The Burning Land

Christian rulers constantly thwarted Viking ambitions. The Danes could roam across much of Wessex and Mercia, but their enemies were safe in the burhs that were defended by the fyrd, a citizen army. Eventually, as at Fearnhamme, the professional army would face the Danes and, by the end of the ninth century, the Saxons had learned to fight every bit as well as the northmen.

The northmen are usually called Vikings and some historians suggest that, far from being the feared predators of myth, they were peace-loving folk who mostly lived amicably with their Saxon neighbors. This ignores much contemporary evidence, let alone the skeletons that are doubtless still buried beneath the railway at Benfleet. Alfred organized Wessex for war and built hugely expensive defenses and he would have done none of that if the Vikings were as peaceably inclined as some revisionists want us to believe. The first Vikings were raiders, looking for slaves and silver, but soon they wanted land as well and so settled in the north and east of England where they added to England’s place names and to the English language. It is true that those settlers eventually assimilated into the Saxon population, but other northmen still lusted after the land to their south and west, and so the wars continued. It was not till William the Conqueror came to England that the long struggle between Scandinavians and Saxons ended, and William, of course, was a Norman; the word denoting “northmen” because the rulers of Normandy were Vikings who had settled on that peninsula. The Norman Conquest was really the last triumph of the northmen, but it came too late to destroy Alfred’s dream, which was the creation of a unified state called England.

I have been (and will be) mightily unfair to ?thelred. There is not a scrap of evidence to suggest that Alfred’s son-in-law was as small-minded and ineffective as I make him out to be, and I recommend, as a corrective, Ian W. Walker’s superb book Mercia and the Making of England (Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 2000). As for ?thelred’s wife, Alfred’s daughter ?thelfl?d, she has been strangely forgotten in our history, even at a time when feminist historians have labored to bring women out from the shadows of patriarchal history. ?thelfl?d is a heroine, a woman who was to lead armies against the Danes and do much to push the growing frontiers of England wider and deeper.

Farnham and Benfleet were two body blows against Danish ambitions to destroy Saxon England, yet the struggle of the Angelcynn is far from over. Haesten is still rampaging through the southern midlands, while Danes rule in both East Anglia and Northumbria, so Uhtred, now firmly allied to ?thelfl?d, will campaign again.

About the Author

BERNARD CORNWELL is the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller Agincourt; the bestselling Saxon Tales, which include The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, Lords of the North, and Sword Song; and the Richard Sharpe novels, among many others. He lives with his wife on Cape Cod.

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