The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great (21 page)

The much smaller burh of Porchester offers a similar testimony. The archaeological evidence suggests a measurement of 697 yards for the original perimeter of the ancient walls. The
Burghal Hideage
assigned 500 hides to Portchester, or 500 men for the burh’s defenses. These men could guard 125 poles of city wall, or 687.5 yards.

Alfred set about reworking the network of roads and public places inside the walls with an eye toward ensuring that the burhs would be well prepared to respond swiftly and efficiently to the unpredictable attacks of a besieging army. The king took his inspiration for these new city plans from the pattern used by ancient Roman camps, a pattern still apparent in the road layout of many of the Saxon cities with a Roman history.

Each burh was equipped with one wide street that ran across the diameter of the city, the “high” street, which allowed for the quick movement of troops from one side of the city to the other in order to respond swiftly to the changing tactics of the attacking army. Smaller streets were constructed running parallel or at right angles to the high street, offering quick access to each segment of the wall. Another street was built along the perimeter of the city wall.

This network of roads ensured that a commander could quickly reposition his troops along the city wall to maintain a wall that was properly fortified at all the key points. And though Alfred’s thoughts were all of gory battles and bitter sieges when he conceived this layout, the efficiency of his new system became more evident in the mundane daily tasks than it did in any particular combat engagement. It was in the everyday routine of gathering at the carefully planned marketplace or in the weekly habit of walking to Sunday morning worship in the burh minster, that the sensible road pattern became evident. Alfred’s layouts are still used in numerous cities, testifying to the efficiency of his plans.

Much like Alfred’s new street layouts, the system of defensive burhs, described in the
Burghal Hideage
, was first conceived as a military innovation. But after it had been implemented, it was discovered that this new system radically improved the efficiency with which the king could administrate his kingdom. The network of burhs and the roads that connected them provided travelers and traders the ability to move across Wessex, stopping every night at a walled and garrisoned burh where peace and safety could be guaranteed.

With the safety afforded by the defenses of the burhs, the surrounding areas naturally gravitated toward bringing their produce and wares to the well-protected and well-governed markets. In later generations, kings of Wessex required that all trade occur within one of the designated burh markets, where the king’s reeves could ensure that proper taxes were paid to the crown on all sales. An alternative Anglo-Saxon word for burh was
tun
, a term that also referred to a fortified or walled settlement. To this day, an English town, or tun, must feature a town marketplace in order to qualify as a “town.” Without this marketplace, it can only be considered a “village.” (After a town has a cathedral, it has earned the distinction of “city.”)

Under Alfred and the protection that the
Burghal Hideage
ensured, trade and industry began to thrive in Wessex. Seeing the importance of this element of the economy, Alfred also undertook a major renovation of the Saxon currency. When he came to power, only two mints could be found in the nations of the Saxons, one in London and the other in Canterbury. And these two mints produced an extremely crude coin, boasting a severely debased silver content of 20 percent. A thriving industry of trade would require that these deficiencies be fixed. Soon Alfred was giving his attention to these problems.

By the time of Alfred’s death, the number of mints under the control of the Wessex crown had more than quadrupled. The new silver pennies that Alfred had ordered to be produced were almost pure silver and, even with this much higher degree of purity, still significantly outweighed the previous coinage. In order to mint these new silver pennies, four of the earlier pennies needed to be melted down to provide enough silver for one new penny. The cost was substantial, but the king believed that a restored confidence in the currency would attract the attention of Europe’s traders and eventually would bring a much greater amount of wealth to the nation.

In addition to this penny, Alfred also introduced the half-penny to the English currency. This smaller coin gave merchants the ability to more conveniently sell smaller items. Altogether, Alfred’s innovations had a tremendous impact on the economy of Wessex, catching the attention of merchants throughout Europe who were drawn to the wealth of the newly thriving English nation.

Although the years following Alfred’s victory over Guthrum were characterized by peace within the borders of Wessex, this was only relative to the earlier years of constant Viking occupation. Alfred still had to contend with regular raiding parties of freebooting Danes striking quickly along the coasts and rivers of the Anglo-Saxons, searching for easy plunder. In the year 882, the king received word of one such fleet of Vikings sailing off the coast of Wessex, hunting for easy spoils. Alfred moved quickly to intercept the Viking naval force and engage the invading pirates in ship-to-ship combat.

The Saxon sailors, led by Alfred, still fighting like a wild boar, overtook four Danish boats. They boarded the Viking vessels and set to work with axe and sword, hewing and slashing their way through the Danish fleet. The crews of the first two Viking ships were entirely slaughtered within minutes. Then, as the bloodied but still battle-hungry Saxons spilled into the hull of the next ship, cutting their way on board, the Vikings quickly lost their stomach for the fight. They surrendered and begged for mercy from Alfred, as the historian records, “on bended knee.”

It is interesting that several years after wresting his great victory from Guthrum and establishing peace throughout Wessex, Alfred could still be found personally commanding these smaller combat missions. Though the king was not present for each and every military engagement fought by the Wessex troops, Alfred, until his death, regularly took his sword, shield, and spear into battle, standing shoulder to shoulder in the shieldwall with his countrymen. In the Anglo-Saxon world, combat was the duty of the ruling class; and the king, his thegns, the noblemen, and other rulers of the English people always filled the ranks of the Wessex shieldwall.

Thus, it was the landed class, not the peasants or slaves, who responded to the summons of the fyrd and were expected to die on the battlefield. Though this system may have had its faults, when compared to modern societies where liberty has made great advances against this class system, there remains something about the Anglo-Saxon mentality that was nobler than the governing practices of modern nations. In Alfred’s day, no man could order another into combat to face a gory death in battle if he wasn’t prepared to stand next to him in that same perilous fight. The image of a king ordering his troops to battle while he sat luxuriously pavilioned far from the place of slaughter was the innovation of a much later age and inconceivable to the Anglo-Saxon mind.

In the year 885, Alfred’s many innovations for the defenses of his territories were put to the test. The Danish army, who had earlier camped at Fullham near London and had tested the sincerity of Æthelstan’s baptismal vows, suddenly returned to Wessex hoping to find that several years of peace from Viking raids would have caused the Anglo-Saxons to grow complacent, lax , and vulnerable. This particular raiding army had spent the intervening seven years between their departure from England and their sudden return pillaging the abbeys, priories, and monasteries of northern Europe.

Alfred had actually carefully followed their gruesome career throughout the Franks’ river systems and knew full well of their bloody attack on the ancient monastery of Saint Bertin in West Francia; their progress into Flanders where they forced the people of Ghent to shelter them through the winter; their seizing of horses for their entire force, making their raiding army a mounted troop; their ravaging up the river Oise to Rheims; their attack on the convent of Condé, where the nuns were forced at sword point to provide for their Viking guests for an entire year; their slaughter up and down the rivers Lys, Scheldt, Meuse, Rhine, Moselle, and finally the Somme. And Alfred heard how this particular force had been rewarded for their theft and murder with repeated payments of the danegeld by the Christian rulers in Europe, men like Charles the Fat and Carloman. Then, in the early winter months of 885, Alfred received the ominous message that this army had divided its forces into two, one half choosing to push deeper into East Francia, while the other half returned to England expecting to be rewarded with a tremendous harvest of plunder in those fields that had been left fallow for so long.

By the time the Britain-bound portion of the Viking fleet landed on the shores of Kent, the English winter was well under way. For the last several years, the Danish policy had been to choose a strategic wintering point, a well-provisioned and poorly defended site, which could be overthrown quickly, held throughout the winter, drained of its wealth and stores, and then abandoned in spring as the river waters surged and other potential victims beckoned.

Their arrival on the shores of England late into the season put the Danes significantly behind schedule, so they wasted little time in selecting their target and striking swiftly. The Viking army chose the city of Rochester, a former Roman settlement sitting on the banks of the river Medway a short distance from the river mouth, where the waters mingle with the Thames in the Thames estuary before flowing into the North Sea.

At the beginning of the seventh century, Rochester had been converted to the Christian faith by the missionary Justus, who had been sent to the city by the newly arrived Augustine of Canterbury. As a result of Justus’s efforts, England’s second oldest cathedral was soon built in Rochester, bringing to the ancient city, over the following centuries, all the wealth such an eminent cathedral might attract. This meant that the city of Rochester was blessed with two of the Vikings’ favorite features—a navigable river and a wealthy church.

Although the city of Rochester sat in Kent and was therefore not included in Alfred’s plans for the reconstruction of the defenses of Wessex, the subkingdoms Alfred ruled—Kent, Essex, and Sussex— had all undergone similar programs of reform. Thus the city walls of Rochester had been quite recently refortified to ensure they were constructed to provide the same sort of protection offered in any of the burhs of Wessex. Additionally, the nobles and landowners had organized a garrisoned fighting force equivalent to the stipulations of the
Burghal Hideage
, a force sufficient to ensure that the newly constructed walls were well defended. For the Vikings, the strength of Rochester would prove to be astonishing.

It would seem that the time elapsed from the moment the dreaded Viking longboats came into view, their dragon-carved prows slicing through the foamy waters of the Thames estuary and then turning to sail up the mouth of the Medway, until the pillaging Danes spilled out of their ships to charge the city would have left little time for a warning to have traveled through enough of the surrounding region to gather any sort of significant fighting force within the city walls.

And so when the Viking horde charged the gates of Rochester splitting the air with their gore-hungry screams, they fully expected to spend little more than a moment hewing through the city’s defenses, leaving the rest of their afternoon free for despoiling the city and the surrounding countryside. That the gates had been bolted against them was not a great surprise to the attacking Danes. But when they drew near the walls to begin smashing down the massive city doors, they were astonished to discover that the many fighting platforms situated along the towering city walls were manned by a substantial contingent of battle-ready Kentish men who eagerly greeted the startled Vikings with a shower of arrows, spears, and rocks.