Gone Medieval - Battle of Maldon

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

Dr. Cat Jarman finds out more about a fragment of Old English poetry that depicts one of the defining conflicts of 10th century England - the Battle of Maldon. Its 325 lines immortalise the bloody defence by Earl Byrhtnoth and the Anglo-Saxons against the Vikings which took place on the banks of the River Blackwater in Essex in the year 991. Cat talks to Dr. Mark Atherton - author of The Battle of Maldon: War and Peace in Tenth-Century England - who describes the circumstances of the battle and examines how and why the poem encouraged readers to relive the experience for themselves.This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.We've also been nominated for Best History Podcast and the Listener's Choice Award at the Signal Awards! We need your help though - it would mean so much to the whole Gone Medieval team if you followed this link to sign up and vote. Thank you!If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here >If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android > or Apple store > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. In 991, a battle took place in England that sent shockways through the kingdom. The Battle of Mulden was fought during the reign of the English king Ethelred the unredi by an East Saxon force against an army of Scandinavians. Although the exact sight of the battle has never quite been discovered, you know, Neely for this period, it's described in a number of written sources, not least an old English poem. And that poem gives us not just an extraordinary insight into an early medieval battle,

but also into the lives, minds and society of those who fought it. To talk about the Battle of Mulden today, I'm delighted to have with me, Dr. Mark Atherton, who is a senior college lecturer in the Faculty of English at Regents Park College at the University of Oxford, is the author of the book, The Battle of Mulden, War and Peace in 10th Century England. Welcome to Gone Medieval, Mark. Thank you very much, very pleased to be able to join you today. First of all, the sort of big question I wanted to ask you was, why exactly was this particular battle so important?

England, in the previous few decades, had come together as a country, for the first time, really. It all started with King Athelstan, a couple of generations back, and he defeated the Vikings and the Scots, the Battle of Brunnenburg. And then two generations later, we get King Edgar coming to the throne. He was a very powerful king, and he's the first king to be King of England without having to fight a battle. He was called Edgar the Peaceable. So Edgar the Peaceable, maybe he wasn't so peaceable as a personality,

but he certainly kept the kingdom together for the first time. And then he suddenly, at the height of his powers, he died. They had two sons, half-brothers. they were rivals for the throne. One of them ended up being murdered, and Athelred, the unready, came to the throne, and smoke signals or something went across to Scandinavia. And the Vikings, who had been more or less away from England, apart from those who'd settled there, so Viking invaders started returning. And it got more serious. Suddenly, they wanted large sums of money in order to be paid to go away. Perhaps they wanted to conquer the country. They came in huge numbers. And it looked like Scandinavia was interested in taking over England, this new prosperous United country which had a kind of civil service, taxation, trade, all sorts of advantages that would make it attractive to a foreign invader. So I think this battle is important because it's the first big battle in these Anglo-Scanadian

wars, which went on through the 990s, right through until 1016, when we got a Danish king on the throne at the end of these wars. King Canute, famous for allegedly trying to hold back the waves of the sea, but he probably didn't do that, not quite in the way they said. So this battle was, as you say, a big shock, important probably for that reason. And also, what's interesting is that we have various sources for this battle and this particular poem, which goes into detail because people didn't keep diaries, there were no newspapers. There are chronicles, there are land transactions, documents of that kind of wills, there are occasional poems written about current events, but there's a lot of detective work involved, and sometimes it's simply

there was a battle in this year, and that's all we know. But in this case, we have a poem in the language of the time, which goes into detail, which has characters, which has dialogue, which has attitudes and evaluation of the behaviour of the people involved. So that is, one of our major sources. That's the interest, I think, for the Battle of Molden is a poem. And people study it in history departments, in universities, but they also regard it as one of the canonical texts of early English literature as well. So it's studied in English departments as well, by those universities that teach old English and medieval studies. Do we know the date of it when it was written down? We don't know for sure when it was written down, because the original manuscript was

burnt in a fire in the 18th century, the one which charred the edges of another famous poem, Beowulf, but Beowulf survived, and the Battle of Mulden was burnt to cinders, but someone had made a copy, so we have a copy of it, but people think it was perhaps written down about the year 1000, we're not of so sure. Most people would agree that it's a fairly recent appraisal of what happened in the year 991. Some people put it a little bit later, 20 years later, in which case it's a memory of what happened. And do we know anything about who wrote it? We don't really have very many names of poets in Anglo-Saxon, England.

If you wrote a chronicle in Latin, it's a possibility that your name would be recorded. So the most famous historian and chronicler was Bede in the 700s. There was someone writing a chronicle in the 10th century as well in Latin, and his name is also recorded. But people who wrote saints' lives as well, or lives of famous men of the period, sometimes women, their names get recorded, but the poets tend to remain anonymous,

so we're not sure. You could guess that he might have been someone attached to a large household of the nobility or the royal court, perhaps, or he might have been ecclesiastically, he might have been a monk, because the monasteries were hugely important in this period,

centers of learning, a bit like the universities today, and also they helped with the administration of the country, because the country, it wasn't 100% literate, we can guess maybe 10% or something like that. So the majority of people couldn't read or write, and the church, the cathedrals and the monasteries would have helped to run the country. So let's get to the contents of the poem now. Can you give us a bit of a summary of the actual battle? What does the poem say, sequence of events are in this battle. Okay, I think I'm going to start with a summary that you can read elsewhere, and then I'll show you what the poem did with the same story. So in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in the oldest version of it, it basically says that the Vikings were raiding the east

coast of England, because Maldon is situated in Essex, at one of the various estuaries that you can sail up in ships on the east coast of England. So they're good places for invading England. If you don't want to go up the Thames, you might go up the Blackwater up to Mulden, or you might go up the next estuary up to Ipswich, and that's exactly what a large fleet of Viking ships did. They went to sandwich first, and then they went up the coast, sailed up the estuary to Ipswich, and they sacked Ipswich, and no doubt got lots of coins and money from the trading place at Ipswich. And then they decided, after all, to go up the Blackwater. So they went down southwards a little bit towards Mulden, and the alderman, the governor or prince of the region, with his forces, met

them there, and they had a battle, and the alderman was killed. And after that, someone added a little bit more to the chronicle in a different handwriting, and this person wrote, and after that, Archbishop Searich gave the advice that they should pay the Vikings a lot of money so that they would go away. This happened, and in fact, the leader of the Vikings, according to this account, seems to have then converted to Christianity and agreed to go away and not return. And so from that point of view, paying off the Vikings was successful. We think it might have been a man called Olaf Trigfusson, or that's one possible account. He went off to Norway and became King of Norway after having led probably a fleet of Danish Vikings,

it seems, but the details are lacking. Anyway, that's the Angoseption Chronicle, and that's all we get. So that's possibly all that would have happened. If we hadn't copied this poem in the 18th century, someone hadn't copied this poem, we wouldn't know the other details. So basically we have in this poem details of a preparation for battle. It starts one page in, it looks like. The first page has been lost.

And we get a mention of the same leader of East Saxon forces. His name is Beitnoth. Ah, so that's a bit of a clue. You can guess that it must be a story of Molden. He's gathering his men together. He's telling them how to stand and hold the line. He orders them to send the horses back into the forest. A young man is given a little cameo.

He sends his hawk flying off into the forest behind the lines because he knows that the Earl or the alderman Berthnoth won't stand for any nonsense and he's got to show that he really means business. So he sends his falcon, I suppose like an image of peaceful activity hunting with hawk. was something that the Anglo-Saxon nobility and the European nobility enjoyed doing. So he gets rid of his hawk because he's ready to fight. And then we have a description of the Viking army and the East Saxon army facing each other off across the water.

They're divided by a stretch of tidal water and the Vikings are on side and the East Saxons are on the other. And there is a kind of parley and the Viking messenger shouts across the Beath-North If you give us tribute, we will leave you in peace and go off with the money, and won't that be better for everybody concerned? And Bithnoth angrily refuses. The tide starts to go out, and it reveals a causeway or a bridge which had been covered by the water. It must, in my opinion, have been fairly narrow,

because then Bithnoth orders one of his great warriors, Wolfstan is his name, with two companions to go out onto this bridge or causeway and hold back. the enemy as they tried to cross and they are very successful. The Vikings can't get across the bridge to the mainland. So they have another parley and the poem is a little bit vague at this point. It says something which seems to be the Vikings were deceitful. Anyway, they asked please give us leave to cross the causeway and then we can have a proper fight. And Bithnoth must be an English gentleman or something or a cricket player because he agrees to this. They line up for battle, and in the initial stages of the battle, we have a detailed description of the hand-to-hand fighting, and Bithnoth is killed.

He fights bravely and dispatches several Viking warriors, but he's killed, and as he dies, he prays a prayer, and that is the end of the Saxon alderman. This is the crucial moment. Some people see that he has fallen, and one of the three brothers, who seem to be part of the retinue, part of the household troops, steal his horse, which is the only horse left on the battlefield as they'd sent all the horses back to the forest at the beginning, and they escape. Quite a few other people see them doing this,

and because he's riding Birnoth's horse, they think that the leader is running away from the battlefield. And so quite a lot of the ordinary troops also leave the battlefield, and that leaves a group of men, most of them seem to be from the household retinue, not his private troops, if you like. And we have a series of, it's rather stylized at this point. Each of the warriors remaining has a speech to deliver about bravery,

about loyalty, about kindred, and these kind of things. And then there's a little bit more description of fighting. And there's a famous speech about fortitude in time of hardship by an old warrior. and shortly after that, the last page of the poem seems to be missing, and so we don't know exactly what happened according to this poet. But we know from the Chronicle and other sources that they seem to have lost them, but it looks like that's the way it was going in the poem as well. What's different, of course, is the dialogue, the characters,

the arguments, the conflicts, the emotions, the feeling, the experience of being in a situation like that, which, of course, is not there. in the very sparse description that we get in the chronicle. So that's essentially an account of the poem and what happens in the poem. That's really fantastic. I want to get into some of those things again in a moment. But one of the things that really strikes me is it seems to say a lot about strategies and roles

and the different people involved. And in your book as well, you talk about this quite a lot about, you know, how this army is put together and what roles the different people have there. Can you tell us a little bit about that? This is the interesting thing. It seems that since the days of King Alfred, who might be regarded as the father of the dynasty, of the Wessexan dynasty, which were now ruling England,

so Atholred was descended from Alfred the Great, who was a king of Wessex, who had resisted the Vikings 100 years before. Since the days of King Alfred, there have been a kind of standing army. So the ordinary farmers and the fishermen and the rural population of England, And those who owned some land or held some land had a duty to fight when needed in the sort of standing army.

The various princely governors, the alderman and earls, who govern the country under the king, so there's one for Wessex and there's one for Essex, there's one for Northumbria and so on. B'athnoth then is an important, I like to call him a prince because they really are almost at the level of royalty underneath the king. And they're the rulers. and they have under them a set of landowners known as Thames, and they're a bit like the knights of later medieval times, and they own land and they have their own men as well. And so we have to imagine that Beirthnoth has his own household troops,

his own household, which he would travel around with as well. And they would be professionals as well. So when it came to fighting and war, they knew what to do. And so we have this mixture then between the levees, who are known as the feared, the defence force, you might want to call it, and then the non-professionals. And then we have the household retinues that are well trained. And so we have members of the household retinue,

and we can actually identify one or two of these men in the documents of the period. On top of that, it seems like there are visitors. That's Berthnav's court. He's not the king, but he has his own court, if you like. And so there's a Northumbrian hostage, and there's someone from Mercia, So people from different parts of the country of England are present at Bithoskort. So it seems like he's a unifying force. He's got various people from different parts of England.

And England hasn't been a country for very long. And the Northumbrians and Northerners general feel a bit different to Southerners and must have felt even more so in those days. So we get characters like that. We also get a mention of a simple landowner who lives on the River Stour on the border between Essex and Suffolk. And we get to mention our simple peasants. And these people are all given a little cameo speech or a little cameo scene.

And so we get to see a kind of microcosm of the men of England. Not much mention of women, of course, this is a battle poem. But there is mention of going home and you can explore the background. So it's really thinking about the Thanes and the peasants and the landowners who all seem to be part of this army and have their own. own little cameo scenes within the poem. I really like that because I normally work on this period from archaeology, and of course that sort of thing is something that we can never really grasp from the material

record, really. So this really fills in quite in a significant gap, doesn't it, I think, in what we know? Yeah, I think so, yeah. And if you then combine it with, say, in the 10th century in this period, we also get more documents starting to appear in English. So people who maybe didn't even know Latin, but were members of the nobility, could write their own last will or have it written in English and have a record of their attitudes to their relatives, their attitudes to land and the church and so. So we have the will of Pithnos' wife, her sister and their father, so his father-in-law. So we get a sense of the kind of lands that they owned in East Anglia, in the East Angrian region.

and sometimes even a little bit about their attitudes to various people. So his sister-in-law was very keen that all the slaves should be freed when she died. His wife was very keen that his gifts that he had made to the various churches should be recorded. And we know from other sources that Beirth Noth was a great supporter of the monasteries and especially Ely Abbey, now Ely Cathedral, of course, and the Abbey at Ramsey. So we get a sense that this was a man who had a highest scientist, to his character as well. And then we get the character Alf Winner,

and we can trace his father and his uncles through the records. And it seems like Alf Winner's grandfather was a well-known alderman in Mercia in the central region of England. Alfwinner's father had got into trouble with King Athelred. Now, Athelred kept changing his views,

and obviously this princely governor had disagreed with this young king who rather impetuously had him condemned for treason. So Alfwinner is fighting for Berthnoth, fighting for Athelred's Ingrid, but his father had been sent into exile and had left the country. And it seems like Beirthnot had nevertheless taken in this Alphwinner, who was some distant relative as well and given him shelter at his court, despite what the king had decreed for his father. So Alphwinner is talking then about his family connections in Mercia, the fact that he's not an East Saxon, but a Mercer.

and that Bithnoth was not only his lord, but also his friend and his kinsman. So these three sets of loyalty, lordship, friendship, and kindred are very important and giving us an insight perhaps into the kinds of attitudes that people had at the time. Hi there. I'm Don Wildman, host of the new podcast American History Hit. Twice a week, I'll be exploring stories from America's past to help us understand the United States of today. Join me as I head back in time to witness Thomas Jefferson, write the Declaration of Independence, head to the battlefields during the Civil War, visit Chief Poetton as he prepares for war with English colonists, tour Central Park before it was Central Park, and a city in Tennessee

which helped build the atomic bomb. From famous battlefields to secret cities, from familiar names to lesser-known events. I'll speak with leading experts from across the United States. I'll speak with leading experts from across the United States and beyond to bring American History to life. Join me every Monday and Thursday for American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. Mark, you talk more about sort of kinship and family group as well and how that was sort of such a significant part within these armies.

Families were a bit like clowns, really, or tribal affiliation. Kindred were supposed to support each other legally and vouch for them. So that was one bond of society. The other one, of course, was lordship. You were supposed to have a lord. You couldn't just run around as a freeman without having some particular allegiance to one of the great men of the country, so one of the aldermen.

So if you were lordless, you were basically without any legal protection. You needed to have a lord of some kind. And sometimes people even had two lords. They had a lord from whom they held land and a lord to whom they'd sworn loyalty as well. So they had two big great men to protect. protect them, if you like. And what's interesting in the way the poem is set up is it doesn't mention the names of the Vikings at all. And when it does mention their ranks, they're just peasants or

small landowners. And the Vikings are the ones who want land. And the English are protecting their land against these lordless men who've come across in boats and they're trying to get land from and achieve land and achieve status. So that's the way the poem rather subjectively presents the enemy. And that's not always the case. In other battle poems, the enemy, if it is the Vikings, are named and identified. And in the chronicle accounts of the period we hear,

the names of the various invaders. So this seems to be a deliberate ploy on the part of the poets of the Battle of Maldon. That's such an interesting point, because actually what happens very soon after? I mean, this is more or less one of the first times that this sort of big payoff and paying them to go away. this is when that really, really begins, and it's something for Ethel read that

that ends up being a huge problem and not really a great strategy in the end. So I guess that is one of the things that is trying to make a statement about then, is it, do you think this poem? Is it sort of giving a sort of judgment, I suppose, on whether or not that was a good idea? The message of the poem is that you shouldn't pay off the Vikings, that you should be courageous, it seems. Whereas the message of the Pangosaxon Chronicle was that it can be advisable sometimes

because then they might convert to Christianity and go off and become King of Norway and leave us in peace, at least for a few years anyway. It's hard to know. Because it's a poem about a defeat, they were defeated. They decided to fight. They decided to resist the Vikings. And in fact, it looks like they're going to be defeated by the end of the poem. It doesn't say we are English and this is our nation. But it does say we're defending King Athoread's country against invaders. It's justifying a war of defense, if you like. and it seems to be saying that paying tribute to Vikings is not going to work. That seems to be the message of the poet, but not the message that we get from other documents at the time.

And this question of whether anybody else is being criticized in the poem is also an interesting one. So obviously the three brothers who run away when Beirthnot is killed and steal Bithnoth's horse, they are criticized for their lack of loyalty by the poet himself or the narrator of the the poem and the men within the poem also seem to be saying that they were cowards as well. So there are two ways of criticizing them. Was it lack of loyalty or was it also cowardice as well? So there's that. And Beirth himself is just for a moment, just briefly, he's mostly a positive character in this poem. But just briefly, the poet says, because of his overmould, and this is an old English word, and it seems to mean someone who has overmuch mold. And mold means,

Mode means courage or mind, but it's also used in religious documents to mean having pride, and pride is a sin? So is he guilty of the sin of pride? Is this a story of pride before the full? If it is, then it all centres on that one word, and that seems to be rather a lot to pin just on one word. I didn't go into this too much in my book because this problem of overmode keeps being discussed back and forth. What I wanted to do in the book more was to look generally at how the man is presented and how he's presented in other sources as well. And all the other sources seem to show that he was regarded in a very positive way. As a great leader, as someone who inspired loyalty, but also as a deporter of the church. And the monasteries were very important,

as I say, in the government of the country in this period. Now, one thing that I always wonder when we've got a source like this, obviously it is quite unusual. in that we have, as you've so well explained, so much information because we have this very lengthy poem. Do you think that the importance of this particular battle has sort of been exaggerated a little bit by historians or, you know, by people later on, because we have so much information about it? Or do you think it genuinely was impactful and significant in that way? If you look at a source I haven't mentioned yet, which is the life of St. Oswald. Bishop Oswald was the Bishop of Worcester in this period, and he had a lot of contacts in East Anglia with Athelwina, who was just north of Essex in East Anglia and a friend of Beirthnoth.

And both Athelwina and Beethnoth were supporters of the monastic role in government, supporters of the monasteries, supporters of the monasteries, supporters of, presumably, the monastic culture and education that you could get through the monasteries. and we know the name of the author of the Life of St. Oswald, his name was Birchfeth. He was a writer in this period based at Ramsey Abbey. In Birchfeth, Life of St. Oswald, Atle Ombudsman was mentioned. And so this is another indicator, if you like, as well as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which also mentions this battle, that this was the first important battle in the wars against the Scandinavian invaders. So it looks to me that although we don't get a lot of deep,

that it was an important battle and that Beethnoth was the last of the old guard, if you like. The country is going to get new people governing it soon under the king, of course. And people must have been shocked when he was killed because he'd had a successful political career for several decades. And one or two historians have gone the other way. Well, I've even read one of two writers who said that the Battle of Mulden wasn't really very important and the poem itself is not particularly well written. I don't think literary critics would agree with that.

It is well written in its own way. It's very carefully constructed and crafted. The command of the poetic language is high in this poet. He has interesting turns of phrase and ways of indicating character and attitudes and behavior and so on. So it's definitely worth reading as a poem. And sometimes English students read it without realizing that it's actually a story about an event that actually happened. That's the other side of the divide between history and English. I think it is important, and it's a shame that we don't have more detailed accounts of later battles.

When King Canute fought at the Battle of Assam Dune, and later he dedicated a church to commemorate his victory and his becoming King of England, we don't have a long account of the Battle of Asam Dune. So we don't know much about the characters involved. On the English side, there was Edmund Ironside, the son of Athelred, the Unready. It would be interesting to know more about their attitudes as presented in a poem, of course, or in some more detailed account. But we don't have those.

We just have the bare facts as they're presented in these rather sparse records, such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other sources. So I still think it's an important poem because the idea that an important statement fell in this battle, it had repercussions possibly even for the history of Norway. This sounds like it was an important battle to me. I would absolutely agree. I think as you've very well explained as well, you know, all those things that I can tell us about that whole society that this was part of. So not just the historical narrative, but also the society and the people, the individuals, you know, the experiences that they had.

Mark, thank you so much for joining me and sharing all of this. You're very welcome. So if people want to know more about the Battle of Molden, I would absolutely recommend Mark's book. It's called The Battle of Molden, War and Peace in 10th. century England. So that brings us to the end of this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. Don't forget if you want more medieval information in your life, you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter.

Just look in the episode notes wherever you found this podcast to find out how. My co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back with another episode on Saturday, and I'll be back next Tuesday, and I hope you'll join me again then. Thank you all for listening.