The Landscape that Saved King Alfred the Great

If not for King Alfred the Great, Great Britain would be a Scandinavian country today. Viking raiders began marauding Britain during the late 8th century. Most of the people who lived in Britain at the time descended from Angles and Saxons–Germanic tribes that began migrating to Britain around 500 AD after the Roman Empire collapsed. Wales was a refuge for the original inhabitants of Britain. The region we know today as England consisted of several kingdoms during the 9th century. Aside from occasional civil wars within the kingdoms, the people living on the island then were not used to violence, and the Vikings found easy victims in the undefended monasteries. They robbed and murdered defenseless nuns and monks. These pious people believed the Viking attacks were divine retribution because they weren’t devoted enough to God. Nevertheless, the local kings began raising armies and fighting back against the Viking marauders. King Egbert, Alfred’s grandfather, fought the Vikings, losing 1 battle, but winning another during 839. Aelwulf, Alfred’s father, inherited the throne in 840.

Alfred the Great is considered the founder of modern England, but he survived numerous battles with Vikings and a coup before he became known as the Great king. He was born in 839, the youngest of 5 siblings–his oldest brothers were born to a different mother, and they were decades older than him. After Aelwulf’s death Alfred’s older brothers became kings of Wessex, a kingdom in the southern part of Britain.

Viking raiders began establishing permanent settlements in Britain and eventually took over the kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia. Kings often paid tribute to get the Vikings to leave them alone, but then the Vikings would break their oaths and simply occupy a different region of the kingdom. Vikings would set up puppet kings in the kingdoms they controlled. The Vikings launched a major invasion with 300-400 warships and 5000 men during 865. Alfred helped his last surviving brother king fight the Vikings. They allied with the neighboring kingdom of Mercia to fight off the Vikings, but when the Vikings next invaded Wessex, Mercia did not return the favor. Alfred’s older brother died, probably from wounds suffered weeks earlier at the Battle of Mereton, and Alfred inherited the throne in 871.

Kings participated in battles during this time period. Battles were primitive brute force in the 9th century. Both sides would form shield walls and push against each other. Men in the first row tried to stab around and between the shields with swords and spears. When a shield holder fell, another would move up to plug the gap. Saxon and Viking kings often died during these types of battles.

These were the kingdoms of England during the 9th century. King Alfred the Great laid the groundwork for them to be united. His son, Edward, united them all into the country of England.

9th century warfare was brutal hand to hand combat. The goal was to break through the other army’s shield wall. Kings participated.

9th century Britain was wilderness and farmland. There were very few towns and a few people lived in abandoned Roman ruins. Unbroken oak forest thousands of square miles in extant still existed then.

King Alfred and his followers were forced to hide in a marsh after a coup staged by disloyal nobles allied with the Vikings.

Artist’s depiction of King Alfred the Great hiding in a marsh following a coup.

King Alfred hid on a hill in the middle of a marsh that was accessible only by boat. The hill was hidden by an alder scrub thicket. All these other structures were built long after Alfred hid here.

During the first 4 years of Alfred’s reign Vikings conquered Mercia because Alfred and his brother had fought them to a standstill in Wessex and bribed them to go away. This time Alfred did not come to Mercia’s rescue. In the year 875 Vikings began another major invasion of Wessex, but a storm sank hundreds of Viking ships. Alfred attacked the remaining Vikings and forced them to retreat back to Mercia. To raise and maintain his army, Alfred depended upon noblemen landowners to provide money and peasant manpower. Noblemen who couldn’t provide this were forced to cede land to the king. Some key noblemen decided that instead of paying King Alfred to defend the kingdom against the Vikings that they would pay the Vikings directly who would establish a puppet king to replace Alfred. It was a coup and Alfred was forced to flee with a few of his loyal followers. He could have abdicated the throne and lived in exile at the Vatican, like other Saxon kings deposed by the Vikings. Instead, he decided to fight for his throne.

During the 9th century much of Britain was a vast wilderness. There were great unbroken oak forests, thousands of miles in extant including Selwood, Ashdon, and Andredsweald. Heaths and great wetlands existed on less well drained sites. The rest was farmland. Very few people lived in towns or abandoned Roman ruins. The population of Wessex was an estimated 500,000, compared to a population of 5.3 million today. Alfred and his men found a 2-acre hill accessible only by boat in the middle of a marsh. An alder break hid the island. (Alder forms scrubby thickets difficult to penetrate.) Today, the island is known as Athelney, and it’s located on the Somerset Levels. It’s no longer a marsh, but instead is drained farmland that would be unrecognizable to people who lived here in the 9th century. Alfred and his followers lived off the land here. They fished and hunted and robbed Viking foraging parties. They started fighting a kind of guerilla warfare from this hidden base. The wilderness around them abounded with roe deer, wild boars, feral goats, rabbits, wolves, beaver, ducks, and geese. This untracked wilderness allowed Alfred to regroup and regain support among the locals.

Alfred raised an army of 4,000 peasants and farmers who marched against the Vikings and defeated them in battle. He forced the Viking King Guthrum to leave Wessex. Alfred ruled Wessex until his death in 899, and he laid the groundwork for his son, Edward, to unite all the kingdoms into the nation of England. Alfred established a defense in depth system, having fortifications built throughout his kingdom. He developed an alternating system of service with half the men serving in the army, while the other half worked on their farms. This reduced famine and desertion. He founded the English navy, so ships could patrol against Viking raiders. He allowed some noblemen to build trading warehouses on the rivers and promoted the development of towns within abandoned Roman ruins. These steps created a middle class. He also promoted literacy and education, improving communication with the bureaucrats who helped him run the country. He married his daughter to the king of Mercia, in effect merging the 2 most populous kingdoms in England. England became too strong for Vikings to prey upon, and they focused on invading and conquering French kingdoms. Descendents of these French Vikings didn’t successfully invade England again until 1066.

Reference:

Pollard, Justin

Alfred the Great: The Man Who Made England

John Murray Publishers 2005

Neolithic Lake Villages in Europe

I wonder what life was like in Neolithic Europe when it was still mostly wilderness. People began practicing agriculture, and they became more sedentary, but this must have been difficult. They grew wheat, rye, barley, peas, flax, and poppy seeds. These crops had to be defended from wild boar, deer, bear, crows, and other seed-eating birds. Livestock had to be protected from wolves and bears. Moreover, village outcasts likely rummaged through the crops as well. Perhaps the biggest threat to not only their food supply, but their lives, came from nomadic tribes traveling on horseback from distant lands. These strangers pillaged, raped, and robbed. Motivations varied but clearly some tribes participated in these heinous acts from a sense of joyous cruelty. As a defensive adaptation, some sedentary people built their villages on stilts or piles over marshes or lakes. They surrounded these villages with walls of upright logs, and they used canoes to access the village from land. Gates could keep the villages relatively safe from invading barbarians traveling on horses. They weren’t impregnable, but invaders would need to build a fleet of canoes and also find a way to breech the walls.

In Europe archaeologists often find the remains of houses built over lakes that people lived in thousands of years ago.

Location of some lakes in Europe where the remains of villages built on stilts have been found. The Jura region of Switzerland has the most sites, but this defensive adaptation was used all over Europe. Map from the below referenced study.

Artist’s representation of a Neolithic lake village. During winter when the lake froze they could just walk over the ice. Nomadic raiders may have roamed less during brutal European winters.

Lake villages must have been neat places to live with a beautiful view of the lake. Hearths kept the insides of homes warm. Archaeologists have found collapsed walls where tools were hung. Houses had trap doors where people crapped, pissed, and dumped their garbage. The waste likely attracted fish and turtles–an easily accessed form of protein. If crops failed or were destroyed, the lakes offered these 2 sources of protein as well as ducks and geese and edible aquatic plants. Archaeologists sift through the organic matter from these former sites and find remains of some of the wild plants they ate. Crabapple and hazelnut are the most common items found, but lake dwellers also ate strawberries, black berries, raspberries, elderberries, beechnuts, acorns, common reed seeds (Phragamites), spinach relatives, turnip, garlic mustard, pine nuts, and blackthorn (a relative similar to sour plums).

The oldest known site of a lake village (also known as pile dwellings) is in Albania, and it dates to 7900 years ago. The practice spread across Europe, and sites of former lake villages are found in Germany, France, and Austria. The Jura region in Switzerland has the most sites–more than 50. The practice spread all the way to Great Britain where they are known as crannaries. People ceased building lake villages in Europe about 2000 years ago, and these structures rotted and collapsed into the lake for archaeologists to find thousands of years after they were abandoned.

Reference:

Colledge, S.; and J. Conolly

“Wild Plant Use in European Neolithic Subsistence Economics: A formal assessment of Preservation Bias and the Implication for Understanding Changes in Plant Distribution”

Quaternary Science Review 101 October 2014