September 23, 2024 • 37 mins
The Battle of Brunanburh took place in 937, and is often referred to as the battle that made England. But there are a LOT of questions about that battle, including how it played out and where it took place.
Research:
- “Battle of Brunanburh.” The Anglo Saxons. https://www.theanglosaxons.com/battle-of-brunanburh-poem/
- Anderson, Anne. “Battle of Brunanburh: The Site Argument.” Liverpool Daily Post. Sept. 18, 1937. https://www.newspapers.com/image/891771637/?match=1&terms=brunanburh
- Blakemore, Erin. “England Was Born on This Battlefield. Why can’t historians find it?” National Geographic. May 24, 2023. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/battle-of-brunanburh-england-anglo-saxon-victory?loggedin=true&rnd=1725286067852
- Bolton, W. F. “‘Variation’ in The Battle of Brunanburh.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 19, no. 76, 1968, pp. 363–72. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/512805
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Athelstan". Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Aug. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Athelstan
- Castelow, Ellen. “Battle of Brunanburh 937AD.” Historic UK. Nov. 25, 2014. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Battle-of-Brunanburh/
- Cavill, P. (2022). The Battle of Brunanburh: The Yorkshire Hypothesis. English Studies, 104(1), 19–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2022.2154045
- Cavill, Paul. “Vikings: Fear and Faith in Anglo-Saxon England.” Harper Collins. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/-sczsteve/Cavill_2001.pdf
- “The Danes in Lancashire, or the Battle of Brunanburh, and the Probable Locality of the Conflict.” Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Advisor. Jan. 17, 1857. https://www.newspapers.com/image/392902369/?match=1&terms=brunanburh
- Halloran, Kevin. “The Brunanburh Campaign: A Reappraisal.” The Scottish Historical Review, vol. 84, no. 218, 2005, pp. 133–48. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25529849
- Hardwick, Charles. “Where was the Batt;e of Brunanburh fought?” The Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Advertiser. July 12, 1856. https://www.newspapers.com/image/392945292/?match=1&terms=brunanburh
- Livingston, Michael. “Never Greater Slaughter: Brunaburh and the Birth of England.” Osprey. 2021.
- Loxton, Alice. “What happened at the Battle of Brunanburh?” History Hit. Oct. 25, 2019. https://www.historyhit.com/what-happened-at-the-battle-of-brunanburh/
- McDonald, J.E. “Stockport and the Battle of Brunanburh.” Wimslow and Alderley and Knutsford Advertiser. Sept. 22, 1933. https://www.newspapers.com/image/887178425/?match=1&terms=brunanburh
- Neilson, Geo. “Brunanburh and Burnswork.” The Scottish Historical Review, vol. 7, no. 25, 1909, pp. 37–55. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25518148
- Sartore, Melissa. “Who was the first king of England? The answer is … complicated.” National Geographic. May 2, 2023. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/first-king-of-england-aethelstan?loggedin=true&rnd=1725286069300
- Whitelock, Dorothy. "Alfred". Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 Aug. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alfred-king-of-Wessex
- WIRRAL ARCHAEOLOGY. “The search for the Battle of Brunanburh, is over.” Liverpool University Press Blog. October 21, 2019. https://liverpooluniversitypress.blog/2019/10/22/the-search-for-the-battle-of-brunanburh-is-over/
- “Wirral Archaeology and the Search for the Battle of Brunanburh.” Wirral Archaeology. https://www.wirralarchaeology.org/pages/wirral-archaeology-and-the-search-for-the-battle-of-brunanburh/
- “Walton-Le-Dale in the Olden Time.” The Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Advertiser. June 20, 1863. https://www.newspapers.com/image/392939927/?match=1&terms=brunanburh
- Wood, M. (2013). Searching for Brunanburh: The Yorkshire Context of the ‘Great War’ of 937. Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 85(1), 138–159. https://doi.org/10.1179/0084427613Z.00000000021
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I don't know how
today's topic got on my list. Yeah, I asked you
this and you were like, I don't know, I don't know.
(00:23):
I don't know how it did. And I will confess
to you. It's a bear. Like it was a bear
to research, it's a bear to sort out all the
stuff because it's a lot of like proto England things
going on where stuff goes by seven different names yep.
So you've got to try to pick one and run
with it and hope that you've chosen correctly. It's like
(00:43):
the cup of a carpenter in history form by. Yeah.
But we're talking about the Battle of Brunnenburgh and it's
first of all, it's an old English poem that appears
in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, but that poem tells the
story of an actual battle that took place in nine
thirty seven. It is often referred to as the Battle
that made England. There are so many questions about this battle,
(01:07):
including how it played out and where it took place,
those questions and the debates about theories to answer them
have become their own interesting story. We're going to talk
about that near the end of the episode. Uh, it
is quite fascinating. We'll talk a little bit too, and
behind the scenes about the claims that this one was
(01:27):
forgotten and what that really means. But we're going to
tackle the Battle of Brunnenburgh and hopefully get most of
the details right. When the Battle of Brunnenburgh took place,
there were multiple groups jockeying for control of what is
now northern England, with multiple different kings involved. And then
(01:52):
this is further complicated by the fact that within these
groups were subgroups made up of alliances as people tried
to strengthen their forces. Even who these subgroups are also
complicated because we have the Anglo Saxons. Of course, that
is why the whole thing is related and the Anglo
Saxon Chronicle. Just that term though, has its own problem. Yeah,
(02:18):
the term Anglo Saxon can incorporate a lot of different
Germanic peoples that all came to Britain. This was at
a time that just a group of cultures, we're all
operating under one umbrella and one ruler, and then there
was all just a whole bunch of other people who
were united against the Anglo Saxons. There's a lot of
(02:41):
history that leads up to this battle. We're going to
start centuries earlier to try to give a broad overview
of how things progressed. This is kind of the same
thing that I ran into with Eustace the Monk, where
I Keith needed to go, needed to go one step
earlier and earlier to get a full sense of how
things developed. Yeah, and this is obviously going to be
(03:01):
a very what I like to call a quick and
dirty version of this history. So prior to the fifth century,
there were Roman forces controlling Britain, although there were non
Roman people who lived there. Those are typically called the Gaels, Picts,
and Britons. But the Romans left in the early four
hundreds and that created a power vacuum that other groups
(03:22):
rushed in to fill, often through violent conquest. So the Angles,
Jutes and Saxons were the major players in this move
westward from the European continent to gain a foothold in
the area of the British Isles. This resulted in multiple
kingdoms being established on the island of Great Britain, Wessex
(03:42):
in the south, Mercia in the central part of the
island called the Midlands, East Anglia to the east, and
Northumbria to the north of Mercia. This was really not
a peaceful arrangement, and the borders of all these kingdoms
were frequently in a state of conflict, particularly the border
that separated Mercia from Northumbria. In Northumbria was York, which
(04:05):
was considered a key location for any power that wanted
to control the northern part of the island. By the
eighth and ninth centuries, there were even more groups arriving
in Britain hoping to capitalize on the available resources there
and claim land for themselves. And all of these disparate
groups were not only divided by their desires for power
(04:28):
and wealth, there was also a spiritual ideology split among
them that made any efforts at international relations really fraught
by judgment. So, while the Saxons were largely Christian by
this point, some of the cultures in play were pagan
and the Saxons had come to view Paganism as backwards
and kind of a primitive way of life. Initially, all
(04:51):
of this bad relationship went very badly for the Saxons
and their lands and their numbers were diminished under the
leadership of King Alfred the Great, and then as Danish
forces advanced on Alfred and the Saxons, the Saxon footprint
grew quite small as they receded into the west, with
only Wessex remaining. But then by the late ninth century,
(05:14):
Alfred was able to kind of put together an army
and push back a little bit when he made some groundback.
Alfred was also pretty good at establishing ally ships and
managing diplomatic efforts. He understood he did not necessarily have
the manpower or the foothold, so while he was not
able to regain all of the Saxon holdings he had
(05:36):
once had, he did manage to bring a degree of
stability to the area before his death in eight ninety nine. Alfred,
by the way, is pretty interesting. He might be an
episode on his own at some point, but germane to
this story. Alfred's son, Edward the Elder, was next on
the throne and he ruled until nine twenty four. He
was able to further expand the Saxon lands again, and
(05:59):
there was amidst all of this definitely a generational familial
gold to get all of the Saxon kingdoms together united
under one king who would be a descendant of Alfred.
As the Saxons were gaining ground, though in the eight hundreds,
there were also Norse invaders taking coastal lands in northern
(06:19):
Britain and Ireland. Those territories would come under the rule
of the Earls of Northumberland, Norse earls of Viking descent.
By the time of the battle we're talking about today,
they were ruled by an Leaf Guthrison. Scotlands, which at
the time was known as the Kingdom of Alba, was
also consolidating its power as the various groups there had
(06:42):
come together for their mutual benefit. King Constantine the Second
was ruler of Scotland and Strathclyde, which that just south
of Scotland in the Lowlands, was ruled by Owen. The
boundaries of all of these kingdoms and the fifes within them,
as well as the Anglo Saxon Lands were just in
a state of almost continuous flux. Everybody wanted to become
(07:07):
the dominant power. Yeah, there was just constant pushing of
boundaries literally of like, but if I just take over
some more of this land, I will expand my power.
So Ethelstan of Wessex, who was the grandson of Alfred,
ascended to the Anglo Saxon throne in nine twenty five,
becoming ruler of Wessex, Mercia and East Anglia. He was
(07:31):
born sometime in the eight nineties, and he had been
raised in Mercia by his aunt ethel Fled. She had
the title of Lady of the Mercians, and she had
ruled there and was a very active participant in the
fighting to gain and retain land and power. Sometimes she
and Edward are talked about almost as like a duo
at this time, her brother Edward being the person on
(07:53):
the throne after Alfred. So all of this is to
say it was not as though Ethelstan had been raised
away from the persistent conflict that just automatically came with
being part of the ruling family. Ethel Fled, his aunt,
who raised him, died in nine eighteen, after Ethelstan had
reached adulthood. By the time he became king at the
age of thirty, Ethelstan was keenly aware that he had
(08:16):
to be firm in that role to deal with the
constant challengers to his power from both without and within.
At one point, claims that he was an illegitimate claimant
to the throne led to an unsuccessful plot by another
noble to try to blind him. Within his kingdom, though
he appears to have been a pretty even handed ruler.
(08:38):
He made just laws. For example, they were intended to
provide material care for the poor, to handle juveniles involved
in crimes in ways that recognized their youth, and didn't
treat them as adults when they were being sentenced. Although
he had detractors in the corridors of power in the
first decade of his rule, he won the loyalty of
(09:00):
the people, and early in his reign, Ethelstan invaded York,
which was held by Vikings at the time, and this
was to prevent the Vikings from moving any farther into
Anglo Saxon territory, but it also sent a very clear
message that Ethelstan was ready, willing and able to engage
in military conflict. To protect and expand his kingdom, he
(09:23):
further consolidated the groups that had been united under Alfred
and Edward, developing the Kingdom of Angleland. And to make
all of this work, he had all of the leaders
of the smaller kingdoms and fifes under him swear their
loyalty to him on paper. Coming up, we'll talk about
all the suspicion and intrigue that ultimately led to the
(09:43):
Battle of Brennenborough for us who will pause, though for
a sponsor break. The entirety of the British isles during
this time has been described as pretty messy by various historians,
(10:04):
and that's accurate. There were so many men and various
icons of power angling for position. Each island was fractured
by various factions in some way, and Ethelstan was pretty
open about wanting to unite all of these varying kingdoms
of Britain under his rule. So the other leaders who
(10:24):
were in the picture always suspected that he might invade,
even if there were agreements or tradees in place, and
that made them reluctant to abide by any such agreements.
And that's kind of how things next escalated. Ethelstan invaded
Scotland and Strathclyde in nine thirty four, following a broken
pledge made by the rulers of those countries to be
(10:46):
loyal to Ethelstan and not befriend the Norsemen. Probably Again,
this history is open to a bit of interpretation due
to the sparse and disparate accounts, but Constantine is said
in one account to have married his daughter off to
anlav gulfridson, so if that was the case, there was
clearly an effort being made to develop a relationship between
(11:09):
those two kingdoms, and Constantine paid a steep price when
it came to angering the Anglo Saxons with this move.
The year after Ethelstan launched this invasion, Constantine io ended
up swearing allegiance to Ethelstan, as did Owen of Strathclyde,
having both surrendered to the Saxon forces. There is another
(11:30):
angle on this that really shows what a tangled situation
was happening. At the very beginning of Ethelstan's reign, he
had married his sister off to an Irish Norse king, Cythric,
trying to work out his own agreement, but he was
really not okay with other people trying to do the
same thing after he decided the Norse were his enemies.
(11:54):
This shift happened after Cythric died and Gutfrith of Ivar,
his brother, took the Northumbrian throne. Ethelstan did not want
to make an alliance or an agreement with Guthfrith, although
the specifics of exactly why are really unknown, so that
then transferred onto his successor, on Guthhferson. All this does
(12:18):
pretty clearly evidence the fact that Ethelston was making his
decisions based on what would protect and expand his own kingdom.
Though so that allegiance with Constantine and Owen that he
made them swear after he invaded only lasted a couple
of years because everyone knew that Ethelstan was going to
be unstoppable if he went unchallenged. So in nine thirty seven,
(12:42):
Constantine and Owen, who were related, formed an alliance with
Onlaf Guthferson, who ruled Viking Northumbria and Dublin at the time.
As an aside, we've been calling him on Lafft, but
you will sometimes see his first name listed as Oloff
instead of Onlaft just if you are looking online. That's
the same person. And the plan of this little group
(13:03):
was to take on Ethelstan, regain their power in land,
and seize parts of England for themselves. They also just
wanted to stop Ethelstan in his tracks, because they knew
he was a very real threat to their own kingdoms.
So at this point all of these different power players
had formed up into two groups, ethel Stan, leader of
the Anglo Saxons, and everybody else who wanted to take
(13:26):
him down. The alert that there was a Viking invasion
fleet on the Ireland facing coast went out in August
of nine thirty seven. This is recorded in John of
Worcester's account Chronicle of Chronicles as quote, I'm luff, the
Pagan king of the Irish and many other islands, incited
by his father in law Constantine, king of the Scots,
(13:50):
entered the mouth of the River Humber with a strong fleet.
But this account is one that was written in the
twelfth century, almost two hundred years after this whole thing
actually happened, so it's not necessarily a reliable source. Yeah,
there is a lot of discussion among historians of John
of Wooster's account, which in many cases has kind of
(14:12):
been taken at face value, but that may have caused
some confusion to the historical record. But regardless, Ethelstan is
said to have been a little bit slow in responding
to this news of an army of newly Allied forces
landing on Saxon territory, and this has been interpreted in
a number of different ways. While it obviously would seem
(14:32):
at first glance like this was just the result of
being taken unawares by the attack, some historians have put
forth the idea that this was also a strategic psychological
move on Ethelstan's part, as he wanted his enemies to
believe he was taking his time to amass a huge
response force. And this is where we get to the
(14:53):
Battle of Brenenborough. Although at the time people just called
it the Great Battle, the battle itself is believed to
have happened on a piece of land that the various
parties all agreed to, but we do not know where
that piece of land was. There have been a lot
of theories over the years, and many historians have pieced
together as much information as they can sifted through clues
(15:16):
in the epic poem to try to triangulate which places
seem like the most likely possibilities. This will probably not
be conclusively known unless some major archaeological find happens, but
people are compelled to just keep looking because this was
such a decisive battle, and we will get to some
of those theories about where it might have been In
(15:37):
a bit. We also mentioned at the top of the
show that the very nature of the battle, meaning the
style in which it was fought, has also been debated
over the centuries. So one possibility, and kind of the
most popular, was that they engaged using the shield wall approach,
meaning that each side would assemble, as the name suggests,
in a formation so that their shields formed all wall
(16:00):
that the approaching opponent would have to breach to strike. Meanwhile,
any attacking side would form a similar wall, but instead
of holding stationary they would be on the move, pushing forward,
and then this would become a very close combat situation
where each side would be trying to find the gaps
at the bottom or the tops of the shields or
in between shields as men shifted so that they could
(16:23):
stab a spear or sword through. It is a lot
of pushing back and forth. If you ever watch historical
reenactments of this, to me, it looks utterly miserable and terrifying,
because it's like being trapped in a space with people
trying to stab you while you are also trying to
stab them, and nobody can really see clearly what's going on.
(16:43):
This is the most commonly accepted take on how this
conflict was fought, largely because it's how it was described
in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. The battle itself is described
in the first three stanzas of that poem, which are these.
In this year, King Ethelstan, lord of earls Ring, giver
of warriors, and his brother as well, Edmund Etheling achieved
(17:08):
everlasting glory in battle with the edges of Swords near Brunneborough.
They cleaved the masked shields, hewed the battle wood, the
relics of hammers of the Heir of Edward, as it
suited their heritage, so that they often in battle defended
their lands, treasures and homesteads against every one of the
(17:29):
hateful foemen were felled the Scottish people, the ship's sailors faded,
were destroyed. The fields grew slickened with the blood of men.
After the sun passed upwards over the earth in the
morning time, the remarkable star, the bright candle of God,
the eternal Lord, until that noble creation sank to its rest.
(17:51):
There lay many warriors seized by the spear. The northern
men over their arrowed shields Likewise, the Scottish also were
we saddened by war. The West Saxons in their ranks
rode down the long long day, the hateful people chopping
down the battle fleers from behind so sorely with sharply
(18:14):
ground swords. Bless you Tracy for reading that. That is
only a small part. It is like a seventy three
line poem, so it's not like massive and epic, but
it's long, and as described in those stanzas, ethel Stan's
forces were ultimately successful. They were able to find those
gaps between shields and had the stamina to keep pushing
(18:36):
through an entire day of battle. Once the shield wall
of the invading forces was really breached by Ethelstan's army, Constantine,
the Second and an Lofts armies scattered in a chaos,
and their respective leaders returned home. In the end, according
to the Anglo Saxon Chronicle narrative, five kings, seven earls,
(18:57):
and an army too large to count had all been killed.
After the battle, Ethelston proclaimed himself the king of all
Britain Rex Toodius Britannia, even though this had not resulted
in all the kingdoms of the British isles being brought together.
So while by some accounting it was technically a victory
(19:18):
for Ethelstone, it had also depleted his resources so much
that he could not even think about expanding the kingdom
any further. He only lived a couple of more years, though,
so even if he hadn't exhausted his possibilities in the
Battle of Brunnenburg, he still probably wouldn't have been able
to do a whole lot in terms of military rallying
(19:39):
and land expansion. He died on October twenty seventh, nine
thirty nine. We're going to pause here to hear from
the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going,
and when we come back, we're going to talk about
all of the efforts to figure out the details and
location of Brennanburgh and how historians have been in heated
debate about it for a while. This battle is referenced
(20:12):
and talked about in dozens of texts from the era
and after it, but they still give us precious little detail,
and the details that do exist often contradict one another
from narrative to narrative. The name Brunnenburgh is even given
differently in various sources. I think there's something like nine
different names given for this field of battle, but this
(20:33):
isn't the only difference in accounts of the battle, which
is part of why there are a lot of ideas
about where it happened and how. And while the battle
is usually noted as having happened in the autumn of
nine thirty seven, some writings place it in the summer.
This seems to be because it's like that August, September,
October time, which you know, even today people will call
(20:54):
different seasons. There's also the possibility that the shield wall
form of battlefield engagement may not have been used. It
may have involved a cavalry charge that's not proven though,
and it might have involved trench warfare. For example, the
Norse army is said to have dug trenches and reinforced
them with timber as part of their preparation for this conflict,
(21:15):
but that doesn't come up in all of the accounts.
So many many questions surround this battle, even though it
is considered incredibly important and decisive in forming the boundaries
of the countries in the British Isles as we know
them today. The main thing most people would like to
know more than how the battle played out is where
(21:35):
the heck had happened. And there have been more than
three dozen possible places that have been put forth as possibilities.
We will not go over all of them, but we
will talk about a couple of the most popular and
most hotly debated of them. One of the big problems,
of course, is that the place names have changed. But
(21:55):
another problem relates to our recent episode on the Doomsday Book.
There wasn't a comprehensive survey of England's until William the
Conqueror had one done and turned it into usable data
in ten eighty six. That was almost one hundred and
fifty years after this battle happened. Yeah, places had names,
and there were some documentations, but in terms of like
(22:18):
just comprehensively making a list and surveying everything and laying
it out, there really wasn't. In twenty twenty two, Paul
Cavill of the University of Nottingham published a paper detailing
what he called the Yorkshire hypothesis. And this paper is
actually a rebuttal to the work of Athelstan historian Michael Wood,
who wrote several articles about it starting in nineteen eighty,
(22:40):
including the twenty thirteen article Searching for Brennenborough, the Yorkshire
context of the Great War of nine thirty seven, and
all of his work. All of Wood's work suggests that
Yorkshire is the location of Brennenborough. Cavill's paper deconstructs Wood's
work point by point, noting, quote, the propositions of Woods
are um are not easily reduced to simple terms that
(23:03):
can be enumerated, but for clarity that is here attempted.
So then he goes through all of these, and one
such point made by Cavill plays out as follows quote.
The prima facie argument for a Yorkshire site of the
battle depends very substantially on the account that records the
Hiberno Norse forces landing in the Humber, originating in John
(23:23):
of Worcester's Chronicle. There are many reasons why John of
Worcester's Humber Entry account of Brennanburgh is suspect. It is,
for example, just one theory of many advanced by early
writers as to where the battle might have taken place,
but given much more prominence than any of these, partly
because John was an influential historian and his work was
(23:43):
used by others. In addition, it has been shown that
the formulaic features of John's writing might suggest that he
resorted to assumption based on parallels elsewhere in his history
to fill a puzzling gap in his and other's knowledge.
That's a problem. I mentioned earlier that the John of
Worcester account a lot of people have run with, and
(24:07):
now there are a lot more people going yeah, but
why did we assume he was accurate? Over time, that
Yorkshire hypothesis, which for a while had a lot of support,
has kind of fallen out of favor. The most supported
theory today places the location of the battle on the
Wirral Peninsula in northwest England, and specifically near the town
(24:29):
of Bromborough in Cheshire County. This peninsula is bounded by
the Liverpool Bay to the north, d Estuary on the
west and Mercy Estuary on the east side. This is
a location that would have been accessible for troops approaching
England by sea from both Ireland and Scotland. This location,
being the likely side of the battle, got some support
(24:50):
in recent years from archaeological finds of weapon remnants. That
effort was headed up by a volunteer project called worl Archaeology,
just collected a wide range of objects on the peninsula
from a span of time. According to their website, they've
collected quote artifacts spanning over to millennium, which includes objects
(25:13):
from the early medieval period and a great deal of iron.
The Worl Archaeology site says of their project, quote, we
know that locating ancient battlefields is an extremely challenging enterprise,
and we also acknowledge that this will be a long
term endeavor and that it will take many years to
collect and identify material before any assessment or judgment can
(25:34):
be made. But we believe that we have all the
physical and topographical features present, combined with a reliable theoretical
assessment of the political landscape of the period and logistical
issues that would have been overcome. This slighte of thinking
has also been included in the work of historian Michael Livingston,
who wrote the books The Battle of Brunnenburgh, A Casebook
(25:56):
and Never Greater Slaughter Brunnenburgh and The Birth of England.
In both of these books, though through different approaches, Livingston
makes the case for the world location. Livingston lays out
details from all of the texts that reference the battle
to note the parallels in topography to existing places. This
(26:17):
is something that others have done as well and ended
up coming to different conclusions as Livingston himself or the
situation quote, no map, medieval or modern has a place
clearly marked Brunnenborough on it, much less the other clues
our sources give us about the battle. As a result,
people have been free to theorize its location almost anywhere
(26:39):
in Britain, and they have. Livingston also breaks down how
the search methods for finding Brennanburgh have kind of fallen
into two groups. The people who work with a theory
about what the campaign's target was to determine the most
likely sight, and then the people who try to work
from noted place names and narrative accounts to try to
(27:00):
match them up with existing places or features of the
landscape and then figure out what the goal of the
whole thing was. Livingston is very open that he is
in the latter group, and through his work analyzing the
various available texts, he comes up with a checklist of
attributes that the brennan Borough site needed to have, including
that it needed to be on the west coast of Britain,
(27:21):
it needed to be near an uncultivated field, and that
it needed to be near a river. That had a
water crossing. There are other items on the checklist. One
of them is that it has to be near some
sort of hill, because brunn my understanding is is a
reference usually to a hill, so it's like saying brennan
Burgh is like saying a borough near a hill. Livingston
(27:44):
ties all of the items on his checklist back to
specific details in various narrative accounts, and usually ones that
can kind of be verified by crossover information from other ones,
and his conclusion through all of this is that it
was on the world with the archaeologis finds there as
supporting evidence. Although these papers we've been talking about that
(28:05):
hash out the whereabouts of the site are recent, this
discussion and sometimes argument has been going on for a
very long time. Though there are often mentions of the
Battle of Brunnenborough being forgotten for a while. The battle
of where it happened has been active in newspapers at
least since the mid eighteen hundreds. One article appearing in
(28:28):
the Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Advertiser in eighteen fifty six,
under the heading where was the Battle of Brennenborough fought,
opens with a plea to the paper's editor by a
man named Charles Hardwick, and it says, quote, Sir, I
was somewhat surprised to perceive in your last paper a
letter signed by a subscriber to the forthcoming History of Preston,
(28:49):
in which the writer takes exception to my announcement at
the dinner of the Historic Society that I had concluded,
after much investigation, that the Battle of Brennenborough might have
been fought in this neighborhood. As I consider a newspaper
scarcely the proper medium for the discussion of such a question,
I should have declined replying to your correspondent, and left
(29:10):
my evidences to exert what influence they might upon public opinion.
But that an erroneous impression as to my motive might
have resulted from such a course, I conceive it would
be logically sufficient for me to request that my position
may be judged upon after I have published my reasons.
I will, however, believing your correspondent's advice to be both
(29:33):
courteous and sincere for his satisfaction, inform him that I
am perfectly aware of the difficulties he mentions, and likewise
of the discrepancies to which he alludes he is wrong, however,
in supposing the site is at all positively determined upon
by any authority. The most probable hypothesis at present rests
(29:54):
upon the merest conjectures, and Bromborough on the World Peninsula
is not a new contender in these arguments either. In
nineteen thirty seven, a woman named Anne Anderson, identifying herself
as the Honorable Secretary of the Bromborough Society, wrote a
letter to the Liverpool Daily Post that makes it sound
(30:15):
as though that group was operating on the belief that
Bromborough was the spot. Anderson has, it appears, written to
the paper before with this information, and that letter got
a great deal of response. So Anne writes, quote, it
may interest your readers to hear my line of argument.
She makes several points. One that there was probably just
(30:35):
one Brunnenburgh in nine thirty seven, quote, just as there
is but one Bromborough today. Two that the d and
the mercy which bound the world have long been embarkation
and debarkation points to and from Ireland. Three that there
is a German map from eighteen eighty that places Brunnenburgh
(30:56):
on the Wirral right about where Bromborough is and four
that if you work through the logistics of how an
invasion from the forces involved had to work, they probably
met on the Isle of Man and then made their
way over and that made the Wirral the most logical place.
Anne Anderson would have likely loved the archaeological work that
(31:18):
has gone on in recent years in the area, but
even today there are still plenty of detractors that feel
that the evidence at hand is not enough for certainty.
It may remain a history mystery forever, but in the
meantime people will keep digging, literally and figuratively. I yearn
for a moment when there's in unearthed where it's like, no,
(31:39):
it's inscribed and it says is this spear made for
the Battle of Brennenborough. Yep, that's probably not going to happen,
But in the meantime I have two pieces of listener mail.
The first is from our listener Kimberly, and it's about
one of my favorite topics, waffles. It also features a
(32:00):
dog that like, I want to steal your dog. It's
the cutest man a very cute kitty as well. Kimberly writes,
High Holly and Tracy, I've been thinking about sending this
email for four years, ever since you first released your
waffle episode, and since it was just the Saturday Classic,
it feels like my reminder to finally sit down and write.
You only just mentioned at the end waffle type foods
(32:21):
from other countries, including Italian pizzeles. My mom's family is
of Italian heritage and we make pizzels every year for Christmas,
along with several other Italian foods. You say in the
episode that pizzels are deep fried. While I can't speak
for every recipe from every region of Italy throughout history,
I have never personally known them to be made that way.
(32:42):
We use a special iron with long handles that's placed
over a burner and turned halfway through to cook both sides.
It sounds a lot like the earlier version of waffle
irons that you talked about. Actually, the result is a
patterned wafer type cookie about four to five inches in diameter.
We always just eat them like a plain cookie, but
I have seen recipe that roll the pizzel into a
cone and call for a filling. Baking them is a
(33:04):
time consuming process as you make one at a time.
Since multiple family members own pizzel irons. We will try
to get two of them going at once to speed
up the process. My aunt bought an electric iron a
few years ago and absolutely loves it. It makes more
than one at a time, like a segmented waffle maker,
so baking does go faster. And then Kimberly shares pictures
(33:26):
of her pizzel iron and her very cute dog that
I kind of want to steal, who is named Luna Lovegood,
and her rescued cat, Nubia Tuesday. The cat, she says,
wants to be held twenty four to seven, and we
adopted the dog four years ago to keep her company.
We specifically chose a dog who had a positive history
with cats. I had visions of them snuggling up together
(33:47):
napping in the sun. It turns out the cat hates
all other animals. Still, after four years, she hisses and
growls every time she sees the dog. I keep hoping
for a miraculous attitude change. Thanks for your time, Giberlate listen.
You can't always predict how animals are going to react
to other animals, even if they've had a history. You
just never know. I love it. Thank you for sharing
(34:09):
your pizzel info. I fully believe that they're made in
different ways by different people, as are most things. It's
kind of like the way you can say you make
you know almost almost anything. Like listen, ask how somebody
makes barbecue in the US, and you'll get a different
answer depending on where you're at, and people will be
(34:32):
angry about it. Some people will be angry. I just
want to eat all the delicious stuff. How do you
make it great? Can you make it for me? I
will say. After we ran that episode as a classic,
one of my good friends texted me was like, I
want to have a waffle frolic and I was like, yeah,
me too, so we'll bring it back. I'm still on it.
I also wanted to answer our listener, Lance, who wrote
(34:54):
us a short email to ask if I was going
to be at dragon Con this year. Lance, Since Holly,
we plan on going to dragon Con on Sunday, September first.
We will be going to many of the Star Wars events,
but if it works out, we would like to see
you as well, if you are attending and available. I
didn't see this until after Dragon Con. I kind of
did a drive by version of dragon Con this year.
(35:16):
We went for like a couple hours a day, and
I tended to like hide out in a bar. We
went to the dealer's room one day, which was almost
a two hour wait just to get in. Oh, it
was like yeah, it was it was a little bananas.
And then we just kind of did that when we
were very tired. So I just I've been so busy
lately that I haven't had like the mental or emotional
(35:37):
energy to go see a lot of people in a
crowd of people that is a big sea that's very overwhelming. Well,
and not being local to Atlanta anymore, I am, it's
not on my list of things to do. But even
when I was in Atlanta, the amount that Dragon con
grew between the time that I started going and the
last time that I went, Like it got to a
(35:58):
point where I was like this too much. Yeah, and
we're definitely back to beyond pre COVID levels, Like you know,
it like many other things, like the travel industry had
like obviously the gap where nobody was doing that and
they had canceled it, and then like the post the
post lockdown surge has just been ceaselessly growing. So it's
(36:21):
a lot. It's still you know, has fun. I love
seeing friends and stuff, but I get a little easily
overwhelmed times. Anyway, if you would like to write to us,
ask us if we'll be a place, I may or
may not see it in a timely manner, but you
could still try. You could do that at History podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can also subscribe to
(36:43):
the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen
to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I don't know how
today's topic got on my list. Yeah, I asked you
this and you were like, I don't know, I don't know.
(00:23):
I don't know how it did. And I will confess
to you. It's a bear. Like it was a bear
to research, it's a bear to sort out all the
stuff because it's a lot of like proto England things
going on where stuff goes by seven different names yep.
So you've got to try to pick one and run
with it and hope that you've chosen correctly. It's like
(00:43):
the cup of a carpenter in history form by. Yeah.
But we're talking about the Battle of Brunnenburgh and it's
first of all, it's an old English poem that appears
in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, but that poem tells the
story of an actual battle that took place in nine
thirty seven. It is often referred to as the Battle
that made England. There are so many questions about this battle,
(01:07):
including how it played out and where it took place,
those questions and the debates about theories to answer them
have become their own interesting story. We're going to talk
about that near the end of the episode. Uh, it
is quite fascinating. We'll talk a little bit too, and
behind the scenes about the claims that this one was
(01:27):
forgotten and what that really means. But we're going to
tackle the Battle of Brunnenburgh and hopefully get most of
the details right. When the Battle of Brunnenburgh took place,
there were multiple groups jockeying for control of what is
now northern England, with multiple different kings involved. And then
(01:52):
this is further complicated by the fact that within these
groups were subgroups made up of alliances as people tried
to strengthen their forces. Even who these subgroups are also
complicated because we have the Anglo Saxons. Of course, that
is why the whole thing is related and the Anglo
Saxon Chronicle. Just that term though, has its own problem. Yeah,
(02:18):
the term Anglo Saxon can incorporate a lot of different
Germanic peoples that all came to Britain. This was at
a time that just a group of cultures, we're all
operating under one umbrella and one ruler, and then there
was all just a whole bunch of other people who
were united against the Anglo Saxons. There's a lot of
(02:41):
history that leads up to this battle. We're going to
start centuries earlier to try to give a broad overview
of how things progressed. This is kind of the same
thing that I ran into with Eustace the Monk, where
I Keith needed to go, needed to go one step
earlier and earlier to get a full sense of how
things developed. Yeah, and this is obviously going to be
(03:01):
a very what I like to call a quick and
dirty version of this history. So prior to the fifth century,
there were Roman forces controlling Britain, although there were non
Roman people who lived there. Those are typically called the Gaels, Picts,
and Britons. But the Romans left in the early four
hundreds and that created a power vacuum that other groups
(03:22):
rushed in to fill, often through violent conquest. So the Angles,
Jutes and Saxons were the major players in this move
westward from the European continent to gain a foothold in
the area of the British Isles. This resulted in multiple
kingdoms being established on the island of Great Britain, Wessex
(03:42):
in the south, Mercia in the central part of the
island called the Midlands, East Anglia to the east, and
Northumbria to the north of Mercia. This was really not
a peaceful arrangement, and the borders of all these kingdoms
were frequently in a state of conflict, particularly the border
that separated Mercia from Northumbria. In Northumbria was York, which
(04:05):
was considered a key location for any power that wanted
to control the northern part of the island. By the
eighth and ninth centuries, there were even more groups arriving
in Britain hoping to capitalize on the available resources there
and claim land for themselves. And all of these disparate
groups were not only divided by their desires for power
(04:28):
and wealth, there was also a spiritual ideology split among
them that made any efforts at international relations really fraught
by judgment. So, while the Saxons were largely Christian by
this point, some of the cultures in play were pagan
and the Saxons had come to view Paganism as backwards
and kind of a primitive way of life. Initially, all
(04:51):
of this bad relationship went very badly for the Saxons
and their lands and their numbers were diminished under the
leadership of King Alfred the Great, and then as Danish
forces advanced on Alfred and the Saxons, the Saxon footprint
grew quite small as they receded into the west, with
only Wessex remaining. But then by the late ninth century,
(05:14):
Alfred was able to kind of put together an army
and push back a little bit when he made some groundback.
Alfred was also pretty good at establishing ally ships and
managing diplomatic efforts. He understood he did not necessarily have
the manpower or the foothold, so while he was not
able to regain all of the Saxon holdings he had
(05:36):
once had, he did manage to bring a degree of
stability to the area before his death in eight ninety nine. Alfred,
by the way, is pretty interesting. He might be an
episode on his own at some point, but germane to
this story. Alfred's son, Edward the Elder, was next on
the throne and he ruled until nine twenty four. He
was able to further expand the Saxon lands again, and
(05:59):
there was amidst all of this definitely a generational familial
gold to get all of the Saxon kingdoms together united
under one king who would be a descendant of Alfred.
As the Saxons were gaining ground, though in the eight hundreds,
there were also Norse invaders taking coastal lands in northern
(06:19):
Britain and Ireland. Those territories would come under the rule
of the Earls of Northumberland, Norse earls of Viking descent.
By the time of the battle we're talking about today,
they were ruled by an Leaf Guthrison. Scotlands, which at
the time was known as the Kingdom of Alba, was
also consolidating its power as the various groups there had
(06:42):
come together for their mutual benefit. King Constantine the Second
was ruler of Scotland and Strathclyde, which that just south
of Scotland in the Lowlands, was ruled by Owen. The
boundaries of all of these kingdoms and the fifes within them,
as well as the Anglo Saxon Lands were just in
a state of almost continuous flux. Everybody wanted to become
(07:07):
the dominant power. Yeah, there was just constant pushing of
boundaries literally of like, but if I just take over
some more of this land, I will expand my power.
So Ethelstan of Wessex, who was the grandson of Alfred,
ascended to the Anglo Saxon throne in nine twenty five,
becoming ruler of Wessex, Mercia and East Anglia. He was
(07:31):
born sometime in the eight nineties, and he had been
raised in Mercia by his aunt ethel Fled. She had
the title of Lady of the Mercians, and she had
ruled there and was a very active participant in the
fighting to gain and retain land and power. Sometimes she
and Edward are talked about almost as like a duo
at this time, her brother Edward being the person on
(07:53):
the throne after Alfred. So all of this is to
say it was not as though Ethelstan had been raised
away from the persistent conflict that just automatically came with
being part of the ruling family. Ethel Fled, his aunt,
who raised him, died in nine eighteen, after Ethelstan had
reached adulthood. By the time he became king at the
age of thirty, Ethelstan was keenly aware that he had
(08:16):
to be firm in that role to deal with the
constant challengers to his power from both without and within.
At one point, claims that he was an illegitimate claimant
to the throne led to an unsuccessful plot by another
noble to try to blind him. Within his kingdom, though
he appears to have been a pretty even handed ruler.
(08:38):
He made just laws. For example, they were intended to
provide material care for the poor, to handle juveniles involved
in crimes in ways that recognized their youth, and didn't
treat them as adults when they were being sentenced. Although
he had detractors in the corridors of power in the
first decade of his rule, he won the loyalty of
(09:00):
the people, and early in his reign, Ethelstan invaded York,
which was held by Vikings at the time, and this
was to prevent the Vikings from moving any farther into
Anglo Saxon territory, but it also sent a very clear
message that Ethelstan was ready, willing and able to engage
in military conflict. To protect and expand his kingdom, he
(09:23):
further consolidated the groups that had been united under Alfred
and Edward, developing the Kingdom of Angleland. And to make
all of this work, he had all of the leaders
of the smaller kingdoms and fifes under him swear their
loyalty to him on paper. Coming up, we'll talk about
all the suspicion and intrigue that ultimately led to the
(09:43):
Battle of Brennenborough for us who will pause, though for
a sponsor break. The entirety of the British isles during
this time has been described as pretty messy by various historians,
(10:04):
and that's accurate. There were so many men and various
icons of power angling for position. Each island was fractured
by various factions in some way, and Ethelstan was pretty
open about wanting to unite all of these varying kingdoms
of Britain under his rule. So the other leaders who
(10:24):
were in the picture always suspected that he might invade,
even if there were agreements or tradees in place, and
that made them reluctant to abide by any such agreements.
And that's kind of how things next escalated. Ethelstan invaded
Scotland and Strathclyde in nine thirty four, following a broken
pledge made by the rulers of those countries to be
(10:46):
loyal to Ethelstan and not befriend the Norsemen. Probably Again,
this history is open to a bit of interpretation due
to the sparse and disparate accounts, but Constantine is said
in one account to have married his daughter off to
anlav gulfridson, so if that was the case, there was
clearly an effort being made to develop a relationship between
(11:09):
those two kingdoms, and Constantine paid a steep price when
it came to angering the Anglo Saxons with this move.
The year after Ethelstan launched this invasion, Constantine io ended
up swearing allegiance to Ethelstan, as did Owen of Strathclyde,
having both surrendered to the Saxon forces. There is another
(11:30):
angle on this that really shows what a tangled situation
was happening. At the very beginning of Ethelstan's reign, he
had married his sister off to an Irish Norse king, Cythric,
trying to work out his own agreement, but he was
really not okay with other people trying to do the
same thing after he decided the Norse were his enemies.
(11:54):
This shift happened after Cythric died and Gutfrith of Ivar,
his brother, took the Northumbrian throne. Ethelstan did not want
to make an alliance or an agreement with Guthfrith, although
the specifics of exactly why are really unknown, so that
then transferred onto his successor, on Guthhferson. All this does
(12:18):
pretty clearly evidence the fact that Ethelston was making his
decisions based on what would protect and expand his own kingdom.
Though so that allegiance with Constantine and Owen that he
made them swear after he invaded only lasted a couple
of years because everyone knew that Ethelstan was going to
be unstoppable if he went unchallenged. So in nine thirty seven,
(12:42):
Constantine and Owen, who were related, formed an alliance with
Onlaf Guthferson, who ruled Viking Northumbria and Dublin at the time.
As an aside, we've been calling him on Lafft, but
you will sometimes see his first name listed as Oloff
instead of Onlaft just if you are looking online. That's
the same person. And the plan of this little group
(13:03):
was to take on Ethelstan, regain their power in land,
and seize parts of England for themselves. They also just
wanted to stop Ethelstan in his tracks, because they knew
he was a very real threat to their own kingdoms.
So at this point all of these different power players
had formed up into two groups, ethel Stan, leader of
the Anglo Saxons, and everybody else who wanted to take
(13:26):
him down. The alert that there was a Viking invasion
fleet on the Ireland facing coast went out in August
of nine thirty seven. This is recorded in John of
Worcester's account Chronicle of Chronicles as quote, I'm luff, the
Pagan king of the Irish and many other islands, incited
by his father in law Constantine, king of the Scots,
(13:50):
entered the mouth of the River Humber with a strong fleet.
But this account is one that was written in the
twelfth century, almost two hundred years after this whole thing
actually happened, so it's not necessarily a reliable source. Yeah,
there is a lot of discussion among historians of John
of Wooster's account, which in many cases has kind of
(14:12):
been taken at face value, but that may have caused
some confusion to the historical record. But regardless, Ethelstan is
said to have been a little bit slow in responding
to this news of an army of newly Allied forces
landing on Saxon territory, and this has been interpreted in
a number of different ways. While it obviously would seem
(14:32):
at first glance like this was just the result of
being taken unawares by the attack, some historians have put
forth the idea that this was also a strategic psychological
move on Ethelstan's part, as he wanted his enemies to
believe he was taking his time to amass a huge
response force. And this is where we get to the
(14:53):
Battle of Brenenborough. Although at the time people just called
it the Great Battle, the battle itself is believed to
have happened on a piece of land that the various
parties all agreed to, but we do not know where
that piece of land was. There have been a lot
of theories over the years, and many historians have pieced
together as much information as they can sifted through clues
(15:16):
in the epic poem to try to triangulate which places
seem like the most likely possibilities. This will probably not
be conclusively known unless some major archaeological find happens, but
people are compelled to just keep looking because this was
such a decisive battle, and we will get to some
of those theories about where it might have been In
(15:37):
a bit. We also mentioned at the top of the
show that the very nature of the battle, meaning the
style in which it was fought, has also been debated
over the centuries. So one possibility, and kind of the
most popular, was that they engaged using the shield wall approach,
meaning that each side would assemble, as the name suggests,
in a formation so that their shields formed all wall
(16:00):
that the approaching opponent would have to breach to strike. Meanwhile,
any attacking side would form a similar wall, but instead
of holding stationary they would be on the move, pushing forward,
and then this would become a very close combat situation
where each side would be trying to find the gaps
at the bottom or the tops of the shields or
in between shields as men shifted so that they could
(16:23):
stab a spear or sword through. It is a lot
of pushing back and forth. If you ever watch historical
reenactments of this, to me, it looks utterly miserable and terrifying,
because it's like being trapped in a space with people
trying to stab you while you are also trying to
stab them, and nobody can really see clearly what's going on.
(16:43):
This is the most commonly accepted take on how this
conflict was fought, largely because it's how it was described
in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. The battle itself is described
in the first three stanzas of that poem, which are these.
In this year, King Ethelstan, lord of earls Ring, giver
of warriors, and his brother as well, Edmund Etheling achieved
(17:08):
everlasting glory in battle with the edges of Swords near Brunneborough.
They cleaved the masked shields, hewed the battle wood, the
relics of hammers of the Heir of Edward, as it
suited their heritage, so that they often in battle defended
their lands, treasures and homesteads against every one of the
(17:29):
hateful foemen were felled the Scottish people, the ship's sailors faded,
were destroyed. The fields grew slickened with the blood of men.
After the sun passed upwards over the earth in the
morning time, the remarkable star, the bright candle of God,
the eternal Lord, until that noble creation sank to its rest.
(17:51):
There lay many warriors seized by the spear. The northern
men over their arrowed shields Likewise, the Scottish also were
we saddened by war. The West Saxons in their ranks
rode down the long long day, the hateful people chopping
down the battle fleers from behind so sorely with sharply
(18:14):
ground swords. Bless you Tracy for reading that. That is
only a small part. It is like a seventy three
line poem, so it's not like massive and epic, but
it's long, and as described in those stanzas, ethel Stan's
forces were ultimately successful. They were able to find those
gaps between shields and had the stamina to keep pushing
(18:36):
through an entire day of battle. Once the shield wall
of the invading forces was really breached by Ethelstan's army, Constantine,
the Second and an Lofts armies scattered in a chaos,
and their respective leaders returned home. In the end, according
to the Anglo Saxon Chronicle narrative, five kings, seven earls,
(18:57):
and an army too large to count had all been killed.
After the battle, Ethelston proclaimed himself the king of all
Britain Rex Toodius Britannia, even though this had not resulted
in all the kingdoms of the British isles being brought together.
So while by some accounting it was technically a victory
(19:18):
for Ethelstone, it had also depleted his resources so much
that he could not even think about expanding the kingdom
any further. He only lived a couple of more years, though,
so even if he hadn't exhausted his possibilities in the
Battle of Brunnenburg, he still probably wouldn't have been able
to do a whole lot in terms of military rallying
(19:39):
and land expansion. He died on October twenty seventh, nine
thirty nine. We're going to pause here to hear from
the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going,
and when we come back, we're going to talk about
all of the efforts to figure out the details and
location of Brennanburgh and how historians have been in heated
debate about it for a while. This battle is referenced
(20:12):
and talked about in dozens of texts from the era
and after it, but they still give us precious little detail,
and the details that do exist often contradict one another
from narrative to narrative. The name Brunnenburgh is even given
differently in various sources. I think there's something like nine
different names given for this field of battle, but this
(20:33):
isn't the only difference in accounts of the battle, which
is part of why there are a lot of ideas
about where it happened and how. And while the battle
is usually noted as having happened in the autumn of
nine thirty seven, some writings place it in the summer.
This seems to be because it's like that August, September,
October time, which you know, even today people will call
(20:54):
different seasons. There's also the possibility that the shield wall
form of battlefield engagement may not have been used. It
may have involved a cavalry charge that's not proven though,
and it might have involved trench warfare. For example, the
Norse army is said to have dug trenches and reinforced
them with timber as part of their preparation for this conflict,
(21:15):
but that doesn't come up in all of the accounts.
So many many questions surround this battle, even though it
is considered incredibly important and decisive in forming the boundaries
of the countries in the British Isles as we know
them today. The main thing most people would like to
know more than how the battle played out is where
(21:35):
the heck had happened. And there have been more than
three dozen possible places that have been put forth as possibilities.
We will not go over all of them, but we
will talk about a couple of the most popular and
most hotly debated of them. One of the big problems,
of course, is that the place names have changed. But
(21:55):
another problem relates to our recent episode on the Doomsday Book.
There wasn't a comprehensive survey of England's until William the
Conqueror had one done and turned it into usable data
in ten eighty six. That was almost one hundred and
fifty years after this battle happened. Yeah, places had names,
and there were some documentations, but in terms of like
(22:18):
just comprehensively making a list and surveying everything and laying
it out, there really wasn't. In twenty twenty two, Paul
Cavill of the University of Nottingham published a paper detailing
what he called the Yorkshire hypothesis. And this paper is
actually a rebuttal to the work of Athelstan historian Michael Wood,
who wrote several articles about it starting in nineteen eighty,
(22:40):
including the twenty thirteen article Searching for Brennenborough, the Yorkshire
context of the Great War of nine thirty seven, and
all of his work. All of Wood's work suggests that
Yorkshire is the location of Brennenborough. Cavill's paper deconstructs Wood's
work point by point, noting, quote, the propositions of Woods
are um are not easily reduced to simple terms that
(23:03):
can be enumerated, but for clarity that is here attempted.
So then he goes through all of these, and one
such point made by Cavill plays out as follows quote.
The prima facie argument for a Yorkshire site of the
battle depends very substantially on the account that records the
Hiberno Norse forces landing in the Humber, originating in John
(23:23):
of Worcester's Chronicle. There are many reasons why John of
Worcester's Humber Entry account of Brennanburgh is suspect. It is,
for example, just one theory of many advanced by early
writers as to where the battle might have taken place,
but given much more prominence than any of these, partly
because John was an influential historian and his work was
(23:43):
used by others. In addition, it has been shown that
the formulaic features of John's writing might suggest that he
resorted to assumption based on parallels elsewhere in his history
to fill a puzzling gap in his and other's knowledge.
That's a problem. I mentioned earlier that the John of
Worcester account a lot of people have run with, and
(24:07):
now there are a lot more people going yeah, but
why did we assume he was accurate? Over time, that
Yorkshire hypothesis, which for a while had a lot of support,
has kind of fallen out of favor. The most supported
theory today places the location of the battle on the
Wirral Peninsula in northwest England, and specifically near the town
(24:29):
of Bromborough in Cheshire County. This peninsula is bounded by
the Liverpool Bay to the north, d Estuary on the
west and Mercy Estuary on the east side. This is
a location that would have been accessible for troops approaching
England by sea from both Ireland and Scotland. This location,
being the likely side of the battle, got some support
(24:50):
in recent years from archaeological finds of weapon remnants. That
effort was headed up by a volunteer project called worl Archaeology,
just collected a wide range of objects on the peninsula
from a span of time. According to their website, they've
collected quote artifacts spanning over to millennium, which includes objects
(25:13):
from the early medieval period and a great deal of iron.
The Worl Archaeology site says of their project, quote, we
know that locating ancient battlefields is an extremely challenging enterprise,
and we also acknowledge that this will be a long
term endeavor and that it will take many years to
collect and identify material before any assessment or judgment can
(25:34):
be made. But we believe that we have all the
physical and topographical features present, combined with a reliable theoretical
assessment of the political landscape of the period and logistical
issues that would have been overcome. This slighte of thinking
has also been included in the work of historian Michael Livingston,
who wrote the books The Battle of Brunnenburgh, A Casebook
(25:56):
and Never Greater Slaughter Brunnenburgh and The Birth of England.
In both of these books, though through different approaches, Livingston
makes the case for the world location. Livingston lays out
details from all of the texts that reference the battle
to note the parallels in topography to existing places. This
(26:17):
is something that others have done as well and ended
up coming to different conclusions as Livingston himself or the
situation quote, no map, medieval or modern has a place
clearly marked Brunnenborough on it, much less the other clues
our sources give us about the battle. As a result,
people have been free to theorize its location almost anywhere
(26:39):
in Britain, and they have. Livingston also breaks down how
the search methods for finding Brennanburgh have kind of fallen
into two groups. The people who work with a theory
about what the campaign's target was to determine the most
likely sight, and then the people who try to work
from noted place names and narrative accounts to try to
(27:00):
match them up with existing places or features of the
landscape and then figure out what the goal of the
whole thing was. Livingston is very open that he is
in the latter group, and through his work analyzing the
various available texts, he comes up with a checklist of
attributes that the brennan Borough site needed to have, including
that it needed to be on the west coast of Britain,
(27:21):
it needed to be near an uncultivated field, and that
it needed to be near a river. That had a
water crossing. There are other items on the checklist. One
of them is that it has to be near some
sort of hill, because brunn my understanding is is a
reference usually to a hill, so it's like saying brennan
Burgh is like saying a borough near a hill. Livingston
(27:44):
ties all of the items on his checklist back to
specific details in various narrative accounts, and usually ones that
can kind of be verified by crossover information from other ones,
and his conclusion through all of this is that it
was on the world with the archaeologis finds there as
supporting evidence. Although these papers we've been talking about that
(28:05):
hash out the whereabouts of the site are recent, this
discussion and sometimes argument has been going on for a
very long time. Though there are often mentions of the
Battle of Brunnenborough being forgotten for a while. The battle
of where it happened has been active in newspapers at
least since the mid eighteen hundreds. One article appearing in
(28:28):
the Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Advertiser in eighteen fifty six,
under the heading where was the Battle of Brennenborough fought,
opens with a plea to the paper's editor by a
man named Charles Hardwick, and it says, quote, Sir, I
was somewhat surprised to perceive in your last paper a
letter signed by a subscriber to the forthcoming History of Preston,
(28:49):
in which the writer takes exception to my announcement at
the dinner of the Historic Society that I had concluded,
after much investigation, that the Battle of Brennenborough might have
been fought in this neighborhood. As I consider a newspaper
scarcely the proper medium for the discussion of such a question,
I should have declined replying to your correspondent, and left
(29:10):
my evidences to exert what influence they might upon public opinion.
But that an erroneous impression as to my motive might
have resulted from such a course, I conceive it would
be logically sufficient for me to request that my position
may be judged upon after I have published my reasons.
I will, however, believing your correspondent's advice to be both
(29:33):
courteous and sincere for his satisfaction, inform him that I
am perfectly aware of the difficulties he mentions, and likewise
of the discrepancies to which he alludes he is wrong, however,
in supposing the site is at all positively determined upon
by any authority. The most probable hypothesis at present rests
(29:54):
upon the merest conjectures, and Bromborough on the World Peninsula
is not a new contender in these arguments either. In
nineteen thirty seven, a woman named Anne Anderson, identifying herself
as the Honorable Secretary of the Bromborough Society, wrote a
letter to the Liverpool Daily Post that makes it sound
(30:15):
as though that group was operating on the belief that
Bromborough was the spot. Anderson has, it appears, written to
the paper before with this information, and that letter got
a great deal of response. So Anne writes, quote, it
may interest your readers to hear my line of argument.
She makes several points. One that there was probably just
(30:35):
one Brunnenburgh in nine thirty seven, quote, just as there
is but one Bromborough today. Two that the d and
the mercy which bound the world have long been embarkation
and debarkation points to and from Ireland. Three that there
is a German map from eighteen eighty that places Brunnenburgh
(30:56):
on the Wirral right about where Bromborough is and four
that if you work through the logistics of how an
invasion from the forces involved had to work, they probably
met on the Isle of Man and then made their
way over and that made the Wirral the most logical place.
Anne Anderson would have likely loved the archaeological work that
(31:18):
has gone on in recent years in the area, but
even today there are still plenty of detractors that feel
that the evidence at hand is not enough for certainty.
It may remain a history mystery forever, but in the
meantime people will keep digging, literally and figuratively. I yearn
for a moment when there's in unearthed where it's like, no,
(31:39):
it's inscribed and it says is this spear made for
the Battle of Brennenborough. Yep, that's probably not going to happen,
But in the meantime I have two pieces of listener mail.
The first is from our listener Kimberly, and it's about
one of my favorite topics, waffles. It also features a
(32:00):
dog that like, I want to steal your dog. It's
the cutest man a very cute kitty as well. Kimberly writes,
High Holly and Tracy, I've been thinking about sending this
email for four years, ever since you first released your
waffle episode, and since it was just the Saturday Classic,
it feels like my reminder to finally sit down and write.
You only just mentioned at the end waffle type foods
(32:21):
from other countries, including Italian pizzeles. My mom's family is
of Italian heritage and we make pizzels every year for Christmas,
along with several other Italian foods. You say in the
episode that pizzels are deep fried. While I can't speak
for every recipe from every region of Italy throughout history,
I have never personally known them to be made that way.
(32:42):
We use a special iron with long handles that's placed
over a burner and turned halfway through to cook both sides.
It sounds a lot like the earlier version of waffle
irons that you talked about. Actually, the result is a
patterned wafer type cookie about four to five inches in diameter.
We always just eat them like a plain cookie, but
I have seen recipe that roll the pizzel into a
cone and call for a filling. Baking them is a
(33:04):
time consuming process as you make one at a time.
Since multiple family members own pizzel irons. We will try
to get two of them going at once to speed
up the process. My aunt bought an electric iron a
few years ago and absolutely loves it. It makes more
than one at a time, like a segmented waffle maker,
so baking does go faster. And then Kimberly shares pictures
(33:26):
of her pizzel iron and her very cute dog that
I kind of want to steal, who is named Luna Lovegood,
and her rescued cat, Nubia Tuesday. The cat, she says,
wants to be held twenty four to seven, and we
adopted the dog four years ago to keep her company.
We specifically chose a dog who had a positive history
with cats. I had visions of them snuggling up together
(33:47):
napping in the sun. It turns out the cat hates
all other animals. Still, after four years, she hisses and
growls every time she sees the dog. I keep hoping
for a miraculous attitude change. Thanks for your time, Giberlate listen.
You can't always predict how animals are going to react
to other animals, even if they've had a history. You
just never know. I love it. Thank you for sharing
(34:09):
your pizzel info. I fully believe that they're made in
different ways by different people, as are most things. It's
kind of like the way you can say you make
you know almost almost anything. Like listen, ask how somebody
makes barbecue in the US, and you'll get a different
answer depending on where you're at, and people will be
(34:32):
angry about it. Some people will be angry. I just
want to eat all the delicious stuff. How do you
make it great? Can you make it for me? I
will say. After we ran that episode as a classic,
one of my good friends texted me was like, I
want to have a waffle frolic and I was like, yeah,
me too, so we'll bring it back. I'm still on it.
I also wanted to answer our listener, Lance, who wrote
(34:54):
us a short email to ask if I was going
to be at dragon Con this year. Lance, Since Holly,
we plan on going to dragon Con on Sunday, September first.
We will be going to many of the Star Wars events,
but if it works out, we would like to see
you as well, if you are attending and available. I
didn't see this until after Dragon Con. I kind of
did a drive by version of dragon Con this year.
(35:16):
We went for like a couple hours a day, and
I tended to like hide out in a bar. We
went to the dealer's room one day, which was almost
a two hour wait just to get in. Oh, it
was like yeah, it was it was a little bananas.
And then we just kind of did that when we
were very tired. So I just I've been so busy
lately that I haven't had like the mental or emotional
(35:37):
energy to go see a lot of people in a
crowd of people that is a big sea that's very overwhelming. Well,
and not being local to Atlanta anymore, I am, it's
not on my list of things to do. But even
when I was in Atlanta, the amount that Dragon con
grew between the time that I started going and the
last time that I went, Like it got to a
(35:58):
point where I was like this too much. Yeah, and
we're definitely back to beyond pre COVID levels, Like you know,
it like many other things, like the travel industry had
like obviously the gap where nobody was doing that and
they had canceled it, and then like the post the
post lockdown surge has just been ceaselessly growing. So it's
(36:21):
a lot. It's still you know, has fun. I love
seeing friends and stuff, but I get a little easily
overwhelmed times. Anyway, if you would like to write to us,
ask us if we'll be a place, I may or
may not see it in a timely manner, but you
could still try. You could do that at History podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can also subscribe to
(36:43):
the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen
to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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