Viking Britain: A History. Thomas Williams

Чтение книги онлайн.

      6

       The Gathering Storm

      … The bird cries,

      grey-coat screams, battle-wood resounds,

      shield to spear-shaft replies. Now shines the moon

      drifting into dimness. Now deeds of woe arise

      that will propel this peoples’ malice.

      But awake now, warriors of mine,

      Seize thy linden-shields, dwell on courage,

      Fight at the front, be fierce and bold!

       The Fight at Finnsburg 1

      Although Viking raids would continue to afflict Ireland with almost absurd frequency throughout the 820s and 830s, there is a gap of twenty-nine years after the third raid on Iona in 806 before a Viking raid is again recorded in Britain.2

      For historians, knowing what was to come, this can seem like a trivial span of time, a brief hiatus before the hammer would fall with all its force. But for people living at the time it would have seemed very different; they did not know that they were living in the ‘Viking Age’.3 Many of those who were aware of the attacks on Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Iona, including some of the survivors, would have lived out the rest of their lives with the impression that this diabolical onslaught had burned itself out – passing, perhaps, like the fiery whirlwinds and bloody rain that had presaged its arrival. Indeed, for more than a generation after the appearance of the first Vikings in the written record, the overwhelming fear – in southern Britain at least – would have been that, if violence were to come, it would come from people who spoke familiar (if not shared) languages, who lived similar lives in recognizable landscapes and who worshipped the same god in broadly compatible ways.

      In 798, for example, King Ceolwulf (newly king of Mercia after Offa’s death in 796) ravaged Kent and captured its king, Eadberht. Eadberht was dragged to Mercia in chains where he had his eyes gouged out and his hands cut off.4 In 815, King Ecgberht of Wessex raided the ‘west welsh’ (that is, the Cornish) from ‘east to west’.5 Ten years later, the same king defeated the Mercians at a place called Ellendun (now somewhere underneath the western suburbs of Swindon), ‘and a great slaughter was made there’.6 A fragment of poetry recalls that ‘Ellendun’s stream ran red with blood, was stuffed up with corpses, filled with stink.’7 In the same year King Beornwulf of Mercia was killed by the East Angles (it was a bad year for the Mercians). These violent convulsions all took place during a period that saw a steady shift in the centre of political gravity in southern Britain, focusing power around the kingdom of Wessex at the expense of Mercia and some of the smaller southern realms. In this reorientation – which would have huge repercussions later on – the Vikings were of little consequence. In the early ninth-century brutality league they would have struggled to make the play-offs.

      Ultimately, however, this state of affairs did not hold. The first black clouds reappeared in 835, when ‘heathen men’ raided across the Isle of Sheppey, but even darker days lay ahead. In 836, a fleet of thirty-five ships (one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says twenty-five) arrived at Carhampton on the Somerset coast, and the formidable King Ecgberht – bane of Mercians and Cornishmen – was there to face them. The fighting that ensued was the first setpiece battle (that we know of) that pitched a Viking army against British foes. Once again, and not for the last time, the Chronicle provides the gloomy observation that ‘a great slaughter was made there’, and from what little else is known about it, it seems indeed to have been a grim day’s work. If the number of ships is taken at face value, a Viking army numbering 1,500 men would be a conservative estimate, and it is probably fair to assume a similar number assembled to fight them. Three thousand men engaged in brutal hand-to-hand fighting with axe and sword would have made for a terrifying spectacle.8

      Although Anglo-Saxon chroniclers reveal little about the realities of early medieval battle, their poets were less reticent:

      The horror of battle materialized. There was cracking of shields, attacking of warriors, cruel sword-chopping and troops dropping when first they faced a volley of arrows. Into that doomed crowd, over the yellow targe and into their enemies’ midst, the fierce and bloody antagonists launched showers of darts, spears, the serpents of battle, by the strength of their fingers. Relentless of purpose onwards they trod; eagerly they advanced. They broke down the shield barrier, drove in their swords and thrust onwards, hardened to battle.9

      The opposing armies would have faced up to one another in close formation, huddling together so that each man might benefit from the protection afforded by the large, round timber shield held by the man to his right. The defensive barrier thus created – a sort of clinker-built fence of human-held timbers – is known by poetic convention in Old English and Old Norse poetry as the ‘shield-wall’. Its importance as a military concept has probably been over-stressed by modern historians – it was a product of fear and necessity as much as it was ever a formalized battlefield tactic, its description in poetry a function of conventional semantics (like other evocative constructs such as wíhagen, ‘war-hedge’) – but there is no doubt that an army arranged this way presented a formidable face to the enemy. The shields would have been brightly painted, probably carrying religious symbols or depictions of beasts designed to intimidate enemies and provide courage to those who sheltered behind them. Ninth-century examples, excavated in Norway with their timber still surviving, are around 3 feet in diameter and painted black or yellow. Rimmed with iron, these shields were augmented with a large semi-circular metal boss riveted to the centre. This protected the hand (which gripped the handle attached behind it), but could also blunt the edges of misplaced weapon-strikes or smash the face of an enemy once the shield-wall had broken down into the series of individual duels and knots of vicious combat that the battle would inevitably devolve into.10

      The smashing of one’s own face was, obviously, something to be avoided wherever possible. Helmets, like the one discovered at Gjermundbu, were probably more common than their rarity in the archaeological record might imply; the simple psychology of self-preservation would suggest that some sort of head and face protection would be desirable. An Anglo-Saxon helmet, found during the Coppergate excavations in York in the late 1970s, suggests the sort of thing that might have been available to the wealthiest warriors. Although it would have been old fashioned by the 830s (it was probably made in the third quarter of the eighth century), it seems to have remained in use until the first half of the ninth century. Old fashioned it may have been, but it was of exceptional craftsmanship and quality – not least the creatures that are woven into an intricate lattice in the decoration of the brazen nose-guard, and the eyebrows terminating in the heads of fanged serpentine creatures. СКАЧАТЬ