The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England

by Marc Morris

that men like Reada and Wocca were not necessarily benevolent father figures, but rather men with strong right arms, violent proclivities and boundless greed, asserting control over others, demanding tribute in the form of goods and services.

Moving on through the list we find a further six tribes answering for more than a thousand hides each, but a far greater number – seventeen out of a total of thirty-five – are assessed at only a few hundred hides a piece.

Having secured the submission of his neighbours, an ambitious warlord could call upon them to fight in his ranks, enabling him to take on bigger contenders, until eventually he established his supremacy over a wide region. At what stage such a man might start styling himself as ‘king’ must have varied from case to case.

Devastated survivors may have been willing to surrender their independence and submit to the rule of others if that was the only way of guaranteeing their sustenance. (The word ‘lord’ derives from the Old English hlaford, meaning ‘loaf-guardian’, or ‘bread-giver’.) Amid all the death, violence and chaos, there must have been a few individuals who emerged as winners, and were able to turn the desperation of others to their own advantage.20

Christianity offered the king not only the promise of future paradise and life everlasting, but the immediate prospect of being elevated above his Anglo-Saxon peers. Rome provided the ideological authority to accompany the cultural and economic clout he already possessed thanks to his Frankish connections.

The most remarkable part of the Burghal Hidage is its second half, which reveals the king’s scheme for keeping his fortresses fully manned. After the list of burhs comes the formula by which their allocations of hides were calculated, based on the number of men needed to man the walls. ‘For the maintenance and defence of an acre’s breadth of wall,’ it states, ‘sixteen hides are required. If every hide is represented by one man, then every pole [5½ yards] can be manned by four men.’ Put more simply, one man was expected to defend just over four feet of wall. Because we have the output data of this equation – the number of hides allocated to each burh – we can work out the wall-lengths the author had used as the basis of his calculations. And, remarkably, there is a fairly close correspondence between the figures he used and the dimensions of surviving burhs. Wareham’s allocation of 1,600 hides, for example, implies it had 2,200 yards of wall to defend, and the surviving circuit of defences extends for about 2,180 yards. There is a similar close correlation at Winchester. The city’s assessment of 2,400 hides was based on a perimeter reckoned at 3,300 yards, and the length of Winchester’s Roman walls as measured today is 3,318 yards.

But it was at this point that the violent factional rivalries at Æthelred’s court started to spin out of control. The rise of Eadric the Grabber had also led to the promotion of his many brothers, who soon came into conflict with the king’s other counsellors. In the same spring of 1009, the Chronicle records that one of the brothers, Brihtric, accused a Sussex thegn named Wulfnoth of some unspecified offence before the king. Wulfnoth, who was evidently a man of some status, responded by persuading the crews of twenty of the ships stationed at Sandwich to support him, and led them on a destructive raid along the south coast, ‘doing all manner of damage’. Brihtric, ‘intending to make a big reputation for himself’, took a further eighty ships and set off in pursuit, convinced it would be an easy matter for them to defeat the deserters and bring in Wulfnoth dead or alive. In their eagerness, however, the pursuers sailed into a terrible storm: those vessels that were not dashed to pieces by the waves were cast ashore, where they were subsequently burned by Wulfnoth. As a result, without so much as a single viking in sight, Æthelred lost more than half his newly constructed fleet.