'Guthrum,' Ragnar said bitterly. 'He lives!'
'He was the first to run,' he said. 'Svein told him we should fight outside the walls,' he went on, 'but Guthrum feared defeat more than he ever wanted victory.'
A cheer sounded as Alfred's banners were carried across the captured fort to the northern ramparts. Alfred, mounted again, and with a bronze circlet about his helmet, rode with the flags Beocca was on his knees giving thanks, while Alfred had a dazed smile and a look of disbelief, and I swear he wept as his standards were rammed into the turf at the world's edge. The dragon and the cross flew above his kingdom that had almost been lost, but had been saved so that there was still one Saxon King in England.
But Leofric was dead and Iseult was a corpse and a hard rain fell across the land we had rescued.
The
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Hist
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The Westbury white horse is cut into the chalk of the escarpment beneath Bratton Camp on the edge of the Wiltshire Downs. From the north it can be seen for miles, The present horse, a handsome beast, is over a hundred feet long and almost two hundred feet high and was cut in the 1770s, making it the oldest of Wiltshire's ten white horses, but local legend says that it replaced a much older horse that was blazoned into the chalk hillside after the battle of Ethandun in 878.
I should like to think that legend is true, but no historian can be certain of the location of the battle of Ethandun, where Alfred met Guthrum's Danes, though Bratton Camp, above the village of Edington, is the prime candidate. Bratton Camp is an Iron Age fortress which still stands just above the Westbury white horse. John Peddie, in his useful book, Alfred, Warrior King, places Ethandun at Bratton Camp, and Edgar's Stone at Kingston Deverill in the Wylye valley, and I am persuaded by his reasoning.
There is no debate about the location of Æthelingaeg. That is now Athelney, in the Somerset Levels, near Taunton, and if Bratton Camp is substantially unaltered since 878, the levels are changed utterly.
Today, mostly thanks to the, medieval monks who dyked and drained the land, they make a wide, fertile plain, but in the ninth century they were a vast swamp mingled with tidal flats, an almost impenetrable marsh into which Alfred retreated after the disaster at Chippenham.
That disaster was the result of his generosity in agreeing the truce which allowed Guthrum to leave Exeter and retreat to Gloucester in Danish-held Mercia. That truce was secured by Danish hostages, but Guthrum, just as he had broken the truce arranged at Wareham in 876, again proved untrustworthy and, immediately after Twelfth Night, attacked and captured Chippenham, thus precipitating the greatest crisis of Alfred's long reign. The king was defeated and most of his country taken by the Danes. Some great nobles, Wulfhere, the Ealdorman of Wiltshire, among them, defected to the enemy, and Alfred's kingdom was reduced to the watery wastes of the Somerset Levels. Yet in the spring, just four months after the disaster at Chippenham, Alfred assembled an army, led it to Ethandun, and there defeated Guthrum. All that happened. What, sadly, did not probably happen is the burning of the cakes. That story, how a peasant woman struck Alfred after he allowed her cakes to burn, is the most famous folk tale attached to Alfred, but its source is very late and thus very unreliable.
Alfred, Ælswith, Wulfhere, Æthelwold and Brother (later Bishop) Asser all existed, as did Guthrum.
Svein is a fictional character. The great Danish enemies before Guthrum had been the three Lothbrok brothers, and the defeat of the last of them at the battle of Cynuit occurred while Alfred was at Athelney. For fictional reasons I moved that Saxon victory forward a year, and it forms the ending of The Last Kingdom, the novel which precedes The Pale Horseman, which meant I had to invent a character, Svein, and a skirmish, the burning of Svein's ships, to replace Cynuit.
The two primary sources for Alfred's reign are the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bishop Asser's life of the king, and neither, alas, tells us much about how Alfred defeated Guthrum at Ethandun. Both armies, by later standards, were small, and it is almost certain that Guthrum considerably outnumbered Alfred. The West Saxon fyrd that won Ethandun. was mostly drawn from Somerset, Wiltshire and western Hampshire, suggesting that all eastern Wessex, and most of the north of the country, had been subdued by the Danes. We know the fyrd of Devonshire was intact (it had won the victory at Cynuit, as was the fyrd of Dorset, yet neither are mentioned as part of Alfred's army, suggesting that they were held back to deter a seaborne attack. The lack of the fyrds from those two powerful shires, if indeed they were absent, only confirms what a remarkable victory Alfred won.
The Saxons had been in Britain since the fifth century. By the ninth century they ruled almost all of what is now England, but then the Danes came and the Saxon kingdoms crumbled. The Last Kingdom tells of the defeat of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia, and The Pale Horseman describes how Wessex almost followed those northern neighbours into history's oblivion. For a few months in early 878 the idea of England, its culture and language, were reduced to a few square miles of swamp.
One more defeat and there would probably never have been a political entity called England. We might
