Ethelred of Wessex

Two years earlier Aelle the Northumbrian leader had ordered that Halfdan’s father Ragnar be thrown into a pit full of Adders, thus denying him the right to die in combat. (The Vikings believed that for a warrior to enter Valhalla, he must die with a sword in his hand.) Now Halfdan and his brother Ivar exacted their revenge on Aelle by using a Viking method of execution, the bloodeagle. It was a horrifying and agonising way to die. The victim was pinned to the ground face down, his ribs separated from his spine, ripped outwards and his lungs pulled out to form a pair of bloody wings.

While all this mayhem was going on, Ethelbert, the King of Wessex died and his brother Ethelred became the new king. The forth son of Ethelwulf and Queen Osburh he was to spend the whole of his short reign in battle with the Danes. Brought up by a deeply christian mother he was a pious and religious man. He was married to Wulfthryth and had two sons, Ethelhelm the eldest and Ethelwold.

After consolidating their gains and setting Egbert a Saxon puppet king on the throne of Northumbria, the Danes moved south into Mercia and after seeing off the army of King Burgred, took Nottingham. Unable force the return of the town, Burgred called on his kinsmen for assistance. Ethelred and his Brother Alfred responded and marched to his assistance at the head of an army. Despite their combined efforts, the Danes remained in possession and could not be moved from the town.

In 869 with Northumbria and most of Mercia under Danish control, the Viking army marched back to East Anglia. After crushing Edmund’s army, they captured the king as he fled to Hoxne, in Suffolk. They then chained and butchered him, as a sacrifice to the Viking god Odin.

By 870 only the Saxon kingdom of Wessex remained free. But the Danes, who had grown strong, were marching into Wessex and Ethelred was waiting with his Saxon army. After several clashes the two armies, one flying the Raven banner, the other the dragon of Wessex, met near an Iron Age fort at a place called Ashdown. Ethelred with Alfred at his side finally won the bitter, bloody, daylong, battle and many dead - both Saxon and Viking - littered the ground. The conflict however was not over and the Saxons were defeated at Basing and after rallying again, beaten once more at Merton, where Ethered was mortally wounded.

Ethelred died from the wounds he sustained and the thirty-year-old king was buried at Wimbourne Abbey. On his death, his sons were still both children and deemed too young to become king, so his brother Alfred succeeded him.