Michael Livingston - Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England

Contents

I suspect that if you ask people about battles fought on British soil they will suggest a few: Hastings, Bannockburn, Bosworth Field, Edgehill, and the Battle of Britain. Maybe they will remember Towton, Flodden, or Naseby, but very few people will add Brunanburh to their list of famous British battles.

Perhaps thats not surprising. It happened long ago, in AD 937, and over the centuries it became forgotten to the extent that no one was even sure where Brunanburh was. Yet perhaps no battle was so important to the shaping of Britain. As Michael Livingston wrote in his magnificent The Battle of Brunanburh: A Casebook , The men who fought and died on that field forged a political map of the future that remains with us today. That makes Brunanburh as significant an engagement as the battle of Yorktown in 1781 and, just as Yorktown established the existence of a United States of America, so Brunanburh sealed the creation of England.

Yet, strangely, the people of England largely forgot Brunanburh. For a time after 937 it was an extraordinarily famous battle, described in chronicles across Christendom, celebrated in poems and songs, and always remembered as a terrible event marked with massive slaughter. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , usually a dry catalogue of events, broke into verse to describe the battle, and this book takes its title from that poem. The language is the English of the time:

Ne wear wl mare

on is eiglande, fre gieta

folces gefylled beforan issum

sweordes ecgum

Never greater slaughter

Was there on this island, never as many

Folk felled before this

By the swords edges.

Brunanburh was recognized as a crucial and appalling event, and as a battle that had consequence, just as Hastings would have. Yet, amazingly, the English forgot where the battle was fought. Names change over time. Mameceaster became Manchester, Snotengaham became Nottingham. Its a natural process and Brunanburh, wherever it was, went through the same changes until folk forgot the original name and, in the process, even managed to forget the famous battle that had been fought there. Over the years there have been myriad suggestions about where the battle was fought, ranging from the Solway Firth to County Durham, from Yorkshire to Cheshire, but it is only recently that archaeologists have discovered broken weapons that point towards the Wirral. Even those discoveries will probably not end the controversy, but having visited the site and talked to the archaeologists I am convinced we at last know where Brunanburh took place. If you happen to be driving the M53 towards Birkenhead then look to your left between Exits Four and Three, and there it is! The lost battlefield of Brunanburh.

So we now know, or think we know, where the battle was fought, and we know who fought there. On one side were the English, and on the other was an alliance of their enemies led by Anlaf, a famous Viking chieftain who had carved out a kingdom in Ireland and now claimed the kingship of Northumbria. He was allied with other Vikings and with Constantine, king of the Scots. They went to the Wirral with one aim: to end forever the power of the English.