Gone Medieval - Battle of Brunanburh

Episode Date: August 3, 2021

When we think of great Medieval battles, many people imagine the Battles of Hastings or Agincourt. Another clash, however, between the kings of England, Dublin, Scotland and Strathclyde late in AD 937, also had far-reaching consequences and resulted in alliances of a scale unseen before. For this episode, we're joined by historian and author Michael Livingston to delve into the location of the battle, the events that ensued and why, generations later, the Battle of Brunanburh is known to many as 'The Great Battle'. Michael Livingston is a historian, a professor of medieval literature, and author of 'Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England'. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. In the year 937, a battle was fought in England that has been described as one of the most significant battles in British history that led to the birth of England. It was a battle known for a very long time simply as the Great Battle. It was commemorated in numerous contemporary and later sources, but there's just one problem.

Nobody knows where the battles fought. We have the name of the location, Brunenbigh, but we actually don't know for certain where in England that was. Scores of locations have been suggested, but a majority of researchers favour the Wirral in the North West. But some are so passionately against the idea that today's guest has in fact received threats for arguing his case. Now, I'm going to ask him a bit more about that later on,

but first of all, we're going to get him to tell us all about the Battle of Brunabur and why it was so important. A very warm welcome to Michael Livingston, who is a professor at the Citadel, which is the Military College of South Carolina. Thank you for joining me today, Michael. Thank you so much for having me. This is great. And congratulations on your new book, which is called Never Greater Slauthr, Brunenberg and the Birth of England. Thank you, thank you. It's doing pretty well. I'm excited about that. Excellent. So this is actually your second book about Brunabur, isn't it? You've also edited a book called Brunenberg, a case book, which

presents, I think, the sources in a bit more detail. That's correct. That's correct. Yeah. And I mean, we can talk about that later if you want, but about a decade ago, I headed up an international team of scholars who put together all of the texts on Brunnenberg to see what we could glean out of it, right? To see what there is for source material. So, yeah, it's not as exciting a book as Never Greater Slaughter. I would say it's not exactly, you know, take-home at-night reading material,

but it's still an important work, I think. Fantastic. So we'll get back to some of those sources a bit later on, but I wanted to just start by asking a bit of a sort of big question to start with. Why is this particular battle so important? I mean, why should we care about it in 2021? So it's a great question. It's the kind of thing we always, as historians, are trying to, you know, make these things relevant.

From my part, I think one of the easiest ways to consider the Battle of Brunnenberg is to think about the Battle of Britain a thousand years later. A couple of reasons for this. One, these are both existential crises. Victory didn't mean some great gain in wealth or lands. Victory meant survival. If the Battle of Britain goes the other way in 1940, our map of the world would probably be pretty different today. And the same is true of the Battle of Brunaburg in 937. So when the English king, Athelstan, goes into battle at Brunabur, he's facing a massive force of Vikings from Ireland.

He's got Scots, Strathclyde Britons, and all these people have kind of set aside their traditional historical differences to create an alliance and an axis, if you will, whose purpose is to destroy the English. So it's an existential fight, and that makes it very important. The second reason to kind of think about this with the Battle of Britain is that because Brunnenberg was existential fight, there's a good chance that if Athelstand doesn't win in 937, there might not really be in England. in any recognizable shape that we know of to be fought for in 1940. And that may seem like a bit of an exaggeration or hyperbole, but one of the things that I've tried really hard to show in Never Greater Slaughter is how hard it is to overstate this battle's importance within its time. There's a reason that, as you said, generations afterwards,

people just called it the great battle, and everyone knew what you were talking about. And this is a time of battles, and everybody's like, yep, that one. That's the one you're talking about because it was so enormous in its scope and in its impact for these people in the 10th century. We're going to get back to that a bit later on

that sort of impact and what happened in the aftermath of it. But you've already mentioned a few of the protagonists, the people who are involved here, and the political situation in England and Britain and Ireland is a little bit complicated at the time. So we're in what we call the Viking Age, but we're talking about quite a few different kingdom, and you mentioned a few of them.

earlier on. Can you sort of explain that a bit for us and kind of set the scene to build up to it? Yeah. So Britain's long been a battleground for competing powers. We don't necessarily think of this today, but if you look historically, that's been the case. And as you just said, the centuries leading up to Brunneberg, we're central to this. Nature abhorrors a vacuum. And when the Romans left, lots of people try to fill that vacuum. And I go over this in Never Greater Slaughter in more detail, But in brief terms, to kind of cut to the chase, by 937, we're down to a handful of main players. There's the coalescing power of what we would today call the English. These are the people who are descended from the Germanic settlers, the Angles, the Saxons, Jutes, Mergings, et cetera, et cetera.

All these dramatic peoples who kind of came in after Rome. The second is the evolving power, I would say, of the Vikings. Their primary center in the British Isles at this point is Dublin, but they certainly have a secondary center in York, Yorvik. If you go to York and take the ride, it's awesome. So cool. So, you know, Yorvik, York, whatever you want to call it. So you've got these two centers of power for the Vikings.

And then the third and fourth large players in this scene are north of York, Scotland and Strathclyde. Now, in addition of that, you've got kingdoms and rulerships in Wales, Cornwall, and then there's a scattering of other folks who probably called themselves kings, but we're sort of like, yeah, that's cute, you know, that are here and there. So you've just got a handful of these major players. And during this period, each one of those major powers is in the process of entrenching and defining itself against the other powers. There's an internal process, when we talk about the rise of states,

there's an internal process of entrenchment, but there's also a, an external process and defining yourself against other parties. And so this is what's sort of happening in the 10th century. And that process in turn, of course, defines what will become our world today in many respects. So it's a tremendously fascinating period and deserves far more attention than it gets. Speaking, what's a great place to plug your book, River Kings. Oh, thank you. Yeah, no, because this is one things you're doing, right, is talking about, you know, the Vikings' place within this age that they do so much to define, but yet they are largely defined by external forces for us. And you reveal, you know, so much of the current work on this, which is extraordinary. So well done. Everybody buy her book.

Everybody by. Oh, thank you. Thanks and Michael, obviously. Both of them work well together. Yeah, so we do have a really complicated situation, really, and we've got a lot of competing elements, as you've said. So let's get straight to it, to the battle itself. What is leading up to this 18-937? What happens to essentially trigger this great battle? So I love this question, and I'll tell you why, because the thing that gets the press, the thing that gets all the attention, is this mystery about the location. That's what gets the headlines. Where was it? Oh, my God. Well, for one thing, I think it's settled where it is, but we can get to that later. But also, that to me is really not the most fascinating.

fascinating question when it comes to Brunnenberg. In all honesty, the biggest mystery is what you just asked. What happens to lead to this? We know that Atholstan, the English king, is following the line of Alfred the Great in pushing back and pushing back and pushing back against the other powers and really throwing his weight around. He's made a huge campaign in Scotland just a couple of years earlier in 934, made a huge campaign, really put the Scottish under his thumb, He's put the Welsh under his thumb. He's kind of, you know, shoved it to the Vikings. Everybody has reason to hate this guy.

But they also had reasons to hate each other. And so what we have in Brunnenbury, it's an international conflict by any kind of stretch of the imagination. This was kind of to these people, almost like a world war, and I think it's everybody that we kind of know of all getting together. We've got more sources for it than we do for almost any other battle in the period. But not one of those sources contains a clear, account of how these rival political and cultural powers, most essentially the Vikings, Scots, and Britons, how did they make an alliance against the English? Who made the initial overtures? Where did that happen? How did they set aside their difference? Were there payments,

were their marriage agreements, were there treaties that were going to define the scope of things afterwards? We got none of that. Absolutely none of that. So we're entirely in the dark about the kind of nuts and bolts, you know, the kind of conferences or whatever that had to have happened, we don't know. We don't know. All we know is that in 937, however it happened, they all got together and we're like,

you know what, we hate each other, but you know who we hate more, that guy. So let's all get him. And they tried. And was that quite unusual then for these groups? Do we have other examples of the same alliances? So not of this scale, but we do have, the Vikings in particular, have a track record, especially in Ireland,

of kind of working with whoever is convenient to work with, right? You know, we want to go get those guys, so let's, you know, set us out of difference, go get those guys. So you get this in kind of small scale. You don't get it on this massive kind of arrangement like this. It's really, really rare. When you move into the Middle Ages and go forward, we start to get more of this kind of thing. but we also usually have the data, you know, about what's leading to it and why.

But, yeah, this is unusual for the period, especially at the scale, because it's just so huge. So it clearly was something really quite unique at the time, which maybe also reflects on why it was remembered so much. But we'll get a bit more into that later on. In terms of the actual battle then, and I know we've got a lot of quite rich sources, do we have a fair idea of what actually happened on the day? So we do ish. You know, I do medieval warfare. That's kind of my schick. And the sources we've got have a huge variance.

When we added to the Brunerberg casebook, we found 53 medieval sources in old English, Latin, Norse, Welsh, French. I mean, there's a lot of stuff. Now, not all those are independent from each other. And some of them are just single line notices, which is, as you know, what we tend to get for a lot of events in the Middle Ages as you're like, oh, on this date, this thing happened. You're like, thanks. I didn't have a question about that. I had a bunch of other questions.

So a lot of it is that. But then we've also got things like the famous poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Battle of Brunnenberg poem, which is the first time I ever heard of the battle was in graduate school translating when I was taking my old English classes and translating that poem. I'm like, this thing is amazing. So it's this great poem. What it tells us is that this is a bit of,

in many respects, the sort of typical 10th century battle. This is shield wall. It doesn't look tactically different. Nobody is saying there was this unusual movement. There was this unusual thing. What was unusual was the scope, the scale, the existential crisis that it was. So we don't have a lot of reason to suspect it's anomalous as far as what the guys were physically doing on the day, which, of course, is just horrific graphic stuff.

I don't want to get too much in the detail in case anybody's eating their food while they're listening to this. It's really bad stuff. People can look it up, can't they? They can read if they want the details. They can go here. Yeah, yeah, read Never Greater Slaughter.

I give some good fun on that. We also have one source, I should say, that stands out on its own, which is Ayl Saga, which is a Norse saga. It's written much later. It's huge. It tells about a battle.

It doesn't call it Brunberg. It calls the Battle of Vinheath, which is a source of some consternation. It gives us all kinds of sort of tactical ground level detail. This guy charged that way and this thing happened and this guy got held up on a spear. Great fun. It's probably pretty fantastical. There's not a lot of weight that we can put on Eagle's Saga. People have tried to do this, but when you look at Eagle Saga and all the stuff we know it's getting wrong about, you know, if this battle is Brunberg, all the stuff that we know

is not correct. It gets a little squishy. So there's a lot of stuff. In fact, one of these sources tells us nothing about the battle, but is utterly fascinating to me. It's, in fact, what got me working kind of professionally on Brunnenberg in the first place. I specialized in the editing of medieval manuscripts in graduate school. When I was getting my PhD, this was, and it remains, a passion of mine to try and find texts that shed light on medieval warfare and history and try and preserve them and propagate them. and a colleague of mine in that work, John Ballard, who was an amazing scholar, mentioned just offhand in a conversation. He says, this Welsh poem, Armus Pridine, and needs some attention.

And it's about Brunerberg. And I'm like, what? A Welsh poem about Brunberg I've never heard of, you know, give me more. And it's a fascinating poem that is begging. It's written in Welsh, from a Welshman very clearly, and it is begging for an alliance of the Norse, Scots, Britons, and Welsh to set aside their differences and wipe the English off the island. It's a call for Brunember, and it had to have been written before Brunabur, and it's astonishing. And it kind of relates back to what you were asking earlier.

You know, what led to this? You know, clearly people were talking about it. You know, here we have evidence of just that. And of course, that then begs, you know, another question, which is, you know, there weren't that we know of any Welsh at the battle. So we've got this Welshman saying, let's all do this. And then the Welsh don't show up. Why didn't they show up? Well, you know, why didn't nobody listen to this guy?

We don't know. So, you know, one way or another, by the spring of 937, you know, the plans are happening, right? And everything agrees that fall, probably around the start of October, the Viking armies of Dublin. Scotland and Strathclyde all set sail in an absolutely massive fleet. It's over 600 ships, which is a lot. That's huge, even by Viking Thames. Yeah, and this is massive, a massive fleet. You know, it's combined.

It's three nations. They set sail, they meet, they land at a harborage that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls Dingasmere, and after some initial skirmishes, they've solidified a beachhead, and then they're met by Athelstan at a place, as you said, called Burnhamber. And we have a day-long battle. The sources are also clear about that. Now, that, I should say, is unusual. Most medieval battles are very, very, very short.

This always surprises people because they're used to Hollywood. Don't trust Hollywood for your medieval education people. Most of them are very short. Lines fairly quickly break, and most people in a medieval battle get it in the back. But this is a day-long battle, which shows how evenly matched it was on the day. But at the end of that, the shield wall of the Vikings' breaks of the Alliance, I should say, the Vikings got Strathclaw. We don't know who it was that broke, but one of them broke.

And they get chased back to their ships, and they sail home. And Athelstan heads back home himself. He makes no pursuit of them, which again probably shows how rough it was. And he takes his own dead and goes home to bury them in Malmnsbury. So that's leading us quite nicely to this idea about the location and the mystery of the location. So as we already said, we've got the name of the place. And in that account that you just gave us now,

you've given us a few of the facts of the fact that they arrived by sea. Obviously, there must be near their boats somehow. But apart from that, do we really not know very much else? I mean, most places, if we have that much information, we sort of feel like we can narrow it down. It's there really nothing in there that gives us definite clues. Yeah, so the kind of physical. memorialization that we get after, say, the Battle of Hastings in 1066 with Battle Abbey,

that's the exception, not the rule. Most battles go without any marker at all. They're ephemeral things. They're fleeting ghosts on the landscape. So the first problem that we've got is the temporary nature of a battle. It's not a siege. It's not something where people dug in. It's just poof and it's gone. The second is that of all those sources, those 53 sources, I mean, all these sources. Not one triangulates its location relative to other known like dots on the map. None of them. No one says it was five miles from such and such a town. Nobody puts it that way. Instead, what we have are what look like references to landscape features on a local level. A hill, a stream, a Ford, a burr. Stuff that really narrow a town. Yeah, I mean, like you can kind of put those

anywhere. Like, we got hills all over England. There's streams everywhere. In the absence of something really clear to kind of, you know, any old reader who would see it, in the absence of that, people have been free to put it pretty much anywhere in England, as he said at the start, and then to write me angry letters about how I said it's not in their backyard. And they're, you know, they're like, damn it, it's in my garden. And sorry. I mean, I've even had one person write me that said it was in the Netherlands. I still can't make sense of that argument, but all right. So, yeah, I mean, obviously I think it is, we know where it is, but there's a case to be made for that.

Okay. Yeah. So let's hear you make that case then. So your money is very much on the rural, so in the northwest of England. What has made you so commenced that that is the correct location? So I go through this in a lot more detail in the book. Here's the short version of it. modern Bramberra derives from the old English word Brunnenberg.

So it's the only place in England that does. That's, you know, something. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean it's the Brunabur, but having a Brunabur, when we have no others, it's a pretty good start, all right? So that's a pretty good reason to even start to think in this area. Looking at the landscape then of the midwerell, We see that the rest of the place names that we've got, Wendun, Brunnenfer, Vinheath,

we get a bunch of these different place names in different languages from different sources. The rest of them fall onto the same landscape. Everything's fitting. We've got the stream. We've got the Ford. We've got the harborage. I mean, 600 ships is going to need a huge harbourage. You can't just like, oh, well, they came up this random creek.

Like, no, you get 600 ships. It's got to have a huge harbourge. We have to be able to find a dinghismere. We've got a dinghismere. We've got all of these clues fitting in, including things that people might necessarily think of as a clue. I mean, you know, I've had people complain to me and they say, well, we're all is kind of off on its own. It's off the beaten path. So therefore, the battle couldn't have happened there.

As if that's like a bug, a problem with the case, I'd say, no, it's actually a feature. because unlike other battles, nobody is triangulating it against things that are well-known. We actually should anticipate it being in a bit of an odd place. That's why it's getting all these odd local references because nobody really kind of knows how to refer to it. It's not near some bigger, well-known place that you can refer to. Right. I mean, if it's on the footsteps of York, somebody's bloody well going to say, hey, it's on the footsteps of York, because that's the dominant feature in the landscape.

We don't get any of that in any of these dozens of sources. I'd say it's also on the correct side of England. When you have three kings coming with fleets, you want to be on that side of things. You don't want to be on the other side. That's bad news. You're in the Irish Sea. You're right on the Irish Sea, so that makes sense. On the Irish Sea, yeah, you want to be off that.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. North Sea isn't exactly a great place to just go tootling around with 600 ships. It had a pre-existing Norse community that would help them form a beachhead. And I think particularly important, the way. Weirall has ready access to the Roman road system leading directly into the heart of England. In particular, it's more or less right atop Watling Street. So this is the line that offered the Great had agreed would be the division line between English and Viking England.

So, you know, he drew sort of a diagonal line more or less across England. And the treaty, this is where to the south, you guys are north, that's it. Now that treaty is subsequently shattered and Apple Stan is doing a hell of a lot. to shatter that treaty and just keep pushing and pushing and pushing. So it also makes sense as a sort of symbolic gesture, if you will, exactly what symbol I will leave to the listeners, for the Vikings to say, we're landing here, and this is where we're going to march from.

So the one place where all of the data that we've got that we can pull together, the center of our Venn diagram of evidence, the overlap of everything, it's the Bebbington Heath on the Wirral, put an X on the map, and that's where it happened. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions, and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers, and over on the Warfare Podcast,

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So arguably, every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities. Subscribe to warfare from history hit wherever you get your podcasts. Join us on the front line of military history. Now, some of those who don't agree with you, you, focus especially on one of the references that talks about the Humber. Can you tell us a little bit more about that source and that particular argument? Because I think that's quite important to put in here. Yeah, so it's a monk, John and Worcester, and about two centuries after the battle,

he's sitting down to kind of write a history. He has a copy of Anglesaxon Chronicle in front of him, pretty much undoubtedly. And he cribs out from that, grab some phrases, and cribs out, a little paragraph about Brimber. And he frames it, then he proceeds it with a sentence in which he said that the Vikings and the Scots invaded via the River Humber. It's in Latin, but there's pretty much no way. It's the River Humber.

That's what he's talking about. The trouble with relying on this is I know some fairly famous people are like, by God, this two centuries later monk knew his stuff. You know, first of all, you have to assume somehow that this really, really important information was recorded by nobody for two centuries until, you know, John decides to dust it off and tell us this important information. The other problem is that John O'Wister himself has been proven extremely unreliable about battles that are far closer in time to when he's writing than Brunnenberg. I give just one example, the Battle of Sherston in Never Greater Slaughter. His account of it is, it's ludicrous, it's stolen,

he plagiarized his account from somewhere else. He's using like an ancient, in battle and he's like, this is what happened in Sherston. No, it didn't. You stole that. He's a plagiarist and he's unreliable. And what he's saying also doesn't make any sense. So if you were a Viking and wouldn't it be awesome, everybody of Kat Jarman was a Viking, and you're like, I'm going to be in charge of this thing and we're going to put together three fleets, 600 ships. Let's sail around the north of Scotland and then down to invade up the Humber in late September, early October, you'd be fired. Like, that's a really bad plan.

That's not a good plan for a Viking. They know how the seas work. They know how dangerous this is. Logistically, trying to pull that off would be mind-boggling. Like, you know, do you all know what happened in the Spanish Armada? Like, this is a really bad idea. It doesn't fit with any of our expectations about how these people work. what they knew, what they did.

And it also doesn't fit with other pieces of information. So people who want to put off the Humber every time they center the Brunnenberg campaign on York. They say it was all about York. York, York, York. Not one source for the Battle of Brunenberg mentions that city in conjunction with the campaign. Not a single one.

Nobody says York. York's a big deal. If this is about York, somebody's going to say it. John Worcester's most strident. offenders, I shall say, in fact, theorizes that York fell, the city fell to this Allied invasion force in the weeks prior to the battle. Like, they took it, they held it, and then they go and meet Appelstan in the field of battle. There's no record anywhere, period, full stop, of York falling at this point. Like, there's nothing. On the flip side, though, we can easily explain

where John of Worcester got this notion from, like where he got this in his head, that is easily explainable. Because with the kind of full picture of Brunnenberg in its context, you know, we can see that he's confused the 937 campaign with the 934 campaign that the English make against the Scots in which, you know, there probably is a Scottish contingent that's fought on this route. So we can really readily grasp where John of Wister made the United States. this up from. Whereas if we instead flip things around and say, well, let's trust John of Worcester, we

then have to start jettisoning all of these other sources because nothing's making sense, including what we know about just how Vikings work, period. Like, we've got to blow everything up for the sake of preserving this monk's account in two centuries afterwards. It just doesn't make

any sense to me. So it comes very much down to just weighing up and when you've got so many other sources leading in a different direction and a of evidence. Yeah, no, I can totally see that perspective. Okay, so that's the written sources then. Now, you've already said that these are very ephemeral. They are flush in the pan, even though this one lasted for a day. We still don't have much physical evidence. I mean, as someone who studies skeletons and bioarchology, would love to see some mass graves, some of the actual dead that we

could study. We haven't got any of that. But quite recently, there have been some metal detectorist and some research going on in the Wirral and some possibilities that more things have turned up. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yeah, so we're all archaeology is a group of dedicated folks who were long interested, I think, in Brunhampur. But when the casebook comes out and we've kind of, you know, we've put an X on the map is here. And I start getting all my hate mail. Little did I know, they were like, let's go look under the X. And they have found a lot of artifacts. I mean a lot of artifacts like hundreds, thousands, like a lot of stuff. Now, this is where a big asterisk would flash on your screen or something if we were watching this at home instead of listening to

it because archaeology is slow and methodical for very, very good reasons. Everything crossed, all the T's crossed, eyes dotted, boxes checked. So this is very, very early in the stages of studying what has been found, identifying at all that business. this. What we do know, what has been kind of publicly released, is that we've got verified arrowheads of the kind that were used by Vikings from Ireland in the 10th century, and the first half of the 10th century, I should say, it's actually a little bit more narrow. So Vikings from Ireland from the first half of the 10th century, arrowheads. We got some of those. Okay. We have a period correct, Abisaduram. This is a coinage that Vikings often used.

an Anglo-Saxon coin, as well as some other goodies that aren't yet to be shared. And most of it is coming from one particular site, which appears to be, and has all the hallmarks of being a post-battle recycling point. It looks like, and we know that this happened after battles, that people would sort of comb the fields and you would bring materials together to kind of collection points to be dealt with. And that's what it looks like this is, to have this kind of arrangement of these particular material, and there's slags, so it looks like stuff was melted. Yeah, it's a spot on the landscape where there's not topographical reasons for random stuff to have been brought together.

It's not like it's in a wash where water would have brought it. It's not near any known community. It's in the middle of nowhere. And it's basically right under the bloody X. So, again, to think in terms of Venn diagram, we have evidence of what looks like probably a pretty major conflict. if they're collecting enough stuff to be melting things down, it's got to be pretty big. Between the Vikings and the English,

in the first half of the 10th century, right next to a place whose name derives from Brunnenberg, and that we already had every reason to think was where the battle happened. So, again, like it's early in the stages, but if I'm a gambling man, I'm not, but I'm putting my chips on this, because, like, if it's not Brunabur, we have a whole other set of,

questions about why it's not Brunnenberg, because it all looks like it is. And this really, I think, is probably the only way we'd ever find that sort of site, because there's not going to be any structures, there's not going to be any buildings, there's nothing built, there's no big fortifications, because we are talking about a single day. I mean, there are other battles where we have battled dead, but that's quite rare as well, quite often they're moved at a later point. So I guess it's really that sort of thing, it's a sort of debris, it's weaponry, it's metal work, that's really the only thing, isn't it, that we would expect to see in a Viking Age battle? It is.

You know, we're hopeful that down the road at some point, there'll be enough funding and interest, that there can also be some work done at St. Andrew's Church in Bebbington, because that was the sort of Anglo-Saxon church at the time. And there are, in its own histories, there is an account of them finding what they say is like Saxon Battle Dead, who were buried on their grounds. Now, what truth is there to that? I mean, you get these kind of like Victorians.

Everywhere you could find this kind of story. So again, it's nothing that you can put weight on, but it would be the sort of next step if you were trying to find, you know, where am I going to find some grave evidence? Doing a survey of sacred ground, basically, in the region, the nearest one, is going to be sort of step one in that process. But yeah, you're absolutely right.

With battles, it's pretty rare that we find a mass, grave. There are exceptions, Battle of Visby, but part of the reason we have that exception is because it's fought beside the walls, and so the kind of zone of holy ground, if you will, kind of covered over close enough that they could dig a pit and just drag everybody straight into it. That's really anomalous and is definitely not the case at Brunberg. This is fought in the middle of the fields nowhere. So yeah, the best we're going to get is going to be the detritus from stuff being gathered or potentially at the point of the battle itself, that stuff being removed from people.

So you don't undress a corpse. You don't carefully pull off any armor or whatever they had. You don't do that. You cut things off of them. And that sort of flings debris onto a battlefield itself too. This is something we found at the Battle of Toughton. So we might be able to find something like that on the field. In addition, of course, arrowheads and, you know, broken gear just from the fight.

itself. Otherwise, what we could expect to find, it's exactly what we're finding, and it's where we would expect to find it. So, yeah, it all comes together pretty well. Well, let's watch this space and see, and hopefully we can get something more in the future. I just wanted to finish off by going back to something we talked about a little bit earlier on. This idea of, as you have in the title of your book, that the birth of England, we talked a bit about early one, and this idea that this battle had such important consequences for the development of England as a nation. Do you think that that was really something that we see in those early sources,

that it was quite a contemporary belief? Or is it something that we've really placed upon those sources in more recent times because for quite a lot of people in the 21st century, that's something that fits quite well in certain lines of thoughts. Is it sort of a contemporary thinking and actually not a very good one? Or is something that was really genuinely there in contemporary sources as well? Yeah, I'm certainly not going to wade into certain waters. You know, the birth of England, if you were really going to sort of hint it down, I guess,

to something, if that was an interest somebody had, would be that period in which, you know, the peoples that would become English, in quotes, however one defines that in which they arrived, organized, expanded. It'd be the kind of dark ages, if you will, after Rome departs, this period in which we have so little information, but we know these folks came. We know they got started and they started kind of rabble-rousing and coalescing. That would be the sort of birth. So I don't tend to say that Brunabur is the birth necessarily, but it is the culmination of England's youth, if you will. It is when England kind of comes of age and faces this existential crisis

and survives and then is able to kind of become what it is. There's a moment in time in which England becomes something that we might recognize today, not just in kind of somebody's dream or something like that, but actually, you know, on the ground, it's been defended, has been claimed and defended, it's there. And it is a lot like what we would look at as England today. So in that sense, it's the coming of age. And it's also, by the same token, it has a fairly important place in Irish history, I think, too, because just whiter kind of British Isles all around the area. Because if the Vikings aren't crippled at Brunabur,

if they don't suffer this loss, and it's a big loss, there's no question. Do we have a Klontarf? Does that happen? Can that happen if the Vikings aren't knocked down, however many pegs on the rung, at Brunabur. So, you know, so many of those, frankly, arbitrary lines on the map that people are drawn to were put in place right at this time. And at Brunnenberg, there's an effort to blow the whole map up and it fails. And the map is solidified more or less kind of how we sort of picture it today.

Now, yeah, there'll be changes. I mean, you know, William the Conquer will come. Like that happens. Brian Burrough happens. But the political powers are replacing at the head of those entities are now kind of stabilized after 937. Things will vacillate, but there's Scotland, you know, there's England, there's Ireland. Everybody's got their positions now. And nobody is wiping anybody off the map in this kind of, as I said, existential moment that we get at Brunnerberg.

So I think it's tremendously important, but again, it's something that we have to see kind of in the negative. What would have happened if it went the other way, right? If Atholstan loses, the English are rolled back significantly. Like, that's going to happen if Applestan loses this. How far? You know, could this have been, you know, Alfred in the swamp again? It potentially could have been even worse. I mean, certainly the idea that this Welshman is talking about in this source, this wonderful poem,

he's talking about wiping them off of its genocide is what he's talking about. He's like, let's kill them all. Push them to the sea and be done with them. That's not what happens. Athelstand wins. So here we are. We're not speaking Norse. Unfortunately, I would say.

And we have Athelstand to the thing. Yeah, it's good. I can't speak it. I can read it. But speaking it, I do. So that's a really, I think, quite an interesting point. To finish on this idea of what would have happened if this battle had not ended the way it did.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I do think it's, you know, victory is survival. And so you could kind of look at that and say, you know, well, nothing changed. So no big deal. But, you know, again, go back to what I was saying earlier, yeah, well, after the battle of Britain, like, Hitler's still there. But I don't think anybody's walking around saying, well, so, you know, so it didn't matter. Like, no, it mattered.

Like, it was a really big deal. And the fact that, yeah, Hitler isn't able to do what he wants, that's a big deal. the same is true here in 937. You know, what the Vikings, Scots and Britons were trying to do doesn't happen. And if it had happened, man, is just the butterfly effect of that going forward is enormous. But yeah, it doesn't happen. But clearly, I mean, this does matter to a lot of people. You already talked about at the beginning, the fact that you get quite a bit of hate mail.

And some of those are quite serious threats of violence, aren't they? So, close, there are people out there for whom this really, really matters. Can you say a little bit more about that? I'm not saying this because I want people to send me hate mail. Please don't send me hate mail. But it's also kind of cool that people care this much about something in history? I mean, I think that's neat. I'm into history.

Really am. Do it for a living. Like, you've got to be really dedicated to send somebody threats over something that happened over a thousand years ago. It does speak to how important this has become for some people. But yeah, please don't send me hate mail. Please don't send me threats. A lot of that is driven by, you know, with someone talked about earlier, you know,

these sources have these kind of clues, but it's hard to sort of put them together. It's like a puzzle that's been blown apart and we're missing most of the pieces. And we don't have the box top to see what the hell the picture was we're supposed to put together. So we're like, we got these pieces that we're trying to fumble and put them together.

And people become really dedicated to how they put those pieces together. They're like, nope, I got it. And they're willing to fight pretty hard to defend that. You know, it's wonderful that people are dedicated to trying to understand our past because as a historian, that's what it's all about to me, is understanding our past. No, I don't think you should be threatening people over basic facts. I don't, like, that's no.

That's taking it a little too far. Let's pull it back from 11 and put it at like a 9 or 10, in which we're just dedicated to finding what we can find, and if that means we disagree, that's fine. None of us truly has a dog in this fight, right? I'm an American. This comes up a lot in my hate mail. Yeah, you bloody yank, you've got no business.

You know, you're not even American. You know, you didn't go to Oxford, so shut up. Well, okay, I guess you're free to have that opinion, but, like, nobody is closer than anybody else is when we're talking about something that happened in 937, right? It's not like anybody can be like, well, as a, you know, as a 10th century of Viking myself, like, no, we don't have any of those left. Like, we're all descendants of descendants of descendants of descendants of descendants at whatever, huge, huge void, you know, sitting here in our finery speaking on Zoom to each other. I mean, you know, this, nobody's close to this.

This isn't our fight. So getting that kind of defensive about stuff doesn't really make any sense to me. we should all just be instead on an objective level. What is the information we've got? How can we objectively understand it? Setting aside our own politics or whatever. I don't own any real estate in the we're all. I don't have any, like I'm not making any money here, people.

This isn't my garden. I'm just looking at the facts and here's what they say. And that's the way I think we should operate. And some people don't. I put it that way. Some people don't. So, you know. Let's try and bring it back to those facts as much as we can.

As much as we can. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that is a great way to end this conversation. Michael, thank you so much for joining us here today. Thank you, thank you. It's been absolutely marvellous. Now, if you do want to find out more and hear this story from the rural perspective, do pick up a copy of Michael's book. It's called Never Greatest Slaughter, Brunner, and the Birth of England. And it's a really great, very compelling and very readable account. And if you enjoyed this episode, do you please consider leaving us a review. Subscribe to Gone Medieval if you haven't. already. I'm Dr. Catjerman and you've been listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Have a great week.