of the English Fyrd and the Frankish Ban. In the ages when personal skill with axe and sword and trained agility of body counted for so much, one practised warrior was worth two farmers fresh from the plough. It required a vast preponderance of force, or a very skilled and fortunate leader, to enable the Christian host to inflict a really crushing defeat on the invaders.

When Alfred was a child the problem seemed growing more hopeless day by day. Even the greatest cities of Western Christendom were falling a prey to the heathen. London had been taken and sacked in 851, Tours in 853, Paris in 857, Winchester in 860. The invading hordes, now carried in fleets of three or four hundred sail, came ashore where they would, seized horses in the country-side and rode across the land, plundering far and wide, to some appointed spot to which their fleet came round and joined them. Or they would draw their ships ashore at some convenient estuary, set a guard over them, and send the rest of the host to make a circular raid, which finally took them back to their camp and their vessels. The former plan was the better, since if the ships ran out to sea after throwing ashore the landing force, the defenders of the realm did not know where the march of the enemy would be directed; while if the fleet was immobilised on some ness or island, it was easy to intercept the raiders, who were bound to make their way back to their base.

The lowest pitch of despair seemed to be reached when in many regions rulers and people ceased to try to defend themselves against the Danes, and merely strove to procure a precarious respite from their oppressors by bribing them to depart and transfer their ravages to other shores. This was done in 865 by the Kentishmen, in 866 by the East Angles, in 869 by the Mercians. Of course the expedient was futile; the news that one Viking host had received a handsome tribute only drew down another, set on obtaining similar booty.

Finally, there came the last step of all: not content with plunder and blackmail the invaders began to think of taking up their permanent residence in the land and making its unfortunate inhabitants their subjects. The idea had already occurred to Jarl Thorgils in Ireland, but his ephemeral kingdom had disappeared at his murder. Now it was renewed in England in 868, after the battle of York, the most fearful disaster which had yet befallen any of the Christian kingdoms. The Danes had stormed the Northumbrian capital: they had slain the two rival kings, Osbert and Ella, who combined to attack them: all the thegnhood of the northern realm had perished. Taking up their quarters in the ancient city of Edwin and Oswald, the conquerors began to parcel out the neighbouring region among themselves as a permanent possession.

It was in the year after this terrible downfall of the Northern Kingdom that Alfred made his first campaign. He was now nineteen, and had just married his Mercian bride, Ealhswith, the daughter of Alderman Ethelred. The enterprise in which he was engaged was one of a very typical character—a dozen expeditions with the same unfortunate end could be cited from the English and Frankish annals of the third quarter of the ninth century. A large Viking host had entered Mercia and forced its way up the Trent as far as Nottingham. King Burgred sent to Wessex to beg the aid of his brother-in-law Ethelred, who marched to his help, taking his brother Alfred with him as second in command. The united hosts of the two English realms were too large for the Vikings to dare to face them in the open field. They stockaded themselves in a great camp on the banks of the Trent and waited to be attacked. The landsfolk laid siege to the stronghold, and strove to storm it; but they utterly failed to break their way in. After lying some time before it, they dispersed in despair: Ethelred and Alfred went home: the unfortunate Burgred then asked for terms, and got rid of the Vikings for a short space by paying them a large tribute. The Danes returned to York, lay there for one year, and then threw themselves upon the East Angles. They slew King Edmund, “the Martyr,” scattered his army, sacked the towns and monasteries of Norfolk and Suffolk, and made themselves masters of the whole realm (870).

Next year the turn of Wessex came: the Mercians had at least bought two years of respite by the treaty of Nottingham. Marching from East Anglia the “Grand Army” of the Vikings crossed the Thames, seized Reading, and stockaded a great camp in the angle between the Kennet and the Thames to serve as a base for their ravaging parties. But in spite of a dozen disasters suffered during the last forty years at the hands of the same enemy, the spirit of Wessex was not yet quenched. Its shire-levies loyally answered King Ethelred’s call, and gathered in great strength opposite the Danish camp. The Berkshire fyrd even succeeded in bringing to bay and destroying at Englefield a large plundering party headed by a Jarl. But the main body of the Vikings was not so easily disposed of. A general attack on their stronghold, headed by Ethelred and Alfred, proved wholly unfortunate. When the assailants had wearied themselves in vain attempts to hew their way through the stockade, and drew off repulsed, the enemy made a sudden sortie: “bursting out of the gates like wolves,” they fell on the shattered ranks of the men of Wessex, drove them away, and held possession of the battle spot. Thinking apparently that the English were disposed of so far as further fighting was concerned, the Vikings now started for a raid westward along the Thames valley: the camps at Sinodun and Pusey, both large and formidable structures, possibly represent their halting-places on the first and second nights of their advance. The third day took them to Ashdown, in the “Vale of the White Horse.” But they found there was still heavy fighting in prospect: the untiring Ethelred and Alfred had rallied their beaten host, and were now hanging on the invaders’ heels and making it impossible for them to scatter after plunder. The heathen kings Halfdan and Bagsceg thereupon determined to take the offensive, and to attack and scatter the men of Wessex before proceeding farther with their raid. They were encamped high on the ridge of the Berkshire Downs, while Ethelred and Alfred lay at some distance below them.

Two such warriors as the sons of Ethelwulf were not likely to decline a fair battle in the open. When the Danes drew up in front of their camp in two heavy bodies, the English arrayed themselves in two corresponding masses. It is now that we get our first concrete and personal notice of Alfred as warrior. His brother the king, pious even to superstition as his father had been, lingered behind in his camp hearing the mass. News was brought him that the Danes were on the move, but he swore that he would not leave his tent till the priest had finished the last word of the service. Alfred meanwhile, not less pious but more practical than his brother, was in his proper place at the head of his division. He waited long for Ethelred, but the king came not, and meanwhile the Danes were drawing near, moving downward in good order along the hillside. If they struck the English host while it stood idly halted on the lower slope, it was certain that they would bear it down by their mere impetus. Then Alfred, taking all the responsibility upon himself, ordered the men of Wessex to advance up the ridge. The four hostile divisions met with a great crash on the down-side, where a single stunted thorn was long pointed out as the actual spot of collision. The struggle was long and fierce; but Alfred, “pushing uphill like a fierce wild boar,” broke the Danish line, and finally the invaders gave way and fled. King Bagsceg and five earls, two Sihtrics, Osbiorn, Fraena, and Harald were slain, with many thousands of their men. Ethelred only arrived in time to urge the pursuit, which was continued for two days, till King Halfdan and the wrecks of his host succeeded in sheltering themselves behind the palisades of their camp at Reading.

Western Christendom had won few such victories over its invaders; yet all the fruits of the success vanished unaccountably in a few weeks. How it came to pass we cannot say, but only fourteen days after Ashdown another fight took place at Basing, a dozen miles south of Reading, and this time Ethelred was defeated. Two months later the war was still lingering on the borders of Berks and Wilts, and a battle was fought at Marton, near Bedwyn, in which Ethelred and Alfred were thoroughly beaten, and the king mortally wounded. He died at Eastertide, and his decease was at once followed by his brother’s election to the throne (871).

Hitherto, save at Ashdown, it has been impossible to separate Alfred’s doings from those of Ethelred. We may guess that much of the untiring energy shown by the men of Wessex was due to the activity of the Etheling rather than to that of his pious elder brother; but we can prove nothing. When, however, Alfred begins to reign in his own right, we can at last make him personally responsible for the conduct of the war.

At first, it must be confessed, we can detect little more than mere courage and perseverance in the young king’s conduct. Of generalship we find no evidence. His first battle was a disaster. The victors of Marton, strengthened by a large new “summer-army” from over-seas, pressed deeper into Wiltshire. Ere Alfred had been a month on the throne, he met them near Wilton, but his army was small. The spirit of Wessex had begun to fail after a year in which eight engagements with the invaders had already been fought, four of which had been bloody defeats. The thegnhood was terribly worn down in numbers, the shire-levies so discouraged that they came to the muster in number far smaller than usual. But Alfred nevertheless offered battle. Taking up a strong position on a hill, he repulsed the Danes with great slaughter when they attacked him. But his army, carried away by their ardour, charged down from its favourable post to cut up the defeated enemy. The Vikings rallied, and turned on their scattered pursuers, whom they finally drove from the field. Thus inauspiciously began Alfred’s independent military career. But in spite of their victory the Danes, who had suffered almost as much as the English in this year of battles, consented to retire from Wessex on receiving a moderate sum of money. Alfred paid them, though he must have been aware that he was only buying a short respite. Time, however, was all-valuable to a king who wished to reorganise his exhausted realm.

For the next four years (872-875) there was comparative peace in Wessex: the enemy was employed partly on the Continent, partly in the conquest of Mercia, whose eastern half they annexed in 874, handing over the western part as a vassal kingdom to “an unwise thegn named Ceolwulf,” who fondly thought that it was possible to settle down as a vassal of the greedy Northmen. Alfred’s main endeavour in these years was to develop a navy; he “built galleys and long-ships,” and exerted himself to find trained crews for them, hiring “pirates”—converted Danes, we may suppose—to teach his own men seamanship. The beginnings of this national fleet must have been modest, for the chronicler thinks it a fact of note that the king’s galleys were able in 875 to attack seven Viking ships, take one, and chase the rest out to sea. Two years later, however, the squadron, as we shall see from its doings, must have developed to a more formidable strength.

It was not till 876 that Alfred’s reorganisation of his realm was put to the test. In that year a great Viking host under the kings Guthrum, Oskytel, and Amund made a sudden dash into Wessex, appeared in Dorsetshire, and seized Wareham, where they stockaded themselves between the Frome and the Trent in one of their usual water-girt camps. Alfred was soon upon them with the whole levy of Wessex, and held them so tightly blockaded—he made no attempt to storm their works after the experience of Reading—that they asked for terms, gave hostages, swore their greatest oath, and promised to depart. But when the king was off his guard all that part of the host that was provided with horses made a sudden sally, slipped through the English lines, and rode day and night till they reached Exeter, which they took by surprise. There they again stockaded themselves, and lay entrenched for the winter of 876-877. The indefatigable king followed them, again drew lines round their camp, and beleaguered them till they were oppressed with famine. They were depending for their relief on a squadron which was to run down the Channel and join them at the mouth of the Exe; but Alfred sent his fleet, such as it was, to intercept the incoming pirates. There was an engagement somewhere off the south coast, from which the Danes retired without winning a victory, and immediately after a great storm cast their vessels on the cliffs of the Isle of Purbeck. A hundred and twenty galleys, with all their crews, are said to have perished near Swanage. Reduced to despair by this news, the Danes at Exeter asked for terms, and departed for Mercia before the summer was out.

This campaign had been such a complete success for Alfred that the events of the next year are a perfect surprise to us—as indeed they were to the contemporary observer; “slay thirty thousand of these heathen in one day,” says Asser, “and on the next sixty thousand will appear.” In the first days of January 878 the main army of the Vikings, starting from Mercia, made a sudden and unexpected descent on Wiltshire, cutting the West-Saxon realm in twain. From a central camp at Chippenham they raided east and west into Hampshire on the one side and Somersetshire on the other. At the same time a separate pirate fleet which had spent its Yule in South Wales crossed the Bristol Channel and threw itself upon North Devon. It must have been the sudden and unexpected character of such an attack at mid-winter which for a moment seemed to have crushed Wessex. The king, who appears to have been in the west at the time, threw himself into the Isle of Athelney with a small band of his thegns and personal retainers, and there built his famous stockade in the marshes of the Parret. Elsewhere there was panic: many men of note fled over-seas to the Franks: large districts offered tribute and submission to the Danish king Guthrum.

But the worst of the panic only lasted a few weeks: before Easter the men of Devonshire rallied and cut to pieces at Kenwith the army from South Wales, slaying its leaders, Ingwar and Hubba, and 1200 of their followers, and capturing their famous Raven standard. Somewhat later the levies of Somerset, Wilts, and Hampshire assembled in the forest of Selwood under the king in person and marched against the Danish camp at Chippenham. The invaders, thinking they were strong enough to fight in the open, moved out to Eddington to meet the advancing English. There they were routed in a battle of which we know no details, save that the king’s men fought in one dense mass—not in two, as at Ashdown—and that the fight was long and desperate. The defeated host fled to its stronghold at Chippenham, on the east bank of the Avon. Alfred followed hard upon them, and, pushing up to the very gates of the stockade, built a camp almost in actual touch with it, so as to make any sortie well-nigh impossible. The Danes were quite unprepared for a siege; they had fondly imagined that Wessex was their own, and had accumulated no stores. In fourteen days they were starved out, and concluded with the king the famous pact which is often, but inaccurately, called the Peace of Wedmore. King Guthrum and thirty of his chiefs consented to receive baptism, did homage to Alfred, and undertook to withdraw from his realm and to trouble him no more. These conditions, it is surprising to find, were punctually fulfilled; the Viking became a Christian, and withdrew his host first to Cirencester in Mercia and then to East Anglia, where they all settled down and gave no trouble for some years. A great fleet which had come up the Thames as far as Fulham, and had been harassing Kent and Western Wessex, lingered some months after Guthrum’s defeat, but gave up its enterprise in the spring of 879, sailed off eastwards, and set itself to ravage Flanders.

The peace of 878 is rightly taken as the turning-point of Alfred’s reign. He had so thoroughly impressed upon the Vikings the notion that in Wessex they would meet hard blows and small plunder that for some years they gave his realm a wide berth, and devoted their main attention to the Frankish kingdoms, where the imbecile Charles the Fat was just about to start upon his disgraceful career. It was more profitable to blackmail realms whose kings shirked battles and proffered rich tribute than pay a visit to the indefatigable ruler of Wessex. The events of 872-878 had made Alfred thoroughly well acquainted with every wile of Danish warfare; he was not likely again to be taken by surprise, or caught unawares by an attack in time of truce or negotiation. In the numerous wars of his later years he shows a mastery over his opponents which he was far from possessing in the days of Reading or Wilton. In especial the great struggle of 893-896, when he had to face dangers quite as complicated and pressing as those of 872 or 878, found him so well prepared that its issue was never seriously in doubt, though the seat of war was perpetually shifting over every region between Kent and Chester, Essex and Exeter.

The first occupation to which Alfred seems to have devoted himself after the peace of 878 was the further development of his fleet. In 882 he actually went out with it in person and destroyed a small Viking squadron. In 885 he took the more daring step of sending it northward into hostile water. The East Anglian Danes having, after seven years of peace, broken their pact with him, he sent a squadron from Kent all up the Essex coast, and destroyed sixteen long-ships at the mouth of the Stour. Unfortunately his victorious vessels were intercepted by the whole force of the Danelagh ere they could return, and suffered a disastrous defeat. It was not till some years later, and when his last great war on land was over, that Alfred tried his final naval experiment, building “long-ships that were nigh twice as large as those of the Danes, some with sixty oars, some with more. They were both steadier and swifter, and also higher than others, and were shaped neither as the Frisian nor the Danish ships, but as it seemed to himself that they would be most handy.” The natural result was the destruction of more than twenty Viking ships along the south coast in the sole summer of 897.

The second expedient which Alfred took in hand was the systematic construction of fortifications. Not only were the towns encouraged to surround themselves with strong ditches and palisades, but “burhs”—moated mounds girt with concentric rings of ditch and stockade—were erected at strategical points. London, recovered from the East Anglian Danes in 886, was made far stronger than it had ever been before by the patching up of its ancient Roman walls. It was filled with a new colony of warlike settlers, and became an outpost of Wessex to the north of the Thames. The consequences of the fact that the larger English towns were no longer open but well fortified are clearly seen in Alfred’s later wars. The Danes cannot capture important places at the first rush, as they had done with York, Winchester, and London thirty years before. They have to lay siege to them in full form, and always before the siege is many days old the indefatigable king appears with an army of relief. The invaders had then either to fight, to take to their ships, or to stockade themselves in their entrenchments and suffer a leaguer themselves. Generally they chose the second alternative, as at Rochester in 886, when they abandoned their horses, their stores, and all their heavy plunder, and sailed off the moment that the army of succour came in sight. The same scene occurred at Exeter in 894. The importance of fortified places in keeping the Danes employed till the fyrd could assemble can hardly be exaggerated. The only stronghold which did not serve its purpose was a certain “work only half constructed in which there were some few countryfolk” near Appledore in Kent. This fell before an attack of the “Great Army” in 893.

It would seem that the system by which Alfred’s “burhs” were maintained was not unlike that which Henry the Fowler employed in Germany a generation later. To each stronghold there was allotted, as it would appear, a certain number of “hides” of land in the surrounding region. All the thegns dwelling on these hides were responsible for the defence of the burh. Probably they were bound to build a house within it, and either to dwell there in person, or to place therein a substitute equally competent with themselves for military purposes. It would seem that the “cnihten-guilds” of London and several other places were the original associations of these military settlers whom Alfred and his immediate successors placed in their burhs. Of the local distribution of the fortresses we have a precious relic in the “Burgal Hidage,” a document belonging to the very early years of the tenth century, which gives a complete list of all the land dependent on the burhs of Wessex, and certain materials for the regions north of Thames also, where Edward the Elder was beginning to encroach on the Danelagh by means of his new foundations. That the system started with Alfred rather than his son seems to follow from two passages in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, where, under the year 894, we hear of “the king’s thegns who were at home in the fortresses,” and again of the fyrd being “half in the field and half at home, beside those men that held the burhs.”

One of Alfred’s devices of fortification deserves a special mention, as being new on this side of the Channel, though some partial precedents for it can be found in the wars of the Franks. In 896 the main body of the Viking invaders had concentrated at the Thames mouth, and then pushed up the river Lea to a spot fifteen miles from London, dragging their fleet with them. Noting the narrowness of the river, Alfred built two formidable burhs, one on each side of the Lea, just below the Danish camp, and then obstructed the stream—probably by palisades and floating booms—between the two forts. The hostile fleet was so securely “bottled up” that the Vikings had to abandon it when they moved off on land, and the Londoners were able to bring back the whole of the galleys to their city when the enemy was gone.

Beside the building of a fleet, and the systematic use of fortification, we have strong evidence that Alfred employed the third means of strengthening his realm that we indicated in the beginning of this chapter—that of increasing the numbers of the thegnhood, the professional military class. We are unfortunately not able to separate his work from that of his successor, Edward the Elder; but as Alfred was a man of far more original genius than his son, we may fairly suspect him of being the originator of the scheme. It took the shape of enlisting in the ranks of the thegnhood all the more wealthy and energetic of the middle-classes both in the country-side and in the towns. Every ceorl who “throve so that he had fully five hides of land, and a helm and a mail-shirt, and a sword ornamented with gold,” was to be for the future reckoned “gesithcund,” or as another law phrased it, “of thegn-right worthy.” A second draft of the first-quoted document even allows a ceorl who has the military equipment complete, but not fully the five hides of land, to slip into the privileged class. The same privilege was given—as a premium for energy among town-dwellers—to “the merchant who had fared thrice over the high seas at his own expense.”

In return for their promotion in the social scale, ceorl and merchant alike were of course bound to follow the king to the field in full mail when he raised his banner, and no longer got off with the less arduous service expected from mere members of the shire-levy. We cannot doubt that such measures caused a large increase in the numbers of the thegnhood, and thereby provided the king with a more efficient and better armed core for the national host than his predecessors had ever possessed.

The campaigns against Hasting and the “Great Army” in 893-896 give, as we have already said, the best test of the efficiency of Alfred’s reorganisation of his realm. The invaders came ashore in two places, Appledore in Kent and Milton by the Thames mouth. Each host found itself at once observed by a strong force, and unable to disperse for plunder. The king “encamped as near to them as he had room for the wood-fastnesses and the water-fastnesses, so that he might reach either if they might seek a field. Then they tried to go through the weald in troops, on whichever side there might not be a force. But each troop was sought out by a band from the king’s host, and also from the burhs.” At last the whole host at Appledore broke up and tried to march northward. Alfred stopped them at Farnham, took all their baggage, and drove them in disorder over the Thames. The survivors joined part of Hasting’s army at Benfleet in Essex: the pirate king himself was absent with the rest. Following hard on their heels, the English stormed the camp, captured Hasting’s wife and sons, and took a vast booty. But Alfred was not in person with this army: a third Viking host of a hundred ships had laid siege to Exeter, and he had flown westward to deal with it. On his approach the Vikings took to their ships and sailed up to the Channel and round the North Foreland to Shoeburyness in Essex, where they picked up the remnants of the force that had been routed at Benfleet, and some other reinforcements from the East Anglian Danes. Swelled to a large host by these accretions, the army that had failed at Exeter marched across Southern Mercia to the Severn, and “wrought a work” at Buttington.[23] Here they were at once beset by Alfred’s son-in-law and most faithful servant, Ethelred Alderman of the Hwiccas, who had with him the levies of Somerset, Wilts, Gloucester, and Worcester. Expelled by him from the Severn valley, the Vikings retired to their kinsmen in Eastern England. There they again gathered reinforcements, and returning to the west, seized the empty walls of Chester—desolate since Ethelfrith had sacked the old Roman town in 606—and tried to establish themselves there. But again they had no rest: the forces of English Mercia, aided by the kings of North Wales, laid siege to the place. Starvation finally compelled the Vikings to abandon it. They went back through the friendly territory of their Northumbrian kinsmen, and returned to East Anglia (895). Their last effort was made in the following year, and consisted in the advance up the Thames and Lea which we have already had occasion to describe. There King Alfred assailed them in person, and captured their fleet by the device of blocking the river by his two burhs. Deprived of their vessels the Danes made their last march: pressing overland, they for the second time entered the Severn valley and “wrought a work” at Quatbridge.[24] Alfred followed them with the bulk of his host, and lay opposite them as the winter set in. It was impossible to get away from this untiring pursuer, and in the next spring the “Great Army” broke up in despair: “some returned to East Anglia and some to Northumbria, and those that were moneyless got themselves ships and went south over sea to the Seine. Thanks be to God, the army had not broken up the English race” (896).

These splendid campaigns, known to us, alas! only in outline, are the finest testimony to Alfred’s powers of organisation that could be given. Wherever the Vikings appeared they were at once met by a sufficient force and held in check. Their strong camps could not defend them as of old: sometimes the palisades were stormed, sometimes blockade did the work, and the host had to depart in order to save itself from starvation. Three years of perpetual disaster tired out at last even the obstinacy of the battle-loving Northmen. They dispersed and sought other scenes of activity and enemies less formidable than the great king of Wessex.

For the last four years of his life Alfred was undisturbed save by trifling raids of small squadrons, which he brushed off with ease by means of the new fleet of “great ships” which he had built. The work of defence was done: Wessex was saved, and with Wessex the English nationality. In a few years the king’s gallant son, Edward the Elder, was to take the offensive against the old enemy, and to repay on the Danelagh all the evils that England had suffered during the miserable years of the ninth century. That such triumphs lay within his power was absolutely and entirely the work of his great father, who had turned defeat into victory, brought order out of chaos, and left the torn and riven kingdom that he had inherited transformed into the best organised and most powerful state in Western Europe.