Category: Culture

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Here we are, with a new king in Wessex. King AEthelred, son of AEthelwulf, was now sitting the throne. He was in his 20s, and despite having a large family back when he was a child… now his only family left were his wife… Queen Wulfthryth (and good on you Wulfthryth for insisting on being given the title of Queen… other than that, we don’t know much about her, but the fact that she was listed as queen, and her name, has lead some scholars to suspect that she was Mercian. You’ll remember that the Mercians were a bit less restrictive on women in power than their southern cousins).

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We’re at a massive turning point for Britain. The Great Heathen Army is arriving on the Northern shores. I have been racking my brain for weeks trying to figure out how best to tell you this story deal with the Great Heathen Army, because it has all the elements that make a story nearly impossible to tell. On the one hand what remains to us of the Great Heathen Army has aspects that are almost certainly pure legend, along the lines of the story of King Arthur. It’s very tempting to just tell this story as a legend and discuss the legendary aspects in a direct way.

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When we left off last week we spoke about King AEthelberht’s ascension to the throne of Wessex in 860 and how, despite the insistence of the Chroniclers that his rule was marked by peace and tranquility, on that same year we had records of a Viking raid that struck the heart of the Kingdom of Wessex, Winchester…

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Before we begin, I’d like to address something from our last episode. I told you about reports of Vikingr armies marching around the countryside near the Wrekin. I offered a variety of methods of reaching the Wrekin, all of which would have involved quite a bit of work. However, as some of you have noted on Facebook and Twitter, I left out the possibility that they may have gone up the River Severn. And I have no excuse for this one, I completely forgot the Severn. I don’t know why, but I did. I’m human, sometimes errors happen and all I can do is make a correction in the subsequent episode. So yeah, those Vikingrs patrolling the Wrekin may have sailed all the way around Wessex and Cornwall, or sailed through the Irish sea, past Wales, and then rowed up the Severn. That would certainly get them much closer to the Wrekin than, say, landing in East Anglia and marching. So fair point. We aren’t given details of how they got there, but that is definitely a possibility.

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It’s Christmas day 854. King AEthelweard of East Anglia, a king who we know almost nothing about, is dead. The only evidence we really have that he was alive in the first place are his coins, and this is likely due to the fact that, throughout the Viking Age, succeeding bands of Scandinavian pyromaniacs destroyed the East Anglian written records. But coins don’t burn all that well, so at least we have that.

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This episode is getting a bit into the political weeds and it’s for a very important reason. We’re seeing the development of that dynastic juggernaut we all know and love, the House of Wessex, and I want you to see how and why it’s forming into what it will eventually become. Because the successes of Alfred and the later successes of King AEthelstan, the first King of England, flow from things that were set into motion during these early days of the Viking era. So please keep that in mind when we’re talking about what the various dynasties are doing, because it really does matter… even though most people don’t talk about it. Alright, lets get to it.

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When we left off last time, we were taking a look at the problem facing Europe that no one wanted to talk about. And this wasn’t like plague of people mistaking tights for pants. In that situation, the only solution is to ignore it until it retreats back to the darkest recesses of fashion. The viking raids worked differently, ignoring them only made them stronger… to make matters worse, the European nobility have been hiring bands of vikingrs as mercenaries in their own personal squabbles, bringing the vikingr bands deeper into European territory and leaving the peasantry completely defenseless.

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