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And in his days came first three ships from Horthaland and then the reeve [the King’s
sheriff ] rode thither and tried to compel them to go to the royal manor, for he did not know
what they were; and then they slew him. These were the first ships of the Danes to come to
England.
This was a chilling prelude to yet more raids, invasions and warfare by the mixed hordes of
Vikings and Danes. After two centuries without any substantial foreign invasions in England, it
looked as if it was starting all over again. After the killing of the king’s sheriff in 789, on what has
all the appearance of a reconnaissance mission, the Vikings paid most attention to the north of
Britain and to Ireland, as we have already seen. But this was only a temporary respite. In 835 there
was a large raid in Kent, then annually after that until, in 865, there was a full-scale invasion. The
Danish Great Army landed in East Anglia led by Ivar Ragnusson, better known as Ivar the
Boneless. I have rather a soft spot for Ivar the Boneless, because he was said to have suffered from
the same genetic disease which I once researched myself. He was born, so it is said, with ‘only
gristle where his bones should have been’. From this description, Ivar almost certainly suffered
from osteogenesis imperfecta, an inherited form of severe brittle-bone disease. If Ivar was anything
like the osteogenesis patients I got to know he would have been very short, unable to walk without
aid and with badly deformed limbs and spine. His head, however, would have been of normal size
and his mental functions not impaired in the least.
The mystique of a fully mature mind in the broken body of a child is very powerful. I am not
surprised that, even with this great physical disability, which would have prevented him from any
combat himself, he was able to command an army by his legendary wisdom and force of
personality alone. He was carried into battle on a shield. It must have been a disconcerting sight
for the enemy.
Ivar forced the East Anglian king to supply him with food, horses and winter quarters, and next
spring marched his troops north and captured the Northumbrian capital of York, beginning the long
association between this city, renamed Jorvik by Ivar, and the Vikings. The Great Army then moved
south to invade Mercia, then east to complete the invasion of East Anglia, which culminated in the
brutal murder of Edmund, the Anglian king who had supplied the Great Army when it first landed.
In three short years the Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia had been utterly
destroyed.
The rampaging Great Army then turned south and prepared to invade Wessex. For the first time,
the Danes were defeated, on the Berkshire Downs near Reading by Alfred and his brother
Aethelred. The Danes withdrew and attacked again, this time beating the Saxon force near
Basingstoke. The Danes were reinvigorated by the arrival of a new army in 871 and then prepared
for the final showdown with the Saxons, with Alfred at their head. Alfred’s Wessex and Mercia
under King Burgred were the only Saxon kingdoms left in England that were not under Danish
control. The Danes left Alfred alone for five years, and headed north, conquering Mercia en route
to Yorkshire, which they began to divide up into permanent settlements. Then, at last, the Great
Army turned south to attack the remnants of Saxon resistance in Wessex. They crushed Alfred at
Chippenham in 878 and forced the king to retreat to his refuge in the marshes of Somerset, where
he spent the winter arranging reinforcements. In the spring of 879 he headed towards Wiltshire and
engaged the Danes at Edington Down on the slopes of Salisbury Plain near Warminster. He crushed