865 AD. It all started in when a sizeable fleet with a coalition army of 3000 men from Denmark, Norway and Sweden set off from Dublin and landed on the Isle of Thanet (then an island). After submitting the population there, they then crossed the water to East Anglia. The people there immediately paid the Vikings tribute in order to stop the slaughter. The Viking army then stayed there over the winter of 865/866 AD.   

866 AD. The Vikings then travelled north into Northumbria in the spring and captured the town of York. King Aella was not killed in this initial attack, instead he died in a second clash in early 867AD. This was the end of the Northumbrian kingdom. The Viking raiders secured the fortified town of York, or Jorvik, and decided to stay. They refounded it as Jorvik, making it the first Viking kingdom in Britain. It would serve as the perfect base for launching raids throughout the rest of Northumbria and the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.  

867 AD. The Danes installed a puppet rule in their Northumbria city and moved towards Nottingham, in Mercia, the following year. The Norse invaders carried out wave after wave of attacks across England. Their nature changed from plunder to conquest.  

868-69 AD. The Danes returned to Jorvik for a year while continuing to terrorise and pillage. The King of Mercia gave Nottingham to the Danes in exchange for peace in 868AD. But as we know from the famous poem by Rudyard Kipling, “Once you have paid him the Danegeld / You never get rid of the Dane.”  

869 AD. Ivar the Boneless and his men crossed through Mercia to East Anglia and demanded payment again. King Edmund had been king since 855AD, and when the Danes came back to fleece his kingdom further, this time he refused. The two forces engaged in battle when they met at Thetford, where Ubba and Ivar slayed the last East Anglian king in November 869AD. Little is known of the Anglian King’s life, including the exact circumstances of his death. The location where he died also remains a mystery. Still, according to Anglo-Saxon legend, he died in a hail of arrows when he refused to renounce his faith – a highly implausible scenario.  

870 AD. From 870AD onwards, the expansive Danish kingdom that had appeared on the British Isles (Britain and Ireland) grew more significant by the day. Only the kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex remained unconquered in England. King Æthelred and Alfred pursued the Danes in a battle at Reading in 870 but suffered heavy losses. The Danes were in control of London, which was an important trading town but not a capital city. Ivar the Boneless renewed his campaign with Olaf the White, and the other two headed for Scotland to try their luck. They overran the Kingdom of Strathclyde and sacked the principal town of Dumbarton in 870AD.

871 AD. The first Danish land attack on the kingdom of Wessex came in the new year of 871AD. Æthelred and Alfred took the battle to the Danes in early January 871AD when they clashed at Ashdown in modern-day Oxfordshire. According to legend, Æthelred remained in his tent praying while Alfred led their army in a charge that delivered a great victory. The Danes’ losses included five jarls. They retreated to Reading and then to Basing(stoke) in Hampshire to regroup. Alfred, still only the king’s brother, achieved two important things that day. First, he kept Anglo-Saxon Britain alive. Had they been defeated, all of England would have been controlled entirely by the Danes. Second, this was the first major defeat that any Scandinavian raiders had experienced in the century since the attack on Lindisfarne. On 23 April 871AD, shortly after Easter celebrations, King Æthelred died and Alfred became the new King of Wessex. Alfred was the fourth son of Æthelwulf to be crowned king.  

872 AD. In late 872, the Heathen Army headed from Reading to London under the leadership of Halfdan, where they settled in for the winter. London remained under the control of those Vikings not allied with Guðrum until 886. These forces continued to menace Alfred’s eastern flank. Danish King Halfdan was intent on staying in England, so much so that five separate hoards of coins have since been found across former Danish England a millennium later. These coins bear his name on one side and the London (LDN) monogram on the other. They suggest that he planned to keep control of London permanently.

873 AD. In the autumn campaign of 873, the Danes drove the Mercian king Burgred into exile. He fled to Rome. The Danes established a puppet king in Repton and maintained it as a strategic base. In York, the puppet king Egbert I died in 873AD. So, too, later, did the all-conquering King Ivar the Boneless – described in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as “King of the heathens of all Ireland and Britain”. The details are unknown, but his remains were believed to have been uncovered in a dig in Repton with at least 264 other bodies. He and his brother, Olaf of Norway, had established the original bases in Ireland two decades earlier. Viking rule had reached its high-water mark, with Dublin and York the seats of their power across the British Isles. The (once) Great Heathen Army appeared to have split after Ivar’s death, and Chieftain Halfdan headed north to Northumbria from Repton with half of the force. He went on to take on the Picts in the north and the Britons of Strathclyde.

874 AD. The remaining Repton force headed for Cambridge in 874 under the triumvirate leadership of three Viking joint-kings: Guthrum, Oscytel and Anund. Following its conquest, Guthrum stayed in the region for a year. With Burgred defeated and his puppet ruler installed in Mercia, Guthrum’s army was now stationed between Reading and his base in Cambridge. Only King Alfred’s Wessex kingdom remained of the original independent kingdoms.

875 AD. In 875, the Danes audaciously settled on some land in Dorset, west of Winchester and well inside the Kingdom of Wessex. By then, Alfred had established a naval force, so he sent out a fleet of seven ships. The first-ever Anglo-Saxon maritime battle took place. They captured one Viking ship and sent the others scurrying away. Peace was eventually agreed on.

876 AD. There were fresh skirmishes around this region in 876 and 877. The period 875-876 would become a critical one for Alfred. The noose around Alfred’s neck was gradually tightening. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that the three kings – Guðrum, Oskytel and Anwind – and their army were circling. The Great Heathen Army took control of the fortress in Wareham (875) on the Dorset coast. Here, negotiations took place, hostages were exchanged, and the Danish leaders swore an oath (involving a holy or sacred arm ring) that they would depart from Alfred’s kingdom. But that promise was broken when they took control of Exeter in Devon in a night operation the following year (876). The Danes were expecting reinforcements from Scandinavia, and a large fleet of ships sailed from Wareham. To England’s good fortune, they got caught in a storm and lost as many as 120 ships off the coast of Swanage.

877 AD. While the years 875/876 were critical,  Wessex prevailed in 877 by both good fortune and determinism. King Alfred and his army kept the Danes on the ropes by pushing them north to East Mercia after the harvesting season. Having been repelled from Wessex once more, the Danes spent the winter of 877 in Gloucester. In Northumbria, where the other half of the Great Heathen Army had gone, King Halfdan appropriated good agricultural land and essentially turned his focus from raiding to farming. In Normandy, King Rollo had seized complete control of Normandy and he, too, began planting permanent roots there. He would reign there for the next 50 years.  

878 AD. (January) The year 878 would prove an all-or-nothing moment in England’s history – the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the Battle of Britain. The story and the potentially irrecoverable circumstances of what happened in 878 are not widely known in England. After spending the winter of 877/878 in Gloucester, the most crucial battle of English history was sparked on 7 January 878 when Guthrum and his men rode south via Cirencester and advanced into Wessex. He was supported by fellow Danish king Hubba, who commanded a fleet of ships. He led his men in launching a surprise attack on the royal estate of Chippenham, where King Alfred of Wessex was staying at his winter residence. His main forces were dispersed over the Christmas period.

The way that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells it: “This year, during midwinter, after Twelfth Night, the army stole away to Chippenham, and overran the land of the West-Saxons, and sat down there; and many of the people they drove beyond the sea, and of the remainder the greater part they subdued and forced to obey them, except King Alfred.”

The Wessex soldiers were off their guard, possibly even intoxicated. The surprise attack during a critical post-Christmas period came close to snatching the final, remaining piece of the puzzle needed for the Danes to completely conquer all of England once and for all – except for the actual king himself.

The Danes seized everything else, and Chippenham became a fortified Danish stronghold in Wessex. Alfred was now in exile – no longer a true king. Make no mistake: Chippenham, Wessex and the rest of England were now under Danish control. It had taken 85 years since the first attack on Lindisfarne to conquer every Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

878 AD. (Spring) This was England’s little-known “Darkest Hour”. It would have been a “1066 moment” for England if Alfred had been killed or captured that day. Instead of being ruled by French-speaking Normans, all of England (and potentially all of the British Isles) may well have become a fully Nordic-speaking group of islands. It may well have been that Scandinavia forever more was not the peninsula inhabiting northern Europe but the peninsula PLUS the British (Danish?) Isles.  

With most of his men either killed, having fled or capitulated, King Alfred’s escape from Danish clutches was not the end of the story. He was now a wanted man with an enormous bounty on his head and few safe places available to him. Alfred and his small party of officers fled south through the woods and headed for the Somerset marshes. They hid and established hasty defences in Athelney to lick their wounds and devise a plan to retake Wessex from the Danes.

In the marshes’ safety, Alfred could find new resolve and quietly muster a defending force of men over the early spring months. From these next few months of exile – of which we know very little in detail – comes the great British fable (call them legends, tall tales or myths) about King Alfred famously burning a woman’s cakes. Surprisingly, more people know this story than the Chippenham battle.

Alfred began a series of guerrilla-style raids on Guthrum’s men, and in May 878 – four months since the near extinction of Wessex – he vowed to take back his kingdom. When his calls to arms finally came, the men of the surrounding fyrds did not disappoint.Alfred’s advantage was that he could set the battleground of his choice. Instead of attacking Chippenham, where the Danes had protection and would be on alert, Albert took his men via the Selwood Forest (east of Athelney, south of Chippenham) and set a trap to draw out Guðrum’s men and force a long march. After meeting at Ecgbert’s Stone, Alfred’s party left for Iley Oak and the next day for Edington.

878 AD. (Summer) Alfred positioned his army of as many as 4000 men up high, with good views of the flat downs of the northern approach. As soon as Guthrum’s spies made him aware of large concentrations of Saxons congregating, he would have sent his army down from Chippenham.

They engaged in: “fiercely warring against the whole army of pagans with serried masses, courageously persevered for a long time, by divine favour at last gained victory, overthrew the pagans with very great slaughter and put them to flight.”

The Great Heathen Army was demolished, and the remaining warriors retreated to Chippenham with Alfred’s men on their heels. Once at the gates of Chippenham, Alfred’s army surrounded the fortification and set up a siege. Hostages were exchanged over time, but without supplies or backup, the Danes had no choice but to surrender after 14 days.  

They laid down their arms and gave up the fortress. This ended the largest and most important “Battle for Britain” during Alfred’s reign. And, arguably, English history. Alfred regained Wessex and maintained the Anglo-Saxon banner in what had nearly been a permanent end. He could have slaughtered every single one, but instead, he acted strategically and long-term.

The Danes remained in Chippenham during the summer of 878 before leaving for Cirencester (where a not-insignificant force remained for a year longer) and then East Anglia 12 months later, where Aethelstan/Guthrum ruled as king for just over a decade. Guthrum, although defeated in battle, became a legitimate king within Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon framework.

This remarkable turnaround for Alfred and the Wessex kingdom resulted in securing – finally – long-term relief from Danish attacks. It marked the point from which Alfred would start claiming new territory and expanding his kingdom. The year 878 marks the birth of what would become England. The Battle of Edington remains one of the most important clashes in the history of the English-speaking people. Wessex and all of England (and the British Isles) were saved from domination by the Danes in this brief moment. Victory at Edington prevented what might have become the Anglo-Saxon conquest and settlement version 2.0 – a permanent Norse/Scandinavian Britain.

Jesse Karjalainen is an author, illustrator, podcaster and YouTuber (@JesseDotExpert). This article is extracted from his latest book, Thor’s Day - Untangling the real history, art and language of Viking Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon Britain (on amazon). The above images are drawn by me and are protected by copyright. Please do not steal from an independent artist. If you want use the images, reach out and ask me for permission.