The bidding prayer in York Minster might invoke a blessing on king and earldorman, but it was the latter, with his castle and retainers, who now had the power to oppress or protect his neighbours. Aftermath. Credit: Odejea / Commons. Viking raids. Alfred was born at Wantage in Oxfordshire in 849, fourth or fifth son of Aethelwulf, king of the West Saxons. When the enemy is eastwards, wrote the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, then our forces are kept westward; and when they are southward, then our forces are northward. The very word entered England through their speech. How long does it take for a body to recomposition? Background TheSack of Winchesteroccurred in 911 AD when the Dyflin Viking army of Sihtric Caech launched a surprise attack on the West Saxon capital of Winchester and sacked and captured the city. What was the Impact of Julius Caesars Murder? At the end of the ninth century a nomad race of mounted archers from the Asian steppes overran the Pannonian plain between the Carpathians and Danube. On April 23rd, 1016 St. Georges Day Ethelred died and Edmund succeeded. But fate was against him. Nowhere was the monastic reforming movement so enthusiastically supported by the laity, so many monasteries built, and such learned and pious clerks appointed to well-endowed benefices. Next day, without awaiting their northern colleagues, the lords and prelates of the Wessex Witan met in the Godwin stronghold of London to choose a successor. He loved to work, too, in the scriptoria, as he had done as a young monk; in his day the illuminators of the monastic renaissance, with their gorgeous colouring and boldly flowing margins, reached new heights of achievement. Englands only respite was when Ethelred, bleeding her people white with taxes, bribed the Danes to withdraw. The Anglo-Saxons were from Europe. Above all, they had energy. Without a trained bureaucracy the Roman system of raising revenue could not work; a Frankish king could only levy taxes by farming them out to local magnates. To matters of theology and philosophy, like their Irish neighbours, they had devoted much thought; alone among northern nations they possessed the priceless heritage of the scriptures in their native tongue. How long does it take to heal a sprained ankle? Feudalism the protection of the locality from predatory strangers by its stronger members was the only answer until either the old imperialism could be recreated or a national order take its place. Then a Danish herald asked that the English should withdraw to allow his countrymen to cross and battle to be joined. The Wessex forces were now retreating back into friendly territory under the command of Alfred. The name of the city during the Anglo Saxon period, during which the series is set, is actually Eoforwic which is pronounced Eferwich. With their round bullet-heads, blue eyes and long aquiline noses, they looked like intelligent birds of prey. They were what the Romans had been a thousand years before, the natural leaders of their age. Being king both of England and Denmark, he tried to make the North Sea an Anglo-Danish lake and England the head of a Nordic confederation stretching from Ireland to the Baltic. With its fine craftsmen and the rule of its strong kings, England was beginning once more to accumulate treasures: to become a rich land worth plundering as she was before the Danes attacked her. Anything that may be counselled never stands for a month. The English were not only outmanoeuvred; they were betrayed. Finally, in 870 the Danes attacked the only remaining independent Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Wessex, whose forces were commanded by King Aethelred and his younger brother Alfred. The Anglo-Saxons believed that Wessex was founded by Cerdic and Cynric of the Gewisse, but this may be a legend. Eardwulf sought to aid the Danes against King Edward, and he proposed a plan to take Winchester without bloodshed. The Sack of Winchester occurred in 911 AD when the Dyflin Viking army of Sihtric Caech launched a surprise attack on the West Saxon capital of Winchester and sacked and captured the city. He is the only English monarch known as 'the Great'. Wessex, one of the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, whose ruling dynasty eventually became kings of the whole country. In Avons of the heart, Rupert Brooke wrote a thousand years later, her rivers run. The greatest Wessex figure of the age was Archbishop Dunstan, who, like his earlier countryman, St. Aldhelm. But a band of his followers closed round the corpse and, dying to the last man, gave the Danes such grim war-play that they were unable to follow up their victory and scarcely, it was said, man their ships to sail home. In its permanent nucleus, its land approximated that of the modern counties of Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, and Somerset. The Vikings typically lived to be around 40-50 years old. Erik the Red, also known as Erik the Great, is a figure who embodies the Vikings bloodthirsty reputation more completely than most. Ethelred of Wessex was Alfreds brother, and his predecessor as king. Here, that he might watch his abbey rising the West Minster, as it was called he made himself a hall that was one, day to become the heart of an empire. But he returned to England at the head of a fleet, harried its coasts and, with the help of the Londoners, dictated terms to the throne. Sack of Winchester was an event which occurred in The Saxon Stories novel series, and The Last Kingdom television series. Aftermath. They rode at will across Sussex and Hampshire, moored their fleet in Poole harbour, burnt Norwich and Thetford, beat the fyrd at Penselwood in the heart of Wessex, and rode past Winchester flaunting the plunder of Berkshire as they returned in triumph to their ships. At the end of the ninth century a nomad race of mounted archers from the Asian steppes overran the Pannonian plain between the Carpathians and Danube. Being king both of England and Denmark, he tried to make the North Sea an Anglo-Danish lake and England the head of a Nordic confederation stretching from Ireland to the Baltic. Only London, its walls manned by its warrior gild, remained faithful to the royal cause and Alfreds disgraced line. You never know, he wrote. A dozen Winchester, the royal capital, York, Norwich and Lincoln, Gloucester, Chester, Canterbury, Thetford, Worcester, Oxford, Ipswich and Hereford had perhaps three or four thousand inhabitants, and one, the self-governing port of London, four or five times as many. After the battle the Viking leader Guthrum converted to Christianity. He went into Cumberland, the chronicler wrote, and ravaged it well nigh all. His crowning act of folly occurred in 1002 when he gave orders for a massacre of the Danes living in York, among them the sister of the king of Denmark. Like laissez-faire in a later age, eleventh-century feudalism suffered from being too exclusively based on self-interest. Ruthless, entirely without sentiment, and, though passionate, self-possessed and cool, they had the simplicity of genius. Three years later, following a dispute in the Witan over the succession, his eldest son was stabbed near Corfe by a thane of the Queen Mothers household. Brida tempted Sihtric into taking Winchester to seize its spoils and bring his men further security and a land to call their own. Ruthless, entirely without sentiment, and, though passionate, self-possessed and cool, they had the simplicity of genius. Indeed, Ethelred drove them to it, harrying their homesteads with the same barbarity as the invaders harried his own. For an hour three of his retainers barred the only causeway. Hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and subscriber rewards. and at Otford in Kent he was himself defeated by Canute at Ashingdon in Essex through the treachery of one of his earls, a vile favourite of his fathers. In 1054 Siward, earl of Northumbria, was forced to lead a punitive expedition as far as the Forth, the old Northumbrian frontier, where he dethroned the Celtic usurper, Macbeth, and installed an exiled prince of the old Scottish line Malcolm, king of the Cumbrians. Seeing his brother join battle, Ethelred ordered his forces to engage, and after a bitterly contested melee the Saxons were victorious. Did Winchester fall to the Danes? It devised an elaborate ceremony at which the young knight, before being invested with arms, knelt all night in solitary prayer before the altar and, like the king at his crowning, took the Sacrament, swearing to use the power entrusted to him in righteousness and the defence of the helpless. By the eleventh century the only dominion, save the royal title, left to Charlemagnes last descendant, the king of the West Franks, was the hill town of Laon. His rivalries and family feuds cut across the growing sense of nationhood and tore the realm to pieces. After Mercia was annexed by Wessex in the early 10th century, the West Saxon rulers divided it into shires modelled after their own system, cutting across traditional Mercian divisions. See you our litle mill, wrote a twentieth-century poet. He was a soft, devout, peace-loving man, with a clerks long tapering fingers, a rosy face and flaxen hair that turned with age to a beautiful silver. Archbishop Dunstan himself was a craftsman and loved to fashion jewellery and cast church-bells. His neighbours had to seek his protection or be ruined. The chief obstacle in the Dukes way was Godwins eldest surviving son, Harold, earl of Wessex, brother to the queen and leader of the English and anti-Norman party at Edwards court. The century of Athelstan and Edgar saw a new flowering of Anglo-Saxon art. The skeletons that the archaeologists have found, reveals, that a man was around 172 cm tall (5.6 ft), and a woman had an average height of 158 cm (5,1 ft). With his horse, lance, sword and shield, and leather and chain-armour hauberk, he was the answer to the invading horde from which the West had suffered so long. It set aside days and seasons for a truce of God when war was forbidden on penalty of expulsion from its communion. Wessex, Mercia, and East Anglia were now confirmed as Saxon kingdoms . Alfred reorganized his army and used ships against the invaders as early as 875. Not all the princes of the House of Wessex were great men or able to ride the tides of anarchy in an age still dominated by the Viking invasions. They loved fighting with lance and horse so much that, when they were not at war, they were for ever challenging one another in mimic tourneys where the victors held the vanquished to ransom and plundered their horses and armour. Such were Plough Monday, when the village lads, with ribbons and cracking whips, resumed work after the twelve days of Christmas; May Day when they marched to the woods to gather greenery and danced round the May-pole; Rogationtide when the parish bounds were perambulated by wand-bearers led by the priest, and small boys were beaten over boundary-stones; Whitsun when the Morris dancers leapt through the villages with bells, hobby-horses and waving scarves; Lammas when the first bread was blessed, and the Harvest Home when the Corn Dolly effigy of a heathen goddess was borne to the barns with reapers singing and piping behind it. In 886 Alfred took London from the Vikings and fortified it. By the time the Viking armies reached the borders of Wessex their advance seemed unstoppable. So, at least in the south, was that of the countryside. It was ruled by King Ethelred I, though the man tasked with defeating the oncoming Danish onslaught was the kings pious and studious younger brother Alfred. They were not delicate craftsmen like the English; their chief resource was to build immensely thick walls, and several of their grander achievements fell down. Then they went on to conquer the rich island of Sicily from the, After the collapse of Canutes empire the Normans turned their gaze on England. Other Scandinavian words were being woven into the map of northern England; Like their kinsfolk in the old Danelaw and East Anglia, these northern dalesmen pirates brood though they were had a great respect for law, so long as they themselves made it. So did the divisions or, For the long reign of the half-brother who succeeded him was one of the most disastrous in English history. 1066) An Italian who witnessed that astonishing conquest has left us their picture: dominant, harsh, revengeful, cunning, frugal, yet capable of lavish generosity when fame was to be won by it. Did the Wars of the Roses End at the Battle of Tewkesbury? They were lovers of hunting, hawking and horse-racing, cock-fighting and bull-baiting, glee-singing, buffooning and tumbling. He might have added, earlier. They were what the Romans had been a thousand years before, the natural leaders of their age. It is widely considered fact that the Vikings and Northmen in general, were heavily tattooed. As they sat, in mantles of brightly coloured silks fastened with golden collars and garnet-inlaid brooches, listening to song, harp and minstrelsy, the princes and earldormen of Wessex were served from polished drinking - horns chased with silver and wooden goblets with gold. Afterwards, Brida led her men in desecrating the Christian gravesites around Winchester, hoping that this blatant sacrilege would encourage the Saxons to attack Winchester. They were as restless as they were greedy and calculating. It was a result of the cumulative alienation of royal estates caused by the difficulty of raising revenue to pay for public services which had been going on for generations and which deprived the monarchy of its chief and almost only source of income. She was living among the memories of the past, static, conservative, unimaginative. As a result, though a country of little account at the worlds edge, her wealth rapidly increased. While Wessex and Mercia were distracted, the Vikings of Dyflin - led by Sihtric Caech - invaded Wales, captured the Deheubarth fortress at Dinefwr, and inflicted a terrible defeat on Prince Hywel Dda when he set out to reclaim to the fortress. But soon afterwards, adventuring far into the Danish ranks, he was cut down and slain. 793 - AD. The Danes withdrew from Winchester without the need for a final assault, settling in their new lands in Northumbria, where Sihtric became King of Jorvik. The rivers swarmed with fish, and many places had eel-traps; the little Fenland town of Wisbech paid the Abbot of Ely an annual rent of fourteen thousand eels. Since the days of Ethelred, the Britons, Picets and Scots of the far North had tended increasingly to merge, not with their southern neighbours, but with one another. Equally masters in their provincial strongholds were his rivals, Leofric of Mercia husband of the legendary Lady Godiva, foundress of Coventry abbey and the giant Dane, Siward of York, who met his death like a Norse warrior standing fully accoutred with breast-plate, helmet and gilded battle-axe. The Vikings proceeded to engage in the usual slaughter, while Sihtric and Brida captured the King's father-in-law Aethelhelm of Wiltshire after luring him out of his home. The dream of an earlier, greater Wales, ever victorious against the Saxons, began to haunt their poems and tales: the Mabinogion with their legends of Arthur and the great Druid magician, Merlin. Henceforward he made no distinction between his new countrymen and his old. How Do You Get Rid Of Hiccups In 5 Seconds? The Duke of Normandy was not the only European ruler impatiently awaiting the Confessors death. The ealdormen . Then they went on to conquer the rich island of Sicily from theSaracens, the lords of the Mediterranean. They also had assumed a Welsh rather than an island patriotism; had become the Cymry or fellow-countrymen, uniting in battle, whenever plunder offered, against their wealthier neighbours, even though the English of the western shires were almost as Celtic as themselves. Six month later, after five astonishing victories at PenseRvood on the borders of Somerset and Wiltshire, at Sherston, on the road to London, at Brentford, and at Otford in Kent he was himself defeated by Canute at Ashingdon in Essex through the treachery of one of his earls, a vile favourite of his fathers. His was the disintegrating force of power without responsibility. Once a year he sent a great fleet round it; every winter he travelled its highways to hear causes and pronounce judgments. Danes sometimes attacked and left with their loot. Incapable of running straight, his double-dealing set the great earldormen by the ears even before he reached manhood. Another sign of returning health was the resumption, by colonizing knights from Germanys frontier Marches and the little Christian kingdoms of northern Spain, of Christendoms long-interrupted expansion towards the east and south. However, further defeats followed for Wessex and Alfred's brother died. So did the sculptors of the Winchester School who carved the angel at Bradford-on-Avon, the Virgin and Child at Inglesham, and the wonderful Harrowing of Hell in Bristol cathedral. The failure of the Danes to make any more advances against Alfred was largely a result of the defensive measures he undertook during the war. True to Alfreds policy of trust, he is said to have granted the king of the Scots and Picts the Lothian plain between Tweed and Forth in return for his allegiance. It sought also, by an appeal to conscience, to present knightly power as a trust. . Ivories and jewelled crucifixes, golden and silver candelabra, onyx vases and elaborate wood-carvings, superbly embroidered vestments, stoles and altar cloths adorned the churches and the halls and hunting lodges of the great. The Witenagemot agreed, causing Edward to order his army to take over the city in the absence of the mutinous Mercian guard and amid the disorganization of the Mercian fyrd after Tettenhall. During her early years, thelfld witnessed her father take back large swathes of England from the Vikings (Danes), starting with the famous battle of Edington in Wiltshire, a key . In the old Viking country on the west coast of Norway, there are people today who live by their forebears values, albeit the more positive ones. After sacking Ipswich the invaders were opposed on the banks of the Blackwater near Maldon by the earldorman of Essex the old, silver-haired, six-foot-nine giant, Britnoth. Sihtric was initially content to stay in Wales with his army, which was tired of months of warfare in Ireland, and now sought to settle down and recover. Alfred's great hall was the heart of the palace, a great timber structure that was the setting for the many feasts that marked the holiday. They were not delicate craftsmen like the English; their chief resource was to build immensely thick walls, and several of their grander achievements fell down. Wessex, Mercia, and East Anglia were now confirmed as Saxon kingdoms, and there was faith on both sides that the peace would hold. Unlike the Danes in England, Rollo's men did not bring many Viking women to France; most of the warriors married local women, resulting in a mixed Danish-Celtic culture in Normandy (see also Celt). His elaborate smith-made protection, his mobility and striking-power, and his life-long dedication to arms, made him despise mere numbers. 1556332. According to medieval sources, Ragnar Lothbrok was a 9th-century Danish Viking king and warrior known for his exploits, for his death in a snake pit at the hands of Aella of Northumbria, and for being the father of Halfdan, Ivar the Boneless, and Hubba, who led an invasion of East Anglia in 865. Did England fall to the Danes? King Athelstan took back the kingdom of York from the Vikings. The richer parish churches helped to house such treasures: small barnlike buildings, with primitive rounded arches, high wallsand narrow windows, and bell-towers crowned with weather-cocks an English invention. 28 Apr 2020. Here, translated from the chronicle, is the story of that invasion of Wessex in AD 1001 A.D. 1001. Get time period newsletters, special offers and weekly programme release emails. At the battle of Ashdown in 871, Alfred routed the Viking army in a fiercely fought uphill assault. Before Ashdown, Ethelreds forces had already fought the Danes at Reading, but had been beaten back by the Viking assault. Yet all this growing polity and wealth depended in the last resort on the ability of English kings to keep the good order that Alfred had won. 0:29. The jealousies aroused by his greatness and the crimes of his eldest son led to his eclipse and banishment. Then the kings young son, Edmund Ironside, put up a fight worthy of Alfred himself against Sweyns son and successor, Canute. The Sack of Winchester is the destruction of the city of Winchester as part of the Great Heathen Army's First Invasion. Manage all your favorite fandoms in one place! It was as though the Norman knights, the most acquisitive in Europe, were trying to offset their outrages by the orthodoxy of their ecclesiastical establishments and, while they stormed their way into their neighbours lands, to buy an entry to Heaven. , Ragnar Lothbrok. A few weeks later he died at Oxford. Uhtred's daughter Stiorra was taken by Sihtric as part of the peace terms, but the two fell in love and eventually married. The average Viking was 8-10 cm (3-4 inches) shorter than we are today. The Kingdom of Wessex (/ w s k s /; Old English: estseaxna re [westsksn rite], lit. And if at first the self-interest was mutual, it soon became contradictory and self-destructive. In tribal times a king had only been able to impose his will when the horde was assembled for battle. So did the divisions or ridings into which they split the southern part of Northumbria, the juries of twelve leading men employed in the administration of their towns and wapenstakes, and their habit of majority decision. The heart of Englands culture was no longer Northumbria now a wasted and depopulated province but Wessex. The murder of the fifteen-year-old king Edward the Martyr made a deep impression; worse deed, wrote the chronicler, was never done among the English. In the sinister light of what happened afterwards it seemed even worse in retrospect than at the time. To make doubly sure of divine intervention he concealed some sacred relics under the cloth of the table on which the Englishman swore. In 1064 Harold was shipwrecked in Normandy, and William a great believer, like all Normans, in Gods sense of legalism used the opportunity to make his unwilling guest swear to be his liege. With their grim massiveness and twin-towers rising into the sky like swords, such churches seemed designed, as Henry Adams wrote, to force Heaven: all of them look as though they had fought at Hastings or stormed Jerusalem.. The Danish Vikings, also known as Danes, were the most politically organized of the different types of Vikings. But in one State at least the little warlike duchy of Normandy it early established a working and mutually profitable partnership with the knightly class. But there are also examples of upper class Vikings who lived longer for instance Harald Fairhair, who was King of Norway for more than 60 years. Following the wishes of their . The Church took the lead by trying to limit the ravages of private war. It tried to make knight errantry a Christian pursuit: to turn the aggressive, acquisitive Frankish freebooter, armed. The Frankish knights obligation to his overlord was the counterpart to the loyalty to the Crown Alfred had tried to create in England. The story of the Vikings in Britain is one of conquest, expulsion, extortion and reconquest. It was at Edgars coronation that the earliest form of the service still used at the crowning of Englands kings was read by its author, the mystic saint and musician, Archbishop Dunstan. Chester sent its earldorman a thousand salmon a year, and Petersham in Surrey a thousand lampreys. The Norse king, Harald Hardrada or Fair Hair, engaged till now in the civil wars of Scandanavia, was also ready to claim his kinsman, Canutes crown. Against the Norse, Magyar and Saracen invasions Europes had been the walled city, the castle or chateau, and the local knight, armed and trained with a degree of specialization unknown in easy-going England. He possessed the finest fleet in Europe, while that of England, which Canute had kept to guard her and which Edward in earlier days had taken to sea on rumours of a Danish invasion, had been disbanded. He was so devout that he refused to give his wife a child and his realm an heir. The Danes had been raiding England's coasts for decades, but in 866 their attacks reached a new and more dangerous phase when they seized the northern city of York. How tall were the Vikings? They had evolved a union of Church and State for national ends which had no parallel outside the civilized empire of the Greeks; their bishops and earldormen sat side by side in the Witan and in the provincial and shire courts. He followed Alfred. It proved a wise choice. Ethelred the Redeless the unready or lacking in counsel was a spoilt, petulant weakling. Prelude Edmund I, Athelstans successor, was murdered in a brawl with an outlaw in his own hall; his sickly brother, Eadred, lost York for a time to the murderous Norseman, Eric Bloodaxe. The power of such magnates was not wholly Edwards fault. Sihtric agreed to evacuate Winchester and leave Mercia, Wessex, and East Anglia in Saxon hands in exchange for Aethelflaed ceding Jorvik and the surrounding region of Northymbre to Sihtric's followers. A few weeks later he died at Oxford. Their God they shall praise, it was said of the Celts, their language they shall keep, their land they shall lose except wild Wales! In 1055 the men of this indomitable, hardy race, under a patriot prince, Griffith or Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, ravaged the city of Hereford in alliance with a traitor English earl, and burnt the minster which Athelstan had built. Levis jumped sharply in betting . Even its early kings had borne names which were not Teuton, like Cerdic, Cynric, Caelwyn, and Celtic place- names were intertwined mysteriously in its western shires with English: Axe and Exe, avon for river, coombe for valley. . He made immense grants of land to a Sussex thane named Godwin, whom Canute had created earl of the West Saxons, and who, in the dynastic quarrels before his accession, had been instrumental in blinding and, possibly, murdering Edwards brother, and later, when the Danish cause seemed doomed, in securing his election to the throne. Only London, its walls manned by its warrior gild, remained faithful to the royal cause and Alfreds disgraced line. Sometimes they made peace with the locals and decided to settle (in Old English word is saeton). The little principalities of Wales, too, for all their constant wars with one another, were drawing closer in the hope of exploiting Englands weakness. Home | About | Contact | Copyright | Privacy | Cookie Policy | Terms & Conditions | Sitemap. At Glastonbury, where his first work was done, legend went back far beyond the English conquest to the tiny wattle church which St. Joseph of Arimathea was supposed to have built among the water meadows for the conversion of Roman Britain. After the collapse of Canutes empire the Normans turned their gaze on England. The future of European society lay with whoever could discipline and ennoble feudalism. Next year they slew its bishop. Something of the Christian missionarys conviction that faith could conquer all things sustained him; that and a well-placed confidence in his weapons and training. Fans may be interested to hear the city eventually became what is known today as York in the northeast of England. Next year, after he had reigned for thirty-five years, Ethelred fled to Normandy, leaving his desolate country in the hands of Sweyn. Dunstan was a mystic, feeling his way to wisdom through visions and trances; he wrestled with fiends and monsters and heard mysterious, heavenly voices. She had lost touch with the new world growing up beyond the Channel: with the international Church, with its reforming popes and disciplined monasteries, with the new ideals of chivalry, and the mailed knights, battle-trained horses; tall, moated castles which were now becoming the dominant features of the European landscape. Alfred was not the archetypal burly and bearded Saxon warrior, but a man of keen intelligence who won battles through cunning rather than brute force. Everyone's heard of 1066: Harold of England (allegedly) . This, too, was a Roman trait. To make doubly sure of divine intervention he concealed some sacred relics under the cloth of the table on which the Englishman swore. In the chapel-royal of the Norman robber king at Palermo and in the cathedral his heirs built at Monreale they infused the graceful sunshine art of the Saracens and Byzantines with their own northern vigour. Following the Battle of Tettenhall in 910 AD, King Edward the Elder of Wessex no longer saw the Danes as a threat, and he instead shifted his focus to the Mercian succession dispute which followed the death of Lord Aethelred. by Ollie Nichols. When the enemy is eastwards, wrote the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, then our forces are kept westward; and when they are southward, then our forces are northward. A few survive, like the log church at Greenstead in Essex, flint and rubble Breamore in the Avon valley with its Anglo-Saxon text which no living parishioner can read, stone Barnack, and broad-towered Earls Barton in Northamptonshire. For an hour three of his retainers barred the only causeway. Some of the earldormen and the feeble kings favourites threw in their lot with the enemy, shifting from side to side in selfish attempts to increase their dominions. His uncle, Athelstan, was the patron of the Welsh prince, Hywel the Good, who attended meetings of the English Witan and gave Wales her first code of law. 2012-2023 On Secret Hunt - All Rights Reserved The indicates that the character was not fighting . The story of his courtiers telling him he could stay the advancing tide at Lambeth may not have been true, but, like many legends, it enshrined a truth.
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