Somehow, it isn’t hard to imagine the scene of battle here, even on a sultry July morning when only the distant growl of a motorbike interrupts the crooning of collared doves. Perhaps it is the quiet. No one is stirring in the Wiltshire village of Edington.
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There are no signs nor interpretation boards, so the imagination can run unhindered to conjure the din of axes and swords smiting shields and helms, and the cries of men killing and dying. For this is the likely site of the battle of Edington – today a peaceful spot beneath a ridge on the north-western fringe of Salisbury Plain.
Today, it is a place of anthills, wildflowers and hawthorns, filled with whitethroat and skylark song. But some 1,150 years ago, Alfred, king of the West Saxons, decisively defeated the invading Vikings.
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As his men slaughtered their foes in a rout driving those enemies back to the Viking fortress at Chippenham to the north, they were, according to my walking companion, historian Rupert Gavin, cementing Edington as “one of the most important locations in the formation and the history of the English nation”.
Without that clash in 878, we would not have the English language, says Rupert – a tongue today spoken by around 1.5 billion people worldwide. Rupert is also a screenwriter and producer of blockbuster theatre shows in London’s West End and on Broadway in New York. Language and culture mean a lot to him.
It’s quite a claim for a single battle, especially one that is so little known, but Edington has “more significance than Hastings, more significance than Waterloo”, says Rupert. We revere Agincourt because of Shakespeare, whereas the Bard overlooked Alfred, and gave him no speeches.
To understand the importance of that clash, we need to know a little more about events in ninth-century Britain, which at that time was a fragmented land of Saxon, Celtic, British and Pictish kingdoms.
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Vikings vs Wessex
Rupert gives me a potted history. The Vikings first appeared at the end of the eighth century, launching raids primarily on the east coast, plundering rich monasteries such as Lindisfarne in 793 and Jarrow a year later. In 865, the roving warbands joined forces to form what is described as the “Great Heathen Army” in the contemporary Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
That work, a series of annals by multiple authors first written down in the ninth century, reveals how the Viking army landed on England’s east coast looking for land to conquer, quickly overrunning the major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia.
Soon only Wessex held out, though remote independent kingdoms existed in Wales and Cornwall, and the Vikings didn’t settle in Scotland beyond Shetland, Orkney and the Hebrides.
At that time, Alfred’s elder brother was ruling as Æthelred I, two of their older brothers having reigned before him. In 870, the Vikings invaded Wessex and, in January 871, defeated Æthelred at Reading. He rallied his troops and gained revenge at Ashdown, north-west of Reading, around four days later.
He was then defeated at Basing (presumably modern Basingstoke) and Meretun (location unknown, though perhaps near Winchester) and died soon after, possibly from wounds sustained in those clashes. Alfred, who had also fought in these battles, was made king at the age of just 22 or 23.
Hostilities continued, with neither side gaining a decisive advantage until the winter of 877. With the Vikings camped at Gloucester – or so Alfred thought – the Wessex king settled at his royal palace in Chippenham. But the Vikings launched a surprise attack just after New Year 878, and Alfred was lucky to escape.
“This was the period when he disappeared into the Somerset Levels,” says Rupert. “But come spring, Alfred decided to make a final throw of the dice. If he lost this, he was completely wiped out. Essentially, the dialect then spoken by around 200,000 people, which Alfred later chose to become the national language, would have disappeared if Edington had gone the wrong way.”
The making of England
Sending out messengers from his Somerset hideout, Alfred ordered a final mobilisation of the fyrd – his ad-hoc militia – to meet at Egbert’s Stone in Selwood Forest on the Somerset-Wiltshire border. Egbert (Ecgberht) was Alfred’s grandfather, who had mustered his troops at this key spot before defeating the Mercians at Ellandun (possibly near modern Swindon) in 825.
Alfred marched north to meet the Vikings while they marched south from Chippenham. Were the Vikings overconfident? Rupert believes that they had sallied to gather provisions from the rich royal farmlands.
“I think they thought they had the advantage,” he explains. The battle was fought at a site named in chronicles as Ethandun or Eðandun – Edington – though the exact location is hard to pinpoint. If the Vikings attacked up the ridge towards Alfred’s forces, they would have been at a major disadvantage, judging by how out of breath Rupert and I are.
Asser, the Welsh bishop and advisor who chronicled the life of Alfred, wrote that the king “there fought bravely and perseveringly by means of a close shield-wall against the whole army of the heathen, whom at length, with the divine help, he defeated with great slaughter, and pursued them flying to their stronghold. Immediately he slew all the men and carried off all the horses and cattle that he could find without the fortress”.
It must have been brutal. With little in the way of ranged weapons such as bows, the fighting was hand to hand – a great press of men with axes, swords and daggers, among whom only the wealthier lords had good mail armour. When the Viking line broke, the blood would really have flowed.
From the ridge, Rupert and I look north to where Chippenham appears dimly, 12 miles distant. Rupert tells me that he doesn’t believe the landscape has changed radically over the past 1,000 years. There would have been nowhere to hide in the open farmland.
We have no idea of the numbers involved, but evidently it was a great victory for the West Saxons. And, while it saved them, it is what happened next that was decisive for the creation of England and the English language.
King of the Saxons First, the leader of the ‘Great Heathen Army’, Guthrum, “terrified by hunger, cold, fear, and last of all by despair, begged for peace,” wrote Asser. For the chroniclers, this was a victory for Christianity – especially because Guthrum accepted conversion to Christianity in the Treaty of Wedmore signed following the clash at Edington.
Alfred: a pious king?
The chroniclers were keen to stress Alfred’s own piety and its role in his victory. It seems that he was powerfully motivated by faith: in early life he had made two pilgrimages to Rome, met the Pope and been deeply impressed by the levels of literacy and devotion he encountered. This is reflected in modern depictions of a spiritual king, such as in the long-running BBC and then Netflix series The Last Kingdom.
Alfred also had a great grasp of strategy. In the Treaty of Wedmore, he forced the Vikings to accept a division of Britain that ring-fenced his beleaguered kingdom.
“They drew a line that comes up the Thames, along the centre of the estuary,” Rupert explains. “To your right, Viking land; to the left, Saxon land. The line comes to the point where the River Lee joins the River Thames and turns right, following the Lee up to the Ouse,” he adds.
“Everything to the right was now Viking territory, henceforth known as the Danelaw. Everything to the left, the Vikings agreed, would be Saxon territory – the land of the Mercians, the West Saxons, the Kent Saxons and the South Saxons.
King of the Saxons
“Alfred was dubbed Rex Saxonum, King of the Saxons,” Rupert continues. “So suddenly you had the first definition of this nation. The first decision was what this new territory should be called. It had to be a name that united the disparate Saxon tribes. So the call that he made – or that he accepted – was ‘Anglelond’.
“Alfred was a great scholar,” Rupert goes on. “He was an avid reader and translator of texts, and he was determined that his new kingdom would have a uniting vernacular language – not Latin, not an international language, but a local tongue. He chose, not surprisingly, his own dialect of West Saxon – his native tongue – as that core strand of the new uniting language. And he called it Anglish.”
It might seem strange that Alfred named his language and nation after the Angles, a people who had generally settled in northern England and southern Scotland, and were now largely contained within the Danelaw; we know them as the ‘Anglo’ part of Anglo-Saxon.
Rupert explains that this might have stemmed “from Alfred’s deference to Bede, [a learned 8th-century monk] who was an Angle, and who wrote the definitive work, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People).”
Alfred also drew on the work of an earlier king of Wessex, Ine, who had defined a code of laws that Alfred adopted and who was the first to refer to Anglo-Saxons as the ‘Anglish’.
An expanded ‘Anglelond’
Creating a structure of laws and social reforms was a sign that, having won the war, Alfred was able to devote time to ordering his expanded kingdom.
Even allowing for Asser’s highly partisan tributes, it is clear that Alfred was a literate, highly intelligent strategic thinker. He had many books written in Latin translated into the vernacular tongue so that more of the population could be educated, and he also ordered the writing of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
To protect his kingdom, Alfread created a series of ‘burghs’ or fortified towns that would be better able to repel invaders in the future.
He also built warships to counter the seaborne threat of the Vikings before they became established on land. And all of this while enduring a severe gastric illness, described in great detail by Asser: “he had suffered this particular kind of agonising irritation even from his youth”.
From Asser’s descriptions, modern historians and medics such as G Craig, writing in the Journal of The Royal Society of Medicine, have diagnosed it as Crohn’s disease, a chronic and incurable bowel condition. So hats off to Alfred for achieving so much while in almost constant, debilitating pain, establishing a stable, powerful kingdom to pass on to his son Edward.
In 927, Æthelstan conquered the last remaining Viking stronghold in York to become the first Anglo-Saxon ruler of the whole of England. Yet the Vikings would have the last laugh.
The Viking legacy
In 1013, Sweyn Forkbeard briefly conquered England. His son Cnut enjoyed a more lasting reign, and was succeeded by his two sons. Even after Saxon kings were restored to the throne with Edward the Confessor, they were soon overthrown by the Normans in 1066.
And who were the Normans descended from? The Norsemen, or Vikings, of course. Yet the English language, established by Alfred, held out and was eventually adopted by the Normans’ descendants. And that, says Rupert, is all thanks to the Battle of Edington.
