The Cambridge Old English Reader

‘In this year Ipswich was ravaged and quickly after that Ealdorman Byrhtnoth was slain at Maldon. And in this year tribute was first paid to the Danes because of the great terror they caused along the coast.’ Thus reports one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's annal for 991 (see 8/20–3 for the OE text). This incident at Maldon, in Essex on the east coast of England, might have gone unnoticed in the larger picture of defeat and capitulation which characterised England in the 990s; the Danes were stepping up their attacks, which would continue with little opposition from King Æthelred and his nobles until the Danish Cnut took the throne in 1016. But an anonymous poet ensured that posterity would know a little more about this particular defeat. Indeed, by invoking the old heroic ideals of his countrymen's Germanic past, and using the poetic style associated with the celebration of those ideals, he turned the dire events at Maldon into a sort of moral victory: English heroes died, but they died well.

How soon after August 991 the poem was written is not known, but nothing in its language or style precludes a more or less contemporary date. Yet its purpose in relation to current events is not clear. Stirring as the defiant speeches of loyal but doomed heroes may be, in practical terms they scarcely constitute an effective national rallying cry, and it may be that the poem had a more parochial aim, to commemorate the English leader Byrhtnoth. By all accounts the elderly ealdorman of Essex was an esteemed figure, and he seems to have been unusual in his willingness to stand up against the enemy. There is a strong possibility that the poem was written in one of the monasteries in eastern England which Byrhtnoth generously supported and where his memory would have been revered. In a Latin ‘Life’ of St Oswald, written a few years after 991 at Ramsey, also in East Anglia, Byrhtnoth figures prominently as a Christian martyr. In the Liber Eliensis (‘the Book of Ely’), moreover, written about 1170 but based on earlier and in some cases oral sources, two battles against the Danes at Maldon are recorded; the first is a triumphant victory for Byrhtnoth and his forces, the second a long and fruitless struggle against overwhelming odds.