The Burning Land

In the middle of the nineteenth century a railway line was made from London’s Fenchurch Street to Southend and, when excavating at what is now South Benfleet (Beamfleot), the navvies discovered the charred remnants of burned ships among which were scattered human skeletons. Those remains were over nine hundred years old, and they were what was left of Haesten’s army and fleet.

I grew up in nearby Thundersley (Thunresleam) where, in Saint Peter’s churchyard, was a standing stone pierced by a hole, which local lore claimed was the devil’s stone. If you walked three times around it, counterclockwise, and whispered into the hole it was said that the devil could hear you and would grant your wishes. It never worked for me, though not for lack of trying. The stone, of course, long predated the coming of Christianity to Britain and, indeed, the arrival of the Saxons who first brought the worship of Thor and so gave the village its name.

Just to the west of our house was a precipitous slope that falls to the plain leading to London. The escarpment is called Bread and Cheese Hill and I was told the name came from Saxon times and meant “broad and sharp,” being a description of the weapons used on the hill in a long ago battle between Vikings and Saxons. Maybe. Yet, strangely, I never learned how important Benfleet was to the long story of England’s making.

In the last decade of the ninth century, Alfred’s Wessex was again under determined assault from the Danes. There were three attacks. An unknown leader (whom I have called Harald) led one fleet to Kent, as did Haesten. Meanwhile the Northumbrian Danes were to mount a shipborne assault on Wessex’s south coast.

The two Danish forces in Kent had both been raiding in what is now France and had accepted lavish bribes to leave those lands and assault Wessex instead. Haesten then took more bribes to withdraw from Wessex, and even allowed his wife and two sons to be baptized as Christians. Meanwhile the larger force of Danes advanced westward from Kent, eventually to be defeated at Farnham in Surrey (Fearnhamme). That battle was one of the greatest victories of the Saxons over the Danes. It shattered the large Danish army, forcing the survivors to carry their wounded leader northward to find refuge on Torneie (Thorney Island) a site that has now disappeared under the development surrounding Heathrow Airport. The fugitives were besieged there, but the siege failed and the Saxons again used silver to get rid of them. Many of the survivors went to Benfleet (then part of the kingdom of East Anglia) where Haesten had made a fortress.

Haesten, despite his protestations of friendship, now went on the offensive by attacking Mercia. Alfred, who protected Mercia, was distracted by the assault of the Northumbrian Danes, but he sent his son Edward to attack Haesten’s base at Benfleet. That assault was wholly successful and the Saxons were able to burn and capture Haesten’s vast fleet, as well as recapture much of Haesten’s plunder and take countless hostages, including Haesten’s family. It was a magnificent victory, though it by no means ended the war.

Mercia, that ancient kingdom that filled the heart of England, was without a king in this period, and Alfred, I am certain, wished to keep it that way. He had adopted the title “King of the Angelcynn,” which described an ambition rather than a reality. Other Saxon kings had claimed to rule the “English,” but none had ever succeeded in uniting the English-speaking kingdoms, but Alfred dreamed of it. He would not achieve it, but he did lay the foundations on which his son Edward, his daughter Æthelflæd, and Edward’s son, Æthelstan, succeeded.

The device that saved the Saxons from defeat was the burh, those fortified towns which were the response of rulers all across Chris tendom to the threat of the Vikings. Viking soldiers, for all their fearsome reputation, were not equipped for sieges, and by fortifying large towns in which folk and their livestock could take shelter, the Christian rulers constantly thwarted Viking ambitions. The Danes could roam across much of Wessex and Mercia, but their enemies were safe in the burhs that were defended by the fyrd, a citizen army. Eventually, as at Fearnhamme, the professional army would face the Danes and, by the end of the ninth century, the Saxons had learned to fight every bit as well as the northmen.

The northmen are usually called Vikings and some historians suggest that, far from being the feared predators of myth, they were peace-loving folk who mostly lived amicably with their Saxon neighbors. This ignores much contemporary evidence, let alone the skeletons that are doubtless still buried beneath the railway at Benfleet. Alfred organized Wessex for war and built hugely expensive defenses and he would have done none of that if the Vikings were as peaceably inclined as some revisionists want us to believe. The first Vikings were raiders, looking for slaves and silver, but soon they wanted land as well and so settled in the north and east of England where they added to England’s place names and to the English language. It is true that those settlers eventually assimilated into the Saxon population, but other northmen still lusted after the land to their south and west, and so the wars continued. It was not till William the Conqueror came to England that the long struggle between Scandinavians and Saxons ended, and William, of course, was a Norman; the word denoting “northmen” because the rulers of Normandy were Vikings who had settled on that peninsula. The Norman Conquest was really the last triumph of the northmen, but it came too late to destroy Alfred’s dream, which was the creation of a unified state called England.

I have been (and will be) mightily unfair to Æthelred. There is not a scrap of evidence to suggest that Alfred’s son-in-law was as small-minded and ineffective as I make him out to be, and I recommend, as a corrective, Ian W. Walker’s superb book Mercia and the Making of England (Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 2000). As for Æthelred’s wife, Alfred’s daughter Æthelflæd, she has been strangely forgotten in our history, even at a time when feminist historians have labored to bring women out from the shadows of patriarchal history. Æthelflæd is a heroine, a woman who was to lead armies against the Danes and do much to push the growing frontiers of England wider and deeper.

Farnham and Benfleet were two body blows against Danish ambitions to destroy Saxon England, yet the struggle of the Angelcynn is far from over. Haesten is still rampaging through the southern midlands, while Danes rule in both East Anglia and Northumbria, so Uhtred, now firmly allied to Æthelflæd, will campaign again.