The Unknown Warrior by Richard Osgood Page B

stacked wide shields
of the toughest hardwood against the wall,
then collapsed on the benches; battle-dress
and weapons clashed. They collected their spears
in a seafarers’ stook, a stand of greyish
tapering ash. And the trips themselves
were as good as their weapons.
    ( Beowulf , 321–30, in Heaney, 1999: 12)
    Although there was no standing army in the Anglo-Saxon period, men were expected to provide military service to those in the upper levels of society. The stratification of Anglo-Saxon society gave specific roles to specific class ranks. For example, the gesith was a man, well-born in status, who had military obligations, and an ealdorman was a regional official. The war gear ( heriot ) of such men showed that the individual was offered the gift of weaponry by a lord to one entering his service – returnable on the man’s death unless this was in battle (Reynolds, 2002a: 59). Reynolds ( ibid. : 59) reveals the heriot of a tenth-century ealdorman as being ‘four armlets of 300 mancuses of gold, and four swords and eight horses, four with trappings and four without, and four helmets and four coats-of-mail and eight spears and eight shields’.
    The ordinary freeman ( ceorl ) was also expected to perform military duties. According to the epic poem ‘The Battle of Maldon’, one such ceorl was fighting as part of the retinue of the Saxon Earl Byrhtnoth against the Vikings in this battle in Essex in 991. Nicolle (1984: 14) believes that the role of the ceorl differed depending on where in the country they lived: ‘The early role of the low class ceorl varied between Wessex, where he seems always to have been both farmer and fighter, and Northumbria, where he probably had no military obligation.’
    Anglo-Saxon warriors seem to have been exclusively infantrymen, even though they possessed horses – these were used as a means of transport to the battle rather than a fighting platform. Norsemen, given the epic voyages they undertook, used ships as their major means of transport. A number of examples have survived and are displayed in museums, such as those from the fjord at Roskilde in Denmark, and the Oseberg, Gokst and Tune ships in Oslo, Norway.
    It must be remembered that there were occasions when Vikings sought to avoid combat if they could, accepting payment ( Danegeld ) rather than fighting. Although much work has been done to dispel the ‘rape and pillage’ reputation of the Viking lifestyle, a martial element was nonetheless present in their lives and can be traced in the archaeological record. The raids and their effects might show up in the presence of weaponry, or bodies of those engaged in the fighting, or in particular layers of destruction. The effects might also be seen, as Reynolds’s work (2002a: 93) suggests, in the presence of warning beacons to raise the alarm when a Viking raiding party was detected, one example being seen at Yatesbury, Wiltshire.
    With all of the elements discussed below – armour, helmets, swords, spears and suchlike – as with most infantrymen, what made the Anglo-Saxon or indeed Viking warrior successful was the closeness or esprit de corps of the war band: ‘For in the final analysis, men did not and do not fight for king or country but for the small group of men around them’ (Underwood, 1999: 148).
    WEAPONRY
    In this period, Underwood (1999: 145) believes that, although there were some variations in usage, ‘the basic weapons were enduring: spear and shield for the rank and file, sword, spear and shield for higher ranking warriors. Only the very richest wore a helmet or body armour.’
    This period saw some major battles, including some which have become enshrined in the British psyche, such as the Battle of Hastings in 1066. It is thus probably surprising that so little has been recovered from battlefield sites, perhaps as a result of long-term scavenging. For example, the paucity of material from Hastings