Battle of Edington: Difference between revisions

The Battle of Ethandun was a battle which took place in the English kingdom of Wessex between 6 and 12 May 878 between the English forces of Alfred the Great and the Danes led by Guthrum the Old.

After fighting for much of the day, Alfred was victorious, fighting behind a protective wall of shields reminiscent of tactics used in a past age by the Roman legions. The Danes fled towards the Danelaw, and eventually surrendered at Chippenham, their own fortress, after a fourteen day siege. They then asked for quarter, which was given. The king of the Danes was afterwards baptized into the Christian religion, Alfred standing godfather to him and raising him from the font.

The Treaty of Wedmore was soon signed, and later the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum, conflict continuing between the Danes and the English.

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.

The history of the Viking attacks on England stretched back, according to the Peterborough Chronicle^[1], to a raid on Lindisfarne, in Northumbria, in 793 A.D. There were occasional raids on Wessex starting soon after Lindisfarne, but these were not a serious threat until the battle at Carhampton, in 836.^[2] Throughout the 9th century, the Danes had been steadily invading England, putting its mostly Anglo-Saxon inhabitants under pressure. The West Saxons "were reasonably successful against the Scandinavians, even when the invaders joined up with the Cornish, but after 851 they fared less well".^[3] By the time of the arrival of the Great Heathen Army in 865, they had been fighting "major campaigns" for fourteen years, and had suffered great losses.^[3].

The Great Heathen Army was not very great in size, so that by modern standards it would probably not be called an army. Jones estimates its numbers as between five hundred and a thousand men, under the leadership of the brothers Ivar the Boneless, Ubbe Ragnarsson, and Halfdan Ragnarsson.^[4] What made this army different from those which had come before it was its intent. Its arrival began "a new stage, that of conquest and residence".^[5] 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.^[6]

Mercia had collapsed by 874, and the Army's cohesion went with it. Halfdan went back to Deira and fought various Celts; his army settled there and he is not mentioned after 876, when "'[the Danes] were engaged in ploughing and making a living for themselves,'".^[7] Guthrum, with two other unnamed kings, "departed for Cambridge in East Anglia".^[7] He made several attacks on Wessex, starting in 875, and in the last nearly captured Alfred in his winter fortress at Chippenham.^[7] 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.

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”.^[8] They then gave hostages and oaths to leave the country to Alfred, who paid them off.^[9] 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,^[8] the terms of which entailed their leaving his kingdom and not returning.^[10] This they did, spending the rest of 877 (by the Gregorian calendar) in Gloucester.^[11] Alfred spent Christmas at Chippenham, thirty miles from Gloucester. The Danes attacked Chippenham "in midwinter after Twelfth Night",^[8] 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.^[8] 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",^[9] although it fails utterly. 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"^[12] casts the great doubt on its ability to defeat the Danes on 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.

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.^[13] 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.^[14] In the seventh week after Easter, or between 4 and 7 May,^[15] 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.^[16] The next day, Alfred's host moved to Iley Oaks, and then the day after that to Ethandun.^[17] There, on an unknown date between 6 and 12 May,^[18] 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]."^[19]

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.^[19] 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.^[20] 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.^[21] 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^[15] 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.

After Ethandun, the Danes were contained within the Danelaw; Wessex, the last free English 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.

• British military history
• The Ballad of the White Horse
• The Battle of Ethandun provides the backdrop to the novel The Pale Horseman by Bernard Cornwell.

• Battle1066.com
• Garmonsway, G.N., trans. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. London: Dent, 1972.
• Jones, Gwyn. A History of the Vikings. Revised ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
• Smyth, Alfred P. Alfred the Great. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Smyth, Alfred P., trans. The Medieval Life of Alfred. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002.
• Yorke, Barbara. Kings and Kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England. London: Routledge, 1997.