A new dynasty of overlords was about to appear, this time West Saxon. In 825 Ecgberht of Wessex won a decisive victory near Swindon, expelled a Mercian under-king from Kent, and annexed Kent, Essex, Surrey, and Sussex. Four years later, Mercia itself fell to Ecgberht, and even Northumbria acknowledged his lordship. This spectacular reversal, and the sudden rise of Wessex to the position of leading player, need some explanation. Two main factors may be suggested: the growing wealth of the West Saxon monarchy, fuelled by the mineral resources of recently conquered Cornwall; and the capacity of Ecgberht’s family to determine inheritance and royal succession by agreement rather than by bloodshed, which obviated one of the crippling weaknesses of earlier English kingship.
Dönem: Wessex
Alfred’in Ticaret Yasaları ve Güvenlik Kaygıları
Alfred went further, decreeing that would-be traders were to bring before a king’s reeve at a public meeting all the men whom they planned to take with them up-country. The point, as the law makes clear, was to establish accountability. A trader was to be responsible for bringing to justice any of his men who committed a crime. This had less to do with regulating commerce than with royal concerns about justice and good order. It was often difficult to distinguish between a company of traders and a band of marauders, a lesson that the unfortunate West Saxon royal reeve who first encountered vikings learned firsthand. Traders, almost by definition, were rootless men lacking kinsmen and lords to vouch for their good character. As such they presented problems for a justice system that depended upon local reputation and personal affiliations. Like gypsies of a later age, they were welcomed for the exotic wares they plied, but regarded with suspicion and mistrust by the locals, who probably counted their livestock and children when they heard that merchants had arrived in the neighbourhood. Nor was this simply xenophobia.
Vikinglerin Anglo Saxon Siyasi Kültürüne Uyumu
Guthrum and other Danish chieftains in Britain did not abandon their Scandinavian identity, any more than Kublai Khan did his Mongol heritage when he adopted a Chinese dynastic name and assumed the trappings of his Chin and Sung predecessors. Nonetheless, for their own purposes, viking ‘sea-kings’ aspired to possess the powers and authority of Anglo-Saxon rulers. The acculturation of the vikings to the political culture of their erstwhile English enemies is far from historically unique. The Romans, after all, created ‘German’ political tribes with which they could deal, and European colonial powers reshaped traditional African chieftainship and redefined traditional concepts of property in the late nineteenth century in order to have kings with which a ‘civilized’ power could deal and contract treaties. ‘Civilizing’ 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 ve Guthrum Rolleri Değişti
Guthrum sat in Chippenham like a West Saxon king, Alfred would become the viking marauder, waging guerilla war against the entrenched invaders and their native allies. Alfred’s flight into the Somerset marshes was a strategic withdrawal that revealed his keen appreciation of the military situation. Rather than retreat into Devon to join Ealdorman Odda, Alfred chose instead to contest Guthrum’s control over the West Saxon heartland by maintaining a military presence in Somerset and Wiltshire. With the Danes in possession of his estates and food-rents, Alfred raided in order to feed his men. But by harrying the lands of his foreign enemies and the traitors who supported them, Alfred also reminded his subjects that their king had not abdicated and still had power to punish the disloyal. Guthrum, on the other hand, lacked the manpower to protect the lands and people he now claimed to rule. In a sense, Alfred and Guthrum were waging a war for hearts and minds; the former knew that he could not regain his kingdom, and the latter that he could not maintain even the pretence of rule, without the active support of the local elites.
Viking Gerçeği Kahraman mı Korsan mı?
It is perhaps more surprising that Halfdan and his soldiers were willing to settle for cash than that Alfred would offer it. Perhaps, the Great Heathen Army, bloodied by its victories as well as its defeats at Englefield and Ashdown, had also had its fill of fighting for the time being. For all the odes to glory in the sagas, real vikings were closer in temperament to pirates than to heroic warriors. Their favourite targets were defenceless monasteries crammed with wealth. When confronted by a superior enemy army, vikings were more likely to retreat to the safety of a fortified camp than risk their lives and booty in battle.
Fyrd Kompozisyonu
The armies of Wessex, the so-called fyrds, were not levies en masse but select forces of king’s men and their retainers. In conception and practice, a fyrd was the king’s following arrayed for battle. At its core was the complement of royal household thegns, perhaps fifty to a hundred men, who repaid their royal lord’s gifts of rings, robes, and feasts with loyalty and service. This ‘standing’ force, however, was too small to conduct full-scale campaigns or engage in battles on its own. For that, Alfred needed to call upon the shire fyrds. These territorial forces, consisting mainly of landowners and their personal followings, were led by ealdormen, royal reeves, and local king’s thegns, either as battalions within the king’s army or, in many instances, as independent armies defending localities against raiders. Because they were raised on an ad hoc basis, in response to an ealdorman’s summons, shire fyrds, were ill-suited to meet the challenge presented by viking raiders. By the time an ealdormen had gathered his army from the various vills and estates scattered throughout a sparsely populated countryside, a highly mobile raiding party might well have already devastated a region and moved on. This led individual ealdormen and thegns to mount small-scale actions against the invaders in 871, presumably attacking bands of foragers as they scattered to plunder the countryside. We are assured by the Chronicler that Alfred himself often rode on such expeditions before he became king.
Vikinglerin Yemin Yöntemi
When Bishop Asser, Alfred’s Welsh mass-priest and court scholar, came to relate these events seventeen years later, he faithfully followed the account given in the recently compiled Anglo-Saxon Chronicle with one small but interesting change. Where the Chronicler had proudly declared that the vikings had sworn to Alfred on ‘the holy ring – a thing which they would not do before for any nation’, Asser altered the text to read ‘they took an oath on all the relics in which the king placed the greatest trust after God Himself’.1 His ‘Alfred’, a Christian warrior-king waging a holy war against a heathen foe, would never have participated in or profited from a pagan ritual. The process of sanitizing Alfred’s image had begun.
Erken Ortaçağ İngilteresi’nde Seyahat ve Hukuki Koruma
Without the protection of the law, a criminal was vulnerable to assault or murder with no expectation of reprisal. But if a stranger came into your community, how could you be sure that he was not an outlaw? The ruling elite sought to control independent travel in early medieval England, in part to make it difficult for their enemies, or outlaws, or marauding groups from other kingdoms, to move about without raising suspicion. In Alfred’s reign, any trader wanting to move into the countryside had to make a public declaration, at a public meeting, in front of the king’s representative, how many men they planned to take with them, and if they wanted to take more, they had to make another public declaration in the same circumstances
If the presence of a stranger in a community raised suspicion and doubt, how much worse to be that stranger? In Old English poetry, the kinless, friendless man is presented as being utterly desperate. The poems known as The Seafarer and The Wanderer portray the life of the stranger as isolated and wretched (ASPR). The Wanderer poet describes himself as a man remembering hardships, the violence of his enemies, and the loss of his loving family.
Savaş Kavramının Anglo Saksonlarca Yorumu
In referring to places of battles, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle often uses a formula, referring to an army, usually Vikings, having ‘held control of the place of slaughter’ (wælstowe geweald ahtan). It is perhaps revealing in these cases that the battlefield was seen as a place that could be controlled, and maybe helps to explain why sea battles are not remembered, but it does not necessarily mean that Anglo-Saxon victories were any less significant – as we have already seen, an action did not have to be large in order to qualify as a ‘battle’ – rather that to an English audience Viking armies contested control of the landscape, whereas victorious Anglo-Saxon armies were reasserting the status quo. Either way, the sites of battles were often important.
Onur İçin Kuşatmayı Meydanda Savunmak
Given that the Vikings who engaged Byrhtnoth at Maldon thus evidently did not excessively outnumber their opponents, the English decision to fight outside the town in pitched battle appears to have been effective. The topic of pitched battle is considered in chapter 7 but it is worth noting that defending a fortified town from within its walls may not have been the first tactical choice, even if this might make more sense to a historian looking back upon the purely military context of an action. If organized violence was, in part, concerned with honour and reputation, the choice to fight outside the walls of a city may have made greater sense to an early medieval commander on occasions where the outcome had to be decisive.