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 Kiliselerinde Gizem ve Hayranlık
One constant feature of early medieval churches throughout the period was the sense of wonder they evoked in the visitor. They were complex, intriguing, narrow, high spaces, with many openings, crypts, staircases, towers, and balconies. With dark interiors, lit by smoky lamps, which illuminated glittering treasures, wall hangings, sculpture, and wall paintings in the flickering light, they were designed to be confusing and mysterious. Wulfstan of Winchester described the New Minster, saying: “If someone were to walk through the interior of the church with unfamiliar steps he would not know whence he came, nor how to retract his steps, because in every direction open doorways may be seen and there is no sure route apparent to him”
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.
Ortaçağ Sağlığı ve İskelet Kanıtlarının Paradoksu
The best evidence for early medieval health comes from the skeletal evidence from thousands of excavated burials. There are some difficulties in interpreting this material, as very few early medieval graves include soft tissue, so paleopathologists focus on diseases or traumas that cause changes to bony surfaces. These tend to be chronic diseases such as tuberculosis, leprosy, or long-term infections, which excludes many of the most common causes of death. There is also a “health paradox”—just because a person shows signs of having lived with disease or injury for a long time before their death does not necessarily mean they were the weakest or the sickest in the community: the fact that they survived their condition long enough for it to have caused bony changes strongly indicates that these were people healthy enough to live with their disease, perhaps supported by good care from the community.
Anglo Sakson Döneminde Bira
The Old English drink beor was probably not the same as the modern English “beer.” It seems to have been a strong, sweet fruit-based drink, perhaps something like sweet cider, and was another prestige drink (Hagen 1995, 207; Banham 2004, 49). Beer was drunk further down the social scale, as Old English ealu (ale). Made with malted barley, water, yeast, and flavorings, it was probably a weak alcoholic beverage and was the preferred daily beverage, providing an important source of calories
Ortaçağda Değerli Meta Cam
According to Bede, when Benedict Biscop wanted glass for his new monasteries at Wearmouth (in AD 675) and Jarrow (in AD 685), he had to import glaziers from France as there was no one in England who knew how to make windows. Window glass has been found at a dozen ecclesiastical sites, including Jarrow and Monkwearmouth, Whithorn, and Winchester: analysis of the seventh- and eighth-century glass from Jarrow and Monkwearmouth suggests that some of the raw material for the glass came from the Levant (modern-day Lebanon and Israel), emphasizing that it was a luxury product. The English did not have the raw materials to manufacture their own glass, relying instead on cullet—recycled glass, either imported, or reused Roman material.
Ortaçağ Dokumacılığı Teknolojisi ve Guildler
Weaving was a social, communal activity, as one loom worked best with two women passing the shuttle back and forth, and weaving sheds might house more than one loom (Crawford 2015). With the introduction of the horizontal loom from the tenth century, textiles were produced in unprecedented quantities by dedicated cloth makers in towns, and with this mass production came a new change—males began to be involved in cloth production, beginning a process that would lead to the formation of powerful cloth guilds in medieval England (Walton Rogers 2003, 130).