The Rest Is History - 250. Alfred the Great: Fury of the Vikings

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

Alfred the Great is under invasion from the Vikings. Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss Alfred's anointment by the Pope in Rome, his duality as both a fearsome warrior and a man of poetry, plus his unbelievable escape from a Christmas ambush from Viking invaders. The second episode in this two part series, Alfred the Great: Return of the King, will be available on Thursday. If you want to hear it right now, just head to restishistorypod.com and sign up to The Rest Is History Club. Dominic's book, 'Adventures in Time: Fury of the Vikings', is available to buy now in all good bookshops. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Tell them to meet me at Egbert's Stone, near the woods where Somerset meets Wiltshire. Tell them to bring whatever weapons they can find, knives, cudgels, even pitchforks if they have them. Tell them to lift up their hearts and summon their courage. For too long have we lived in fear of the Danes. No longer. At Egbert's Stone, we will stand and fight. For God, for Wessex, for England.

That Dominic Sandbrook was an extract from a top new book, Fury of the Vikings, by a top historian, namely yourself. So the latest in your series of books written for children, Adventures in History. Adventures in Time. Adventures in Time, Dominic, sorry. Brilliant stuff. That is exactly how, when I was a child in Wessex, that's exactly the kind of stuff that I read when I learned about King Alfred, because i was devoted to alfred um i grew up near wilton which became the the kind of the great dynastic um center for for the for the women of wessex and so i felt incredibly proud of alfred i kind of felt that he was my king um and i'm absolutely thrilled to be doing this episode ever since we started doing this podcast i'm glad to have stirred such feelings in you tom i laughed at you when you

implied that alexander the great was um a worthwhile model for young boys and girls but with this i completely agree that alfred is an absolute model and uh everyone should try and live like alfred for those people who don't know i've been doing a series of children's books aimed at people between i don't know eight and've been doing a series of children's books aimed at people between, I don't know, 8 and 12 or something. And this one is, as Tom says, called Fury of the Vikings. And Alfred is one of the great characters in it because there is an argument, isn't there, Tom? The battle against the Viking, the fight against the Vikings was the foundational moment in the creation of something called England and Englishness. And the idea of Englishness doesn't make any sense unless you understand it as a reaction to the landing of

so many boats from Denmark and Norway and whatnot and the long ships. I mean, I think I would go further than that. So the passage I read, that is Alfred summoning the West Saxons to join him and they will go on to fight a great battle at Eddington. But this is after probably the most famous thing associated with Alfred, which is the burning of the cakes. He's been attacked by the Vikings. He's fled into the marshes of Athelni and he's gazing into the fire, trying to work out how to defeat the Vikings and he burns the cakes. And then he goes out and he has this stirring peroration, which Dominic has just written up for us. So it's all great stuff.

But I think that the history behind this is actually, I mean, it couldn't be more dramatic. And we've talked quite a lot over the course of this series about whether there are truly decisive moments, whether there are episodes or events that if they'd gone differently, history would have been radically different. And I do think that had Alfred died, had he been captured by the Vikings and executed, or had he fallen in battle, or had he given up and fled as so many of the other kings of the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had done i think i think the history of england and therefore of much of the rest of the planet would be considerably different i really

do think that would there even be an and somewhere called england would that word exist that is that is the question um i mean i certainly think the language that we're speaking now would probably not exist um it would be a very different thing. So I think that the reign of Alfred is really, really important. I mean, there is a problem, I think, in overhyping Alfred, because that's what the Victorians did. So there's a sense in which our image of Alfred is so strongly mediated through the devotion that the Victorians felt for him, as this kind of flaxen-haired Victorian Christian gentleman, which is very much the image who basically invented everything. Didn't he invent, he invented clocks, the Royal Navy,

books, English. Oxford University. Yes. I mean, basically everything. But I do think that he's great. I mean, if the word great means anything, I think Alfred was great. And that word is actually, you know, the association of Alfred with the idea of greatness is quite, I mean, it goes quite a long way back. I mean, it goes back to, I think, 13th century. I think it's Matthew Paris who first does that and then really takes wing with the Tudors. But simultaneously, it's interesting that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is our main source for vast sweeps of early medieval history in Britain, and which basically Alfred started up. When Alfred dies, it doesn't give him any great encomium. I mean, it doesn't kind of cast him as this great figure that we subsequently salute. And I think that

that reflects the fact that perhaps it required the distance of centuries properly to appreciate the full scale of his achievement. They don't know what we know. So they don't know that Alfred's heirs, presumably, when they're writing, they don't know that Alfred's heirs are going to go on and build this. They're going to fulfill his dream, as it were. So people who've seen the TV series The Last Kingdom, based on the Bernard Cornwell historical novels, will know that in the series, Alfred is always going on about his dream of England. Yeah. And obviously, I couldn't resist putting that in my children's book. Well, also, Dominic, people have listened to our episode on World Cup of English Kings

and Queens. Yeah. The winner was Athelstan, commonly thought to be the first king of England. That's certainly how we cast him, who is the grandson of Alfred. Yeah. And deeply shaped by him. Alfred did not feature in the World Cup of English. We had a massive argument about that, didn't we, Tom?

We did, because he was not a king of England. He's a king of Wessex, which is the... So we should just... So let's get on to Alfred. Let's get on to Alfred's life. Right. So we should do the Vikings as well. We're going to talk about the Vikings in the second half, aren't we?

Because we're going to bring them on stage. I mean, a hero needs antagonists. And I think Alfred's story does depend on the Vikings in the second half, aren't we? Because we're going to bring them on stage. I mean, a hero needs antagonists. And I think Alfred's story does depend on the Vikings, on these sort of gigantic, black-bearded... Or blonde-bearded. Well, I suppose they would have been blonde-bearded, yeah. But they... Well, in the Lady Bird book that I read when I was little.

Exactly. I'm sure they were black-bearded because all the Anglo-Saxons were blonde. Blonde, yes. Looking like Prince Albert but that sort of antagonism that's what fires your imagination that's what must have been what fired your imagination

towards the fact that you know these terrifying figures with horned helmets and so as a child in the books I read the Vikings were terrifying, they were terrifying adversaries who would disembowel you or pull your guts out or whatever, shoot you full of arrows and then I kind of

graduated to books that said oh no that wasn't true at all these are all um you know they're kind of fantasies manufactured by uh by monks uh in fact that yes the wonderful culture that they spread and all this kind of and now i've definitely gone back to yeah they were terrified i mean you know their culture was extraordinary but it was extraordinary in a terrifying way. And I completely agree. The measure of the drama of Alfred escaping the assault on Chippenham, getting to Walthamlea, winning at Eddington, is entirely dependent on the fact that the penalties for defeat were horrendous. But as you say, we will come to the Vikings.

So we don't have a unitary state of England, do we, in the 9th century? Competing kingdoms. So you've got North will come to the Vikings. So we don't have a unitary state of England, do we, in the 9th century? Competing kingdoms. So you've got Northumbria in the north. You have Mercia, which is the kind of, on paper, looks like the giant because it's kind of sprawling over the Midlands. You've got East Anglia and you've got Wessex, haven't you? And Wessex is the coming power. The others have all had a moment in the sun,

particularly Northumbria and Mercia. But they're in decline. And Wessex, which has kind of been, not exactly, a whipping boy is too strong, isn't it? But Wessex has been a slightly junior kingdom, I would say. Is that fair, Tom? A slow developer. Yeah.

You won't hear a word against Wessex, of course. So in Chipping Norton, where I live, you can vote for the Wessex Regional where i live you you can you can vote for the wessex regionalist party presumably you would vote for them yeah i think i would i think i would well but i'm mercy and as well my my um my ancestry reaches back to mercia of course i am an anglo-saxon figure so the northumbrians the mercians the east by definition, are Anglians, Angles, Angli. And the Wessex is the kingdom of the West Saxons, so they're Saxon. They essentially speak the same language.

They have the same religion. They have the same kind of foundation myths. So I think they feel a certain kind of kinship. And this will become very important to Alfred. But at the same time, the opportunity to fight each other is also very important. And basically, they play by rules, I think. I mean, obviously, battles between, say, the Mercians or the West Saxons or whoever are murderous when they get there.

But there's the slight element of a kind of seasonal fixture about it. You know, you summon your men they take time to come there you go out you have a battle you come back uh and this is why the vikings are so devastating is that they don't play by the rules and there's a sort of sense isn't it doesn't uh the uh bead the venerable bead um northumbrian doesn't he call them the gens anglorum or something like that so yes there is there is a sense that they know that they've got something in common, like their language and customs. And as you say, they've got this sense they've come over the sea,

which they had done sort of 200 or 300 years earlier. But there's never been in England, nobody has ever really even thought to do away with the competing kingdoms and have a single state. There is this title, the Bretwalder, which is the kind of the supreme king. And essentially, to begin with, it's Northumbrian kings who tend to claim that title, then Mercian ones. And Alfred's grandfather, Egbert, he claims it for Wessex so um 825 there's a great battle where he defeats Beornwolf the king of Mercia and the kind of the strain of the Tolkienist in all this is not um coincidental because of Tolkien was absolutely steeped in all this stuff

so Beornwolf bear bear wolf so as a result of that battle, by 1829, he's being hailed as the Bretwalder, the paramount king in England. And he has essentially brought the previously independent kingdoms of Kent, of Sussex, of Essex under his rule. And he's kind of got Mercia to acknowledge a degree of of sovereignty but i think what's interesting in the wake of this is that oddly relations between mercy and wessex seem to have improved and it may be that he he doesn't force his supremacy too brutally or too kind of aggressively uh and actually kind of works to build bridges between um between wessex and mercia um and this this will be very important in the story of alfred one thing we haven't mentioned kind of works to build bridges between Wessex and Mercia.

And this will be very important in the story of Alfred. One thing we haven't mentioned, Tom, just to put this into context, these people are all Christian, aren't they? Completely Christian, yes. Very, very, very devoutly Christian. It's really important to them that they're Christian. I mean, that's the big difference, I would say. So when I've given school talks and stuff about my books, the children always say the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings look so similar.

They wear the same clothes. They have the same swords. What's the difference? I mean, obviously to them, the single biggest difference, apart from any linguistic differences or whatever, is that the Anglo-Saxons are Christians and that's how they see themselves. And when they talk about the Danes or whatever, what we would call the Vikings, they usually call them the heathens or the pagans. That's the thing that strikes them about them, isn't it? Yeah. They take it very seriously. Alfred in particular, the king about whom we know the most, there's an absolute sense that he feels

that he has been appointed to the throne by God and that he will therefore be answerable to God for the state of his kingdom and the people within it. And I think that you get a sense definitely with Alfred, again, because we know enough about his character and actually about the physical ailments that over the course of his reign affect him. He seems to have experienced, I think, the kind of the tension between the obligations on him as a Christian and the obligations to defend his people as a kind of, it seems to have induced a considerable strain in him, I think. But it is important to him. You know, the tension between, you know, put up your sword and having to draw your sword. Alfred, I think, is troubled by this throughout his reign. But the other thing, Dominic, I was just going to say

is that the church is important to any king in early medieval England, because they provide the literate clerks who can draw up the charters and who can provide the kind of the nascent bureaucracy that gives to the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms their claim to be a part of a kind of broader Christian civilization. And again, that is very, very important to Alfred because, and it's so important. So he's born in 849 in Wantage in Oxfordshire. And his father is Aethelwulf. Yeah, who is the first, I think the first son to succeed his father as king of Wessex for about a century or more. Yeah, because that gives you a sense.

It was very unstable. I mean, there were different families kind of fighting. There's not one dynasty going all the way through. It's very Game of Thrones. But Aethelwulf succeeds. Alfred, there's no sense that Alfred has been born to be king though, is there? Because he's not the oldest son. No, he's the youngest of five brothers and one sister. But I think the measure of how

confident Aethelwulf is in the stability of his realm is that, first of all, he sends Alfred off to Rome as a very young boy. The age of four. The age of four, to be where he's received by the Pope Leo IV, who bestows great honours on him. Yeah, gives him the sword and the robe of a Roman consul. And that sort of, I mean, obviously they are living, I mean, they are literally living, Tom, in the ruins of the Western Roman Empire. But there's still a sense, isn't there, that there's enormous status and prestige associated with Rome and Roman-ness.

And for a little boy, I mean, who knows? It must have been overwhelming. Do you remember this? Do you remember things that happened when you were four? I mean, maybe you do if people are always talking about it. You think you do. And I'm sure for, you know, we don't, I mean, it's difficult to delve too much into Alfred's psychology.

But for a little, a four-year-old boy surrounded by servants and bodyguards and whatnot. Yeah. To be there with the Pope in front of him, the Pope anoints him, I think, puts a hand on his forehead and says, here's all the stuff of a consul. That's a pretty big deal, isn't it? It is a big deal. And rammed home by the fact that two years later, Alfred goes to Rome again. I mean, unbelievably, with his father, who has left one of his sons as kind of regent. He's kind of slightly divvied the kingdom up between two of his two elder sons. And he goes off on pilgrimage, again taking Alfred.

Rome, I think, has a huge impact on Alfred. It's a kind of model of the kind of grandeur that it is possible for a Christian city to possess. But then coming back from Rome, they go through Francia. So the, the, the Frankish empire that had been founded,

you know, brought to greatness by Charlemagne. And they visit the court of Charles, the bald. You had a full head of hair. You had a full head of hair. Yeah. So they called him Charles, the bald. And we don't know if that was a joke or what. And Arthur Wolfe marries

one of Charles's daughters called Judith. But again, I think the effect of seeing the court of the heirs of Charlemagne again must have had a very, very powerful impact on Alfred, and given him a sense of what it was to be a Christian king that will never leave him. So when he gets back, I mean, there's one thing we know about him. Well, there's one story that's often told about him as a boy, isn't there, Tom? Which is that, I mean, you read this in all the sort of children's accounts, children's sort of storybook accounts of Alfred the Great, that his mother calls all her sons to her side. And she's holding this beautiful illustrated volume of Anglo-Saxon poetry. And she says, I should give this to the first boy who can read it.

And Alfred is absolutely determined to overhaul his older siblings. And he says, how do I, how do I, you know, she says, well, you have to learn everything in the book. And the story goes that he borrows the book and he takes it to a monk who's teaching him about the Bible. And the monk explains to him what's in the book. Alfred learns it all by heart. Obviously dead easy to learn the contents of a book in just a few days, Tom. And then a few days later, he goes to his mother and says, oh, I can tell you what's in the book. And he recites it all.

And she gives him the book. And the children's stories say he keeps the book by his bedside for the rest of his life. Such a moving story. But this is in the life of Alfred, isn't it? There's a hint of this in the life of Alfred by his friend and sort of protege and devotee, the Welsh Bishop Asser, who clearly worshipped Alfred. Indisputably, one of the reasons why posterity has such a positive take on Alfred is the fact that Alfred, a bit like Churchill, wrote his... He controlled the sources. And so Alfred commissions the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,

but he also commissions this extraordinary life by this Welsh bishop, Asser, which is pretty unique. We don't really have anything comparable. And so we do get these anecdotes. And presumably this story must have come from Alfred. And it shows him in a very good light. So surprise, surprise. What it also suggests, though, is alfred learns it by the poetry by heart but he doesn't learn to read well that's

the fascinating thing isn't it yes because there's no way you can learn to read in three days so this is this is something that that i think weighs on alfred over the course of his childhood and then into his his youth that that he can't't read. He would like to learn to read. He would like to learn to write. He would like to be able to translate from English into Latin or vice versa much better than he actually can. And this is something that over the course... He's an absolute exemplar of adult education.

Over the course of his life, even when he's busy fighting Vikings and issuing charters and building new towns and all kinds of things, all the stuff that Anglo-Saxon kings have to do, he is also committing himself to this learning. And the idea of it. But he's also associated with poetry, with literacy, with education, with religious institutions, all these kinds of things. And that gives him a dimension that just a warlord wouldn't necessarily have. Yeah. I mean, I think that there are lots of Anglo-Saxon kings that are very good at killing people in war. And Alfred is very, very good at killing people in war. And he is perfectly capable of behaving very brutally when he needs to. You know, the idea that he was a Victorian gentleman is not true.

You know, you don't become a successful warlord without being able to be very, very brutal. But I think where Alfred is exceptional, and, you know, the reason why it's legitimate to think of him as great, if you believe in that kind of concept of great, is he seems to have had a real and authentic kind of originality of mind and a kind of breadth of vision that enables him to see what you do with your military victories. And Alfred seems to have understood that you can't really have a strong army and therefore a strong kingdom that is capable of keeping enemies at bay without also having the apparatus of learning. So monasteries where monks and nuns are going and towns that are prosperous and able to generate revenue. So he understands that learning and wealth are basically

the key to being a great military leader and that they're a kind of single package. And he seems to have understood that better than any other king in early medieval England. And I wonder whether one of the reasons why he gets that sense is firstly, that he's been to the continent. We've talked about that. But also when he comes back to England, it's to a land that is under massive strain and where actually the worldly possessions of his own family and certainly of other royal families are starting to come under strain because they're being pillaged by invaders. And that infrastructure of learning that had sustained Christian civilization in England for centuries is likewise starting to crumble. And this is why Alfred doesn't have the chance to learn in the way that he would have wanted to. And all you can do is learn by heart because the apparatus of teaching is no longer there. And of course, the reason why both learning and prosperity are coming under attack during Alfred's childhood is because he is coming of age in a

period of devastating evasion by the Vikings. That's a great segue, Tom. Perfect segue. I think we should take a break and we should return after the break with the Vikings and Alfred's struggles against the Vikings. See you in a minute. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com.

That's therestisentertainment.com. now this episode of the rest is history is sponsored by our friends at unheard the online magazine that encourages independent thinking and as it happens i've just written an article for unheard all about the vikings talking about their reputation today and the way in which we should tell their stories to children. So when I was writing my book, there were lots of gory bits. And to forestall any talk of the dreaded sensitivity readers, I read bits to children, school groups, and so on. The children generally loved them, except there was one little girl I always remember who sort of frowned and shook her head. And afterwards, she came up to me, and she looked very serious, and she's still

shaking her head. And I said, what's the trouble? And she said, there wasn't enough beheading. If you're rewriting it, put in more deaths, please. So the future of the British nation is clearly in great hands. Now, if you want to read more from UnHerd, there is a new special offer. And it's been running since Bonfire Night for listeners to The Rest is History. So you can enjoy UnHerd every day. It's only a pound for three months, one pound, and it runs this week only, the offer. So normally, UnHerd would cost you a pound a week,

but this is just a pound for three months. So go to unheard.com slash rest. That's unheard.com slash rest to claim your subscription now. The raiders charged up the beaches of Lindisfarne like a storm from the depths of hell. The first monk they met on the path leading up from the shore, they hacked to the ground without a word, an axe splintering his skull in a moment. Then they raced on up the slope, their swords eager for slaughter. More monks came towards them, their hands raised to beg for mercy. The Vikings cut them down where they stood. Blood splattered over the turf. Now they were into the monastery, crashing through the doors, roaring and howling with diabolical rage.

They pulled down the crosses and smashed open the tombs. They piled up the holy vessels and stamped on the relics. They tore off the altar cloth, ripped up the Bibles, and dragged out the desks. And all the time, Tom, they were laughing, a chorus of cruel and savage joy. So, the rotters. That is the raid on Lindisfarne in the year 793.

Often taken, in most sort of general histories of the Vikings, that's always taken as the kickoff, you know, the most exciting moment when they explode into the pages of history. So that was obviously a reading from a wonderful new children's book called Fury of the Vikings by myself. Yeah, very good. But Tom, actually, that's not the first time they had pitched up. No.

So as early as kind of the mid-8th century, so kind of 750, 753, you're getting chroniclers in the Isle of Thanet describing Danish raiders as a kind of um a kind of disease that induces madness and death yeah um and they the vikings seem to have um been raiding the southern coast of england they disgraced themselves in dorset didn't they do four years earlier yes the isle of portland yeah and they turn up and the a local reeve a kind of royal official thinks that they've well that they're the peaceable traders of 1960s historiography exactly come and talk to me about multiculturalism in your lovely jewelry there goes his head um and and you would expect of course you know the channel is the easiest for

ships to to get to you know you follow the line line of the North Sea coast. So it's not surprising that Kent and the South Coast of England are starting to be raided through this period. But Lindisfarne is a shock to everyone because of course, it's the Shrine of St. Cuthbert, very much a friend of the show. So it has a genuinely, dare I say, sacral place, Tom. It's beyond sacral, Dominic. In the hearts of Englishmen. It certainly does.

And as we will see, Cuthbert has a great hold on Africa. He does indeed, yeah. So the Vikings, I mean, obviously they are raiders and traders from what are now Denmark, I suppose Norway, to some extent Sweden, though. I think the Swedes are probably going east rather than west. But they have always, almost certainly, they've been coming for a long time to trade. The North Sea has been a lake.

Yeah, a lake. But what seems to have happened, doesn't it, in the sort of mid-eighth century is that the Vikings become, what we call the Vikings, the norsemen become emboldened they become more aggressive there's more stuff for them to steal yeah so so lindisfarne is very rich yeah and obviously once they've descended on lindisfarne purloined it the news of that gets around and from from that point on, essentially, all the strongholds of wealth in England, monasteries, royal centres, whatever, are kind of sitting ducks. And it's worth sort of saying, I think, why bother going to England? The answer is that

England is very rich. England is rich and settled and stable. It has all this farmland, which frankly, they don't have in Norway. Yeah, to begin with, they're not settling necessarily. And the thing also is that with their ships, they can kind of glide up rivers. So every major river is like a kind of dagger pointed at the vitals of England

and they can glide up and just grab stuff and then go. The mark of the escalation is when they start to overwinter so that's about 850 isn't it so 850 they winter on the isle of thanet which is the kind of running joke in 1066 and all that that all invasions begin in the isle of thanet so that's the very corner of kent so it's not just they're going to hit your town they're going to hit your monastery and then disappear this is they're coming and they're staying they're starting to think yeah we'll put down roots here over winter and we'll, in the long run, try and grab land and entire kingdoms.

Yeah. And they seem, so the Isle of Thanet in Kent, Wessex is vulnerable. After they've overwintered there, they strike into Wessex and they get annihilated. A great battle in Surrey. That's such an old thing to say, a great battle in Surrey on the Gulf Coast. But it was described as the greatest slaughter on a heathen army that we ever heard of until this present day. And that's being written in the time of Alfred. So that's even by comparison with Alfred's victories. So I think one of the reasons why

Wessex comes under less strain than the other kingdoms despite the fact that in a way it's absolutely in the path of all these fleets coming over the north sea is that they do put up a good showing and that the memory of this this great slaughter um at a place called aclaia is remembered by the vikings and so they go after other softer targets yeah i mean there's a sense isn't there sometimes in the sort of popular imagination of the Anglo-Saxons, you definitely see this in TV series, that the Anglo-Saxons are sort of weedy,

foppish monks, and the Vikings are terribly fierce, brilliant fighters. But the Vikings at first are not terribly good at pitched battles because they're raiding parties, they're not armies. And they don't do sieges particularly,

they're not very good at sieges at first. So the Anglo-Saxons are not... The Anglo-Saxons are not weedy no exactly you know the anglo-saxons are very very keen on fighting they're very good at fighting but they are not suited to the kind of warfare that the vikings bring because as we said in the first part they um you know you have to raise armies from the shires you have to have meeting points. So the passage we opened with Egbert's Stone, set up by Egbert, Alfred's grandfather, this is a meeting point. But if you've got a Viking ship gliding up the river

and a great fat monastery, they're just going to grab it and hair off before the local troops can be summoned from all the various corners. It's that point you made about not fighting by the rules. Yeah. The Vikings don't follow the rules. But obviously, the more treasure you get, the richer you become, the more troops you can attract,

the larger and larger you become. And this is the problem. It just becomes, you know, it's a kind of escalating danger. And it's happening so quickly that the apparatus of these Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is inadequate to cope with it. But I don't think it's, you know, there's no sense that any of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is inadequate to cope with it. But I don't think it's, you know, there's no sense that any of the Anglo-Saxon kings are weedy. But the Anglo-Saxon, so interestingly, the one that they attack most successfully first, which is Northumbria, is divided. So it's always the way when you're divided that attracts outsiders. And I think it's when, I mean, that's Alfred's genius in a way, is that he privileges, he prioritises the idea of unity

and his idea of sort of Englishness, which is sort of Bernard Cornwell fantasy Alfred. I mean, that kind of makes sense, that that's exactly the way that you would fight off these raiders who are sort of striking that warning. Yeah, so by 865, you've had these raiders who are sort of striking their warning yeah so so by uh by 865 um you've had

these raiders coming for decades and they're starting to accumulate more and more people you get what in old english is called the mickle heaven hera uh a vast heathen vast pagan army and um there's a great book called viking england by thomas williams who who who who defines a hera and our army as actually being a large group of thieves working together which i think is maybe a slightly more accurate um description of it but so they overwinter in east anglia where there's a king edmund who basically buys them off gives them a load of horses and they go galloping off up Ermine Street, the old Roman road that leads to York.

And they just ride straight into York because the Northumbering Kings have no idea. Well, there's two Northumbering Kings who've fallen out with each other, aren't there? Aella and Osbert. And Aella, ultimately, who meets this famous fate. So I was saying in the first half, giving talks to schoolchildren about the vikings they

always ask the same kind of four or five questions so one of them is horned helmets obviously yeah but another one is a boy and it'll always be a boy a very sort of a boy with death in his eyes did they do the blood eagle because aella is the person who supposedly falls victim to this so there's a the guy who's meant to have done it, one of the leaders of the great heathen army, has the absolutely splendid name of Ivar the Boneless. Yeah. And nobody knows.

But his brothers are always as good, aren't they? There's Halfdan, Halfdan Whiteshirt. And Hubba. Yeah, Hubba. I think Hubba. Hubba is funnier. But I either the boneless he may have had some kind of we don't know some historians think he may have had brittle bone disease or he may have had i mean who knows spina bifida or or is it a mistranslation it's so suffused with

myth isn't it it is because they're meant to be the sons of um uh ragnar lothbrok ragnar hairpants who is killed a dragon wearing trousers which where yeah where he's rolled in snow and made kind of frozen all the fur and then the serpent wraps itself around him and exactly and dies that's basically the kind of the level of probability that we're well hold on tom in my in my version of the story in the children's book this absolutely absolutely happened. The Ragnar is real. But also there's, I mean, there's a medieval epic, and this is centuries after it, that says that Ragnar gets chucked into a pit of snakes by Aella. By Aella, yeah. Anyone who's seen the Kirk Douglas film, The Vikings, this is one of the key plot motors.

And so this, I think, what is it? 13th century, 12th century, that story? Yeah. They want revenge on Aella, don't they? So they capture Aella. He's tried to get York back. He and all the lads have piled in. They get cornered. They get captured. And supposedly, according to a 13th century epic ivor and his brothers had the eagle cut into ella's back then all his ribs severed from the backbone with the sword so that his lungs were pulled out and this is the blood eagle and it looks like you know he's got these kind of bloody wings sadly tom this may not be true indeed because a century earlier a danish writer with the brilliant name of saxo grammaticmaticus says that the eagle is actually carved into Aela's back and they then rub salt into it, don't they?

Which is in its way, I mean, it's better, but it's still probably quite unpleasant. the court of knut yeah um so the the danish king who becomes king yeah of waves fame uh where again they say that um you know this this eagle is is inscribed onto the back of the king or it could conceivably mean that um either has an eagle tear at alice yes so he has a kind of pet eagle that rips him out but either way tom you've got a bloke with no bones doing something eagle related something absolutely unspeakable and equal relations to somebody else while his brothers are looking on and cackling through their beards i mean great scenes great great stuff great stuff hubba roaring with laughter uh yeah so it's all it's all very very frightening um and obviously this isn't good news for the northumbrians um because they uh you know they've lost their kings they get a a tame puppet king a

kind of quizzling put over them uh and then the um they go off and invade mercia and this is where alfred enters the story as a warrior because the first known example of him riding to war is to go is to join the mercians and alfred's wife is a mercian yes uh her name is um ailswith exactly yes um and they go off to nottingham where the vikings have have kind of built themselves a fort and they get rebuffed they can't attack it and they don't know what to do again it's because the vikings aren't playing by rules under the terms of traditional sporting you know marcus queensberry rules yeah i think supposed to come out and have a fight and they don't so um it's it's all a little bit inglorious

there so the anglo-saxon chronicle is this brilliant there occurred no serious fighting there so it's a score draw right yeah um and it may be telling that this is when alfred this is the same year that alfred marries um elswithans. So there's clearly a sense, I think, that the West Saxons and the Mercians are aware that this is a very grievous threat, and they need to completely bury their difference. Well, after this, there's another example of Viking poor behaviour,

Tom. Very. Because they, because you, some people may remember that we said, you'd said they were given a load of horses by Edmund, the king of east anglia when they arrived he'd bought them off they then pitch up back in east anglia and they say actually we'll have your kingdom we'll have a lot please yeah we'll have a lot um edmund resists doesn't he he says you know i'm not gonna we don't really know yeah but i mean all we're told is all we're

told is is that he dies that there's a battle and he dies. But later on, it was said they captured him. They tie him up and they fire arrows at him so that he's prickly like a hedgehog. Yeah. Which I think is a lovely image. And then eventually, supposedly they're firing arrows at him and he's just there. He still doesn't die. Yeah, talking about Jesus. He's just shouting, talking about Jesus the whole time.

They fire arrows. He won't shut up. So eventually they cut his head off. Isn't that right? They cut his head off and throw it into the woods. They chuck it into a bramble patch in the middle of a wood. And then they gallop off, kind of roaring with laughter as you would with such thing. And then subsequently, a peasant is walking through the wood and he hears this voice going, Hick, Hick, Hick. And he's not drunk because Hick means is Latin for here. Yeah. And he goes over and there is King Edmund's head being guarded by a giant wolf.

Fantastic stuff. And I don't know if you saw on Twitter over Halloween, there was an excellent, somebody had dressed up as a wolf with St. Edmund's head as a halloween costume really yeah it was excellent costume that is a good costume and of course that tom is the origin of bury saint edmunds the place isn't it it is although it's not about the burying no saint edmunds obviously because bury is the burr which will come to in the course of town so if you if you have been moved by this story get yourself down to edury St Edmunds. Well, so Francis Young, who we had on the show talking about-

The occult. The occult. Big, big fan of Edmund. And he is convinced that Edmund's tomb still lies under the tennis courts at Bury St Edmunds. Really? Which would be very exciting.

He should do a Philippa Langley and try and dig up the tennis courts. I think he's gagging too. He's absolutely desperate to do that. But basically you're right that the death of Edmund gets kind of hyped up by a monk called Abo of Fleury

who's writing in the late 10th century. Who does, I mean, he's obviously aware that what he's writing is unlike, you know, there might be a bit of doubt about it because he's very keen to say, I heard it from this guy, who heard it from this guy, who heard it from this guy. But basically, he's casting him as being like Christ. This is his passion.

And so Edmund becomes a very, very significant saint throughout the Middle Ages. Yeah, whether or not it's true, the fact of the matter is now that the Vikings, who decades before had just been pillagers they have taken northumbria they have taken east anglia they have reduced mercia to a kind of client state that they can crush a will yeah and suddenly wessex is really vulnerable it's just sitting there ripe for taking yeah well so it seems so 870 which is the year that edmund dies they they the vikings go off and attack um wessex and they attack reading yeah um and there uh they capture reading but they have a foraging party that gets wiped out by the local um the local elder man the local earl a man called athelwolf and this inspires um athelred who is alfred's elder brother

the fourth of of um of his brothers to have become king and the other three have basically all kind of you know they've been worn out by the challenge of leading wessex in this very troubled time um so he and alfred um go and try and recapture red, are defeated, are hurled back. Arthur Wolfe is killed. It looks like an absolute disaster. The West Saxons are kind of having to cross and recross the Thames to try and escape the Vikings. They're basically just fighting constant battles around the M4, aren't they? Exactly. Right around service stations along the M4.

But they do win a great victory um so shortly after this in early january 871 they win a great victory um fighting around a single thorn tree so it comes really called ash down yes um and alfred it is said takes the lead in this he charges like a wild boar up a hill well this is basically downplays alfred's brother yeah and brother and says he was too busy praying. He was late for the battle because he was praying. Alfred's roaring and charging into battle and all this stuff. Yeah, exactly. Not a boring person, but a wild, aggressive pig.

So in 871, Atharad dies, doesn't he? Yeah. So Alfred becomes king. And Atharad has sons. He has two boys. But there's no question of them succeeding. No. Because, you know, this is…

It'd be bonkers in the current conditions. It would. Yeah. It would. Not least because there's another Viking force now, isn't there? So, there's a second Viking horde that has sailed up the Thames called the Great Summer Army. And that's led by a man called Guthrum. So, Guthrum is basically… we know so little about Guthrum.

It's so disappointing when you look at the sources. Great name, though. Because in all the kind of tales and legends, Guthrum is the antagonist par excellence, isn't he? You sort of – I think it's probably the Lady Bird book or something that I read when I was about 10. Guthrum was a massive man, you know, 10 feet tall, really wide, massive beard. Horns on his helmet.

Horn, absolutely the horn, you know, multiple horns on his helmet, tattooed, you know, just a figure of just a brilliant antagonist. And he's going to be the person whose destiny is linked with alfred yeah yes and and almost straight away alfred alfred is you know the moment he's become king he's you know he's desperately trying to fight the vikings off so the vikings defeat him at wilton so yeah the place very near where i grew up um and alfred buys them off but you you know you know that they're going to be back and the the only reason really that they're not launching a full-blown invasion of Wessex is because they're now starting to move in on Mercia. They start overwintering in Mercia, huge great camps.

The archaeologist is really interesting. They say they found evidence basically that thousands of people were staying here. And you know the one at Repton? Oh, yes. There's a famous tomb, isn't there? Yes. So Repton, it was an acropolis for the Mercian kings,

kind of a crypt where the Mercian kings were buried. So very, very, dare I say, sacral. Very, very significant. An emblem of Mercian royal power and status. And so the Vikings go and build a massive great camp there, utter humiliation. And they found an incredible grave there where a boar tusk had been placed

where the genitals would have been. So presumably this guy had been castrated, disemboweled in battle and round his neck. He wore the hammer of Thor. Well, some people think he could have been either the boneless tom yes so i mean wouldn't that be a nice twist and maybe that's what the bonelessness meant comes from yeah so just what you say about the camps now that actually makes us think slightly

differently perhaps about that viking horde because the viking horde is not just blokes with beards and non-horned helmets. There's almost certainly women and children with them and camp followers. And blacksmiths making swords and all kinds of stuff. So when you read some of the descriptions by modern historians of these Viking hordes and armies, they will say, you know what? If you'd actually seen them, it's a combination of a huge group of lads kind of tooled up for battle but it's also got the slight atmosphere maybe and this sounds a bit bonkers kind of slightly rock festival atmosphere in the background yeah i mean a very violent one very violent one very muddy people in tents though there probably would have been music there would have been a lot of drinking um a combination

yeah a combination of a refugee camp a rock festival you know that's a stag do that's gone horribly wrong i mean probably not a good place to be a local woman or indeed a monk or indeed probably anyone um unless you're a massive viking lad yeah which case is obviously you know it's brilliant. And of course there are, you know, this is the plot of, of the Bernard Corwell novels is that English speaking angles or Saxons can

sign up to this. You know, they can't go over to them. Well, almost certainly as Romano Britons would have done with the Anglo Saxons generations earlier. So this is all very bad news for the Mercians. And the King of Mercia, a guy called Burgred,

eventually has enough and he decides he's off and he goes off and lives in Rome. He doesn't, he's also Prince Harry. He really, he doesn't. I think he's under slightly more pressure than Prince Harry, to be fair to him. And the Vikings set up a guy called Caelwolf, who gets roundly abused by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a foolish thane.

I called him a mean and weaselly man in my children's book, Tom. But Dominic, we don't know. I know. I made it up. I mean, he must have been. He's a collaborator. Well, or the alternative is, you know, the vicious argument that he's struggling to do his best to maintain a kind of fig leaf of mercy and independence when we do that podcast about marshall payton tom are you

going to be getting all this stuff out he basically gets given gloucester yeah and there is evidence that he and alfred actually form a kind of alliance so they found a coin um minted in london london is a mercy and uh center showing alfred and kale wolf on it portrayed as two caesars implying that there's a kind of you know they have an equal dignity which doesn't equate with the way that subsequently in the anglo-saxon chronicle sponsored by alfred he is dismissed as this kind of idiot because by this point alfred is quite keen to take over mercy of course bring it under his authority so that again i think, I think is another example of the way in which Alfred is not this perfect gentleman. Well, it would be interesting, wouldn't it, just talking about the sources,

if we had an equivalent to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle written from outside Wessex. Well, we do have a Mercian. We do have Mercian accounts, but they don't write about this particular period. They're not as detailed, are they? They're not as colourful. But if you did have the equivalent, they might present a very different portrait of Alfred. They might see Alfred as a Wessex imperialist, I suppose. In due course, Alfred will go and capture London.

And there was evidently fighting in London, but it's not entirely clear who Alfred was fighting. People tend to assume it was the Vikings, but it may well have been the Mercians because it was a Mercian city. So I think that there is a sense that Alfred does acknowledge Caerwulf as an authentic Mercian king, but he also, of course, recognises that Caerwulf is basically, you know, I mean, he's so weak, he's so much a puppet that he's not really going to be much use

and that Wessex, therefore, is pretty much on its own it's the last kingdom so alfred let's get to 878 tom yeah alfred has been king now for seven years and so far he's done a solid job of staving off the vikings hasn't he by a combination of fighting and buying them off yeah he's preserved i suppose you would say the status quo is that fair yeah pretty much and there's he's had a lucky storm. So there's a great storm off the Dorset coast and it said 120 Viking ships are lost. So he's just about holding them out. And he gets them to, you know, he signs a treaty. They swap hostages. The Vikings withdraw.

It looks as though Wessex is you know i mean it's just about keeping its head above water and it's winter and by and large you don't fight in winter yeah and of course it's you have christmas in winter very very holy feast alfred very devout celebrates it and then you have the 12 days of christmas which you, we have celebrated in our own humble way, haven't we? With our episodes. And Alfred is celebrating 12th night at Chippenham, which is in North Wiltshire. And it's a great royal centre. And this is a holy feast day.

He signed the peace treaty. It's the dead of winter. He assumes that everything's going to be fine. But the Vikings are cheats. Said it before, we'll say it again. They do not play by the rules and they launch an ambush. And this is absolutely standard Viking behavior. They love to attack people on Christian feast days because they know that the likelihood is that their enemies will be off guard.

And this is exactly what happens and i think you could say that you know it's on or around um 12th night in 878 alfred is taken wholly by surprise he cannot stand and fight because if he does he'll be killed so he flees into the dark and the whole future of england is hanging by a thread oh it's so exciting hanging by a thread. Oh, it's so exciting. Hanging by a thread. It's a very dramatic moment. And if that thread had been cut, we'd all be, you know, we'd all be speaking Danish. Oh, I like Denmark actually, Tom.

Brilliant tradition of kind of design. Lego and herring. Yeah. Yeah, it'd be wonderful. But it didn't happen. And as we will find out in Thursday's episode, Alfred will go on to prove himself the king least likely to win the Great British Bake Off, but very much the king most likely to save a kingdom that is tottering on its very foundations. Well, that's all to come on

Thursday, isn't it, Tom? And of course, if you're a member of the Rest is History Club, you can listen to that right now. But before you do, we should end on a proper cliffhanger with a reading from Fury of the Vikings of what happened that night in Chippenham. So the Scullion boy has just gone outside, Tom, to relieve himself in the dead of night. And he's seen the Danes coming. Do you want to know what happens next?

I'd love to. As his desperate yells broke through the silence, the men in the hall were shaking themselves awake and calling for their weapons, and the servants were running to bar the doors, and the first axe blows were thundering into the timbers. It was all too late, for already the heathens were inside the hall, and people were screaming and shrieking, and there were bodies on the ground,

and blood was soaking into the rugs on the floor. But when it was all over, and Guthrum walked in through the shattered doors, picking his way past the heaps of bodies and puddles of gore, one body was missing. For somehow, against all the odds, Alfred had escaped. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. biz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early