Explore how King Alfred’s peace-making strategies, from treaties to baptisms, reshaped Viking leaders into Christian rulers, ultimately transforming the fate of medieval England.
By Richard Abels
Few kings have ascended a throne under more daunting circumstances than those faced by Alfred in the spring of 871. In that year the West Saxons had fought nine battles and numerous skirmishes with the Vikings. The ‘great heathen army’ that had first wintered in England in 865-66 was now joined by a new band of adventurers, a ‘great summer army’ (myeel sumer lida), apparently led by three more Danish ‘kings,’ Guthrum, Oscetel, and Anwend. Alfred’s first battle as king took place a month after his accession. Greatly outnumbered, he engaged the enemy at Wilton and was defeated. ‘Nor should it seem extraordinary, to anyone,’ commented Alfred’s biographer Asser, ‘that the Christians had a small number of men in the battle: for the Saxons were virtually annihilated to a man in this single year.’ Asser’s hyperbole aside, the new king probably had few resources at his disposal, and his forces probably were no match for the raiders. Alfred had no alternative but to make peace with the Vikings, ‘on the condition that they would leave [his kingdom], which the pagans did.’
Alfred’s attempts to make peace with the Vikings and his attempts to resolve the conflict and bind them to that resolution became a leitmotif of his reign. The methods that he chose reflect both changes in his and his enemies’ circumstances and in his understanding of the threat the Vikings posed to him and his kingdom. As in other aspects of his reign, Alfred’s peace-making strategies force us to reconsider the received view of the king. The ‘earnest, kindly, simple’ Alfred of Victorian historiography, the Dark Age Prince Albert enshrined on the High Street of Winchester and in the market square at Wantage, must give way to another vision of Alfred, that of a flexible, pragmatic, and, when the occasion demanded, even ruthless warrior king, whose Christian piety did not preclude him from attempting to bind the ‘heathens’ by means of a pagan ritual.
The difficulties Alfred experienced in making peace with the Vikings also call into question whether Christian Anglo-Saxon kings and pagan Viking sea-kings shared a common political culture and held the same concept of ‘peace.’ The primary lesson that Alfred learned from his failures to bind the Vikings to their promises was that to make a lasting peace with a Danish king one had to recreate him into a Christian English monarch.
What do the sources mean when they say that Alfred ‘made peace’ with the Vikings in 871? Asser’s claim that Vikings promised to vacate the kingdom is found neither in the surviving recensions of the Chronicle nor in Æthelweard’s rendition. Nevertheless, all the sources make it clear that the Vikings did leave Wessex to take up winter quarters in Mercian London. The quid that Alfred paid for this quo was undoubtedly cash, much as the Mercians were to do in the following year. Cash and plunder, after all, were what the Vikings sought, and when one was dealing from a position of weakness, as were Alfred in 871 and King Burgraed of Mercia in 872, cash was what one offered and hoped would be accepted.
Map of England durint. the time of Alfred the Great – The dawn of American history in Europe (1912)
The precedent Alfred followed was Frankish. The payment of tribute was the primary way in which Charles the Bald and other Frankish princes dealt with the Vikings throughout the second half of the ninth century. Given Charles’s domestic problems with his nobility and the tactical challenge presented by the mobile raiders, such a policy was not unreasonable; indeed, until Charles created an effective system of fortified bridges on the Seine and Loire he had few other options.
Whether they came to plunder, to extort tribute, or to grab land, Viking chieftains and their warbands were after the same thing: the acquisition of wealth. In this, as Timothy Reuter has recently reminded us, the Viking predators were no different from their aristocratic English, Irish, or Carolingian prey.
This shared culture of predation is evident even in the chronicles of the victims. The reader of the Annals of Ulster is hard-pressed to distinguish between the plundering of the ‘good guys,’ the Irish high-kings, and that of the ‘bad guys,’ the Danes and Norse (dub- and finnihgallaibh), their sometime allies. Aed mac Niall of Tara laid waste the rival kingdom of Laignin, burning the churches as he went. The Norse of Dublin joined forces with Cinaed son of Conaing, king of the Ciannachta, to plunder the lands of the high-king ‘from Shannon to the sea,’ sparing neither the land nor its churches. The Danish sea-king Ivarr sacked the Norse settlement of Dublin, slaughtering all he encountered. The names and nationalities may change, but the activities described in the Annals remain the same.
Anglo-Saxon kings of Alfred’s day undoubtedly had similar aspirations. As the Beowulf poet sang:
Often Scyld Scefing took mead-benches away from enemy bands, from many tribes, terrified their nobles . . . [He] became great under the skies, prospered in honours until every one of those who lived under him . . . had to pay tribute. That was a good king.
By this measure, Alfred’s son Edward the Elder and his grandsons Æthelstan, Edmund, and Eadred were very good kings. In 871 Alfred was not yet one; by the end of his reign, however, he would be, not simply because he saved Wessex from conquest and his dynasty from extinction, and not just because he issued law and translated Latin works into English, but because he defeated Guthrum and imposed his royal lordship over and undoubtedly exacted tribute from Danes, west Mercians, and the southern Welsh.
Alfred’s essential pragmatism is revealed by the negotiations that followed. Unable to achieve military victory over the Danes, he attempted to find common ground with them, some ceremony or ritual of peace-making that the Vikings would recognize as binding. He thought he found it by combining a payment of money with an exchange of hostages and the swearing of oaths. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates:
and then the king made peace with the enemy and they gave him hostages, who were the most important men next to their king in the army, and swore oaths to him on the holy ring – a thing which they would not do before for any nation – that they would speedily leave his kingdom.
Sacred oaths played a critical role in resolving disputes in ninth-century England. Sworn on holy relics, they drew upon a force more powerful than any wielded by an earthly king, the shared Christian belief that Divine retribution would visit oathbreakers. A supernatural sanction was needed to secure a man’s promise in a period when the coercive power of government was so weak. This was even more true for ending hostilities between kingdoms of equal or near equal power.
Because of their blithe contempt for the wrath of the Christian God, the pagan Northmen must have appeared untrustworthy in the extreme to the English. How could one deal with a foe to whom oaths were mere words, to be honored or broken as the situation required? An exchange of hostages and a mere promise of good behavior, Alfred realized, was insufficient warranty for the withdrawal of Guthrum and his army. An oath was necessary to bind the enemy with supernatural fetters, but oaths upon relics could bind only a Christian foe. To bind heathens one needed something that they believed sacred, hence the ‘holy ring,’ an arm-ring associated with the worship of Thor. Asser realized the implications of such a ceremony and was embarrassed enough by it to alter the text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, changing the holy ring into ‘relics in which the king placed the greatest trust after God.’ His hero had been willing to engage in a pagan ritual, in fact had insisted upon a pagan ritual, to resolve a conflict.
King Alfred, MS_Royal_14_B_VI
Embarrassed as Asser may have been, Alfred’s only regret probably was that his clever stratagem failed:
But one night, practising their usual treachery, after their own manner, and paying no heed to the hostages, the oath and the promise of faith, they broke the treaty, killed all the hostages they had, and turning away they went unexpectedly to another place called Exeter…. There they spent the winter.
Why had the oath failed? That, unfortunately, is an unanswerable question. The Danes of Wareham may simply have been a slippery crew, even by Viking standards. Or perhaps they did not regard an oath to a Christian as binding, even if taken on the ring of Thor. Or maybe Alfred just got it wrong. We know precious little about pagan practices in Viking-age Denmark. Most of the evidence comes from Icelandic and Norse sagas of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In a number of these, notably Eyrbyggja Saga and Landnámabók, we read about a holy ring of Thor upon which oaths were taken, and in others, about peace-oaths taken before the formal handshakes or handslaps that ended conflicts. This evidence, however, is late, and even in the sagas oaths do not have the same centrality as in Anglo-Saxon law and literature. It is possible that oaths were not as essential in resolving disputes in ninth-century Denmark as in Anglo-Saxon England. In any event, Alfred’s attempt to find common ground failed. The betrayal of the oath was sufficient to justify Asser’s bitter comment that the heathens were by nature perfidious.
When enemies do not share the same idea of what is honorable and dishonorable, it is easy to demonize the foe. A well-documented example from Roman history offers an interesting parallel to Alfred’s situation. In 150 B.C. a praetor named Galba, pursuing a war with the native Celtiberians, did a most un-Romanlike thing: he treacherously annihilated a tribe of Lusitanians after agreeing to a truce. Tired of war, the Lusitanians had sued for peace, asking Galba to restore the terms of a treaty that they had recently violated. Feigning sympathy, Galba persuaded them to lay down their arms under a promise of friendship and then slaughtered them. As Appian commented, ‘Thus he avenged treachery with treachery, imitating barbarians in a way unworthy of a Roman.’ Underlying this atrocity was an unbridgeable cultural gulf. For the Romans, treaties were sacred, and those who broke them lacked fides. For Alfred, the same was true for oaths and for oath-breakers.
From his failure in 876 Alfred learned that to make a secure peace with Vikings they had to cease to be Vikings. To bind them, one had to recreate their leaders in the image of Christian Anglo-Saxon (or Carolingian) territorial rulers. Once defeated, their sea-kings had to be provided with a political ideology that emphasized stability and legitimacy. For this, Christianity, as well as military superiority, was essential, not merely for the pious purposes of saving the souls of the heathens, but to ‘civilize’ them, to make them into people with whom one could deal.
Alfred’s opportunity came with his decisive victory over Guthrum at Edington in the spring of 878. He pursued the remnants of Guthrum’s army to its stronghold, probably Chippenham, and laid siege to it. He seized all the horses and cattle and summarily killed all the men he found outside the burh. Alfred was playing for keeps. He and his army camped outside Chippenham for a fortnight, until:
the heathens, thoroughly terrified by hunger, cold and fear, and in the end by despair, sought peace on this condition: the king should take as many chosen hostages as he wanted from them and give none to them; never before, indeed, had they made peace with anyone on such terms. When he had heard their embassy, the king (as was his wont) was moved to compassion and took as many chosen hostages from them as he wanted. When they had been handed over, the heathens swore in addition that they would leave his kingdom immediately, and Guthrum, their king, promised to accept Christianity and to receive baptism at King Alfred’s hand; all of which he and his men fulfilled as they promised. For three weeks later Guthrum, the king of the heathens, with thirty of the best men in his army, came to King Alfred at a place called Aller, near Athelney. King Alfred raised him from the holy font of baptism, receiving him as his adoptive son; the unbinding of the chrism took place at a royal estate called Wedmore. Guthrum remained with the king for twelve nights after he had been baptized, and the king freely bestowed many excellent treasures on him and all his men.
Alfred’s dealings with Guthrum in the wake of Edington, like his payment of Danegeld, finds an echo in ninth-century Francia. Carolingian rulers ordinarily required conversion before they would ally themselves with Viking chieftains. When in 826 the exiled Danish king Harald Klak sought aid from Louis the Pious in the recovery of his kingdom, the emperor agreed only on condition that his pagan suppliant convert, because (in the words of St. Anskar’s biographer Rimbert): ‘there would then be a more intimate friendship between them, and a Christian people would more readily come to his aid and the aid of his friends if both peoples were worshippers of the same God.’ Harald was baptized with his wife in Louis’s palace at Ingelheim. Then, according to Thegan, ‘the Emperor gave him a large part of Frisia, and having honored him with many gifts, he sent him and his messengers away in peace.’ Similarly, in 862 Charles the Bald required the Viking chieftain Weland to accept baptism along with his family, before accepting his oath of fealty. And in 873, a mere five years before Edington, Charles required conversion from a group of Vikings whom he had defeated at Angers who expressed a desire to remain in his territories.
Though Alfred’s peace-making strategy in 878 may not have been as innovative as his attempt in 876, it was far more successful. He was now dealing from strength. Guthrum’s forces had been crushed in battle, and the Danish king’s very survival had depended upon Alfred’s mercy. Alfred’s insistence upon Guthrum’s conversion should be regarded as an attempt to remake his enemy after his own image. With his baptism, the Danish sea-king Guthrum had been reborn; Christened Æthelstan, he was now Alfred’s adoptive son. The ceremonies at Aller and Wedmore were intended to impress Guthrum and enmesh him in webs of obligation and dependency. By standing sponsor at the baptism, Alfred was asserting his political as well as spiritual superiority over his new adoptive son. The rich gifts that he showered upon Guthrum and his followers were freely given and freely accepted, in pointed contrast to the payments of tribute that he had made in the past. Alfred was now the ring-giver, the open-handed lord, and Guthrum the grateful recipient of the largess.
A Victorian representation of the baptism of King Guthrum – A Chronicle of England: B.C. 55 – A.D. 1485 (1864)
Alfred had not only received Guthrum into the body of Christian believers, but had welcomed him to the political community of English rulers. This is clearly reflected in the treaty between the two kings in or soon after Alfred’s seizure of London in 886. Although the frontiers established by this treaty may have collapsed within a decade, the document is nonetheless interesting for the light it sheds on Alfred’s relationship with Guthrum after Wedmore. Its prologue establishes the tone:
This is the peace which King Alfred and King Guthrum and the councillors of all the English race and all the people who are in East Anglia have all agreed on and confirmed with oaths, for themselves and for their subjects, both for the living and the unborn, who care to have God’s favour or ours.
The language is that of traditional Anglo-Saxon law, emphasizing oaths and the favor of God. The agreement that follows defines the social classes of Danish East Anglia in terms equivalent to those of Wessex, so that redress and compensation for crimes could be offered. It also attempts to minimize opportunities for conflict by regulating movement and commerce between the two kingdoms. The Guthrum of this treaty is no longer the sea-raider of the summer army of 871; he is now a king.
The success of Alfred’s peace-making is reflected in the numismatic evidence. The ‘Cross-and-Lozenge (i.e., geometric)’ and ‘Two Emperors’ issues of the early 880s and the famous London Monogram and Two-line types of the latter part of his reign represent a significant coinage reform, replacing the debased, light ‘Lunette’ series (50 per cent fine under Aethelred I, falling to less than 20 per cent fine in the 870s) with a new coin of fine silver. The restoration of the coinage eloquently attests to the new political stability and prosperity Alfred enjoyed after Edington. That prosperity may have been funded in part by the spoils of victory; it would be reasonable to expect that Guthrum more than returned the victor’s baptismal gifts.
The numismatic evidence also underscores Alfred’s success in acculturating his enemy to the Anglo-Saxon political culture. The Danes lacked a tradition of minting coins, and ‘the Vikings who settled in Britain and Ireland seem to have been unfamiliar with the use of coin per se.’ The large, well-regulated coinages of pennies and halfpennies struck in the Danelaw at the end of the ninth century suggest that the new Anglo-Danish rulers quickly learned the value of a monetary system. Guthrum was the earliest to adopt this attribute of kingship. Between 880 and 890 he issued a series of Two-line coins under his baptismal name Æthelstan. The coin type was not only based on a West Saxon issue, but some of Guthrum’s coins were minted by moneyers who also struck for Alfred. There is even evidence that the two kings shared a mint.
Silver, penny of Aethelstan II of East Anglia, aka Guthrum – photo courtesy The Portable Antiquities Scheme/ The Trustees of the British Museum
One cannot assess how seriously Guthrum regarded his conversion, but his use of his baptismal name on his coinage implies that he at least wished to present himself as a Christian king. By the mid-890s, the most popular coinage in the southern Danelaw was the St. Edmund’s penny, commemorating a king martyred by the fathers of those who placed his name and image on their coins. In this way, the Christian Viking rulers of East Anglia associated themselves with the English royal dynasty they had extinguished and replaced a generation before.
The power of the Anglo-Saxon model of kingship is demonstrated in the widespread minting of ‘Alfred’ coins throughout the Danelaw at the beginning of the tenth century. This does not mean that the Vikings of Northumbria accepted even the theoretical overlordship of West Saxon kings, any more than Offa’s imitation Arabic coins meant that he recognized the superiority of the Caliph. But it does indicate the integration of the victorious Viking chieftains into an Anglo-Saxon Christian culture and an adoption of the conquered people’s concept of rulership. This is not to say that the Vikings ceased to be Scandinavians, any more than Kublai Khan ceased to be a Mongol. What it does imply is that, for their own purposes, the Viking ‘kings’ exchanged their powers and authority as Herekonigen for that of territorial Anglo-Saxon kings.
One is reminded both of the Roman ‘creation’ of German political tribes with which they could deal, and of the British and French reshaping of traditional African chieftainship (and redefinition of traditional concepts of property) in the late nineteenth century in order to have kings with whom a ‘civilized’ power could deal and contract treaties. In the case of both the Romans and the European imperialist powers, the giving of gifts to chieftains and the promise of material and military support helped create ‘big men’ who in fact had the power posited to them in theory by the ‘civilized’ powers with whom they dealt. One perhaps could even note here that the ‘civilizing’ of Africa entailed not only the creation of stable political units, but the Christianization of the native populace to provide a common cultural ground upon which to deal.
Alfred’s dealings with the Viking raiders of 892–96 provide a coda for our inquiry into his peace-making strategies. When the Vikings returned from a suddenly inhospitable Francia in the 890s, they found an England that had been militarily transformed through Alfred’s efforts. Between 878 and 892 he had instituted a new integrated defensive system of garrisoned boroughs and rotating contingents in a standing, mobile field army. Alfred’s military power in the 890s was thus far greater than it had been a decade or two before.
Alfred attempted to deprive the raiders of support among their compatriots settled in East Anglia and Northumbria by taking oaths and hostages from the native Danish rulers. The lure of plunder, however, seems to have been too great, and ‘contrary to their pledges, as often as the other Danish armies went out in full force, they went either with them or on their behalf.’
Alfred attempted to pacify the Viking chieftain Haestein through conversion and gifts, as he had done before with Guthrum. Haestein accepted baptism and gladly took Alfred’s gifts and then proceeded to build himself a fortress at Benfleet from which he could raid Alfred’s kingdom. Alfred tried once more to bind the chieftain to him through the moral obligation arising from the acceptance of gifts, when he generously restored to Haestein his wife and two sons (Alfred’s and Ealdorman Æthelred’s godsons), whom he had captured when he took Benfleet in 893.
It didn’t work. What was missing was clear military superiority and a territorial settlement. This was Alfred’s last attempt to make peace with the new army. Over the next two years, he pursued the raiders and fought them; when he caught them, he killed them. Two Viking ships, trying to escape a naval engagement near the Isle of Wight in 896, ran aground on the Sussex shore. The crews, many of whom were wounded, were immediately seized and brought before Alfred at Winchester. The king’s decision was to hang them all. By the summer of 896, it had become obvious to Haestein and his followers that their raid had been and would continue to be unprofitable.
The support provided by the East Anglians and Northumbrians ought not to be regarded as proof of the failure of Alfred’s policies. By supporting the Danish invaders, the rulers of these Anglo-Scandinavian principalities were behaving no differently from Irish kings and Frankish princes who viewed the Vikings as useful allies in expeditions of plunder. Nor were they behaving that differently from previous Anglo-Saxon warrior-kings and æthelings. Alfred had succeeded in bringing the Viking chieftains into the Anglo-Saxon political structure, but this made them no more safe or reliable than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.
Nevertheless, the support given the Vikings by native Danish leaders underscored a problem for the West Saxon dynasty, a problem which came into clearer focus in 900 when the ætheling Æthelwold, son of Alfred’s elder brother King Æthelred, contested the succession of Edward and sought allies among the Danes of Northumbria and East Anglia, who, according to all but the ‘A’ recension of the Chronicle, took him to be their king and lord. Edward’s first campaign against the Danelaw was, in fact, a response to Æthelwold’s harrying of English Mercia. From 902 to about 913, the campaigns of Edward and the Mercian rulers Æthelred and Æthelflæd were probably defensive; by 914, Edward and his sister had taken the war to the Danes. From that point on, peace-making was to be indistinguishable from conquest.
Explore how King Alfred’s peace-making strategies, from treaties to baptisms, reshaped Viking leaders into Christian rulers, ultimately transforming the fate of medieval England.
By Richard Abels
Few kings have ascended a throne under more daunting circumstances than those faced by Alfred in the spring of 871. In that year the West Saxons had fought nine battles and numerous skirmishes with the Vikings. The ‘great heathen army’ that had first wintered in England in 865-66 was now joined by a new band of adventurers, a ‘great summer army’ (myeel sumer lida), apparently led by three more Danish ‘kings,’ Guthrum, Oscetel, and Anwend. Alfred’s first battle as king took place a month after his accession. Greatly outnumbered, he engaged the enemy at Wilton and was defeated. ‘Nor should it seem extraordinary, to anyone,’ commented Alfred’s biographer Asser, ‘that the Christians had a small number of men in the battle: for the Saxons were virtually annihilated to a man in this single year.’ Asser’s hyperbole aside, the new king probably had few resources at his disposal, and his forces probably were no match for the raiders. Alfred had no alternative but to make peace with the Vikings, ‘on the condition that they would leave [his kingdom], which the pagans did.’
Alfred’s attempts to make peace with the Vikings and his attempts to resolve the conflict and bind them to that resolution became a leitmotif of his reign. The methods that he chose reflect both changes in his and his enemies’ circumstances and in his understanding of the threat the Vikings posed to him and his kingdom. As in other aspects of his reign, Alfred’s peace-making strategies force us to reconsider the received view of the king. The ‘earnest, kindly, simple’ Alfred of Victorian historiography, the Dark Age Prince Albert enshrined on the High Street of Winchester and in the market square at Wantage, must give way to another vision of Alfred, that of a flexible, pragmatic, and, when the occasion demanded, even ruthless warrior king, whose Christian piety did not preclude him from attempting to bind the ‘heathens’ by means of a pagan ritual.
The difficulties Alfred experienced in making peace with the Vikings also call into question whether Christian Anglo-Saxon kings and pagan Viking sea-kings shared a common political culture and held the same concept of ‘peace.’ The primary lesson that Alfred learned from his failures to bind the Vikings to their promises was that to make a lasting peace with a Danish king one had to recreate him into a Christian English monarch.
What do the sources mean when they say that Alfred ‘made peace’ with the Vikings in 871? Asser’s claim that Vikings promised to vacate the kingdom is found neither in the surviving recensions of the Chronicle nor in Æthelweard’s rendition. Nevertheless, all the sources make it clear that the Vikings did leave Wessex to take up winter quarters in Mercian London. The quid that Alfred paid for this quo was undoubtedly cash, much as the Mercians were to do in the following year. Cash and plunder, after all, were what the Vikings sought, and when one was dealing from a position of weakness, as were Alfred in 871 and King Burgraed of Mercia in 872, cash was what one offered and hoped would be accepted.
The precedent Alfred followed was Frankish. The payment of tribute was the primary way in which Charles the Bald and other Frankish princes dealt with the Vikings throughout the second half of the ninth century. Given Charles’s domestic problems with his nobility and the tactical challenge presented by the mobile raiders, such a policy was not unreasonable; indeed, until Charles created an effective system of fortified bridges on the Seine and Loire he had few other options.
Whether they came to plunder, to extort tribute, or to grab land, Viking chieftains and their warbands were after the same thing: the acquisition of wealth. In this, as Timothy Reuter has recently reminded us, the Viking predators were no different from their aristocratic English, Irish, or Carolingian prey.
This shared culture of predation is evident even in the chronicles of the victims. The reader of the Annals of Ulster is hard-pressed to distinguish between the plundering of the ‘good guys,’ the Irish high-kings, and that of the ‘bad guys,’ the Danes and Norse (dub- and finnihgallaibh), their sometime allies. Aed mac Niall of Tara laid waste the rival kingdom of Laignin, burning the churches as he went. The Norse of Dublin joined forces with Cinaed son of Conaing, king of the Ciannachta, to plunder the lands of the high-king ‘from Shannon to the sea,’ sparing neither the land nor its churches. The Danish sea-king Ivarr sacked the Norse settlement of Dublin, slaughtering all he encountered. The names and nationalities may change, but the activities described in the Annals remain the same.
Anglo-Saxon kings of Alfred’s day undoubtedly had similar aspirations. As the Beowulf poet sang:
Often Scyld Scefing took mead-benches away from enemy bands, from many tribes, terrified their nobles . . . [He] became great under the skies, prospered in honours until every one of those who lived under him . . . had to pay tribute. That was a good king.
By this measure, Alfred’s son Edward the Elder and his grandsons Æthelstan, Edmund, and Eadred were very good kings. In 871 Alfred was not yet one; by the end of his reign, however, he would be, not simply because he saved Wessex from conquest and his dynasty from extinction, and not just because he issued law and translated Latin works into English, but because he defeated Guthrum and imposed his royal lordship over and undoubtedly exacted tribute from Danes, west Mercians, and the southern Welsh.
Alfred’s essential pragmatism is revealed by the negotiations that followed. Unable to achieve military victory over the Danes, he attempted to find common ground with them, some ceremony or ritual of peace-making that the Vikings would recognize as binding. He thought he found it by combining a payment of money with an exchange of hostages and the swearing of oaths. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates:
and then the king made peace with the enemy and they gave him hostages, who were the most important men next to their king in the army, and swore oaths to him on the holy ring – a thing which they would not do before for any nation – that they would speedily leave his kingdom.
Sacred oaths played a critical role in resolving disputes in ninth-century England. Sworn on holy relics, they drew upon a force more powerful than any wielded by an earthly king, the shared Christian belief that Divine retribution would visit oathbreakers. A supernatural sanction was needed to secure a man’s promise in a period when the coercive power of government was so weak. This was even more true for ending hostilities between kingdoms of equal or near equal power.
Because of their blithe contempt for the wrath of the Christian God, the pagan Northmen must have appeared untrustworthy in the extreme to the English. How could one deal with a foe to whom oaths were mere words, to be honored or broken as the situation required? An exchange of hostages and a mere promise of good behavior, Alfred realized, was insufficient warranty for the withdrawal of Guthrum and his army. An oath was necessary to bind the enemy with supernatural fetters, but oaths upon relics could bind only a Christian foe. To bind heathens one needed something that they believed sacred, hence the ‘holy ring,’ an arm-ring associated with the worship of Thor. Asser realized the implications of such a ceremony and was embarrassed enough by it to alter the text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, changing the holy ring into ‘relics in which the king placed the greatest trust after God.’ His hero had been willing to engage in a pagan ritual, in fact had insisted upon a pagan ritual, to resolve a conflict.
Embarrassed as Asser may have been, Alfred’s only regret probably was that his clever stratagem failed:
But one night, practising their usual treachery, after their own manner, and paying no heed to the hostages, the oath and the promise of faith, they broke the treaty, killed all the hostages they had, and turning away they went unexpectedly to another place called Exeter…. There they spent the winter.
Why had the oath failed? That, unfortunately, is an unanswerable question. The Danes of Wareham may simply have been a slippery crew, even by Viking standards. Or perhaps they did not regard an oath to a Christian as binding, even if taken on the ring of Thor. Or maybe Alfred just got it wrong. We know precious little about pagan practices in Viking-age Denmark. Most of the evidence comes from Icelandic and Norse sagas of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In a number of these, notably Eyrbyggja Saga and Landnámabók, we read about a holy ring of Thor upon which oaths were taken, and in others, about peace-oaths taken before the formal handshakes or handslaps that ended conflicts. This evidence, however, is late, and even in the sagas oaths do not have the same centrality as in Anglo-Saxon law and literature. It is possible that oaths were not as essential in resolving disputes in ninth-century Denmark as in Anglo-Saxon England. In any event, Alfred’s attempt to find common ground failed. The betrayal of the oath was sufficient to justify Asser’s bitter comment that the heathens were by nature perfidious.
When enemies do not share the same idea of what is honorable and dishonorable, it is easy to demonize the foe. A well-documented example from Roman history offers an interesting parallel to Alfred’s situation. In 150 B.C. a praetor named Galba, pursuing a war with the native Celtiberians, did a most un-Romanlike thing: he treacherously annihilated a tribe of Lusitanians after agreeing to a truce. Tired of war, the Lusitanians had sued for peace, asking Galba to restore the terms of a treaty that they had recently violated. Feigning sympathy, Galba persuaded them to lay down their arms under a promise of friendship and then slaughtered them. As Appian commented, ‘Thus he avenged treachery with treachery, imitating barbarians in a way unworthy of a Roman.’ Underlying this atrocity was an unbridgeable cultural gulf. For the Romans, treaties were sacred, and those who broke them lacked fides. For Alfred, the same was true for oaths and for oath-breakers.
From his failure in 876 Alfred learned that to make a secure peace with Vikings they had to cease to be Vikings. To bind them, one had to recreate their leaders in the image of Christian Anglo-Saxon (or Carolingian) territorial rulers. Once defeated, their sea-kings had to be provided with a political ideology that emphasized stability and legitimacy. For this, Christianity, as well as military superiority, was essential, not merely for the pious purposes of saving the souls of the heathens, but to ‘civilize’ them, to make them into people with whom one could deal.
Alfred’s opportunity came with his decisive victory over Guthrum at Edington in the spring of 878. He pursued the remnants of Guthrum’s army to its stronghold, probably Chippenham, and laid siege to it. He seized all the horses and cattle and summarily killed all the men he found outside the burh. Alfred was playing for keeps. He and his army camped outside Chippenham for a fortnight, until:
the heathens, thoroughly terrified by hunger, cold and fear, and in the end by despair, sought peace on this condition: the king should take as many chosen hostages as he wanted from them and give none to them; never before, indeed, had they made peace with anyone on such terms. When he had heard their embassy, the king (as was his wont) was moved to compassion and took as many chosen hostages from them as he wanted. When they had been handed over, the heathens swore in addition that they would leave his kingdom immediately, and Guthrum, their king, promised to accept Christianity and to receive baptism at King Alfred’s hand; all of which he and his men fulfilled as they promised. For three weeks later Guthrum, the king of the heathens, with thirty of the best men in his army, came to King Alfred at a place called Aller, near Athelney. King Alfred raised him from the holy font of baptism, receiving him as his adoptive son; the unbinding of the chrism took place at a royal estate called Wedmore. Guthrum remained with the king for twelve nights after he had been baptized, and the king freely bestowed many excellent treasures on him and all his men.
Alfred’s dealings with Guthrum in the wake of Edington, like his payment of Danegeld, finds an echo in ninth-century Francia. Carolingian rulers ordinarily required conversion before they would ally themselves with Viking chieftains. When in 826 the exiled Danish king Harald Klak sought aid from Louis the Pious in the recovery of his kingdom, the emperor agreed only on condition that his pagan suppliant convert, because (in the words of St. Anskar’s biographer Rimbert): ‘there would then be a more intimate friendship between them, and a Christian people would more readily come to his aid and the aid of his friends if both peoples were worshippers of the same God.’ Harald was baptized with his wife in Louis’s palace at Ingelheim. Then, according to Thegan, ‘the Emperor gave him a large part of Frisia, and having honored him with many gifts, he sent him and his messengers away in peace.’ Similarly, in 862 Charles the Bald required the Viking chieftain Weland to accept baptism along with his family, before accepting his oath of fealty. And in 873, a mere five years before Edington, Charles required conversion from a group of Vikings whom he had defeated at Angers who expressed a desire to remain in his territories.
Though Alfred’s peace-making strategy in 878 may not have been as innovative as his attempt in 876, it was far more successful. He was now dealing from strength. Guthrum’s forces had been crushed in battle, and the Danish king’s very survival had depended upon Alfred’s mercy. Alfred’s insistence upon Guthrum’s conversion should be regarded as an attempt to remake his enemy after his own image. With his baptism, the Danish sea-king Guthrum had been reborn; Christened Æthelstan, he was now Alfred’s adoptive son. The ceremonies at Aller and Wedmore were intended to impress Guthrum and enmesh him in webs of obligation and dependency. By standing sponsor at the baptism, Alfred was asserting his political as well as spiritual superiority over his new adoptive son. The rich gifts that he showered upon Guthrum and his followers were freely given and freely accepted, in pointed contrast to the payments of tribute that he had made in the past. Alfred was now the ring-giver, the open-handed lord, and Guthrum the grateful recipient of the largess.
Alfred had not only received Guthrum into the body of Christian believers, but had welcomed him to the political community of English rulers. This is clearly reflected in the treaty between the two kings in or soon after Alfred’s seizure of London in 886. Although the frontiers established by this treaty may have collapsed within a decade, the document is nonetheless interesting for the light it sheds on Alfred’s relationship with Guthrum after Wedmore. Its prologue establishes the tone:
This is the peace which King Alfred and King Guthrum and the councillors of all the English race and all the people who are in East Anglia have all agreed on and confirmed with oaths, for themselves and for their subjects, both for the living and the unborn, who care to have God’s favour or ours.
The language is that of traditional Anglo-Saxon law, emphasizing oaths and the favor of God. The agreement that follows defines the social classes of Danish East Anglia in terms equivalent to those of Wessex, so that redress and compensation for crimes could be offered. It also attempts to minimize opportunities for conflict by regulating movement and commerce between the two kingdoms. The Guthrum of this treaty is no longer the sea-raider of the summer army of 871; he is now a king.
The success of Alfred’s peace-making is reflected in the numismatic evidence. The ‘Cross-and-Lozenge (i.e., geometric)’ and ‘Two Emperors’ issues of the early 880s and the famous London Monogram and Two-line types of the latter part of his reign represent a significant coinage reform, replacing the debased, light ‘Lunette’ series (50 per cent fine under Aethelred I, falling to less than 20 per cent fine in the 870s) with a new coin of fine silver. The restoration of the coinage eloquently attests to the new political stability and prosperity Alfred enjoyed after Edington. That prosperity may have been funded in part by the spoils of victory; it would be reasonable to expect that Guthrum more than returned the victor’s baptismal gifts.
The numismatic evidence also underscores Alfred’s success in acculturating his enemy to the Anglo-Saxon political culture. The Danes lacked a tradition of minting coins, and ‘the Vikings who settled in Britain and Ireland seem to have been unfamiliar with the use of coin per se.’ The large, well-regulated coinages of pennies and halfpennies struck in the Danelaw at the end of the ninth century suggest that the new Anglo-Danish rulers quickly learned the value of a monetary system. Guthrum was the earliest to adopt this attribute of kingship. Between 880 and 890 he issued a series of Two-line coins under his baptismal name Æthelstan. The coin type was not only based on a West Saxon issue, but some of Guthrum’s coins were minted by moneyers who also struck for Alfred. There is even evidence that the two kings shared a mint.
One cannot assess how seriously Guthrum regarded his conversion, but his use of his baptismal name on his coinage implies that he at least wished to present himself as a Christian king. By the mid-890s, the most popular coinage in the southern Danelaw was the St. Edmund’s penny, commemorating a king martyred by the fathers of those who placed his name and image on their coins. In this way, the Christian Viking rulers of East Anglia associated themselves with the English royal dynasty they had extinguished and replaced a generation before.
The power of the Anglo-Saxon model of kingship is demonstrated in the widespread minting of ‘Alfred’ coins throughout the Danelaw at the beginning of the tenth century. This does not mean that the Vikings of Northumbria accepted even the theoretical overlordship of West Saxon kings, any more than Offa’s imitation Arabic coins meant that he recognized the superiority of the Caliph. But it does indicate the integration of the victorious Viking chieftains into an Anglo-Saxon Christian culture and an adoption of the conquered people’s concept of rulership. This is not to say that the Vikings ceased to be Scandinavians, any more than Kublai Khan ceased to be a Mongol. What it does imply is that, for their own purposes, the Viking ‘kings’ exchanged their powers and authority as Herekonigen for that of territorial Anglo-Saxon kings.
One is reminded both of the Roman ‘creation’ of German political tribes with which they could deal, and of the British and French reshaping of traditional African chieftainship (and redefinition of traditional concepts of property) in the late nineteenth century in order to have kings with whom a ‘civilized’ power could deal and contract treaties. In the case of both the Romans and the European imperialist powers, the giving of gifts to chieftains and the promise of material and military support helped create ‘big men’ who in fact had the power posited to them in theory by the ‘civilized’ powers with whom they dealt. One perhaps could even note here that the ‘civilizing’ of Africa entailed not only the creation of stable political units, but the Christianization of the native populace to provide a common cultural ground upon which to deal.
Alfred’s dealings with the Viking raiders of 892–96 provide a coda for our inquiry into his peace-making strategies. When the Vikings returned from a suddenly inhospitable Francia in the 890s, they found an England that had been militarily transformed through Alfred’s efforts. Between 878 and 892 he had instituted a new integrated defensive system of garrisoned boroughs and rotating contingents in a standing, mobile field army. Alfred’s military power in the 890s was thus far greater than it had been a decade or two before.
Alfred attempted to deprive the raiders of support among their compatriots settled in East Anglia and Northumbria by taking oaths and hostages from the native Danish rulers. The lure of plunder, however, seems to have been too great, and ‘contrary to their pledges, as often as the other Danish armies went out in full force, they went either with them or on their behalf.’
Alfred attempted to pacify the Viking chieftain Haestein through conversion and gifts, as he had done before with Guthrum. Haestein accepted baptism and gladly took Alfred’s gifts and then proceeded to build himself a fortress at Benfleet from which he could raid Alfred’s kingdom. Alfred tried once more to bind the chieftain to him through the moral obligation arising from the acceptance of gifts, when he generously restored to Haestein his wife and two sons (Alfred’s and Ealdorman Æthelred’s godsons), whom he had captured when he took Benfleet in 893.
It didn’t work. What was missing was clear military superiority and a territorial settlement. This was Alfred’s last attempt to make peace with the new army. Over the next two years, he pursued the raiders and fought them; when he caught them, he killed them. Two Viking ships, trying to escape a naval engagement near the Isle of Wight in 896, ran aground on the Sussex shore. The crews, many of whom were wounded, were immediately seized and brought before Alfred at Winchester. The king’s decision was to hang them all. By the summer of 896, it had become obvious to Haestein and his followers that their raid had been and would continue to be unprofitable.
The support provided by the East Anglians and Northumbrians ought not to be regarded as proof of the failure of Alfred’s policies. By supporting the Danish invaders, the rulers of these Anglo-Scandinavian principalities were behaving no differently from Irish kings and Frankish princes who viewed the Vikings as useful allies in expeditions of plunder. Nor were they behaving that differently from previous Anglo-Saxon warrior-kings and æthelings. Alfred had succeeded in bringing the Viking chieftains into the Anglo-Saxon political structure, but this made them no more safe or reliable than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.
Nevertheless, the support given the Vikings by native Danish leaders underscored a problem for the West Saxon dynasty, a problem which came into clearer focus in 900 when the ætheling Æthelwold, son of Alfred’s elder brother King Æthelred, contested the succession of Edward and sought allies among the Danes of Northumbria and East Anglia, who, according to all but the ‘A’ recension of the Chronicle, took him to be their king and lord. Edward’s first campaign against the Danelaw was, in fact, a response to Æthelwold’s harrying of English Mercia. From 902 to about 913, the campaigns of Edward and the Mercian rulers Æthelred and Æthelflæd were probably defensive; by 914, Edward and his sister had taken the war to the Danes. From that point on, peace-making was to be indistinguishable from conquest.
Richard Abels is professor emeritus at the United States Naval Academy and a medieval historian. He now hosts the podcast ’tis but a scratch: Fact and Fiction about the Middle Ages.
This article was first published in The Haskins Studies Journal, Vol.3 (1991). Click here to download the original article with footnotes.
Top Image: Statue of King Alfred the Great, Wantage, Oxfordshire. Photo by Philip Jelley Philipjelley / Wikimedia Commons
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