The most interesting feature, from a military point of view, of the contest between Wessex and the Danelaw, is the systematic defence of the Midland rivers by burhs during the reign of Edward the Elder, either by himself or his sister Æthelflæd. Æthelflæd, who fixed her chief residence at Tamworth, on the edge of Staffordshire and Warwickshire, ruled over Mercia, and fortified her frontier between 909 and her death in 921. Her brother died in 925: his activity in constructing burhs began about 913. Of the construction of these fortresses two phrases are used: their builders either “wrought” or “timbered” them. Both words probably mean the same thing: the town or village to be fortified was enclosed within the usual wooden stockade.[34] The identity of a few of the burhs is uncertain; but the remainder may be classified as follows: (1) Burhs wrought by Æthelflæd on the river banks of her frontier: these include Runcorn and possibly Warburton on the Mersey, Bridgnorth and possibly Shrewsbury on the Severn, Tamworth and Stafford on tributaries of the Trent, and Warwick on the Avon. (2) Frontier burhs taken by Æthelflæd from the Danes were Derby and Leicester, both on tributaries of the Trent. (3) Eddisbury in Cheshire, an early hill fortress, was the site of one of Æthelflæd’s burhs: here the inference is that the existing hill fort was palisaded by her orders, and garrisoned as a camp of refuge. Of Edward’s burhs, Witham and Maldon on the Essex Blackwater, of which some probable traces remain, belong to class (1), as also does Thelwall, his fortified post on the Mersey. To class (2) belong Colchester, Huntingdon, and Tempsford, the first on the Colne, the two latter on the Great Ouse. None of Edward’s works bear any analogy to class (3), unless his last burh, Bakewell in Derbyshire, may be taken into account. But (4) Bakewell represents a push northward along a hostile border, and may be claimed, with Towcester, as belonging to a fourth class of burh, unconnected with a navigable river, but providing a constant menace to the enemy. (5) Towcester may, however, also be classed with Colchester as a Roman burh with stone walls. A sixth class of burh was riverine, like class (1), but with this difference, that it was double. There was one burh on one side, the other on the opposite side of the river. The cases are Hertford on the Lea, Buckingham and Bedford on the Ouse, Stamford on the Welland, and Nottingham on the Trent. At Hertford and Buckingham both burhs were the work of Edward. At Bedford, Stamford, and Nottingham, the northern burh was in the hands of the enemy, and Edward took it by converting the southern suburb into a fortified and garrisoned post. His proceedings were exactly analogous to those of Charles the Bald in 862. He gained control of the navigable rivers by placing garrisons on both their banks; the natural places which he chose were the existing towns on the river, and the garrison, as at Nottingham, was formed out of the inhabitants.
Some of these burhs, as we have seen, were in the occupation of the Northmen; and at a later date, when the frontier of the west Saxon kingdom had been pushed back, and English kings were again placed on the defensive, Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Stamford, and Leicester became known as the five burhs, the centre of Danish power in the Midlands. There is no reason to suppose that there was any essential difference between the burhs of Danes and Saxons—that the burh which Æthelflæd took at Derby was in any way different from her own burh at Tamworth. When the Danes first landed on a river bank or island and beached their ships, they constructed what is called in the Chronicle a geweorc, i.e., a thing wrought. This probably consisted of a slight bank and ditch enclosing the landward side of their position. Where they raised permanent dwellings within the enceinte, the burh grew out of the geweorc, just as a Roman station developed out of a mere camp. However, it is unsafe to push the phraseology of the Chronicle too far, or to fasten a too technical meaning upon its words; and the fact remains that the term geweorc may be very well applied to a wrought burh. The Danish burhs at Huntingdon and Tempsford, the landmarks of their progress up the Ouse to recover Bedford in 921, are called indiscriminately burh and geweorc.
Map of Saxon and Danish Burhs
[The line from the Mersey to the Wash roughly indicates the Danish frontier.]
Many of the burhs wrought or taken during the Danish war became, after the Norman conquest, sites of castles; and the presence of a Norman castle at such places has led to the still popular inference that the castle simply usurped the earthworks of the earlier stronghold, and that therefore the burh was equivalent to the later castle.[35] It is not surprising that all the five places where we hear of a burh on either side of the river should have been chosen for the foundation of later castles. But the castle earthworks of Hertford and Bedford, the castles of which there is record at Buckingham and Stamford, were private strongholds which formed part of the defences of one of the burhs, but were not identical with either. The Conqueror’s castle of Nottingham, greatly transformed in its present state, looked down from its sandstone cliff upon the northern burh where Edward welded together Englishman and Dane in one common work of defence and bond of citizenship.[36] But even were it not self-evident that the burh is identical with the burgus or burgum of Domesday and the “borough” whose organisation plays so large a part in English history, there is one fact which makes its identification with the castle impossible. At Hertford, Buckingham, Bedford, Stamford, Nottingham, there were two burhs, but there never has been more than one castle. When the Conqueror wrought a castle on either side of the river at York, he did not repeat Edward the Elder’s tactics literally: he applied them to a form of fortification of which Edward knew nothing. If the test by which the Norman castle is identified with the Saxon burh fails in these instances, we are obviously forbidden to make the identification in the cases of single burhs like Warwick or Tamworth. The great earthen mount and curtain wall which stand in the south-west corner of Tamworth, beside the Tame, are not the remains of Æthelflæd’s burh, although it is not improbable that they were raised on the site of her dwelling-house. Her burh is the town of Tamworth itself; and although her wall of palisades is gone, there are still traces of the ditch with which, in the eighth century, Offa had ringed the burh about.
Earthwork at Tempsford.
There is no trace of any arx or citadel within these enclosures. Their defenders were the citizens. In France, for reasons sufficiently indicated, the art of fortification was more advanced. Roman traditions survived there without that abrupt break which the historical continuity of England had suffered. No fortress of stone and wood, such as that which Charles the Bald, in 869, built within the enceinte of the abbey of St Denis, is heard of in Saxon England. The state of society in which, as early as 864, Charles found it necessary, by the edict of Pistes, to forbid his vassals to raise private fortresses without royal authority, did not exist in England, and was only beginning to exist there two centuries later. In both centuries we have to deal with the same invaders, but with defenders whose state of social development was quite different. Although the private fortress or castle was introduced into England by the Normans, and although the type of earthwork associated with it was developed to its highest extent by Northmen, not only in Normandy and England, but also in Denmark, it is nevertheless probable that the earliest development of that form of earthwork took place on Frankish soil. The Danish geweorc or burh, where it can be traced with any certainty—and this is in very few cases—supplied accommodation for the force, and probably a harbour for its vessels, but no private stronghold belonging to a prominent leader. The earthwork called Gannock’s castle ([32]), close to the Ouse near Tempsford, is sometimes supposed to be the geweorc wrought by the Danes in 921. In plan, it very closely resembles a rather small mount-and-bailey castle of the usual early Norman type, and could have accommodated only a very small body of defenders. But the point in which it differs from the ordinary mount-and-bailey plan—the smallness of the mount, which is a mere thickening of the earthen bank, and the absence of a moat round its base—may show that here the Danes anticipated their Norman successors with a plan with which some of them may have gained acquaintance during marauding expeditions in France. This, however, is mere conjecture, and the utility of such a fortress for the immediate purposes of the Danes may well be questioned.[37] Of the private dwellings of the Danish leaders, and how far they may have approximated to the later type of the castle, we know nothing. St Mary’s abbey at York is on the site of Galmanho, the residence of the Danish earls outside the western wall of the Roman city, but nothing of its earthworks remain. If they were at all considerable, like those of a mount-and-bailey castle of Norman times, it seems strange that no trace of them should be left.
The details of the doings of the Danish army, during the reign of Ethelred the Redeless (979-1016), are recorded at great length in the Chronicle. They show the old tactics, familiar for two hundred years: the long ships are brought to the nearest point convenient for a campaign of pillage; there the “army is a-horsed,” and they ride at their will inland, lighting their “war-beacons,” the blazing villages of the country-side, as they go. Year after year records its tale of disaster, until the partition of England in 1016 between Cnut and Edmund Ironside. The whole story of river and land warfare, of plundering and burning, of the paying of Danegeld as a temporary sop to the army, is in no way different from the record of the Danish operations in France during the ninth century. In France the Danish conquest was quicker, because the invaders had to deal from the beginning with a worn-out civilisation: the partition of France, owing to the superiority of the Danes to their opponents, was effected within seventy years of their first settlement. The power of Normandy, however, was checked by the rise of the Capetian dynasty in the later part of the tenth century: the Northmen were kept strictly to their Danelaw, and their subsequent expansion took place, not in France, but in England. On the other hand, in England, the Danish invaders of the ninth century had to contend with the rising power of Wessex and a race younger and more vigorous than the contemporary Gauls of Neustria. Their inroads were therefore checked and their conquest was delayed until the house of Wessex had run its natural course, and Englishmen and Danes had had time to be practically amalgamated into one nation. The glory of Wessex ceases with Edmund Ironside, the glory of the Danes with Cnut. Before Cnut died, the child William already had succeeded to his father’s duchy of Normandy, and thirty-one years after the death of Cnut, William was king of England, and, for all practical purposes, the inroads of the Northmen from Scandinavia were over.