The Snare of War

Britain was once a place of little kingdoms. By the end of the fifth century, the two Roman dioceses, Britannia Inferior and Britannia Superior, had given way to a mosaic of petty princedoms. Some were the size of a county. Some were smaller: the land around a cluster of villages, perhaps demarcated by some natural features such as forest and river. Many of these tiny kingdoms have left not the slightest trace on the historical record: they disappeared with the deaths of the kings who claimed to rule them. And the reason that so many were forgotten was that the life of a king was short and ended in blood.

For the kings, the men sitting at the apex of the social pyramid, had made a deal with devils in their ascent: having reached the top of the mountain there was no way back down. They were caught as tight as a hare in a wire. It did not matter if their subjects were Britons, Angles, Saxons or any of the other peoples who lived on the land. The farmers were constrained by the rhythms of farming: ploughing, sowing, harvesting, preparing. But the kings were trapped. They were trapped more firmly than any of their subjects.

The kings were caught in the snare of war.

Warriors Born and Warriors Made

Could the son of a farmer become a warrior in Anglo-Saxon Britain? Whether the warrior caste was sufficiently open to allow such a boy to enter it is an interesting question. Certainly, the easiest way to enter the warrior caste was to be born into it. However, it might have still been possible for a farmer’s son to become a warrior and part of the king’s warband.

While the social distance between king and peasant was great, the physical distance was not. The king and his warband were personal and present; they travelled their kingdom. A young man exhibiting strength, courage and initiative could attract their attention, particularly if he had the opportunity to do something that drew attention to his abilities: taking part in a battle and distinguishing himself, alerting the warband to the presence of an enemy, acting as a scout. Any of these could bring the farmer’s boy to the king’s attention and lead to his recruitment into the warband.

Once in, it was deeds that counted. While there was a hierarchy within the warrior aristocracy and the son of a farmer was never going to be an ætheling, his son or his grandson might.

Separated by Battle, Joined by Warfare

The warriors of early medieval Britain – Angle, Saxon, Briton, Irish, Pict – shared much even when they were separated by different religions: following the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, their cultures converged further.

The threads holding them together ran through language, the hierarchical but meritocratic organisation of the warband, the training necessary for fighting men, the broader horizons established by travel and the many outlanders among them. Indeed, perhaps a majority of warriors learned their skill far from their own mead hall.

It was a common practice for kings in Anglo-Saxon Britain to send their sons, from the age of seven and up, to be fostered as part of the retinue of an allied king. This served to broaden the experience of the growing boy, and it cemented ties between competing and allied kingdoms.

The Rules of Battle

One of the paradoxes of warfare is that for it to occur, the combatants have to share comparable views of how war is waged. They must share the same, or similar, war cultures. Indeed, the whole idea of a determining battle deciding the winner and the loser is part of a particular idea of war that is not universal. Threading it back through the past, it seems to have originated from the internecine warfare of the Greek city states. The citizen soldiers of the city states could not afford to be away from their homes during harvest since missing the harvest meant starvation. So rather than the long-drawn out conflicts of raiding and slave taking that characterised ancient warfare before the Greeks, the armies of the city states met and decided it all in a furious clash of arms, leaving the dead for the dogs and the living time to return home and harvest their crops.

When the Persians invaded Greece, there was a clash of very different military cultures. The Persians did not expect to have to fight set-piece battles with an enemy that would rather die than retreat – withdrawal to fight again another day was perfectly respectable within their military culture. There must have been a consuming feeling among the Persian officers that the Greeks weren’t fighting fair. But it was rather that the Greeks were fighting a different kind of war, and no one had told the Persians.

Swords For Hire

Photo by Fernando Cortés: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-viking-holding-a-sword-10068848/

It’s plausible that a substantial percentage of an Anglo-Saxon king’s warband were not local men – and that that percentage increased as the fame and renown of the king grew, attracting from further afield young men keen to make their names.

Indeed, this practice was in no way confined to the Anglo-Saxons. The poem Y Gododdin, ascribed to the Brittonic poet Aneirin, tells how the king of the Gododdin called warriors to his kingdom from all over Britain, feasting them for a year in his hall until they launched a doomed attack on their enemy (the battle is now generally accepted to have taken place around 600 and resulted in the defeat of the Gododdin by the Northumbrians).

Spice Run

Photo by Engin Akyurt: https://www.pexels.com/photo/assorted-color-herbs-3368291/

News from the outside world was one of the currencies a travelling warrior took with him, along with his sword and, sometimes, things to trade. Gifts, particularly portable, exotic gifts, were highly prized and, if small and light, reasonably easy to transport.

Things like spices were ideal. Living in Britain in the seventh century, you would only taste spices when someone returned from abroad bringing a taste of far away. Spices were the ideal gift to bring home since they are light, portable and appreciated in a taste world lacking many of the flavours we know today.

Warriors Abroad

Photo by Samuel Kalina: https://www.pexels.com/photo/rock-formation-in-the-middle-of-body-of-water-3800084/

Anglo-Saxon warriors travelled. In Beowulf, we hear of a Geatish warrior, Beowulf, fetching up at the court of Hrothgar, king of the Danes, to help him in his fight against the monster Grendel.

There was clearly nothing outlandish to the audience that first heard this poem in a warrior setting off to a different country in search of adventure, renown and an enemy against whom to pit his sword. It was quite common for a warrior to travel to another kingdom and offer his fighting skills there.

Indeed, the most renowned of all the kings of Northumbria, Oswald, took refuge in the sea-spanning kingdom of Dál Riata as a boy and fought for its rulers as a man. While there, he learnt the language of the Dál Riatans, heard their stories, sang their songs. There were many stories for him and his men to tell when they returned to Northumbria.

In the Hall of the Anglo-Saxon King

The king’s hall was an open space. Access to it was not limited to the king’s retinue. The king, by necessity, had to remain available to his subjects, and there were also the servants and artisans, and the women and children of the long retinue that followed the king on his progress through the kingdom.

All of these would gather during the long nights to talk, listen, play games and generally pass the time. Apart from anything else, it was warmer in the hall than outside, and the food and ale were plentiful. One of the principal requirements of being a king was to provide for those he had responsibility for.

With such a mixed audience, the tales told were tailored for all sorts of ears, from the old to the young, from the experienced to the enthralled. But they were not just stories of war and battle.

Riddle Me This

The Penguin, the Riddler, Catwoman and the Joker from the 1966 Batman film.

The Anglo-Saxons, and particularly their warrior elite, were very fond of riddles.

A riddle was, in essence, a competition between the person posing the riddle and those attempting to answer it, so it fit well into the competitive milieu of the king’s warband. But it was also a demonstration of wit and a chance to indulge in early examples of the enduring English love for the double entendre.

Not all riddles were filthy, but a significant sub-section of recorded riddles are – and these were riddles written down by monks. One might suspect that there were many more that the monks chose not to record.

Death and the Warrior

The Anglo-Saxon warrior had to exhibit unflinching, potentially suicidal bravery as well as guile and strategic insight. In The Battle of Maldon, an incomplete Old English poem describing the titular battle, the leader of the English, Byrhtnoth the ealdorman, confronts a band of raiding Vikings confined on Northey Island in the Blackwater Estuary. There is a causeway linking the island to the mainland and Byrhtnoth, in his ofermōde, accepts the Vikings challenge to battle and allows them to cross to the mainland – a decision that proves disastrous.

The English engage the Vikings in battle but one of Byrhtnoth’s men absconds, riding away during the fighting on Byrhtnoth’s own horse. The English, thinking that their ealdorman is fleeing the battle, are thrown into confusion and panic. Byrhtnoth himself is hacked down and killed by the Vikings. The poem breaks off as Byrhtnoth’s loyal men determine to fight to the death alongside their fallen lord.

The poem captures perfectly the conflicting ideas at the heart of the ideal of the warrior, hinging upon the word ofermōde. The poet gives this as the reason for Byrhtnoth’s decision to allow the Vikings to cross to the mainland. Its literal meaning is ‘overconfidence’ or ‘high spirits’, but it can be used to signify pride or arrogance.

So, the disaster of Maldon was due to Byrhtnoth’s pride and arrogance, but his courage in what becomes a lost cause is held up as ideal, as is the doomed determination of those warriors who choose to fight to the death alongside him. Thus, the ofermōde that led Byrhtnoth to accept battle from the Vikings also led to his defeat.