Viking Britain: A History. Thomas Williams
with iron, these shields were augmented with a large semi-circular metal boss riveted to the centre. This protected the hand (which gripped the handle attached behind it), but could also blunt the edges of misplaced weapon-strikes or smash the face of an enemy once the shield-wall had broken down into the series of individual duels and knots of vicious combat that the battle would inevitably devolve into.10
The smashing of one’s own face was, obviously, something to be avoided wherever possible. Helmets, like the one discovered at Gjermundbu, were probably more common than their rarity in the archaeological record might imply; the simple psychology of self-preservation would suggest that some sort of head and face protection would be desirable. An Anglo-Saxon helmet, found during the Coppergate excavations in York in the late 1970s, suggests the sort of thing that might have been available to the wealthiest warriors. Although it would have been old fashioned by the 830s (it was probably made in the third quarter of the eighth century), it seems to have remained in use until the first half of the ninth century. Old fashioned it may have been, but it was of exceptional craftsmanship and quality – not least the creatures that are woven into an intricate lattice in the decoration of the brazen nose-guard, and the eyebrows terminating in the heads of fanged serpentine creatures. The equipment of warriors in this period would have been far from homogeneous, and military gifts and heirlooms could be prized symbols of lineage, affiliation and religious persuasion. The Coppergate helmet carries an inscription on the brass crest that runs over the top of the helmet, an invocation to commend protection of its wearer – a man named Oshere – to the care of the saints.11 The inscription enhanced the helmet’s protective capabilities, transforming it into a magical item that conferred mystical as well as physical protection: a reminder that, to the warriors of the Viking Age, supernatural forces could play a critical role on the battlefield: ‘IN NOMINE DNI NOSTRI IHV SCS SPS DI ET OMNIBUS DECEMUS AMEN OSHERE XPI’ (‘In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the Spirit of God, let us offer up Oshere to All Saints. Amen’).12
Other helmet fragments, like an eyepiece discovered at Gevninge on Zealand (Denmark) and dated to the cusp of the Viking Age, imply that the finest helmets might still have resembled those recovered from the Vendel, Valsgärde and Sutton Hoo cemeteries. These objects, with their full-face coverings of mask or mail, their swooping dragons and coiling serpents, their images of riders and spear-shakers, are objects to inspire awe and terror in equal measure. They rise up darkly from an age of legend, conjuring images of heroes and kings – dripping with antiquity and the glamour of mighty forebears. If helmets like these did indeed appear on the battlefields of the Viking Age, it would have seemed to contemporaries as though the ghosts of the mighty dead strode among them still, time collapsing amid the blood and chaos of battle, the eternal raven wheeling overhead.13
Several high-ranking West Saxons fell in the fighting at Carhampton: the ealdormen Duda and Osmod (ealdormen were senior nobles, subordinate to the king and often in charge of a shire or, later, groups of shires) and the bishops Herefrith and Wigthegn. They were surely the tip of a bloody iceberg, but the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was never much concerned with the deaths (or the lives) of the average warrior. Of their enemies we know even less. All we are told, in a phrase that would roll out with grim regularity on the parchment leaves of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is that þa Deniscan ahton wælstowe geweald: ‘the Danes had possession of the place of slaughter’. In other words, they were victorious.14
The attack at Carhampton was a major incident, and it represented a sea-change in how Viking raiders related to the people of Britain. No longer content with the small-scale smash-and-grab raids which had defined Viking activity in the early ninth century (and which had picked up again in Ireland and Frankia from the 820s), the Vikings who attacked Carhampton seem to have done so with a heightened sense of what might be achieved through violence. A settlement of some importance, with archaeological traces dating from the fifth to the eighth centuries, Carhampton seems also to have been the site of an early monastic church – associated with the Celtic saint Carantoc. It may, therefore, have been a place of pilgrimage and a major centre of wealth, and in this it would fit the pattern of the targets of earlier Viking attacks, both in Britain and abroad.15
However, Carhampton was also the site of a royal estate (it is included in the will of Ecgberht’s grandson, Alfred, drawn up sixty years later) and was later the administrative centre for the hundred in which it sits – all of which suggests that it was an important political centre. This might, in part, explain why King Ecgberht himself was there to deal with the Viking threat – for if a king couldn’t hold his own, how could he be expected to defend an entire kingdom? His failure to do so in this case may well have emboldened the people who had sailed against him. Victory against the fearsome king of Wessex can only have awakened Viking warlords to their ability not only to wrest wealth from hapless coastal communities, but also, through sheer force of arms, to win glory, fame and – perhaps – power and dominion of their own.
In 838, King Ecgberht brought his army to Hengestdun, now known as Kit Hill in Cornwall. He had come to head off a new threat to his growing hegemony – an army of Cornishmen and their ‘Danish’ allies who had marched east to contest with the West Saxon king for control of their borders and to make a stand against his increasingly domineering approach to the south-west. The battle that ensued was significant, not so much because of its outcome, but because – for the first time that we know of – a Viking army had chosen to involve itself in the internal politics of Britain, making common cause with the Cornish to fight against the West Saxon king.
It is not known why the Vikings chose such involvement. Perhaps they fought as mercenaries, seeking a share in the spoils, or perhaps they had been promised land or trading rights in whatever new arrangement could be wrested from the English king. Whatever the reason, it was a sign of things to come: over the course of the ninth century, Viking war-bands would increasingly use their military muscle to redraw the map of Britain. On this occasion it came to naught. Ecgberht, as we have seen, was not a king to be trifled with (his heavy-handed treatment of the Cornish in the 820s had perhaps gone some way to inspiring the events of 838). When the king ‘heard of that [the alliance between the Vikings and the Cornish], he then went there with his army and fought against them at Hengestdun, and put both the Britons and the Danes to flight’.16
Rising to the impressive height of 1,096 feet, Kit Hill dominates the valley of the Tamar from which it rises, standing aloof from its comrades that huddle together in the uplands of Bodmin Moor. Up here you can see for miles. From Bodmin to Dartmoor to Plymouth Sound, a vast swathe of Britain’s south-western peninsula opens itself to the eye: rime-scoured boulders and ancient field boundaries, rough delvings and crook-backed pollards, the scars of a tussle between the tough, wilful landscape and its human wranglers that has been fought over millennia. To the south the sea glints in a cleft cut into the horizon by the broad silver band that snakes through green pastures on its way from the hills. It is no doubt the combination of its commanding position and its accessibility by sea and river that gave this place the strategic importance that it seems to have had in the ninth century; whoever held this place could, with good reason, consider himself master of the Cornish borders.
The significance of the formative battle that was fought here was not lost on early English antiquarians. Of the many earthworks and monuments that litter the sides and summit of Kit Hill, one of the most prominent is a five-sided enclosure of low walls, with bastions at four of the five intersections. It looks like the shaggy remains of a fortress. This curious structure was long interpreted as a Civil War-era fortress (1642–51) on the strength of compelling similarities with the plans of other, better-documented forts around England. However, appearances were deceptive. On 27 June 1800, Sir John Call, who owned the adjacent estate and manor at Whiteford, wrote in his will that he desired a ‘tomb of Cornish granate [sic] alias Moorstone’ to be made on top of Hingsdon Down or Kit Hill ‘within or adjoining to the Inclosure of the Castle I have built there’.17