The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great (30 page)

As Alfred dealt with the attack on Exeter, Prince Edward and Ealdorman Æthelred heard news of Hastein’s treacherous betrayal as the Viking chieftain began to launch plundering raids from his new fortress at Benfleet. Seeing that the threat at Thorney Island had been dealt with, the two Saxon warriors set out to repay the Viking for his infidelity. First, they stopped in London, where the ealdorman was able to muster a significant army of fresh soldiers from the city. Then, this newly formed fyrd marched on the Benfleet fortress.

The Saxons arrived at the Danish stronghold when Hastein was out on a raid. However, the Viking chieftain had taken only a small contingency of his plundering Northmen with him on this particular raid, leaving the bulk of the Viking raiding army behind at Benfleet. The Saxon attack was ruthless and fierce. The warriors of Wessex crashed through the Danes’ defenses in one powerfully punishing charge, overwhelming the startled Vikings and smashing their resistance in a moment. Soon the Northmen had fled entirely from the onslaught, and the Saxons were left in possession of the remains of the fortress, together with everything the Danes had abandoned in their frantic retreat. All of the plunder that had been hoarded by the Vikings was recovered by the Saxons, a reward for their combat. The victorious warriors then took their pick of the Viking longboats and sailed their captured plunder back to London and Rochester. The rest of the ships were either smashed up or burned. Edward also ordered the fortress completely destroyed, leaving the Vikings no ready-made defenses for future invasions.

Along with the plunder and longboats, many of the wives and children of the Danish warriors had also been left behind by the fleeing Vikings, including the family of Hastein. What the Danish chieftain had so casually deserted, Edward carefully collected and guarded. As soon as possible, Edward sent these captives to London to await his father’s judgment on how they should be dealt with.

When news reached Hastein that the Benfleet fortress had been overthrown and his family taken away captive, the Viking chieftain was undeterred. Moving his camp ten miles east to Shoebury, the Dane continued his campaign of plunder. Soon the Viking camp received a wave of new recruits from the Danelaw, as floods of fresh warriors from East Anglia and Northumbria streamed south to join the Viking chieftain’s campaign. It had seemed to the settlers of the Danelaw that Alfred’s kingdom must be on the brink of collapse. In the hopes that they had finally found the opportunity to break the resistance of the last Anglo-Saxon king, the kings of the Danelaw continued to send a seemingly unending supply of fresh warriors to join in Hastein’s campaign. How much longer could the king continue to repulse such an unceasing invasion?

Thrilled by the sudden supply of fresh recruits and paying little mind to the loss of his family, Hastein pressed on with his plunder. The Vikings, however, were beginning to hold the warriors of Wessex in higher esteem and to search for a less formidable opponent. With this in mind, the Danes marched the length of the Thames, carrying on up the tributaries of the river until the army finally reached the Severn River. The Danes were cutting deep into Mercia, all the way to the Welsh border.

Since Alfred was still in the west hunting the raiding armies that had struck Devon, it remained up to the other British rulers to deal with this new attack. Æthelhelm, the ealdorman of Wiltshire, upon hearing of Hastein’s raid, gathered his mounted army and rode in hot pursuit of the Vikings. Meanwhile, the king’s son-in-law, Ealdorman Æthelred, joined forces with Æthelnoth, the ealdorman of Somerset who had been Alfred’s faithful companion throughout his dark days at Athelny, and the two of them marched their combined armies north as swiftly as possible.

Soon the joint forces of the three ealdormen overtook the Vikings at Buttington, a Welsh village beside the Severn river. Here the Vikings attempted to dig in and wait out the siege. However, the Anglo-Saxon army—helped out by the Welsh who were equally uninterested in a visit from the Danes—were much better prepared than the Vikings to outlast a lengthy siege. The food stores of the Viking army quickly ran out, and the hunger of the Danes began to drive them to desperation. Overwhelmed by the pains of starvation, the Vikings slaughtered and ate the horses the raiding army had brought along, though little sustenance could be gotten from the emaciated beasts.

Eventually, as the numbers of Vikings dead from starvation began to mount, the Danes saw the impossibility of their predicament and hazarded a frantic attempt to break through the Saxon lines, striking out suddenly to the east. But the combined armies of the three ealdormen stood their ground and violently repulsed the Danish drive. The battle was gruesome and cost the lives of a number of Saxon noblemen. Nevertheless, the Vikings were completely defeated. And though a portion of the Danish forces escaped (Hastein among them), the bulk of the Viking army was slaughtered. A mass grave discovered in the nineteenth century revealed the remains of a portion of these fallen warriors—hundreds of skulls and a few skeletons in a series of circular pits, all testifying to the extent of the carnage on that bloody day.

Once again, Alfred’s defensive innovations had successfully repulsed the Viking attacks, but this particular siege revealed something new about the real extent of Alfred’s success. Not only were the fortified burhs ably withstanding the Danish sieges and not only were the fyrds swiftly and efficiently responding to the summons for warriors, but in this particular siege, the noblemen of Wessex had shown initiative, courage, and a devotion to their people, demonstrating that the king had truly achieved his goals in raising up a generation of principled leaders to govern the Anglo-Saxons.

The three ealdormen, in the king’s absence, had identified a threat to the people and had worked swiftly and selflessly to deliver the nation from this danger. It would have been very easy for Ealdorman Æthelred to have excused himself from this particular campaign since he had been continuously and tirelessly fighting for nearly a year and had surely earned a brief respite. But the ealdorman saw that he was still needed and unquestioningly threw himself back into the gory combat for the sake of his nation. An entire generation of English leaders, men who had been trained in the courts of Alfred to understand wisdom, justice, righteousness, and the true duties of a ruler, had been raised up, and the battle of the three ealdorman stood as proof of Alfred’s success.

The Vikings, however, were not yet prepared to concede ultimate defeat. Hastein’s army, resupplied one more time with fresh recruits from the Danelaw, attempted one last attack on the western reaches of Mercia. Marching day and night, the Vikings crossed to the northern Welsh border well ahead of any Saxon pursuers. By the time the Anglo-Saxon army was able to catch up with the Danish marauders, the Vikings had already found the ruins of an abandoned Roman fortress in Chester and fortified the position against the coming Saxon attack. The Danes had chosen well, as the ancient Roman walls, even in their ruined condition, ringed the Viking raiders with an impermeable shield of defense.

Rather than waste their manpower in a costly assault on the walls of Chester, the ealdormen chose to employ a scorched-earth tactic to besiege the Danes. The Saxons rode down and slaughtered all the Vikings found outside the city walls, removed all of the cattle from the nearby fields, burned up all the corn, and set their beasts to devour all the nearby pastureland—leaving the Danes, once more, stranded and starving. This time the Vikings understood their predicament much more quickly and fled without a fight into the kingdom of Wales, where they were able to plunder much more freely. When, at the end of their rampage through Wales, the Danes returned heavily laden with booty, they carefully traced a high arc across the island of England, staying well inside the Danelaw for the entirety of their journey and cautiously avoiding Alfred’s kingdom.

Alfred, meanwhile, was finally successful in dislodging the two raiding armies that had been working up and down the coasts of Devon. The Vikings finally abandoned their hopes of toppling Alfred’s kingdom and returned home, sailing back along the southern coast of England, the same way they had come. However, along the way, the Danes decided to make one quick raid on an English coastal town, fill their ship holds with treasure and booty, and give their mission some semblance of success.

The longboats landed on the coast of Sussex, near Chichester, where the Vikings spilled out of the ships and began searching the region for any wealth they could seize easily. Once more, the Danish campaign proved ill-fated. Chichester had been another of Alfred’s fortified burhs and was completely prepared to handle this sudden raid. The soldiers garrisoned in the Chichester burh were chomping at the bit to play their part in the great war against the Danish invaders. Once word reached the burh of the beached longboats, the garrison poured out of the fortress battle-hungry. Overtaking the Vikings in the coastal countryside, the Saxons slaughtered hundreds of the startled Danes. The rest were chased all the way back to their longboats, with many more cut down along the way. Needless to say, those who escaped made no more stops along the British coast in their hurry to reach the safety of the Danelaw.

With the western reaches of his kingdom finally freed from danger, the king traveled to London where an important matter waited for him to settle. Upon his arrival in the city, the wife and two sons of Hastein were presented to the king in order for him to determine their fate. The situation was not unlike Alfred’s earlier encounter with Guthrum, when the Viking king had been captured after his great treachery. However, what Guthrum had done, he had done as a pagan. And Alfred had forgiven this treachery when he welcomed his enemy to the Christian faith.

Hastein had been different. Hastein had committed his offenses as a Christian man, and his treachery had been a treachery against his own baptism and the baptisms of his family members. Alfred would have been completely justified, in the eyes of the noblemen who sat awaiting his decision, if he had given harsh sentence and sent Hastein’s family to their grave or, at least, to slavery. But the king reminded his people that the two young men had become his spiritual kinsmen. He and Ealdormen Æthelred had stood as sponsors at their baptism and had become godfathers to these two Danes. And whether Hastein considered this baptism binding or not was irrelevant to the Saxon king. Alfred considered the baptism binding and would stand by it.

The king embraced Hastein’s family as his own. They feasted and once more were showered with gifts by the ring-giver. Then, once they had been loaded down with tokens of Alfred’s sincere fondness and reminded of the significance of the oath they had made before God, Alfred provided for their travel, ensuring that they would return safely to Hastein. It is difficult to say exactly how the Viking chieftain took this unexpected kindness. With his family returned, the Dane returned to Europe, never to set foot on England’s shores again, leaving the remaining Viking forces to fend for themselves.