Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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It was a field of bodies. Among them, five kings lay dead. A glittering coalition from across the British and Irish Isles and beyond had brought kings and jarls and lords to this corner of England, and here they had died. The rest of the fallen, we're told, countless. Forty years later, the English were still calling it the Great Battle. It was England's Great Hardening. The testing ground.
The moment when England could have been snuffed out. It was the Battle of Brunanbur. In this episode of Dan Snow's History, I'm going to tell you that story. The story of not only how two armies clashed on that field 1100 years ago, but how they embodied two opposing visions for Britain and Ireland. On the one side, you've got the Scots, what we might call the Welsh.
You've got the Irish, the Vikings.
And on the other side, a political experiment. Fragile, uncertain, an upstart.
England, under arguably its first king. Athelstan. I am extremely grateful to the kind and enthusiastic legends of the Wirral Archaeological Trust who introduced me to what they believe is the battlefield. They let me come with them for some metal detecting and some surveying work.
Also to Professor Fiona Edmonds who came with me that wonderful day and Mike Livingstone, great friend of history, for his fabulous book Never Greater Slaughter. This is the story of Brunanbur, Athelstan and the rise of England. In the early Middle Ages, Britain and Ireland was a contested space. Groups within the Isles fought each other, and they fought outsiders.
In around, let's say 750 AD, there was a patchwork of little states.
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Chapter 2: What led to the Battle of Brunanburh?
And that's just a cross-section from sort of east to west. You've also got Cornwall in the south. In the north of Britain, there were lots of other little kingdoms like Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, Strathclyde, which is a British kingdom, Welsh if you like. War was the norm between all of these different statelets.
In the later 700s and the 800s, well, lucky them, they had the opportunity to fight outsiders too. In 787, a Reeve, so that's a local government official, we think he's Portland in Dorset, he hastened down to the quayside to investigate and presumably try and charge some tax on an unfamiliar trading ship that had called in. The crew was, well, they were men from the north.
And by the way, they had no interest in paying any taxes. They had no interest in the writ of the Reeve or his king. They killed him and they pushed off. Three years later, worryingly similar men stormed ashore on the holy isle of Lindisfarne and slaughtered the priests they found there. Book bindings dripping with jewels were torn from the vellum pages within.
Liturgical implements, so you've got your silver chalice and the like, they were thrown into their ship's holds by these Northmen who couldn't believe their luck. The Vikings had come to the archipelago. They arrived in Scotland a few years later, and then Ireland in the 830s. There were waves of them. At least two groups of Vikings fought each other and many Irish kingdoms.
It was Ireland that became the Viking stronghold in the Isles. Dublin became a thriving Viking town. But they didn't restrict themselves to Ireland. In 865, Vikings sailed round and seized the Isle of Thanet in Kent. Now, that's long been the gateway to England. The Romans had built a massive triumphal arch there. St. Augustine of Canterbury arrived there on his mission to the English.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at this point, it talks about a cabal of Viking brothers. Perhaps, possibly, sons of Ragnar Lothbrok. Ivor the Boneless, his brother Uba. Later sources talk about even more brothers. Bjorn Ironside, Sigurd Snake in his eye, Haftan. It is possible that these were a mixture of Vikings from Scandinavia and some that had already settled in Ireland. We just can't be sure.
The men of Kent, the people of Kent, bowed to the inevitable and they just paid a massive bribe. The Vikings raided the coast before they headed north to East Anglia. There, the king also tried to bribe them, bought them off with a lot of horses, but they didn't go home. For the first time ever, they spent the winter in Britain. They stayed. in Thetford.
The following spring, a chunk of them swapped their dragon ships for horses and set off to the north, their naval forces moving on a parallel track up the coast. In November 866, they pulled off a real coup. They seized the greatest northern city, York. If it wasn't already clear, this was now a massive threat. These Vikings were here to conquer.
And from this point on, there would be decades of near-continuous war. York were a bit the heart of those wars, it was a glittering prize.
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Chapter 3: Who were the key players in the conflict?
But neither Viking nor, shall I say, Anglo-Saxon appetites would be sated with that glittering prize. They were playing for the highest possible stakes. So the Northumbrians, the English Northumbrians, tried to seize back their capital in 867, but the Vikings defeated them soundly.
We hear from a source a year later that Northumbrian King Ella had his back sliced open, his ribcage torn outwards, his lungs pulled out so that he resembled an eagle with bloody wings. From there, the Vikings surged onwards, their numbers swollen by fresh recruits from across the sea, lured by tales of riches as whole kingdoms fell. The army marched south. They wintered at Nottingham.
Desperate Mercians, so that's the English kingdom of the Midlands, bribed them to leave. And they did leave for a year or so. They went back to York to toast their good fortune, but they marched south again in 869. And don't think they'd forgotten East Anglia, where they'd intimidated their first English king. They returned there and they killed him. King Edmund.
They shot him to death with arrows, according to later sources. He is buried in Bury, St. Edmunds. Ivor the Boneless, we think, then headed to Scotland. He successfully besieged Dumbarton, which was capital of the Kingdom of Strathclyde, it was called, in about 870. He filled his ship's hulls with slaves and booty, and he sailed back to Ireland. His brothers, though, they stayed in the south.
In fact, they crisscrossed eastern central England and eventually pushed south, where an Anglo-Saxon kingdom was still holding out. It was called Wessex. In 871, Wessex had got a new king. His name was Alfred. He'd been the younger brother of the previous king, but after a series of battles, his big brother had been killed, mortally wounded, we think anyway, he died, and Alfred took the throne.
Within five or six years of that, Mercia had fallen to the Vikings, so Wessex was the only English-speaking kingdom left in Britain. Look, it wasn't clear if Wessex would survive. In January 878, a small Viking force launched a lightning strike against Alfred himself while he was at Chippenham. He fled further to a small island in the Somerset Marshes.
And briefly, that island was pretty much Wessex. That was England. But Wessex was more than just territory, it was an idea, and Alfred rolled the dice. He summoned the third, so that's the able-bodied men of the surrounding counties, we might call them a militia, and they responded. It's one of the most dramatic moments of English history. Alfred arrives at the prearranged meeting point.
He must have been slightly worried there'd be no one there to meet him, because he knew that local lords, well, they make their accommodations with the Vikings. They try and save their own skin, their own property, so maybe no one's going to show up. Instead, as he got there, he found an army. Alfred's in the game. That army went on to fight the Vikings at a place called Ethenden.
We think it might be Eddington and Wiltshire. It's a win. It's a crushing victory. The Viking king, Guthrum, he retreats to Chippenham. There's a siege. Guthrum submits. He surrenders. He agrees to become a Christian. He agrees to leave Wessex. And then, even more so, there's a treaty between Guthrum and Alfred. And they draw a line from the north of London to Chester.
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Chapter 4: How did the Vikings impact early British politics?
They're properly protected. That was all paid for by a sophisticated system of taxation. And it meant that the English were more able to effectively respond to a large Viking raid, say on Kent in the mid-890s. Now, Across the other side of that line, in Viking territory, to the east and north of that line, well, the Vikings were not unified at all. They were a quarrel of competing earls.
Alfred died in 899. His oldest son, Edward, succeeded him. Edward himself had a son of around five years old. His name was Athelstan. And just before Alfred died, he presented his grandson, Athelstan, with a scarlet cloak, a sword belt, and a sword. He is saying at that point, this is the future of my royal line. So meanwhile, in Ireland, the Vikings have been driven out of Dublin by the Irish.
This was a tumultuous time, folks. People were up and down. These Irish Vikings have now been scattered across, well, much of Europe, really. So we have accounts of these Vikings battling King Constantine of Scotland in 904, We have accounts of Vikings landing in Lancashire.
Some tried to capture the Isle of Anglesey off the northwest coast of Wales, but rebuffed by the Welsh, that band of Vikings sails along the coast till it arrives near Chester in what had been the kingdom of Mercia. Now, Mercia was being ruled by Alfred's daughter, Athelflaed. She was married to someone described not as the King of Mercia, but as a Lord of Mercia.
So look, clearly what's happened here is that Wessex has conquered Mercia under this exciting new banner of Englishness. Alfred's daughter is calling the shots there. She's fortified Chester, which had briefly fallen to the Vikings in 893. Now, importantly, the new king of Wessex, Edward, he sent his oldest son, Athelstan, to live with his aunt, Athelflad. He wants her to be educated by her.
He wants his sister to introduce his son to the battlefield. Edward himself had remarried. He had lots of new kids. And it's possible his new wife wanted his son, Athelstan, away from his father's gaze. And perhaps she wanted her own children on the throne one day. We're not certain. Athelflad, for her part... She conquered territory.
She pushed back the Vikings, but she does seem to have let this little band of Vikings settle on the Wirral Peninsula between the Rivers Mersey and the River Dee. We can see some of the place names. West Kirby, for example, is a classic Viking place name. It's still there to this day. In 909, Æthelflad and her brother King Edward launched a raid into the Midlands.
In retaliation, the Vikings gathered up a huge fleet and sailed up their rear up the River Severn, but the English burrs, the English forts held, and Æthelflaed and Edward caught the Viking force near Wolverhampton, the Midlands. A vast number of the Vikings were slain. Kings were slain, including the rulers of Northumbria. The local English were able to re-establish English control
in Northumbria, in that northern kingdom. And the English rise, the key to holding back the Vikings, is building these defensive towns. So there's a massive expansion of Burr building in the next few years, into Essex, into East Anglia, parts of the East Midlands. You can just watch England expand. That is Englishness expanding across Britain.
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Chapter 5: What was the significance of Athelstan's leadership?
The English feasted. We get the best impression of what happened after the battle from, weirdly, a Viking saga. It's one that I wasn't familiar with before I went to Iceland the other day to make a documentary for our History at TV channel. We visited the house of Snorri Stellarsson, and he is just a huge figure in Iceland. The father of Icelandic literature, really. He wrote down the sagas.
He is the reason that we know about Erik the Red, Thor, Odin, the whole Norse worldview. He was writing in the early 1200s, so he's writing a long time later. He could have made it all up, but the consensus among scholars is that it's rooted in history. He's writing down stories told through long Icelandic winters. He is writing down oral traditions.
He's gathering up from source material now tragically lost. And one of his sagas is about Egil Skallamagrimsson. And what a life this guy had. Born in Iceland, killed another boy with an axe, raiding in the Baltic states a teenager. Now, weirdly, he signed up to fight with Athelstan at Brunabra. Athelstan paid his debts, so men like Egil and his brother Thorulf were happy to fight for him.
And we hear that Egil chased down the fleeing enemy, he hacked down men in the shallows, they leapt aboard passing boats, he was tall, he was thick-set, he was a lord of war. But he returned to the battlefield to find that his brother Thorulf had been killed. The saga says that he grieved his stout-hearted noble brother. He buried him with his sword and gold in the ground under a pile of rocks.
And then he went off to find Athelstan. The king was with his army. They were feasting. They were drinking. It was a wild group. They were happy to be alive. They were trying to blot out what they'd been through. Egil walks in. A place of honour was made for him near the king, but Egil did not take off his battered helmet or his mail.
Slick with blood, filth and the soil into which he'd just laid his brother. Overwhelmed with a sorrow worse than death pang, he was. The hall fell silent. Athelstan looked up. And without speaking, he took off one of his golden arm rings. He walked down to Egil and he placed it on his sword and he held it out to Egil through the fire. Egil accepted.
And then like all good Vikings, he composed a song right there on the spot. In front of that throng, he addressed Athelstan as Mael's monarch, god of battle. And that really eased the tension. Egil removed his helmet and joined the feast. Athelstan later brought in two chests of silver in payment, which I can imagine further cheered him up.
Sometime after, Egil described Athelstan as lavish of gold, kin-glorious, great Athelstan victorious. Well, those are the best glimpses that we have of that great battle. It is a milestone in the long and twisting and dramatic story of Britain and Ireland. On that field, on that day, 1100 years ago, the complex ethnic and national identities of these islands were hammered out.
literally hammered and hacked out. The lords of the north and the west came together, united by their fear and loathing for the man who ruled the east and the south. A different Britain was very possible that day. We could imagine a Scotland that runs down to the Tees, Vikings ruling over all the Viking territory given to them in their deal between Alfred and Guthrum.
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Chapter 6: What strategies did Athelstan use to defend against the Vikings?
For more explainers like this on Dan Snow's history, wherever you get your podcasts, see you next time.
Thank you.
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