Read Online The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great by Benjamin R. Merkle - Free Book Online

soldiers, a confidence that their fight was just and that God was on their side. The intensity of the fight, the thrill of the early success, the confidence of divine favor, all worked powerfully on Alfred, awakening a savage fury in him. His men later described him as a wild boar on the battlefield, a bloody beast, rampaging through the Viking lines in a ruthless rage. On and on the combat continued, swirling around a lone thorn tree. Many years after the battle was over, veterans would come and point with pride to that thorn tree, which marked the very spot on the hillside where they had stood with Alfred and fought in the battle of Ashdown.
    The surprising strength with which the Wessex shieldwall resisted the initial Viking charge may have sent a momentary disappointment through the Danish host. They quickly converted their hope for an easy victory into an indefatigable determination to bathe the slopes of Ashdown in Wessex blood. Soon the ground gained by Saxon troops was being slowly granted back again to the Viking horde, passing the lonely thorn tree once more.

    A well-formed shieldwall was virtually impenetrable, so long as the wall held together. If a gap could be cut into the wall, then the enemy would pour through the line and attack from behind, where the wall was vulnerable. Once a hole was cut into the shieldwall, even if for just a moment, the sudden attack of enemy soldiers from behind made it impossible to keep the formation together; the shieldwall would be abandoned quickly, and general chaos would ensue. Thus, most methods for assaulting the wall focused on ripping open the wall, hoping to capitalize on the bedlam that inevitably followed.
    An attack would come as a sudden hard push, a human battering ram, where one shieldwall tried to outmuscle the other. In this type of engagement, the primary weapon was the spear. Instead of being thrown, the spear was kept in hand and thrust over and in between the shields. The spear’s length made it possible to wield it effectively against the enemy while standing several ranks back from the front line of the shieldwall. A Norse manual would later insist that a spear was worth two swords when fighting against a shieldwall.
    Swords and axes were more difficult to wield in such close quarters and tended to be reserved for hand-to-hand combat in the many smaller skirmishes that followed once the shieldwall had broken. It was possible, however, to use the bottom of the axe head to hook an opposing shield and pull it away to leave its owner vulnerable to a spear thrust. Additionally, many soldiers carried a sax, a much shorter sword with a blade of one to two feet. A sax could be much more easily wielded inside the tight confines of the shieldwall. Swords and axes may have also been useful for attacking the unprotected legs of the enemy, but the awkwardness of swinging such bulky weapons within the confines of the shieldwall, however, made the spear the weapon of choice.

    Though the Wessex shieldwall continued to hold, the casualties inflicted by the Viking attack began to mount. The Danish spear-men constantly wormed their deadly spears through the network of shields, searching for the tender flesh of the Wessex front rank. Each time the spear was driven home— sometimes with a deadly precision to the neck or abdomen, but more often catching some Saxon in a less vital area like the thigh or an unprotected shoulder—the wall was weakened by one. These wounds may not have been immediately fatal, but the pain and blood loss removed the soldier from the fight. 2
    The Wessex line now required endurance and discipline to hold together throughout this cruel battle of bloody attrition. As each warrior fell, his place had to be filled quickly and willingly by the man standing immediately behind him. A moment’s hesitation, a moment of considering what price might be paid for filling that gap, and a hole was left open for a horde of Vikings to pour through the shieldwall,