Anglo-Saxons and the Pirates of Vin

The Anglo-Saxon response to the Viking invasions.


The story of England in the Middle Ages is an enchanting one. It’s a long, complex poem—illustrated in a few of the surviving manuscripts from that age—and traces in an undulating parabola the rise and fall of the ideas of men. Just a generation after the Venerable Bede’s death, in the late 8th century, the Vikings orchestrated their first strike. That famous raid, of course, was the initial act in what was to become a symphonic litany of incursions onto British soil.

It is difficult to gauge the exact effect of the Viking invasions upon the Anglo-Saxons, and while this essay will set out to bring some sense to that very topic, I concede at the outset the lack of space and time to adequately answer the question. In that vein, I would like to narrow my argument to concentrate on only a few of the primary events during this period (793-1066), and see if or how those events helped shape the overall Anglo-Saxon response to the Vikings.

The author through whom we can most closely conceptualize the early Norse invasions is Alcuin (735-804), the great displaced Northumbrian teacher and thinker at the court of Charlemagne, and so it is there that the story begins.

One immediately wonders upon reading the Letter of Alcuin to Ethelred, king of Northumbria, what darkness has come over the face of England. “Behold, judgment has begun, with great terror, at the house of God,” he chides—referring here to the Viking raid on Lindisfarne in the year 793. “God chastiseth every son whom he receiveth; and thus he perhaps chastised you more harshly, because he loved you more.”(1) In the eyes of Alcuin, the suffering of his kinsmen was a kind of Biblical scourging, a wrath of God’s making solely designed to test the weak faith of his children.

To be fair, Alcuin’s language should put in context. He is referring here—with intended irony—to the likeness between the sufferings of his kinsmen and those of Israel (one almost sees Alcuin as the Deuteronomistic historian in the foreign court), God has forsaken you, because you turned away from him. Alcuin’s religious advise to the paling faith of the English was not an isolated event. His clear message of ‘faith determines fate’ was foreshadowed in Gildas’ The Ruin of Britain. Gildas, like Alcuin centuries later, framed a geopolitical event in Biblical terms, and those terms were very stark indeed.

By exchanging the rhetoric of Alcuin for the insights of modern scholar and author Peter Hunter Blair, we might explain how the Anglo-Saxons (indeed, the whole of Europe) were unprepared to sustain the damage that they themselves (as invading Germans) inflicted only centuries previous.

The success of these expeditions [Viking] was mainly due to the complete unpreparedness of Britain to meet such attacks and it was this factor more than any other which led to the ultimate conquest of large parts of the British Isles. Once the most vigorous phase of the Germanic migrations was over, western Europe seems to have been so fully engaged in adapting itself to the resultant changes that the seas and their opposing shores were left undisturbed for a long time…The English themselves seem largely to have abandoned seafaring once they had become established in Britain….(2)

The causes, as Hunter Blair illustrates, really had nothing to do with faith and everything to do with the vacuous space left trailing in the wake of the Germanic invasions, a space capitalized upon by the Vikings, just as the Anglo-Saxons had benefited themselves from on the collapse of Roman culture. This is obvious now, and one wonders why it wasn’t so obvious to Alcuin residing in the court of Charlemagne. Alcuin must have, in some sense, aided in the geopolitical awareness of the court of Charles, thus it seems even more strange that he wouldn’t tell them to do the obvious: build yourselves a navy!

The Vikings were great seafarers and traders; their skill at maneuvering through rough northern seas gave them an obvious advantage. Donald Logan writes in his work The Church in the Middle Ages, of the Viking age:

Out of the fjords and viks (inlets) in their homelands, they sailed westward to the British Isles and further west to Iceland, Greenland, and the shores of North America…They sailed as pagans, as worshippers of anthropomorphic deities like Thor, the thunder god, Odin, the god of the spear, and Frey, the god of sexual pleasure.(3)

Fierce and feared, they rolled across the waves westward, taking different approaches to their plundering. At first, the raids were an entirely economic operation, sacking monasteries on the coast of England in the summer, and returning back home in the winter. Monasteries were easy targets, offering the Vikings high return for little risk, no doubt emboldening them to do it over and over again. Had Alcuin known that the Viking raid on Lindisfarne was only the precursor of a centuries long event (known as the Viking age, 793-1066), perhaps he would have offered more strategic and practical advise. As it was, he didn’t, and it took nearly another century for the Anglo-Saxon kings to birth a soul determined enough to deal with the issue, in the character known as Alfred the Great.

During the reign of Alfred (871-899), we begin to understand not only the psychological effect of the previous centuries attacks, but the fallout and disorder that those attacks produced. The political and religious confusion was so great that, upon success in defending the attacks of Guthrum in 878, Alfred spent the next 14 years designing a vast cultural and educational reconstruction program. It is difficult to know whether this lapse in cultural and literary knowledge was due to the loss of the libraries of Wearmouth and Jarrow, and other religious-cultural sites around England, or whether it was just a general slip in education. Either way, by Alfred’s time the renaissance of the Northumbrians, the age of Bede and Biscop, was nearly forgotten.

But Alfred was a clever king, and his treaty with Guthrum created a clear demarcation to the acceptable wave of the Viking hoard. The treaty begins:

First concerning our boundaries: up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to Watling Street.(4)

Geographically, the Norse invaders had control over most of eastern England, and much of the north. That Alfred and his progeny were able to wrest this tidal movement remained temporary at best; perhaps he understood that, and set out to make certain he brought a renewed cultural understanding in their language and ideas. It seems likely he did understand that his culture was itself at stake. One must act, sometimes with the sword, but most often with the word.

Alfred’s life and times mirrors a court already mentioned, that of Charlemagne. Alfred penned law codes (mostly Anglo-Saxon variations of Mosaic Law), translated numerous works including Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy and Pope Gregory the Greats Pastoral Care. There were seven works in total (described by Alfred as certain books all men should know), and translated from Latin into the local vernacular. Alfred’s great work was codifying law, history, and religion together, and writing it all down in Old English. But his project, despite procuring lasting cultural effects, only bought the Anglo-Saxon’s another century of security, and in the year 981, the Vikings, as if propelled by some epoch clockwork, returned.

In the 82 years between the death of Alfred and the new wave of Viking raids, the Anglo-Saxons (as a nation) had a chance to solidify themselves. They did that relatively well, and I might be tempted to say here that Anglo-Saxons won the long fight in the battle for England. Through the efforts of Bede, Alfred, and the voluminous work of medieval manuscript engineers, cultural ideas bent their way northward for much of the middle ages. The Anglo-Saxons represented a repository of western cultural evolution, and the Vikings had little choice but to submit to that dominant culture.

Just a decade after the raids of 981 occurred the Battle of Maldon. Led by Byrhtnoth, Ealdorman of Essex, the battle was fought near Northy Island. Memorialized as the last heroic Anglo-Saxon poem, it clearly shows the arrogance and determination on the side of the Vikings, and the conflict between cowardice and bravery on the side of the English. Byrhtnoth delivers a stirring rally to his forces, before dying in battle:

Can you hear, you pirate, what these people say? They will pay you a tribute of whistling spears, of deadly darts and proven swords, weapons to pay you, pierce, slit and slay you in the storm of battle. Listen, messenger! Take back this reply: break the bitter news to your people that a noble earl and his troop stand over here—guardians of the people and of the country, the home of Ethelred, my prince—who will defend this land to the last ditch.(5)

History has tended to look harshly on king Æthelred, enough to give him the honorific Æthelred the Unready for his apparent unsuccessful attempts at dealing with the impact of the Danish army. The Battle of Ashington (1016) pitched the last stroke against the head of a very determined nail. Cnut, son of the great Viking leader and military commander Swein Forkbeard, struck a deal with Æthelred’s son Edmund Ironside, allowing Edmund to remain king of Essex. Edmund died a year later, leaving Cnut as undisputed king of England for the next 26 years (1016-1042).

This was the great foreshadowing of the Norman invasions of 1066, leading to the famous Battle of Hastings. The Vikings had succeeded at barraging the Anglo-Saxons long enough that they relented the throne, abdicating a long line of familial kingships, marking the end of their state.

It seems fitting somehow to close mimicking the diatribes of Alcuin with the Sermon of the Wolf to the English, by Wulfstan (written in the early 11th century). Perhaps unstoppable change drives men to stretch their imaginations about the nature of change, the cause of cause: regardless, for Wulfstan, and Gildas and Alcuin before him, an old tradition of uttering apocalyptic reasons to geopolitical events is entertainingly potent. Wulfstan begins his sermon on a sour note:

Dear men, understand that this is true: the world is in haste and it approaches the end, and because it is ever worldly, the longer it lasts, the worse it becomes; and so it must necessarily greatly worsen before the coming of Antichrist because of the sins of the people, and indeed it will become then fearful and terrible throughout the world.(6)

God’s chosen people, again, being brought under the hammer of love and justice. It is a deal with the devil, in a way, to tie ones ship to the sails of the Tetragrammaton. For Wulfstan, this is the reality of Gods punishment. For modern scholars, it remains a poignant lesson of the rise and fall of empires and human ideal. Like the numerous other Germanic invasions before them, those of the Vikings ended in a similar fashion. They had the strength to attain the thrones of other states, but not the cultural strength to maintain rule under pagan practices. In nearly all cases, conversion was immediate and final.

In that sense, I repeat my earlier sentiment that it appears the Anglo-Saxons won the penultimate battle, while loosing the military one. Their culture was well dug in by 1066, and the only choice left to the Vikings was to embrace it.

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Footnotes:

1. Whitelock, ed., English Historical Documents, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (London, 1979), pp. 843.
2. Hunter-Blair, Anglo-Saxon England (New York, 2006), p. 63.
3. Logan, A History of the Church in the Middle Ages (London, 2003), p. 80.
4. Keynes, Lapidge, Alfred the Great (London.2004), p. 171.
5. Crossley-Holland, The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology (Oxford, 1982), p. 12.
6. Crossley-Holland, The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology (Oxford, 1982), p. 294.

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Reese 4.24.07

The above essay was written yesterday, and submitted this morning to my professor. I put it off to the last moment, and then had to spend the entire day composing it...but, as I've often thought, stress is inspirations inebriant. I enjoyed writing it, here's hoping you'll be entertained reading it.

Fair use of above material.