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7

Dragon-Slayers

This is a very old story: the Danes who used to fight with the English in King Alfred’s time knew this story. They have carved on the rocks pictures of some of the things that happen in the tale, and those carvings may still be seen. Because it is so old and so beautiful the story is told here again, but it has a sad ending – indeed it is all sad, and all about fighting and killing, as might be expected from the Danes.

ANDREW LANG, ‘The Story of Sigurd’ (1890)1

In 850, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports, ‘heathen men stayed over the winter for the first time’. Although this notice passes without commentary in the Chronicle, dropped in almost as though it were an afterthought, the over-wintering of the heathens was the breath of wind that carried off the first leaves of autumn from the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. It was the harbinger of a storm that would not only strip those old oaks bare, but tear many of them up by their roots.2

Viking attacks had been increasing in volume and severity since the 830s, particularly in Wessex and the south-east. Between 840 and 853, this part of Britain was attacked at least fifteen times, and an attack is also recorded as taking place in Northumbria in 844 – resulting, disastrously, in the death of the king and his heir.3 The first raids on Lundenwic (London) occurred in 842 and 851,4 and there were attacks on Southampton and Portland (840), Romney Marshes (841), Rochester (842), Carhampton again (843) and Canterbury (851).5 Many of these seem to have started off as raids with, presumably, economic motives, and most seem not to have encountered serious resistance. On occasion, however, Viking raiding armies were intercepted by shire levies raised by local leaders or by the king, resulting in pitched battles in which Viking armies often took a serious mauling.

At the mouth of the River Parrett in 848, the men of Dorset and Somerset – led by their respective ealdormen, Osric and Eanwulf, and Ealhstan, bishop of Sherborne – ‘made a great slaughter’ of a Viking war-band.6 The Vikings were defeated again in 850 at a place called Wicga’s Barrow by Ealdorman Ceorl and the men of Devon,7 and in the following year King Æthelwulf of Wessex and his son Æthelbald routed the Viking army at a place called Aclea where they ‘made the greatest slaughter of a heathen horde that we have ever heard tell of’.8 Achieving a crushing victory over his heathen foes would have brought the king great personal satisfaction. In 843 he had gone to Carhampton with the intention of defeating a Viking army at the very place where humiliation had befallen his father, Ecgberht, in 836. But at the second battle of Carhampton, Æthelwulf too had been outfought. The victory at Aclea in 851, therefore, avenged both his own and his father’s shame, ending it the way that Anglo-Saxon feuds had always traditionally been settled: in blood.9

After this robust West Saxon response, Viking war-bands seem to have become wary of assaulting Wessex directly, with raids in southern Britain confined to Kent for the rest of the decade. But the Viking winter camps of 850 – or at least the concept of such camps – were never abandoned. It became possible for Viking armies to mount raids throughout the year, as seems to have been the case in the early 850s, and by living off the land they could keep large numbers of warriors permanently in arms. Reinforcements from overseas could join them unimpeded, and the numbers of men and the size of their fleets could therefore grow unchecked. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon warriors they faced, there was no imperative for them to return to their fields for the harvest, or – like their compatriots in Scandinavia – to stay at home when North Sea storms kept their ships moored over the winter.10

Conflict between Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had always been, to a certain extent, a ritualized activity. The phrase ‘ritual war’ is an unfortunate one, implying something lacking in severity (what one anthropologist has compared to ‘over-enthusiastic football’),11