Battle of Ethandun

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Battle of Ethandun
Part of the Viking-Saxon wars
Ethandunmem.jpg
Memorial to the Battle of Ethandun near Bratton Castle.[1]
Date May 878
Location Probably Edington, Wiltshire, but may have been at Edington, Somerset
Result Decisive West Saxon victory
Belligerents
Wyvern of Wessex.svg West Saxons RavenBanner.svg Danelaw Vikings
Commanders and leaders
Alfred the Great Guthrum the Old
Strength
unknown unknown
Casualties and losses
unknown unknown

Coordinates: 51°26′25″N 02°14′32″W / 51.44028°N 2.24222°W / 51.44028; -2.24222 The Battle of Ethandun or Edington is where the forces of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex under Alfred the Great defeated the Great Heathen Army led by Guthrum between 6 and 12 May AD 878. It ultimately resulted in the Treaty of Wedmore the same year.

Contents

[edit] Events before the battle

The first Viking raid on Anglo-Saxon England is thought to have been between AD 786 and 802 at Portland in the Kingdom of Wessex, when three Norse ships arrived and killed King Beorhtric's reeve.[2] At the other end of the country, in the Kingdom of Northumbria, during AD 793 the Holy Island of Lindisfarne was raided.[3] After the sacking of Lindisfarne the raids around the coasts were somewhat sporadic till the 830s, when the attacks became more sustained.[4] In 835, heathen men ravaged Sheppey.[4] In 836, Ecgberht of Wessex met in battle a force of thirty-five ships at Carhampton,[4] and in 838 he faced a combined force of Vikings and Cornishmen at Hingston Down in Cornwall.[4]

The raiding continued and with each year became more and more intense.[4] In 865/866 it escalated further on the arrival of what the Saxons called the Great Heathen Army,[4] the size of which has been estimated at between five hundred and a thousand men, which was under the leadership of the brothers Ivar the Boneless, Ubbe and Halfdan Ragnarsson.[5] What made this army different from those before it was its intent. Its arrival began "a new stage, that of conquest and residence".[6] By 870, the northmen had conquered the kingdoms of Deira and East Anglia, and in 871 they attacked Wessex. Of the nine battles mentioned by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle during that year, only one was a West Saxon victory; but in this year Alfred succeeded his brother Ethelred, who died after the Battle of Merton.[7]

Mercia had collapsed by 874, and the Army's cohesion went with it. Halfdan went back to Deira and fought the Picts and the Strathclyde Welsh to secure his northern kingdom.[8] His army settled there and he is not mentioned after 876, when "[the Danes] were engaged in ploughing and making a living for themselves".[9] Guthrum, with two other unnamed kings, "departed for Cambridge in East Anglia".[9] He made several attacks on Wessex, starting in 875, and in the last nearly captured Alfred in his winter fortress at Chippenham.[9] By 878, the Danes held the east and north east of England, and their defeat at the Battle of Ashdown had paused but not halted their advance. Alfred the Great had spent the winter preceding the Battle of Ethandun in the Somerset marsh of Athelney, the nature of the country giving him some protection. In the Spring of 878, he summoned his West Saxon forces and marched to Ethandun, where he met the Danes, led by Guthrum the Old, in battle.

[edit] Alfred's position before the battle

Guthrum and his men had applied the usual Danish strategy of occupying a fortified town and waiting for a peace “treaty,” involving money in return for a promise to leave the kingdom immediately; Alfred shadowed the army, trying to prevent more damage than had already occurred. This started in 875 when Guthrum's army “eluded the West Saxon levies and got into Wareham”.[10] They then gave hostages and oaths to leave the country to Alfred, who paid them off.[11] The Danes promptly slipped off to Exeter, even deeper into Alfred's kingdom, where they concluded in the autumn of 877 a "firm peace" with Alfred,[10] under terms that entailed their leaving his kingdom and not returning.[12] This they did, spending the rest of 877 (by the Gregorian calendar) in Gloucester.[12] Alfred spent Christmas at Chippenham, thirty miles from Gloucester. The Danes attacked Chippenham "in midwinter after Twelfth Night",[10] probably during the night of January 6–7, 878. They captured Chippenham (barely missing Alfred) and forced Alfred to retreat "with a small force" into the wilderness.[10] It is to this period that the story of King Alfred burning the cakes belongs.

Alfred seems at this time to have chased ineffectually around Wessex, while the Danes were in a position to do as they pleased. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle attempts to convey the impression that Alfred held the initiative; it is "a bland chronicle which laconically charts the movements of the Danish victors while at the same time disingenuously striving to convey the impression that Alfred was in control",[11] although it fails. Even if Alfred had caught up with the Danish force, it is unlikely that he could have accomplished anything. The fact that his army could not defend the fortified Chippenham, even in "an age... as yet untrained in siege warfare"[11] casts great doubt on its ability to defeat the Danes in an open field, unaided by fortifications. There was little, beyond repeatedly paying the invaders off, that Alfred could do about the Danish menace between 875 and the end of 877.

[edit] Battle

King Alfred's Tower (1772) on the supposed site of Egbert's Stone the mustering place before the battle.[13]

This was even more true after the Twelfth Night attack. With his small warband, a fraction of his army at Chippenham, Alfred could not hope to retake the town from the Danes, who had in previous wars (for example at Reading in 871) proved themselves adept at defending fortified positions.[14] So he retreated to the south, preparing himself and his forces for another battle, and then defeated Guthrum and his host. The first we read of Alfred after the disaster at Chippenham is around Easter, when he built a fortress at Athelney.[15] In the seventh week after Easter, or between 4 and 7 May,[16] Alfred called a levy at Ecgbryhtesstan (Egbert's Stone). Many of the men in the counties around (Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire) who had not already fled rallied to him there.[15] The next day, Alfred's host moved to Iley Oak, and then the day after that to Ethandun.[17][18] There, on an unknown date between 6 and 12 May,[19] they fought the Danes. According to the Life,

"Fighting ferociously, forming a dense shield-wall against the whole army of the Pagans, and striving long and bravely...at last he [Alfred] gained the victory. He overthrew the Pagans with great slaughter, and smiting the fugitives, he pursued them as far as the fortress [i.e., Chippenham]."[20]

After the victory, when the Danes had taken refuge in Chippenham, the West Saxons removed from the area around all food that the Danes might be able to capture in a sortie, and waited.[20] After two weeks, the hungry Danes sued for peace, giving Alfred "preliminary hostages and solemn oaths that they would leave his kingdom immediately", just as usual, but in addition promising that Guthrum would be baptized.[21] The primary difference between this agreement and the treaties at Wareham and Exeter was that Alfred had decisively defeated the Danes at Ethandun, rather than just stopping them, and therefore it seemed more likely that they would keep to the terms of the treaty.

The primary reason for Alfred's victory was probably the relative size of the two armies. The men of even one shire could be a formidable fighting force, as those of Devon proved in the same year, defeating an army under Ubbe Ragnarsson at the Battle of Cynwit.[22] In addition, in 875 Guthrum had lost the support of other Danish lords, including Ivar and Ubbe. Further Danish forces had settled on the land before Guthrum attacked Wessex: in East Anglia, and in Mercia between the treaty at Exeter and the attack on Chippenham; many others were lost in a storm off Swanage in 876-7, with 120 ships wrecked[16] Internal disunity was threatening to tear the Danes apart, and they needed time to reorganize. Fortunately for Wessex they did not use the time available effectively.

[edit] Location of the battle

The location of the battle is generally stated as Edington, Wiltshire, but this is uncertain, and arguments have been advanced for other places, including Edington, Somerset.[23]

[edit] Consequences

The Treaty of Wedmore was soon signed, and later the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum, but conflict continued between the Danes and the Anglo-Saxons.

After Ethandun, the Danes were contained within the Danelaw; Wessex, the last free Anglo-Saxon kingdom, was to remain free of Danish control. If Alfred had lost at Ethandun, it seems inevitable that Guthrum would have swept through the rest of Wessex, bringing it under his rule. Another direct consequence of the battle, the baptism of Guthrum and his men at Aller, with Alfred as Guthrum's sponsor, gave Alfred some moral sway over the warriors of the Danelaw.

The spiritual parenthood established by Alfred over Guthrum at Aller must inevitably have implied some level of cultural and political superiority, and Guthrum, as the spiritual son of Alfred, was in turn supposed by the Saxons to have acknowledged the future on-going superiority of the king whose religion he had been forced to adopt. However, the Danes disputed this.

The defeat of Guthrum 'the Unlucky' after the battle of Ethandun, and after many other failed attempts to take the country, was immensely demoralizing to the Danes, and Wessex was made safe from them for some years.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ UK Inventory of War Memorials. The Memorial stone plaque reads:
    TO COMMEMORATE THE BATTLE OF ETHANDUN FOUGHT IN THIS VICINITY MAY 878 AD WHEN KING ALFRED THE GREAT DEFEATED THE VIKING ARMY, GIVING BIRTH TO THE ENGLISH NATIONHOOD. UNVEILED BY THE 7TH MARQUESS OF BATH 5TH NOVEMBER 2000.

    An additional inscription reads:

    THIS STONE, PRESENTED BY F. SWANTON AND SONS, NORTH FARM, WEST OVERTON, IS A SARSEN STONE SIMILAR TO THOSE AT KINGSTON DEVERILL, THE AREA WHERE KING ALFRED RALLIED SAXON LEVIES FROM HAMPSHIRE, WILTSHIRE AND SOMERSET TO MARCH AGAINST GUTHRUM'S VIKING ARMY BASED AT CHIPPENHAM.
  2. ^ Sawyer, Illustrated History of Vikings, p. 50
  3. ^ Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, A.D. 793: This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island (Lindisfarne), by rapine and slaughter.
  4. ^ a b c d e f Sawyer, Illustrated History of Vikings, p. 52
  5. ^ Jones, p. 219
  6. ^ Jones, p. 218
  7. ^ Garmonsway, pp. 70-73
  8. ^ Jones, A History of the Vikings, p. 221
  9. ^ a b c Jones, p.221
  10. ^ a b c d Garmonsway, p. 74
  11. ^ a b c Smyth, p. 70
  12. ^ a b Smyth, p. 72
  13. ^ Horspool, Why Alfred Burnt the Cakes, p. 173. The inscription reads ALFRED THE GREAT AD 879 on this Summit Erected his Standard Against Danish Invaders To him We owe The Origin of Juries The Establishment of a Militia The Creation of a Naval Force ALFRED The Light of a Benighted Age Was a Philosopher and a Christian The Father of his People The Founder of the English MONARCHY and LIBERTY
  14. ^ Garmonsway. p.70
  15. ^ a b Garmonsway, p. 76; Life, p. 26
  16. ^ a b Smyth, p. 74
  17. ^ Garmonsway, p. 76; Life, pp. 26-27
  18. ^ 'The Hundred of Warminster', A History of the County of Wiltshire: Volume 8: Warminster, Westbury and Whorwellsdown Hundreds (1965), pp. 1-5. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=16071 Date accessed: 22 May 2010.
  19. ^ Smyth, p. 75
  20. ^ a b Life, p. 27
  21. ^ Garmonsway, p. 76
  22. ^ Life, p. 26
  23. ^ Illtyd Trethowan, 'Alfred and the Great White Horse of Wiltshire', in Downside Review vol. LVII (1939)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Battle_of_Ethandun&oldid=473321340"
Personal tools
Namespaces
Variants
Actions
Navigation
Interaction
Toolbox
Print/export
Languages