Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit Anglo-Saxons vs Vikings: The Battle That Gave Birth To England About this episode Dan explains the Battle of Brunanburh, an epic clash that decided the fate of the British Isles. On one side, the Anglo-Saxon forces of King Æthelstan, fighting for his vision for a unified England; on the other, a massive ‘anti-Wessex’ coalition of Vikings, Scots and Celts, determined to stop the English project from taking hold.
Today, we explore the high-stakes diplomacy that led to this point, hear how this savage battle played out, and dig into its consequences for the modern UK.
Written and produced by Dan Snow, and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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0:00 Dan Snow? Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player. 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
0:41 Dan Snow? and yarls 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 Brunemburgh. 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 1,100 years ago, but how they embodied two opposing visions for Britain and Ireland.
1:26 Dan Snow? 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 Hit, for his fabulous book, Never Greater Slaughter. This is the story of Brunemburgh, Athelstan and the Rise of England.
2:18 Dan Snow? 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. So if you drew a line across the Isles from Dover, you would have the Kingdom of Kent, you would go through Wessex, you'd go through the Kingdom of Mercia, you'd go into a little mosaic of Welsh statelets like Gwent and Powys and Gwynedd and others. You'd cross to Ireland where there was another collision of competing kingdoms: Meath, Leinster, Connor, others. And that's just a cross-section from east to west. You've also got Cornwall in the south.
3:03 Dan Snow? 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 then, they had the opportunity to fight outsiders too. In 787, a reeve, so that's a local government official, we think he's in 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.
3:46 Dan Snow? 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 hulls 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.
4:33 Dan Snow? 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 Thannet in Kent. Now, that's long been the gateway to England. The Romans had built a massive trample 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, Iver the Boneless, his brother Uba. Later sources talk about even more brothers. Bjorn Ironside, Sigurd Snake in His Eye, Haftan.
5:16 Dan Snow? 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 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 dragonships 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.
6:00 Dan Snow? 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 would be at the heart of those wars. It was a glittering prize. 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.
6:24 Dan Snow? 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, Northumbrian King Ella had his back sliced open, his rib cage 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 Mercian, 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
7:07 Dan Snow? 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 Edmund's. Iver the Bonus, we think then headed to Scotland. He successfully besieged Don Barton, which was capital of the kingdom of Strathclyde, it was called in about 870. He filled his ships' hulls with slaves and booty and he sailed back to Ireland. His brothers, though, they stayed in the south. In fact, they crisscrossed east and central England and eventually pushed
7:47 Dan Snow? 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.
8:18 Dan Snow? And 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 was one of the most dramatic moments of English history. Alfred arrives at the pre-arranged meeting point. He must have been slightly worried there'd be no one there to meet him. Because he knew that local lords, what they make their accommodations with the Vikings,
9:02 Dan Snow? 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 Ethendon. We think it might be Eddington in 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, that there's a treaty between Guthrum and Alfred. And they draw a line from the north of London to Chester. Everything south and west of that line was Alfred's sphere of influence. Now, Alfred is very cunning at this point. Very cunning indeed.
9:46 Dan Snow? There's a rebrand. He extended his power over this area, but not as the king of Wessex, but as the king of the Angles and Saxons, as king of the English. There weren't any other English kings around because the Vikings had killed them all. So Alfred, as the last English king, sets his stall out to become the first king of the English. And Alfred didn't just talk about a new kingdom, he really built one. He constructed a series of burrs around the kingdom. So those are fortified towns. And they're garrisoned with a standing force, 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
10:31 Dan Snow? 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 had 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."
11:11 Dan Snow? 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 north-west coast of Wales, but rebuffed by the Welsh. That band of Vikings sails along the coast until it arrives near Chester in what had been the Kingdom of Mercia. Now, Mercia was being ruled by Alfred's daughter, Athelflad. She was married to someone described
11:55 Dan Snow? 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's 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...
12:39 Dan Snow? 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 it in some of the place names, West Kirby, for example, is a classic Viking place name, it's still there to this day. In 909, Ethel Flad 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 at the River Severn, but the English burrs, the English forts, held, and Ethel Flad and Edward caught the Viking force near Wolverhampton, the Midlands. Vast number of the Vikings were slain, kings were slain, including the rulers of Northumbria.
13:23 Dan Snow? The local English were able to re-establish English control in Northumbria, in that northern kingdom. And the English realised 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. At the same time, while that process is going on, in 917, the Vikings stormed back into Dublin. Men called Ragnall and Citrick, we think they're grandsons of Iver the Boneless, they came back to Ireland in force. Ragnall hit Waterford on the south-east coast, Citrick reclaimed Dublin in the east.
14:06 Dan Snow? A brutal battle followed and the Irish were left with catastrophic losses. Boyed up by this, Ragnall decides to invade England once more, he decides to invade Northumbria once more, re-establish Viking control of Northumbria. The English once again kicked out, they were deposed. The King of the Scots, who'd marched down to deal with the Vikings, to help deal with the Vikings, he was defeated. Northumbria, with its capital of York, once again Vikings. So as you can see, the political complexion of the Isles is just veering this way and that, it's all up for grabs. In June 918, Athelflad died at the height of her power. Her brother, King Edward of Wessex, swiftly steps in. He removes Athelflad's daughter from rule and installs his own son.
14:49 Dan Snow? Remember his own son, Athelstan, as Lord of Mercia. Athelstan's grown up there, he knows the people. He might have been a popular choice, but it's clear that Mercia was no longer independent. It had been absorbed into this expanding, expanding empire of Wessex, if you like. And that was fast becoming the Kingdom of England. In July 924, possibly while putting down a rebellion in Chester, Edward himself died. He may have been fighting and died as a result of a wound. He left behind this young English kingdom that he and his sister had built on their father's foundations. Their England controlled nearly all the south of Britain. The Vikings rule Northumbria, the Welsh rule up through Wales and into Strathclyde.
15:33 Dan Snow? So that's Cumbria and Glasgow. Then we got the Kingdom of the Scots to the north east of that. This is Edward's legacy, this Kingdom of England. Could his son sustain it? Could he grow it? Athelstan was 30 and he was probably with his dad when he died, having put down this revolt. Straight away, he had himself hailed as King in Mercia. But back in Wessex, his younger half-brother was proclaimed king. So this was quite a moment. Was the fragile English union over? Would Wessex and Mercia return to their ancient division? No, they wouldn't. We don't know exactly what happens next. We do not know. But very sadly and strangely, his younger half-brother, who I'm sure Athelstan was very, very close to,
16:17 Dan Snow? accidentally and shockingly died within the month. Oh dear, never mind. Athelstan persuaded the Wessex nobles to accept him as king. And he was crowned in Kingston, which is very symbolic, because that is where Wessex meets Mercia. It's a symbol of the union of the two realms. He's crowned right there on the border. And that he's saying, these two realms are now indivisible. They're embodied by me and I'm sitting astride this traditional frontier. I'm not King of Wessex, I'm not King of Wessex and King of Mercia. I'm King of the Angles and Saxons. This was an ambitious claim, it was quite a statement, because lots of Angles and Saxons
16:57 Dan Snow? were living in parts of Britain under, well, British or Scottish rulers. This was a maximalist vision.
17:07 Dan Snow? Other princes in other parts of the archipelago, well, they took notice. He quickly married his sister to Sitrick, the Viking ruler of York, hoping that like his aunt Ethelphled, she would somehow manage to take over the country. And luckily, Sitrick did indeed die very shortly afterwards, and Athelstan charges up to York, forced the Northumbrians to acknowledge his rule. So he's managed to take control of Northumbria, and then shortly after that, it seems that he realised the dream of so many past kings. He pulled off the remarkable coup of securing loyalty oaths of all the other rulers on the island, whether they be Vikings, whether they be Welsh, British, whatever they are, whether they be Scots.
17:50 Dan Snow? So Constantine of Scotland, for example, Edred of Bamburgh, who controlled a little slice of Northumbria, Huel da Aldiath in Wales, Owain of Strathclyde, all of them. It was the 12th of July, 927. And if Athelstan and his propagandists are to be believed, this was a huge moment. The Anglo Saxons, the English, appeared to be dominant on the island. He's got these oaths of loyalty from everyone else. We think he pressured the Welsh to accept his overlordship. He visited Cornwall to enforce his claim there as well. And certainly, Athelstan-friendly sources stressed that at this point,
18:33 Dan Snow? he was the overlord of all of Britain. The King of Scotland, his willing subordinate. How willing was clearly up for question. Because in 934, Athelstan invaded Scotland. He moved fast, his navy shadowed him as he marched up the North Sea coast. He left Wessex in late May, he went north, raided, campaigned, he was back in southern England again by early September. Pretty impressive. We don't know how successful he was, other than that the King of the Scots, Constantine, was at his side in England, playing the sort of subservient role as a sub-king. So it seems to have worked. Now, as you'll know from listening to this podcast and watching these videos, in the medieval period, acknowledging that someone is an overlord
19:16 Dan Snow? is something that kings and princes and earls could actually be quite relaxed about. You swore an oath, you went home and got on with ruling your own lands. It doesn't really mean that Athelstan can... Tax all those subjects up there in Scotland. He can't settle legal disputes in sort of eastern Scotland or Wales or Galloway. It doesn't mean he can wander about in Aberdeenshire or in Gwynedd without an army to look after him. But I think it still means something. It's an acknowledgement of raw power. And Athelstan was at that moment the most powerful ruler in Britain. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We'll be back after this break.
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21:05 Dan Snow? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail. But suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us? Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.
21:51 Speaker 01 Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, host of Echoes of History, the podcast that plunges you into the ranks of the Knights Templar across ancient Egypt and behind the barricades of history's great revolutions to explore the worlds recreated in Assassin's Creed. In our new series, Chasing Shadows, we're in feudal Japan alongside samurai, warlords, and shinobi spies. Whether you're gearing up for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or captivated by Japan's rich history, this podcast, brought to you by Ubisoft and History Hit, is a must-listen. Chasing Shadows is out now on the Echoes of History podcast.
22:36 Dan Snow? All of that meant that the rest of Britain and Ireland now had an English problem. The English were now threatening to overwhelm the myriad of other states in the Isles. The only way to solve this was to work together. There's a great medieval saying that I've always loved about the Welsh, which is, "If they would only be inseparable, they would be insuperable." So if they'd worked together, no one could defeat them. But the disparate peoples of Britain and Ireland at this point were not inseparable. They were definitely separate. In fact, they all hated each other. But perhaps this was enough of a crisis to bring them together. That's a great poem by a Welshman at the time, The Great Prophecy of Britain.
23:19 Dan Snow? It fantasizes about driving the English, who it calls "the shitheads from Thanet", the tormentors of the island. It fantasizes about driving them back into the sea. It imagined the people of Wales, the people of Ireland, of Anglesey, of Scotland, of Cornwall, of Strathclyde, all of them working together. "The Saxons will fall as food for wild beasts; there will be floods of blood." So at least someone was thinking big. At least this poet was trying to normalize the idea that all the other peoples of the Isles should put aside their differences and strike at Athelstan and commit genocide while they're at it. And in 937, extraordinarily.
24:04 Dan Snow? The rulers came round to that point of view. A grand anti-English alliance was born. Constantine of Scotland, Owain of Strathclyde, Anlaf, Viking King of Dublin. They formed a coalition. Men who'd spat insults at each other over shield walls, suddenly and dramatically decided to fight together. Former enemies would march shoulder to shoulder to try and strangle a kingdom. We know an invasion of England took place. We know it climaxed in a truly decisive battle called Brunemburgh. But very annoyingly, we do not know where all that happened.
24:47 Dan Snow? There is nowhere called Brunemburgh anymore. And even more painfully, there are several different names for the battles in different sources. So we get Brunemburgh in the English Assassin Chronicle, Brun in the Welsh Chronicle, Brunendun, Wendun, Brunfield, and the plains of Othlin in an old Irish Chronicle from some time later. One Chronicle writing in the mid 1100s, so quite a long time later, says that coalition forces sail up the Humber to do battle in north-east England. Now, I'm enormously sceptical about that suggestion. It is a 900-mile sea journey from Dublin to the Humber. In the summer of 937, we know that the Vikings of Ireland, who were often at each other's throats, well, they'd met up, they'd come to an agreement. There may have been violence, there may not have been violence, we're not sure.
25:31 Dan Snow? The Limerick Vikings were commanded by Olaf, the Dubliners by Anlaf. West met east, right in the middle of Ireland at Loughry. That was, we think, in August. So, within eight weeks, Olaf and Anlaf are side by side at the Battle of Brunemburgh. So it seems unlikely to me that they sailed all the way around Britain in that time. On the other hand, Dublin to Lancashire is just over 100 miles. That's less than 24 hours with a fresh westerly breeze in your sails. We know this Viking invasion force was joined by the King of Strathclyde. They were a west coast kingdom of Welsh Britons, we can call them. Of course, they could have marched across the entire island, the River Humber,
26:15 Dan Snow? but the idea of them nipping down the coast of Lancashire feels, I think, better. If you ask me, I'm afraid, west is best. So the question is, where in the west? And this is where we turn our attention to the Wirral Peninsula. I've mentioned this lovely spot before. It sits between England and Wales, a beautiful place. My wife grew up right next to it, so I need to proceed with caution. We still go there a lot. At low tide on the west side, there are wide, beautiful sandbanks that run out from the shore. I've explored them with my kids as the sun set on a summer's night. Then I've enjoyed a pint in the pub while my kids continue to explore and get caught by the incoming tide. It's character-forming stuff. On the east of the Wirral Peninsula, you have the mighty Mersey. You can clearly see the glorious city of Liverpool on the far bank.
27:01 Dan Snow? But on the Wirral, you get the town of Bromborough. It sits about halfway down on the Mersey side now. In 1611, a map of the Wirral was produced, and on that map, the town of Bromborough is given a different name. It's called Brunborough. I think that's as close as we're going to get. The Wirral is just a very obvious place to land. It's a perfect place to land if you're attacking from Ireland. It is an excellent place to meet armies coming down from the north. It already has a Viking population. Remember, I mentioned that little band that were allowed to settle there by Athelflad? West Kirby, where in fact, we were staying with friends, the pub is, which I went to,
27:43 Dan Snow? and Griesby next door have the classic suffix b, meaning settlement in Norse. Those are Viking names, and those are very rare in that part of eastern England. In the heart of the Wirral, there's even a place called Thingwall, which is Old Norse, basically for meeting place. There are things in Iceland, in Norway, in Sweden, in Orkney, you name it. It is the ideal meeting point for Irish Vikings, for the Scots, for the Strathclydeans, and for any anti-Westies northerners, and for any Welsh if they choose to join, more on that later. It is near Chester, which is really important lynchpin of England, and from Chester, there's a big old Roman road running like an arrow into the heart of the
28:28 Dan Snow? Southlands. Mike Livingstone, veteran of this podcast, friend, legend, historian, he thinks it was here, and that's good enough for me. This is where the Alliance fleet beach themselves, and its cargo of armour-clad warriors disgorged onto beaches. We think 500 ships is a reasonable bet. Mike Livingstone reckons there might be up to 50 men on each ship, that's a rough place to start, and that gives us around 25,000 men, but you also need supplies, you also need non-combatants, so you strip out some of those men and replace them with food and weapons, you might end up with a fighting strength of 10,000 or so. They would have come ashore using little tendrils of water that crept inland, the
29:11 Dan Snow? inlets, which once crisscrossed this peninsula. Now, if I have banged on about it once on this podcast, I have banged on about a thousand times. The coast of England today is almost unrecognisable to what it was in pre-modern times. Vast tracts of land have been drained, they've been reclaimed. The coasts of Hampshire, Sussex, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, were all far more higgledy-piggledy. There were marshes and wetlands stretching miles inland. There were not straight lines, there weren't sea defences and well-kept fields dividing up by neat hedgerows, and that's true of the Wirral Peninsula as well. Wallasey at the top end, I think was probably an island cut off at high tide, where the docks are now just north of Birkenhead. The flood tide would have surged in, in fact, the flood
29:56 Dan Snow? tide would have surged in just north of the excellent U-boat museum, which you should go and check out now. In fact, at the point where the ferry across the Mersey sets off for Liverpool. Wallasey means Isle of the Foreigners, so because C...
30:10 Dan Snow? Means island, like Angle Sea or Port Sea. And Wyl is the same root word in English as the Welsh. So land at the plate, island of the foreigners. And we can imagine the Viking ships grounding there. Horses lashed to trees along the shoreline. Perhaps a keg anchor out to keep them moored fore and aft. Men in stores unloading different languages. Men gathered from across the archipelago and beyond. A mass of warriors, weathered faces, forearms scarred from blacksmithing from fighting. Men wading to and fro from the ships. They're carrying bundles of arrows on their shoulders, squealing goats, sheep, pigs. Their weapons reasonably similar to each other. Swords for the high status warriors.
30:53 Dan Snow? Men with gold on their arms and at their throats. Spears on wooden shafts. These men would have carried axes that they used to split wood. They had at their waist the knives they used to carve meat. And these men would be splitting and carving before the campaign was up. Some men carried the larger axe, a two handed vicious weapon. Traditionally, a Viking weapon blows powerful enough to behead a horse. To our eye, it might have been difficult to differentiate one group from another. To them though, I'm sure they'd have known a Strathclyde Brit from an Irishman from a Scot to a man of Norse descent. Yeah, there would have been little tells, hair, body markings, colours, shirt jewellery.
31:38 Dan Snow? These were men who would have been as happy fighting one another as fighting the English. But this was now and here, and their lords had sworn oaths. And so today they would march together. They would have been greeted by the local inhabitants of Viking origin. They got themselves together. They built fires to warm and dry themselves after their trip across the Irish Sea. Voyages from which I have never emerged dry. They stretched themselves on land for a decent sleep after the uncomfortable snoozes on and under wooden thwarts. I imagine pretty quickly they set their eyes on Chester. The great Roman city, the key to North West England, the gateway to Wales. That was the target initially.
32:22 Dan Snow? They advanced some way down the peninsula, but then they paused. Ahead of them. Was an army, blocking the way south. At its head, England's warrior king. Grandson of the mighty Alfred, sire from the line of Serdic himself, king of kings, overlord of Britain, here was Athelstan. The English had been quick. Athelstan had been able to respond to the threat. A network of messengers, perhaps beacons, had done the job. Athelstan had been able to gather enough men, fast enough, to march on the Wirral and block off its exit. Now, this is exactly what King Harold would try and do to William the Conqueror at Hastings in 1066.
33:07 Dan Snow? March to the site of the invasion, bottle up the enemy, and then hopefully hurl them back into the sea. I wish we knew more about what happened next. Did Athelstan stride down the length of his line, calling on his men to fight for him, as their parents had fought for Edward and Athelflad, as their grandfathers had fought for Alfred? On the other side, did Anne Laff promise that his men would seize the golden arm rings of their slaughtered enemies? Was there a cacophony of exhortation? Viking, Norse, British, English, a babble of languages, different ways of saying the same things? It was a time to conquer or die. We can assume the two sides morphed into massed shield walls, dense bodies of men packed together.
33:52 Dan Snow? I'm sure the higher status men reserved the front rank. Lords squarely at the front of their households, their younger brothers, their sons around them, behind them, their followers, either paid or owing some obligation. They were offering their own bodies and blood for their land and all their privileges. Shoulders rubbing, men drawing strength from those around them, steam rising from the scrum of men if it was a morning cold enough. With small steps, they maintained their cohesion and closed with the enemy. Some men voided their guts, some drank alcohol to dull the fear. Yeah, I wish we knew more. Some battles begin with an ambush, others with a dashing cavalry strike like Alexander
34:37 Dan Snow? at Gorgomela. This one probably was very different. This would probably be much more deliberate, direct. A collision of unstoppable, iron-tipped masses of warriors.
34:48 Dan Snow? Archers shot arrows, they thudded into shields. One or two found gaps and sunk into flesh, shoulders, thighs, feet. The wounded were so packed in by their mates, they would have been swept along like flotsam on a river. Eventually, the shield walls clashed, shield to shield. The front ranks pressed so close that men could smell the breath of their enemy. There was no room to swing a sword, certainly no room to send a huge axe through its mighty arch. It was a shoving, stamping, it was little jutting thrusts with knives. I wish we knew more, but we do not. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're going to be back after this break.
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36:19 Dan Snow? We do have a Brünnberg poem, written in the Old English, preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. We don't know when it was composed. It makes a point of praising Edmund, who's Athelstan's younger half-brother and his successor. So I've always been drawn to the suggestion that it was written in his reign, so perhaps within 10 years of the battle being fought.
36:38 Dan Snow? But it's really pretty much all we've got, certainly on the English side. And it's far more poetic than me, so it's worth quoting at length. This year, King Athelstan, lord of warriors, ring-giver to men, and his brother, also Prince Edmund, won eternal glory in battle with sword edges around Brunebro. They split the shield wall, they hewed battle shields with their hammer-beaten blades. The sons of Edward, it was only befitting their noble descent from their ancestors that they should often defend their land in battle against each hostile people.
37:19 Dan Snow? The enemy perished, Scotsmen and seamen fated they fell. The field flowed with the blood of warriors. From sunup in the morning, when the glorious star glided over the earth, God's bright candle, eternal lord, till that noble creation sank to its seat. There lay many a warrior by spears destroyed, northern men shot over shield, likewise Scottish as well, weary, war-sated. Pretty epic poetry, and I think it does reflect an epic, drawn-out clash. By evening, the dead were carpeting the ground. The grass beneath them churned up, the ground sodden with blood,
38:03 Dan Snow? flesh and entrails scattered as if it was an abattoir. The country folk from around the area joined camp followers in looting the corpses. Metal already being melted down, makeshift forges, valuable mail coats being scooped up by new owners, the odd arrowhead and broken blade pressed into the soaking ground by careless feet. Clues for later archaeologists. I'm lucky enough to have spent time with those archaeologists. I've watched as metal detectorists unearth vast amounts of metal from parts of the potential battlefield, parts of weapons, a coin from exactly the right period. There is still much to be done, but those heroes at Wirral Archaeology are on the case. While the battlefield was looted, the fighting hadn't finished.
38:47 Dan Snow? Most of the killing, I think, in these battles would take place when one side breaks. Together, men are strong, scattered their prey. They're just desperate, tired boys in a foreign land. They're running blind, hunted by swaggering victors. Let's hear from that old English poet again. He says that the West Saxon pushed onwards all day. They pursued the hostile people. They hewed the fugitives grievously from behind with swords sharp from grinding.
39:17 Dan Snow? The Mercians did not refuse hard handplay to any warrior who came with Anlaf over the sea surge in the bosom of a ship. Those who sought land fated to fight. Five lay dead on the battlefield, young kings put to sleep by swords. Likewise, also seven of Anlaf's earls, countless of the army, sailors and Scots.
39:43 Dan Snow? Well, it was a one-sided day. Anlaf and Constantine, the king of the Scots, had survived, but they had been thrashed, they had been humiliated. They were, says the poet, ashamed in spirit. And frankly, they were worse than ashamed. Anlaf, we think, may have lost two brothers. Constantine had lost his son, a beloved child, the future of his dynasty, a double blow chief among the many burdens of kings. Owen of Strathclyde, the king of Strathclyde, he disappears from the record after battle. His body may have been one of those left on the field. Let's go back to some of the poetry. "They left behind to divide the corpses, the dark-coated one, the black-raven, the
40:26 Dan Snow? horn-beaked one, the dust-covered one, the white-tailed eagle to enjoy the carrion, the greedy warhawk, and that grey beast, the wolf of the wood. Never greater slaughter was there on this island. Never as many folk felled before this by the sword's edges, as those books tell us, old authorities, since here from the east the Angles and Saxons came ashore." It was a crushing victory. It saved the English project. It had been battle-hardened. England emerged stronger. The English feasted. We get the best impression of what happened after the battle from, weirdly, a Viking saga.
41:12 Dan Snow? 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 Stenarsson, 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 Eric 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 Skallmar Grimsen.
41:56 Dan Snow? 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 Brunnabru. Athelstan paid his debts, so men like Egil and his brother Thorolf 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, Thorolf, 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.
42:41 Dan Snow? 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 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 Egill and he placed it on his sword and he held it out to Egill through the fire.
43:26 Dan Snow? Egill 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 male's monarch, god of battle. And that really, that eased the tension. Egill 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, Egill described Athelstan as lavish of gold, king 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.
44:10 Dan Snow? 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 Scotland that runs down to the Tees, Vikings ruling over all the Viking territory given to them in their deal between Alfred and Guthrum. We can imagine a kingdom of Strathclyde, secure right the way down to Morecambe Bay. We can imagine the Welsh pushing east into a weakened England.
44:51 Dan Snow? All that was at stake as the shield walls swayed and buckled and flexed. That day, the future was a blank. It was written with every thrust of sword and thud of axe.
45:05 Dan Snow? Nothing in this archipelago is straightforward. Now, as it happens, Athelstan died two years later and the Vikings did seize the opportunity to return. Anlaugh seized York. He and other Vikings grabbed back swathes of eastern England. But the tide would turn again and England would resume its march. It would continue on that trajectory set by Alfred and his heirs. Brunelborough did not settle things forever, but it did set England more firmly on its path to the present. A grand coalition had tried to throttle England in its adolescence, and it had failed. Well, folks, I hope you enjoyed it. That's a remarkable story, and it's one that's so important to understanding how England and the British and Irish Isles were forged,
45:50 Dan Snow? and yet it isn't nearly as well-known as it should be. So I hope that episode has closed the gap, and feel free to send it to someone that you know would enjoy it. Thanks for listening, folks. Don't forget to hit follow or leave a review for more explanations like this on Dan Snow's History wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.
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