The Danish Conquest, Part 13: The Battle of Assandun

Cnut (British Library, Stowe 944, f.6)

On this day 1000 years ago, Cnut defeated Edmund Ironside at the Battle of Assandun, the final battle in his conquest of England. This blog has been following the course of the Danish Conquest for the past three years, beginning with Svein Forkbeard's invasion of England in the summer of 1013; it's been a lengthy and complicated story of shifting allegiances, invasions, resistance, multiple battles, and extended periods of doubt and uncertainty. It must have felt like a very long three years had passed by the time the two armies met in Essex on 18 October 1016.

(Rather than going back and reading all previous posts in this series, you can get caught up on the whole story with my new ebook, A Short History of the Danish Conquest, just published by Rounded Globe!)

Last Friday saw the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which attracted a great deal of attention here in the UK - much more than any other anniversary from Anglo-Saxon history would ever receive. That reflects, of course, the important part played by the Norman Conquest (and just as importantly, the myths associated with it) in English and British history, as well as the fact that it's one of the few historical dates 'everybody knows', or used to. This anniversary also comes at a time when the relationship of Britain to the rest of Europe is under particular scrutiny, so the historical analogies have been flying around, from Bayeux Tapestry-inspired political cartoons to official prayers offering thinly-disguised parallels between 1066 and the current political situation (something about an 'island nation poised between Europe and Scandinavia' - don't ask). Future historians will be able to look back on the 2016 commemorations of 1066 and explore what they reveal about our present moment, just as we look back on those of 1966.

It's not surprising that the 1000th anniversary of Cnut's conquest has received so much less attention, given the general lack of information, and widespread misinformation, about Anglo-Saxon England, even among people who are otherwise quite educated about history. The inaccurate but still popular belief that 1066 marks 'the beginning of English history' (and the end of the Dark Ages) consigns everything before that date to misty obscurity, and it can be difficult to convince people that an event like Cnut's conquest might actually be an interesting or important part of this country's history. Particularly unfortunate is a persistent refusal to acknowledge that pre-Conquest England was as complex as any other period of history: the myth of rugged, plain-spoken, 'simple Saxons' persists, both among those who romance about the brave-but-doomed heroes of Hastings and among those who prefer to celebrate the Normans for bringing sophistication and European civilisation to a nation of half-savage peasants. It's sadly difficult to persuade people on either side that Anglo-Saxon England might not actually be simple at all, but worthy of considered thought and attention in its own right - not just as a kind of prologue to 'real history' or a quarry for facile Brexit parallels.

(As for 'plain-spoken' - a few minutes with any piece of Old English poetry ought to dispel that myth!)

Few things illustrate that complexity better than the long story of Cnut's conquest. There are no heroes and villains here, no easy tales of winners and losers. This is a period of Anglo-Saxon history for which we have rich and sophisticated written sources; for the Battle of Assandun, those sources include a long chronicle in English, a Latin history whose author parades his classical learning and his familiarity with Roman historians - oh, and one of the most intricate forms of poetry ever devised by the human imagination (skaldic verse). So let's have a look at what these sources have to say about Assandun, the battle fought on 18 October 1016.

Cnut and Edmund Ironside (CUL MS. Ee 3 59, f. 5)

We can pick up the story where we left off in the last installment. Edmund Ironside, having fought with the Danes in Kent and accepted his treacherous former ally Eadric Streona back into his counsel ('never was there a more unwise decision than that was', the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle comments), now pursued the Danish army into Essex. And then:

Se here gewende eft up on Eastseaxan, 7 ferde into Myrcan, 7 fordyde eall þæt he oferferde. Ða se cyning geahsade þæt se here upp wæs, þa gesamnade he fiftan siðe ealle Engla þeode 7 ferde him æthindan, 7 offerde hi innon Eastseaxan æt þære dune þe man hæt Assandun, 7 þær togædere heardlice fengon. Þa dyde Eadric ealdorman swa swa he ær ofter dyde, astealde þæne fleam ærast mid Magesætan, 7 swa aswac his kynehlaforde 7 ealle þeodæ Angelcynnes. Ðær ahte Cnut sige, 7 gefeaht him wið ealle Engla þeode. Þa wearð þær ofslægen Eadnoð biscop, 7 Wulfsie abbod, 7 ælfric ealdorman, 7 Godwine ealdorman, 7 Ulfkytel of Eastenglan, 7 Æþelward Ælfwines sunu ealdormannes, 7 eall seo duguð of Angelcynnes þeode.

[The [Danish] raiding-army turned back up into Essex, and went towards Mercia, and destroyed all that they overtook. Then when the king [Edmund] heard that the army was inland, he gathered all the English people for the fifth time and travelled behind them, and overtook them in Essex at the hill which is called Assandun, and there they fought a hard battle together. Then Eadric the ealdorman did as he had so often done before, and first began the flight with the Magonsæte, and so betrayed his king and lord and all the English people. There Cnut had the victory, and won for himself the whole people of the English. There Bishop Eadnoth was killed, and Abbot Wulfsige, and Ealdorman Ælfric, and Ealdorman Godwine, and Ulfcytel of East Anglia, and Æthelweard, the son of Ealdorman Æ[thel]wine, and all the best of the English people.]

We don't know exactly where the battle took place: 'Assandun' is the Old English form of the place-name, which today is most likely to be either Ashdon, in north-west Essex, or Ashingdon, in the south-east of the county. (This uncertainty makes the fevered debate about moving the supposed site of the Battle of Hastings a mile this way or that seem quite trivial!). Ashingdon was the favoured candidate for a long time, but I personally incline towards Ashdon, so I'll use the Old English form Assandun for convenience's sake.

The chronicler, whose sympathy is with Edmund Ironside and what he considers to be the 'English' side, here insistently uses variations on the phrase 'all the English people' (ealle Engla þeode); but we have to remember that not all among the English were fighting for Edmund in 1016. There must also have been Englishmen fighting for the Danes by this point in the war - and not only the treacherous Eadric Streona. There's a strong chance, for instance, that by a remarkable historical irony the father of the king who would lead the English at Hastings, fifty years later, was fighting for the invaders in this battle. Godwine (not the one named in the extract), father of Harold Godwineson, had perhaps already gone over to the Danes; he would soon marry a Danish noblewoman and be richly rewarded for his service to Cnut. Godwine gave his eldest sons the distinctly Danish names Svein and Harold (the names of Cnut's father and grandfather, and of Cnut's own two oldest sons) - and fifty years after Assandun, almost to the day, that Harold was killed at Hastings.

We don't know the names of any on the Danish side killed at the battle of Assandun, but the Chronicle lists some prominent men killed among the English. Ulfcytel was Ealdorman of East Anglia, and for a decade or more he had been more successful in his battles against the Danes than most English leaders. He had made a big impression on his Danish opponents: he appears in Scandinavian sources under the name Ulfkell Snillingr, 'Ulfkell the Bold', and in 1004, after he led his men into battle at Thetford against a Danish army, it was apparently said that 'the Danes admitted they had never met with harder battle in England than Ulfcytel had given them'. He died in battle on his own ground, in Essex; the ealdormen of Hampshire and Lindsey were likewise killed, along with the son of a noble East Anglian family (Ealdorman Æthelwine).

The dead also included two leading churchmen, Wulfsige, Abbot of Ramsey, and Eadnoth, Bishop of Dorchester. They may have been fighting, or they may have been with the group of monks from Ely and elsewhere who took relics to the battle to pray for the army. The Liber Eliensis says that Bishop Eadnoth was killed while he was singing mass at the battlefield; 'first his right hand was cut off for the sake of a ring, then his whole body was cut to pieces'. His body was buried at Ely, where he was considered to be a martyr. Four years earlier, Eadnoth had been responsible for retrieving the body of St Ælfheah, Archbishop of Canterbury, after he was killed by the Danes, which makes Eadnoth's own fate particularly poignant.

Eadnoth's remains still lie at Ely, alongside those of another famous casualty of the Danes: Byrhtnoth, the ealdorman of Essex killed in battle at Maldon in 991, and hero of the Old English poem of that name. Byrhtnoth died in what is sometimes considered the first battle of the Danish Conquest, Eadnoth in the last, and at Ely they are together (alongside Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, but we'll get to him in a moment).

Memorial to Eadnoth, Byrhtnoth, Wulfstan and others (Ely Cathedral)

At Assandun eall seo duguð of Angelcynnes þeode, 'all the best of the English' were slain, according to the chronicler. This is rather poetic language: duguð has an interesting range of meaning, and might be best translated with a poetic phrase like the 'flower of English manhood'. The word is powerfully associated with loss and grief in two famous Old English poems, The Wanderer and The Seafarer (lines 80-90):

Dagas sind gewitene,
ealle onmedlan eorþan rices;
næron nu cyningas ne caseras
ne goldgiefan swylce iu wæron,
þonne hi mæst mid him mærþa gefremedon
ond on dryhtlicestum dome lifdon.
Gedroren is þeos duguð eal, dreamas sind gewitene,
wuniað þa wacran ond þas woruld healdaþ,
brucað þurh bisgo. Blæd is gehnæged,
eorþan indryhto ealdað ond searað,
swa nu monna gehwylc geond middangeard.

The days are departed,
all the glories of the kingdom of the earth;
there are now no kings nor caesars
nor gold-givers such as there once were,
when they performed among themselves so many magnificent deeds,
and lived in most lordly majesty.
Fallen is all that duguð, joys are departed,
weaker ones now live and possess the world,
gain use of it by their labour. The blossom is bowed down,
the nobility of earth ages and grows sere,
as now does every man across the world.

The language of these last few lines is autumnal: blæd (which I've translated here as 'blossom') means glory or fame but also blossom, flower and fruit, and all things which grow and flourish. In this world the flowers of spring and of youth inevitably fall, and the earth grows sere (searað), like autumn leaves 'in the sere and yellow' of the year. In the October of 1016, such language might have seemed very apt.

A possible site of Assandun (near Ashdon, Essex)

If the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is tinged with the language of loss, Cnut's Scandinavian poets commemorated the Battle of Assandun in very different terms. His victory is extolled in an Old Norse poem composed by the Icelandic poet Óttarr svarti, probably late in the 1020s. This poem praises Cnut's greatest triumphs, including the victory at Assandun:

Skjöldungr, vannt und skildi
skœru verk, inn sterki,
(fekk blóðtrani bráðir
brúnar) Assatúnum.

Strong Skjöldungr, you performed a feat of battle under the shield; the blood-crane [raven/eagle] received dark morsels at [Assandun].

Óttarr svarti, Knútsdrápa, ed. and trans. Matthew Townend, in Diana Whaley, ed., Poetry from the Kings' Sagas 1, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages I (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), Part 2, p.779.

Cnut is called 'Skjöldungr' in reference to his supposed ancestors, the legendary Skjöldung dynasty of kings, who appear in Old English literature as the Scyldings of Beowulf. It's an epithet which reaches back into the mists of history and legend, to endow Cnut with the greatness of his royal Danish lineage to make a political point. (Compare, perhaps, the modern fondness for calling the English army at Hastings 'Saxons', despite the fact that - as you can see in the extract from the Chronicle above - by this date they were more likely to call themselves 'English'.)

Source

The power of historical parallels, and especially of recognisable images, was just as evident in 1016 as it is to today's cartoonists. The Encomium Emmae Reginae, a history of Cnut's conquest commissioned by his wife Emma, claims that the Danish army carried an especially meaningful banner into battle at Assandun:

Now they had a banner of wonderfully strange nature, which though I believe that it may be incredible to the reader, yet since it is true, I will introduce the matter into my true history. For while it was woven of the plainest and whitest silk, and the representation of no figure was inserted into it, in time of war a raven was always seen as if embroidered on it, in the hour of its owners' victory opening its beak, flapping its wings, and restive on its feet, but very subdued and drooping with its whole body when they were defeated. Looking out for this, Thorkell, who had fought the first battle, said: "Let us fight manfully, comrades, for no danger threatens us: for to this the restive raven of the prophetic banner bears witness." When the Danes heard this, they were rendered bolder, and clad with suits of mail, encountered the enemy in the place called Aesceneduno, a word which we Latinists can explain as 'mons fraxinorum'.

This magical raven banner, which prophetically displays whether the bearer will be victorious, is very like one said by legend to be have been carried into battle by Ivar and Ubbe, sons of Ragnar Lothbrok, Danish conquerors who had ruled in the north of England in the ninth century. Their raven banner was, one medieval English source claims, 'woven by the three daughters of Lothbrok in the space of one noon-tide'. Ivar and Ubbe were not direct ancestors of Cnut, but they were the most successful Danish invaders of England before his time. In Norse sources, there's a suggestion that after death Ivar's mighty spirit guarded the coast of England from later invaders, who could only win the land by conquering the dead king as well as the living ones.

In the eleventh century, 150 years after their heyday, it was still a powerful thing for Cnut's poets to compare him to 'Ivar, who ruled in York' - a reminder that the Danes had ruled in England before, and were now ready to do so again. We can't know whether Cnut's army really did carry a raven banner at Assandun, or only said they did, but the link this story suggests between Cnut and the sons of Ragnar might indeed have 'rendered the Danes bolder' and daunted the English.

The raven banner in the Encomium (BL Add. MS 33241, f.37v)

The Encomium goes on:

And there, before battle was joined, Eadric, whom we have mentioned as Eadmund's chief supporter, addressed these remarks to his comrades: "Let us flee, oh comrades, and snatch our lives from imminent death, or else we will fall forthwith, for I know the hardihood of the Danes." And concealing the banner which he bore in his right hand, he turned his back on the enemy, and caused the withdrawal of a large part of the soldiers from the battle. And according to some, it was afterwards evident that he did this not out of fear but in guile; and what many assert is that he had promised this secretly to the Danes in return for some favour.

Then Eadmund, observing what had occurred, and hard pressed on every side, said: "Oh Englishmen, today you will fight or surrender yourselves all together. Therefore, fight for your liberty and your country, men of understanding; truly, those who are in flight, inasmuch as they are afraid, if they were not withdrawing, would be a hindrance to the army." And as he said these things, he advanced into the midst of the enemy, cutting down the Danes on all sides, and by this example rendering his noble followers more inclined to fight. Therefore a very severe infantry battle was joined, since the Danes, although the less numerous side, did not contemplate withdrawal, and chose death rather than the danger attending flight. And so they resisted manfully, and protracted the battle, which had been begun in the ninth hour of the day, until the evening, submitting themselves, though ill-content to do so, to the strokes of swords, and pressing upon the foe with a better will with the points of their own swords.

Armed men fell on both sides, but more on the side which had superiority in numbers. But when evening was falling and night-time was at hand, longing for victory overcame the inconveniences of darkness, for since a graver consideration was pressing, they did not shrink from the darkness, and disdained to give way before the night, only burning to overcome the foe. And if the shining moon had not shown which was the enemy, every man would have cut down his comrade, thinking he was an adversary resisting him, and no man would have survived on either side, unless he had been saved by flight. Meanwhile the English began to be weary, and gradually to contemplate flight, as they observed the Danes to be of one mind either to conquer, or to perish all together to a man. For then they seemed to them more numerous, and to be the stronger in so protracted a struggle. For they deemed them stronger by a well-founded suspicion, because, being made mindful of their position by the goading of weapons, and distressed by the fall of their comrades, they seemed to rage rather than fight. Accordingly the English, turning their backs, fled without delay on all sides, ever falling before their foes, and added glory to the honour of Knutr and to his victory, while Eadmund, the fugitive prince, was disgraced.

Encomium Emmae Reginae, ed. and trans. Alistair Campbell (London: Royal Historical Society, 1949), pp.25, 27 (paragraph breaks added).

It's interesting that the author, though obviously on the Danish side, gives Edmund Ironside a heroic speech, pro libertate et patria: 'O Englishmen, fight for your liberty and your country!' For the Danes, it's Thorkell the Tall, Cnut's chief supporter/rival, who is the most prominent figure here: to Thorkell falls the key role of encouraging the troops and interpreting the omens of victory. Considering this is supposed to be Cnut's triumph, he's strangely absent from every detail of the battle. But triumph it was, and the Danes won the day.

Initial from the Encomium (BL Add. MS 33241, f. 8r)

Like William the Conqueror at Battle, Cnut later founded a church on the site of his victory. In 1020, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us:

on þisan geare for se cyng 7 Þurkyl eorl to Assandune, 7 Wulfstan arcebiscop, 7 oðre biscopas, 7 eac abbodas 7 manege munecas, 7 gehalgodan þæt mynster æt Assandune.

[In this year the king and Earl Thorkell went to Assandun, with Archbishop Wulfstan and other bishops, and also abbots and many monks, and consecrated the church at Assandun.]

If we believe the Encomium, Thorkell had been the hero at Assandun in 1016; by 1020 Cnut had made him Earl of East Anglia, so the site of the battle, wherever it was, lay in his earldom. In 1016, Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, was the leading churchman in England (since it took some time to appoint a successor to the martyred St Ælfheah as archbishop of Canterbury). Wulfstan had been outspoken in his preaching against the Danes, and in 1016 he must have been wondering whether if Cnut and Thorkell triumphed he would share Ælfheah's terrible fate. But by 1020 he had become the king's chief English adviser, writer of Cnut's laws and public pronouncements, and now preaching reconciliation and peace. It's been suggested that one of his surviving sermons, 'On the Dedication of a Church', may have been preached at the dedication of the church at Assandun. Wulfstan died in 1023 and now lies at Ely, in the same monument as Bishop Eadnoth.

Other people likely to have been present at the dedication of the church, among the crowd mentioned in the Chronicle, include Cnut's queen Emma (patron of the Encomium), Earl Godwine (perhaps with his new Danish wife, Gytha), Æthelnoth (soon to be made Archbishop of Canterbury), the Norwegian earl Eiríkr (newly appointed earl of Northumbria) and more. The church was entrusted to Stigand, a priest probably of Anglo-Danish heritage - the first appointment of the man who would rise to be Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of the Norman Conquest. With hindsight, there are many tantalising connections and ironies to be drawn out from this disparate collection of people - English, Danish, Norwegian and Norman - who between them would shape England's fate throughout the eleventh century. No one could have foreseen on that day in 1020 that fifty years later the young priest Stigand would be Archbishop of Canterbury, crowning Godwine's son King of England.

Stigand and Harold Godwineson

The date of Assandun was also commemorated when Cnut endowed a new church at Bury St Edmunds, which was consecrated on 18 October 1032. Cnut's commemoration of Assandun through church patronage is often described as an 'act of penance', but it's rather more complicated than that. A great public ceremony like the one described in the Chronicle, attended by the leading figures of the kingdom, preserves the memory of a victory; even if the king expresses regret for the lives lost, he is asserting the importance of his conquest and ensuring that posterity will remember it, and there's nothing humble or penitent about that. Several people have commented in the last few days on the difficult question of whether we have been 'commemorating' or 'celebrating' the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, and you might ask the same question of Cnut and his followers at Assandun. It's hard to believe that the court which preserved the triumphal stories about Assandun recorded in the Encomium did not think the battle more a matter for celebration than penance - and the church a memorial to a great victory.

One possible candidate for Cnut's minster (Hadstock, Essex)

'There Cnut had the victory, and won for himself the whole nation of the English', says the Chronicle. But Assandun is not quite the end. Edmund Ironside did not die on the battlefield, and in fact there's one really excellent part of the story still to come (it involves a duel - which never actually happened - between Cnut and Edmund). Even the last stages of this fascinating story are not straightforward or simple...

The Danish Conquest, Part 11: The Battle of Sherston

The Battle of Sherston in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (BL Cotton MS Tiberius B IV, f.67)

This week marks the 1000th anniversary of one of the most important battles of the Danish Conquest, fought at Sherston in Wiltshire on or around 25-26 June 1016. The Battle of Sherston might be largely forgotten today - though its anniversary is being commemorated in the village this weekend - but it features prominently in medieval narratives of Cnut's conquest of England. In this post we'll look at some of the many accounts of this battle, both the history and (perhaps more interesting!) the legend.

As we saw in the last post in this series, after the death of King Æthelred on 23 April, his son Edmund Ironside was left to lead the English defence against the Danes. Cnut's forces besieged London, unsuccessfully, and then fought a succession of battles with Edmund's army across the south of England during the summer and autumn of 1016. The first major engagements were in the south-west, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (E):

Þa wæs Eadmund cyng ær þam gewend ut. 7 gerad þa West Seaxan. 7 him beah eall folc to. 7 raðe æfter þam he gefeaht wið þone here æt Peonnan wið Gillinga. 7 oðer gefeoht he gefeaht æfter middan sumera æt Sceortstane. 7 þær mycel wæll feoll on ægðre healfe. 7 þa heres him sylfe toeodon on ðam gefeohte. 7 Eadric ealdorman 7 Ælmær Deorlingc wæron þam here on fultume ongean Eadmund cyng.

Then King Edmund had gone out before that [the siege of London] and rode into Wessex, and all that people submitted to him. And quickly after that he fought against the army at Penselwood near Gillingham, and he fought another battle after midsummer [June 24] at Sherston. There was great slaughter on both sides, and the armies themselves broke off the fight. Ealdorman Eadric and Ælfmær Darling were aiding the army against King Edmund.

Sherston is near the Fosse Way, a few miles west of Malmesbury. This was the first major battle between the armies led by Cnut and Edmund, but the outcome was apparently unclear; 'the armies themselves broke off the fight', and sources disagree on who gained the advantage. The Encomium Emmae Reginae, whose version of events we can now rejoin for the first time since September's installment, as usual provides a story sympathetic to Cnut and the Danes. (This text was written for Cnut's queen in the 1040s, and probably drew its information in part from the memories of people who took part in the conquest.) For the Encomium, the battle at Sherston was a great victory for the Danish army, and it was won by one of Cnut's most experienced warriors, Thorkell the Tall, on behalf of his young king:

Then Thorkell, observing the time to have come when he could demonstrate his fidelity to his lord, said: "I will undertake to win this fight for my lord with my troops, and will not permit my king to be involved in this battle, very eager to fight as he is, inasmuch as he is a youth. For if I be victorious, I will win on the king's own behalf; but if I fall or turn my back, it will not be to the glory of the English, for the reason that the king will be left, and he will give battle again, and perhaps as a victor will avenge my injuries." Since this seemed to all to be good reasoning, he disembarked with the king's approval, and directed his force against the army of the English, which was then assembled at the place called Sherston.

The Danish army had disembarked from forty ships and more, but still this number was by no means equal to half the enemy. But the leader, relying on courage rather than numbers, sounded the trumpets without delay, and advancing in the forefront and ever praying in his heart for the help of God, laid low all that came in his way with the sword's point. The English, indeed, were the more bold at first, and cut down the Danes with terrible slaughter, to such an extent, that they nearly won the victory and would have compelled their enemies to flee, if the latter, held back by their leader's words and being mindful of their own bravery, had not regarded flight with shame. For he mentioned that there was no place to which they might flee, that they were, of course, foes in the land, and that their ships were far from the shore, and that accordingly, if they should not conquer, they would necessarily fall together.

After they had been rendered of better courage by this, they forthwith showed in battle how dangerous a thing is desperation. For despairing of a refuge to which to flee, they raged on against the enemy with such madness, that you would have seen not only the bodies of the dead failing, but also of the living, as they avoided the blows. Accordingly they ultimately gained the victory which they desired, and buried such of the remains of their comrades as they could find. After they had also seized the spoils from their foes, they returned and made themselves ready for an invasion of the adjacent country.

This was the first honour which Thorkell brought to the arms of Knutr, and for this he afterwards received a large part of the country.

Encomium Emmae Reginae, ed. and trans. Alistair Campbell (London: Royal Historical Society, 1949), pp. 21-3.

Sherston (source)

While the Encomium talks up Thorkell's loyalty in this battle, other versions of events at Sherston are more interested in disloyalty - specifically, the treachery of the ealdorman Eadric streona, who is roundly blamed for things going badly for the English (as we've seen before in this series). Twelfth-century English historians have various tales to tell about Sherston, most of which centre on Eadric's dirty tricks. Although dating from more than a century after the battle, these sources may preserve some older traditions; if nothing else, they develop some of the narrative possibilities implicit in the earliest sources quoted above. In the following stories, we get different versions of two points in particular: Eadric's betrayal of his king, and the fact mentioned in the Encomium that the Danes were deep in Wessex and potentially in great danger unless they could keep together ('they were foes in the land, and their ships were far from the shore...').

Let's start with John of Worcester's account of Sherston:

[Edmund] went boldly to meet them in Dorset, and in a place called Penselwood, near Gillingham, he gave them battle, won, and put them to flight. After this, when midsummer had passed, and he had mustered an army, one greater than before, he determined to fight vigorously against Cnut, whom he encountered in Hwiccia at a place called Sherston.

When he drew up his army according to the terrain and the forces he had, he moved the best soldiers into the front line, placed the rest of the army in reserve, and addressing each man by name, exhorted and entreated them to remember that they strove for their country, children, wives and homes, and with these most inspiring words he fired the soldiers' spirits. Then he ordered the trumpets to sound, and the troops to advance gradually. The enemy army did the same.

When they arrived at the place where they could join battle they rushed together with their hostile standards and with a great shout. They fought with spear and lance, striving with all their might.  Meanwhile, King Edmund Ironside made his presence felt in fierce hand-to-hand fighting in the front line. He took thought for everything; he himself fought hard, often smote the enemy; he performed at once the duties of a hardy soldier and of an able general. But, because Eadric Streona, the most treacherous ealdorman, and Ælfmær Darling, and Ælfgar, son of Meaw, who ought to have been supporting him with the men of Hampshire and Wiltshire and with an innumerable mass of people, were on the Danish side his army was quite exhausted and quite overstretched.

However, on the first day of battle, that is on Monday, so harsh and cruel was the conflict that both armies were unable for weariness to fight any longer, and they left the place at sunset of their own accord.  But on the following day, the king would have crushed all the Danes if it had not been for the wiles of Eadric Streona, the treacherous ealdorman; for, when the battle was at its height and he observed that the English were stronger, he cut off the head of a certain man called Osmear, very like King Edmund in face and hair, and raising it aloft he shouted, saying that the English fought in vain: 'You men of Dorset, Devon, Wiltshire, flee in haste, for you have lost your leader. Look, I hold here in my hands the head of your lord, King Edmund. Flee as fast you can.'

When the English perceived this they were appalled, more by the horror at the action than by any trust in the announcer, whence it happened that the waverers were on the verge of flight; but as soon as they realized that the king was alive their spirits rose, and they attacked the Danes the more fiercely, and they slew many of them, striving with all their might until dusk.  When that arrived, as on the previous day, they separated voluntarily.  But when the night was far advanced Cnut ordered his men to leave the camp silently and, going back to London, returned to his ships again, and not much later he besieged London again. However, when day came, and King Edmund Ironside perceived that the Danes had fled, he returned at once to Wessex to raise a larger army.

The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. and trans. Jennifer Bray and P. McGurk (Oxford, 1995) vol. ii, pp.487-9 (paragraph breaks added).

This is taking the idea that Eadric 'aided the Danes against King Edmund' to quite an extreme! Henry of Huntingdon gives in English the words Eadric was supposed to have spoken to send the army into chaos: Flet Engle, flet Engle! Ded is Edmund! 'Flee, Englishmen! Edmund is dead!' (However, he attaches this story to the later battle of Assandun, rather than Sherston.) William of Malmesbury also blames the flight at Sherston on Eadric's wiles, although in a slightly different form:

After St John's Day [Edmund] joined battle with them again at Sherston, but it was broken off with the two sides equal, his English troops taking the first steps towards retreat under the influence of Eadric, who stood on the enemy's side brandishing a sword which he had bloodied in the battle by the bold slaughter of some country fellow, and shouting: 'Flee, flee, poor wretches! Look, this is the sword which has killed your king!' And the English would have fled immediately, had not the king heard of this and made for a prominent hill, where he took off his helmet and displayed his bare head to his fellow-soldiers. He then brandished an iron spear with all the force he could muster and hurled it at Eadric; but he saw it coming and dodged it, and it went astray and pierced the soldier who was standing next to him with such violence that it transfixed a second man as well.

Gesta Regum Anglorum, trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thompson and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998), vol.i, p.315.

This ruse of tricking an army into believing their leader is dead is a common tale, and similar stories are told in medieval sources about the Battle of Hastings - though in that case it's William the invader, and not the English king, who has to display his face to prove he's still alive. There are all kinds of historical irony about that, as we'll see in a moment...

Edmund Ironside in a 14th-century manuscript (BL Royal MS 14 B VI)

Scandinavian sources also have some interesting things to say about the Battle of Sherston. It's mentioned in a poem written in praise of Cnut by the skald Óttarr svarti, which you can read in full here:

Svefn braut svǫrtum hrafni
sunnarr hvǫtuðr gunnar;
olli sókn inn snjalli
Sveins mǫgr at Skorsteini.

The urger of battle broke the sleep of the dark raven further south; the bold son of Sveinn made an attack at Sherston.

Óttarr svarti, Knútsdrápa, ed. and trans. Matthew Townend, in Diana Whaley, ed., Poetry from the Kings' Sagas 1, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages I (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), Part 2, p.774.

Here it's Cnut himself, 'the bold son of Svein', and not Thorkell, who gets all the credit. (I like the alliteration and near-rhyme of Svein and Skorstein - with this campaign Cnut was, he hoped, repeating his father's conquest of England.)

Quoting this verse, the thirteenth-century Knýtlinga saga goes on to give its own version of Sherston, which it calls 'one of the most famous battles of the time'. It has the same story that the English soldiers fled when they believed Edmund to be dead, 'and though the king shouted to them to turn back no one showed any sign of hearing him'. But more importantly, there's also a fascinating story about the aftermath of the battle. The saga tells how one of Cnut's commanders, his brother-in-law Ulf Thorgilsson, is separated from the rest of the Danish army in the confusion, and loses himself in a forest. He comes upon a boy tending a flock of sheep, and asks him his name. The boy, whose name is Godwine, recognises Ulf as one of Cnut's men, and warns him that if any of the people living nearby find him in the forest, he'll be killed.

Ulf asks Godwine to guide him back to the Danes, and offers him a gold bracelet as a reward. Godwine refuses to take the reward - canny boy! - saying that he would rather have the earl in his debt if he manages to save his life. Godwine takes Ulf home and introduces him to his father, a prosperous farmer named Wulfnoth. (Can you see where this story is going?) The family look after him, feed him, and give him horses to get him back to the army. In return, Wulfnoth asks the earl to take Godwine with him and find him a position in service among the Danes - 'he can't stay here if the locals discover he's helped you escape', he says.

Ulf and Godwine ride off and join Cnut and the rest of the Danish army, at which point Godwine realises that the man he's helped is an important and popular earl. Ulf takes him in, and it ends with Godwine marrying Ulf's sister Gytha and eventually being made an earl when Cnut becomes king of England. He becomes, in fact, Godwine, Earl of Wessex, one of the most powerful men in eleventh-century England.

It's unlikely that much, if any, of this story is true; Godwine's father Wulfnoth was almost certainly not a farmer, but a Sussex thegn. However, it is true that Godwine married Ulf's sister, and from their marriage sprang a family which helped to reshape the ruling dynasties in both England and Scandinavia, long after the conquest we're commemorating here. The children of this Anglo-Danish union outlasted Cnut's rule in England, surviving and holding high positions throughout the reign of Edward the Confessor, with at times greater influence than the king himself. And half a century after 1016, of course, the sons and daughters of Godwine and Gytha were to be important players in another conquest of England: their daughter Edith married Edward the Confessor, and Gytha lived to see (though Godwine did not) her son Harold on the English throne.

Edith and Edward the Confessor (CUL MS Ee.3.59, f.11v)

Today this family is usually called the 'Godwinesons', a testament to their father's dominance of English politics; but Gytha seems to have been a formidable woman in her own right, and her family connections in Scandinavia were an important influence on what happened in 1066 and afterwards. Through their mother, Harold and Edith and their siblings were closely related to the royal family of Denmark, Ulf's children with Cnut's sister Estrith. Exactly fifty years after the Battle of Sherston, in the summer of 1066, Gytha was at once mother of the king of England and aunt of the king of Denmark - although it didn't last, of course. Gytha lost three of her sons in one day at the Battle of Hastings (and one at Stamford Bridge, a few weeks earlier). In 1067 she left England with some of her surviving children and grandchildren, and eventually took refuge with her nephew in Denmark. Her granddaughter, Harold's daughter (also named Gytha), married into a ruling family in Kievan Rus, while in 1069 and 1075 her nephews intervened to aid English rebellions against the Normans. As Knýtlinga saga says, 'many great men from England, Denmark, Sweden and east from Russia are descended from them [Godwine and Gytha]'.

It's not very likely that this all began with a chance encounter between Ulf and a young shepherd-boy, but it's a fascinating origin myth for this hugely important dynasty. And the really interesting thing is that one English source tells a very similar story about Godwine's humble origins: Walter Map in his De Nugis Curialium also has Godwine rising from obscurity through his unwitting attendance on a surprise guest, although in that case it's King Æthelred, who has got lost while hunting and ends up taking the attentive boy into his service. So the story in Knýtlinga saga takes on a shade more credibility; and it's not impossible that at least it was around the time of the Battle of Sherston that Godwine went over to the Danes.

Rattlebone Inn, Sherston (source)

In any case, there were clearly plenty of stories circulating about the Battle of Sherston in the twelfth and thirteenth century, if not before. And later, too: local tradition in Sherston still tells of a man called John Rattlebone, who supposedly fought for Edmund's side against the Danes. This story is first recorded in the seventeenth century by John Aubrey, who says that a small carved figure in Sherston church was believed to represent Rattlebone, and that 'the old women and children have these verses by tradition':

Fight well, Rattlebone,
Thou shalt have Sherston.
What shall I with Sherston do
Without I have all belongs thereto?
Thou shalt have Wych and Wellesley
Easton Town and Pinkeney.

This verse is said to represent what Edmund promised Rattlebone to persuade him to fight. In the battle Rattlebone was mortally wounded, but staunched the flow of blood by pressing a stone tile to his wound, and fought to the bitter end (the pub sign above illustrates him doing so). What a splendid legend - I do like the thought of doughty John Rattlebone going up against Thorkell and Ulf!

A Visit to Assandun (maybe)

18 October is the anniversary of the climactic battle of the Danish Conquest of England: on this day in 1016 the Danish army, led by Cnut, defeated an English army led by Edmund Ironside at a place called Assandun in Essex. After Assandun Edmund Ironside conceded defeat to the Danes and agreed to divide the kingdom with Cnut; when he died just over a month later, Cnut was accepted as king of all England. Assandun was, therefore, a significant date in the history of Anglo-Saxon England, which probably would have been even more significant if it had not been overtaken by the Battle of Hastings, which took place exactly fifty years later, almost to the very day. Last year I wrote about three sources for the battle in English, Latin and Old Norse, partly in an effort to suggest just how large this battle loomed in the memory of Cnut's conquest later in his reign (those three sources were written between 5-25 years after Assandun). Today I want to do something different - where that post was nearly all words, this will be nearly all pictures.

As I've been working on narratives of the Danish Conquest and writing a series of posts about it (which you can find here), I've been getting interested in what you might call the landscape of conquest: what significance certain places might have had for the people involved in the various events of the conquest. (For a possible comparison, think how the single word 'Hastings' has come to stand for everything that happened at the Norman Conquest.) We don't know whether Assandun had that kind of significance to Cnut and his followers, but there are various bits of evidence to suggest it might have done - I touched on another possible example in my post about a church in Sandwich. This train of thought has encouraged me to try and visit some of the places in question, so today, come with me on a visit to Assandun.

Actually, that's not possible. The site of the battle of Assandun has never been conclusively identified: it’s a common placename, and there are various possible candidates. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says it was in Essex, so the two most likely sites are Ashdon and Ashingdon, in the north-west and south-east of Essex respectively. Ashingdon has traditionally been the favoured candidate, but there are strong arguments for both (I personally lean towards Ashdon, for reasons I'll only bore you with if you really want to hear them). I recently paid a flying visit to Suffolk, in the course of which I found myself not far from Ashdon, which is on the border between Suffolk and Essex. This seemed the perfect opportunity for an impromptu pilgrimage. Now, even I wouldn't attempt to plan a pilgrimage to a completely unidentified battlefield, but there's a more tangible relic of Assandun, more worth going in search of. In 1020, a few years after becoming king, Cnut founded a church at the site of the battle. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (D) tells us in the entry for 1020:

on þisan geare for se cyng 7 Þurkyl eorl to Assandune, 7 Wulfstan arcebiscop, 7 oðre biscopas, 7 eac abbodas 7 manege munecas, 7 gehalgodan þæt mynster æt Assandune.

[In this year the king and Earl Thorkell went to Assandun, with Archbishop Wulfstan and other bishops, and also abbots and many monks, and consecrated the church at Assandun.]

The people named in this entry indicate the importance of this church to the new Danish regime. Wulfstan is the great archbishop of York, whom we last encountered in 1014 railing against the disloyalty of English people who collaborated with the Danes; he had by this time had quite a change of heart, and become one of Cnut's chief advisers and law-makers. (A lot can happen in six years!) Wulfstan presided at the consecration of the church at Assandun, and one of his surviving sermons, 'On the Dedication of a Church', may well have been preached on this occasion. The other person named by the Chronicle is Earl Thorkell, who was remembered as the hero of Assandun, and whom Cnut had recently made Earl of East Anglia. Any event which could bring these two men together must have been pretty extraordinary. We can also populate the Chronicle's crowd with various people likely to have been there, standing beside Cnut, Thorkell and Wulfstan: Cnut's new wife Emma, Earl Godwine (and his new Danish wife, Gytha?), Æthelnoth (soon to be made Archbishop of Canterbury), the Norwegian earl Eiríkr, newly appointed earl of Northumbria, and more. The church was entrusted to Stigand, a priest probably of Anglo-Danish origin, who though very much a winner after the Danish Conquest was very much a loser after the Norman Conquest. With hindsight, there are many tantalising connections and ironies to be drawn out from this disparate collection of people - English, Danish, Norwegian and Norman - who were between them to shape England's fate throughout the eleventh century: the following year Thorkell would be outlawed, three years later Wulfstan would be dead, and fifty years later the young priest Stigand would be Archbishop of Canterbury, crowning the upstart Godwine's son King of England.

So the church at Assandun is very much worth searching for, and that's what I went to find at Ashdon. In this post I'll take you on a tour of what I saw at Ashdon, but do take everything I say on the understanding that this might not be the site of Assandun at all - I’m not sure I can sustain ‘might be’s all the way through the post, so if I slip into unwarranted certainties you’ll have to forgive me! Perhaps another day I’ll go to Ashingdon and give that possibility its proper due. The awkwardness of this is not lost on me - the innate strangeness of going in search of a long-lost battle-site is only exacerbated by the idea that I might have been doing so in completely the wrong corner of Essex, so I do appreciate how absurd this whole venture is. But that's not a bad thing, for two reasons. Firstly, it proves some of the points I made in my first post about the problems of commemorating the Danish Conquest, or indeed any historical event where the sources are more complex than can easily be translated into a modern act of commemoration. And secondly, I'm aware that I went to Assandun to commemorate an event which was itself a commemoration, an act of collective remembering which was public, highly political, and open to multiple interpretations. Was Cnut's foundation of a church at Assandun an act of penance, attempting to make amends for some of the wounds of conquest; a display of mutual reconciliation, with both sides agreeing to put the past behind them; or a victor's monument to a triumphant conquest? Or a combination of all three? (And did Cnut and Thorkell and Wulfstan and the disparate audience all think it was the same thing?) Commemoration is and was problematic in any number of ways - in 1020 or today - and it's not a bad thing to be forced to confront what a strange and difficult thing we're really attempting when we try to commemorate the past.

 

All that said, let me show you what I saw at Ashdon. If Ashdon is Assandun, Cnut's minster would be this church, St Botolph's, which is actually in the nearby village of Hadstock. Why not Ashdon itself? I'll quote the guidebook: "While it is just possible that evidence for an Anglo-Saxon building is encapsulated in Ashdon church, there is nothing to suggest a structure of minster-proportions; hence historians have turned to Hadstock where a large and imposing Anglo-Saxon church cannot fail to command attention. There is no doubt that it was a minster, and of the period in question; it stands on the same 'Hill of the Ash Trees' as Ashdon."

The core of the present church is late Anglo-Saxon, and thus plausibly of the date of Cnut's minster. It's worth noting that St Botolph, the dedicatee of the church, was one of the saints in whom Cnut took an interest; Cnut was responsible for the translation of Botolph's relics to Bury St Edmunds, where he founded a church on the anniversary of the Battle of Assandun in the 1030s. There's some suggestion there was a shrine to Botolph here, not just a dedication - the archaeologists talk about traces of an empty Saxon grave in the fabric of the south side of the church.

The church stands in an attractive spot, on a more impressive hill than I was able to capture with a photograph. From the gate of the porch the churchyard slopes down towards the village of Hadstock, which consists of a few houses around a little village green.

The church has gone through various phases of rebuilding, but there are several parts of it which appear to be essentially unchanged since the eleventh century. Behind the fifteenth-century porch...

...is a late Saxon doorway.

The decoration around this doorway, I'm reliably informed, is from the early eleventh century. The ornament is fairly worn on the front-facing side, though still clear:

And on the insides of the doorway it looks as if it could have been carved yesterday, rather than 1000 years ago.

The door itself is interesting too: according to the church guide, it's been dated by dendrochronology to c.1034-1042, making it the oldest door in England still in use. And very solid and ancient it feels. It's also one of a number of church doors associated with a gruesome folk-tradition: that it was once covered with the tanned skin of a Dane who had been flayed for stealing from the church, and had his skin nailed to the door in punishment. Needless to say, bits of the 'skin' have been tested and shown to be nothing more than cured cowhide. As I said, this bizarre story is attached to several English churches, but it's intriguing to find any oral tradition linking this particular church to Danes.

(15 pictures and we've only just made it inside the door! Hope you don't have anything better to do with your day...)

It's a plain but pleasing church, white-walled and light with a narrow nave. It's the nave which is the Saxon core of the church, apparently. Just in the corner of the picture above you can see the font, of which the base is 'possibly Saxon'.

Lots of fonts are 'possibly Saxon', but one can't help wondering, is this the font in which poor Stigand performed his first baptisms?

Other traces of the Saxon church are the four high, cobwebby windows in the nave.

In the eleventh-century church there was a stone tower above this crossing, but this had collapsed by the middle of the thirteenth century. The chancel is Victorian, but the two transepts preserve more of the older building.

With a mind full of Assandun, I was a bit startled to see a Danish flag – had some Cnut-loving pilgrims been here before me? It transpired that its presence was nothing to do with Cnut’s Danes at all; it commemorates links between this church and St Botolph's Cathedral in Aalborg. So nothing more than a fortuitous coincidence, apparently. It’s a particularly apt one, though, because it was at Assandun that the Danes bore into battle (according to legend) a famous and unusual flag of their own: a plain white silk standard, upon which would magically appear in time of war a black raven. If the bearers of the standard were to be victorious, the raven would flap its wings and clap its beak; if they were to lose, it would droop. At Assandun, says the Encomium, the raven was exultant; Thorkell read the omen rightly and encouraged his men: “Let us fight manfully, comrades, for no danger threatens us; the restless raven of the prophetic banner bears witness.” Inspired by this, the Danes rushed on to victory. This reference to the raven banner comes straight out of Scandinavian legend, and specifically legends associated with the most famous Danish conquerors of England, the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok. Not the kind of flag you'd want to hang in an English church!

On the south side there's more of that carving around the opening to the transept:

Perhaps a few strokes of carving on stone don't seem all that exciting to you, but there are precious few bits of stone, or of anything, really, which we can imagine being seen by the eyes of Cnut and Wulfstan and Thorkell.

The south transept:

The war memorial, so familiar a sight in English churches, struck me particularly here, since Cnut’s minster was, of course, a war memorial too. This one was installed in 1920, exactly 900 years after Cnut's, because however much has changed in nine centuries, some things don't change.

The Roll of Honour for the English side at Assandun is given by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

Þa wearð þær ofslægen Eadnoð biscop, 7 Wulfsie abbod, 7 ælfric ealdorman, 7 Godwine ealdorman, 7 Ulfkytel of Eastenglan, 7 æþelward ælfwines sunu ealdormannes, 7 eall seo duguð of Angelcynnes þeode.

'There Bishop Eadnoth was killed, and Abbot Wulfsige, and Ealdorman Ælfric, and Ealdorman Godwine, and Ulfkytel of East Anglia, and Æthelweard, the son of Ealdorman Ælfwine, and all the best of the English nation.'

We don't know the names of those killed on the Danish side.

A few assorted shots:

The white walls and the hanging lamps made me think, perhaps only by association by ideas, of the church at Jelling, where Cnut’s grandfather commemorated bringing Christianity to Denmark. (There is a superficial resemblance!) If only Cnut had erected a stone monument rather than a minster church, we might not have so much trouble finding the site of Assandun...

There are a few bits of masonry just lying around; the north transept is like a museum of old books and unidentified lumps of stone:

The foundations of the Saxon chancel lie under the Victorian one, so that remains a mystery:

Looking back from the chancel:

(Where did Wulfstan stand to preach his sermon?)

And so, via that wonderful door, we go back out into the sunshine.

Such an English view!

So, that's the church. Where to find the battlefield? I'm afraid this is where things get hopelessly speculative, and really, kind of absurd. Because not only does no one really know where the battle site might be (if it's near Ashdon), on the day I visited Hadstock I had nothing to go on but this description from the local history website:

A local county history of Cambs reports that weapons were found in Red Field in the 1850s when the railway cutting was dug, 'presumably the relic of some skirmish between Saxon and Dane', but there is no official record and one would expect the odd weapon to be found almost anywhere in East Anglia after all the Viking raids... There used to be a small pasture on the corner of the Bartlow Road at the junction with Chalky Lane. According to the late Ernie and Joe Freeman, this was called Traitors' Field and it was unlucky to plough it because it was where Eadric Streona and his men held back from the battle and betrayed Edmund and the English.

This seemed marginally better than nothing, so that's where I went. But since I was lacking a properly detailed map (it was an impromptu visit, remember), I'm not even really sure if the field I went to, among the many fields around, was actually the one this website was describing. (By this point the whole expedition had become a lesson in how not to do a field-trip, to the point of almost being an unfortunate metaphor for the wild goose chase of academic study. I promise I usually do my research more meticulously than this!)

Anyway, I followed the map I had, and found a lane:

On the slope of a hill which is (I think) called Haw's Hill:

There's nothing around but farmland and fields, as far as the eye can see. I think this is the above-mentioned Traitors' Field:

The lane leads to a point of high ground above the River Granta, where there's a ford leading into the Red Field. 'Red indicates a battle site' said the church guide, optimistically.

Unlike Hastings, there's no visitor centre here, no audio tour, no English Heritage signage - maybe not even a battlefield. But even if there were, it would still just be a field. Everything else is all in the mind and the memory.

If you'd read this far in the post, I admire and congratulate and slightly pity you. Your reward will be a bit of actual, incontrovertible Assandun history. Because on the same trip, pre-planned and therefore properly pre-researched, I went to Ely - and in Ely Cathedral is buried the most high-profile casualty of Assandun, Eadnoth, Bishop of Dorchester.

This chapel at the far end of Ely Cathedral, now strangely empty and denuded of its medieval statues, is the final resting-places of seven prominent men of late Anglo-Saxon England, whose bones lie in chests behind this monument. They were Ely's chief patrons and benefactors, highly valued in the twelfth century, when the Liber Eliensis was written. Their remains were removed from the Saxon church into the choir of the Norman one, and eventually into the chantry chapel of a sixteenth-century Bishop of Ely. There they lie, barely mentioned in the guidebook and barely glanced at by the stream of tourists who entered the chapel while I was there. Perhaps it was the flamboyant eighteenth-century Latin inscriptions which put the tourists off; in which case it's a shame, because behind these memorials are people associated with some of the most powerful words in English literature.

The Liber Eliensis says Bishop Eadnoth went to Assandun with a group of monks 'to pray for the army', and was killed while he was singing mass (it's possible he was in fact just fighting on the English side); 'first his right hand was cut off for the sake of a ring, then his whole body was cut to pieces'. His body was retrieved from the battlefield and buried at Ely, where he was considered a martyr. Four years before his death, Eadnoth himself had been responsible for retrieving the body of St Alphege after he was killed by Thorkell's army - which makes his own fate particularly poignant.

Buried beside Eadnoth is the victim of Vikings best-known to students of Old English poetry: Byrhtnoth, Ealdorman of Essex, killed in battle at Maldon in 991, and hero of the poem of that name. Byrhtnoth died in what is often considered the first battle of the Danish Conquest, Eadnoth in the last, and here they are together. I wonder if anyone at Assandun on the day the church was consecrated had the words of The Battle of Maldon ringing in their ears, whether Byrhtnoth's bold defiance of the Danes or the desperate last stand of his men: Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað...

And buried beside Eadnoth and Byrhtnoth at Ely, as if things couldn't get any more poignant, is Archbishop Wulfstan himself. He must surely have been thinking of Eadnoth - and who knows, maybe of Byrhtnoth too - on the day he consecrated the church at Assandun.

No 'cæsus a Danis' for Wulfstan; he died peacefully in 1023, and was buried by his own desire at Ely. It's Wulfstan who in his Sermo Lupi gives us the most memorable picture of England under Danish attack, where he describes in a thundering series of alliterating doublets the disasters which have befallen the country:

Ne dohte hit nu lange inne ne ute: ac wæs here and hungor, nu bryne and blodgyte on gewelhwylcan ende oft and gelome, and us stalu and cwalu, stric and steorfa, orfcwealm and uncoþu, hol and hete, and rypera reaflac derede swyþe þearle.

Nothing has prospered now for a long time, at home or abroad; but there was harrying and hunger, now burning and bloodshed in every place often and frequently, and theft and death, plague and pestilence, death of cattle and disease, malice and hatred, and the robbery of pillagers have sorely afflicted us.

In his sermon for the consecration of a church he talks about a king and his witan going to dedicate a church together, putting aside envy and hatred, and finding in the process another of those alliterative doublets: unity mid sibbe and mid some, 'with peace and with reconciliation'. Perhaps that's what Wulfstan sought at Assandun.