A Brief History
On August 10th or 11th, 991, a Viking invasion of England resulted in The Battle of Maldon, fought in Essex near the River Blackwater.
Digging Deeper
English King Aethelred, called Aethelred the Unready, was represented in the battle by Earl Byrhtnoth leading the English fighters against between 2000 and 4000 Vikings led by a man named Olaf, perhaps Olaf Tryggvason.
English reaction to incursions of Vikings varied at the time from submitting to the invaders and paying tribute to military resistance. In this case, fighting the Vikings did not go well for the English and victory was won by the Norsemen.
We know of this battle almost exclusively from 325 lines of an Old English poem, “The Battle of Maldon,” the beginning and ending of which are missing, which is why we know so little about details of the battle, and demonstrating the difficulty in accurately reporting historical events.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Ferguson, Robert. The Vikings: A History. Penguin Books, 2009.
Winroth, Anders. The Age of the Vikings. Princeton University Press, 2014.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Ben Sutherland from Crystal Palace, London, UK, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
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