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King Alfred's ships: text and context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

M. J. Swanton
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Extract

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's well-known reference to King Alfred's plan for a new design of war-ships is problematic both in general and in detail. In the account of the year 897 (recte 896), we are told how, after the raids made along the coast of Wessex by Danish gangs based in East Anglia and Northumbria, and in particular with raiding-vessels (OE œscas, ON askar) which they had built ‘many years before’, Alfred ordered ships of a new type to be constructed to meet the Danish menace. In the near-contemporary Winchester manuscript (A) the critical passage reads:

Þa het Ælfred cyng timbran langscipu ongen ða æscas. Þa wæron fulneah tu swa lange swa Þa oðru. Sume hæfdon lx ara, sume ma. Þa wæron ægðer ge swiftran ge unwealtran ge eac hieran Þonne pa oðru; næron nawðer ne on fresisc gescæpene ne on denisc, bute swa him selfum ðuhte Þæt hie nytwyrðoste beon meahten.

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Research Article
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Anglo-Saxon England , Volume 28 , December 1999 , pp. 1 - 22
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

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90 Goodburn, D. M., ‘Anglo-Saxon Boat Finds from London, are they English?’, Crossroads in Ancient Shipbuilding, Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Boat and Ship Archaeology, Roskilde 1991, ed. Westerdahl, C. (Oxford, 1994), pp. 97–104 (summary table at p. 98).Google Scholar

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98 As Bray and McGurk recognize, translating John of Worcester's altiores as ‘with a bigger draught’, pp. 350–1.Google Scholar

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100 ‘Antony had eighty ships, in which travelled ten legions; but by so much as he had fewer (than Octavianus) by so much were they better and larger, because they were so built that they could not be overladen with men, in that they were not ten feet high above the water’: The Old English Orosius, ed. Bately, , pp. 129 and 317.Google Scholar

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114 Alan Binns ingeniously supposes that the deliberately beached askar were using rollers (perhaps spare oars), unlike the accidentally grounded English ships: ‘The Navigation of Viking Ships round the British Isles in Old English and Old Norse Sources’, The Fifth Viking Congress, ed. Nicolasen, B. (Tórshavn, 1968), pp. 103–17, at 109–10.Google Scholar

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117 Smyth, , King Alfred, pp. 112–13.Google Scholar

118 ‘as it seemed to himself, see above, p. 1, n. 1.

119 ASC 911, 1008, Two Chronicles, ed. Plummer, I, 96–7 and 138.Google Scholar On the later Anglo-Saxon navy, see Hollister, C. W., Anglo-Saxon Military Institutions on the Eve of the Norman Conquest (Oxford, 1962), pp. 103–26Google Scholar, and Abels, R. P., Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1988), passim.Google Scholar

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122 Two Chronicles, ed. Plummer, I, 194–7.Google Scholar

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