Canterbury was an important town in pre-Roman times and became a local capital under Roman rule. It was the first city to pass to the Saxons, who were to become the English, and the only one to do so by treaty rather than conquest. Its later importance was due to the fact that it was here that St Augustine established his mission to convert the pagan English in 598.
In the year 602 St Augustine converted an existing church into a cathedral, making it the mother church of the English christians. This original building was enlarged in the 750s but was still substantially standing in 851 when war came to the city. A short distance to the east, outside the city, St Augustine founded an abbey. In its early years the abbey rivalled the cathedral in importance. While the cathedral ministered to the spiritual needs of the lay community, the abbey held the theological library and acted as a centre for learning and erudition. Quite what form these buildings took in 851 we don’t know, but it most likely had a small stone church acting as the focus for a variety of wooden monastic buildings.
Also standing in 851 were the Roman walls that surrounded the city. These were built mostly of stone, but with brick coursing at intervals to help bind the stonework together. They stood around 20 feet tall and had bastions at intervals on which the Romans had mounted ballistae and other heavy machines able to throw stones or bolts considerable distances. Such sophisticated mechanical weapons had fallen out of use during the dark ages, and now the walls would be manned by local men armed with spears, backed up by a small professional core of soldiers with mail shirts, metal helmets and sidearms such as swords or knives as well as spears. English military equipment and tactics had not changed much since the battles at Lydd and Otford a generation or two earlier.
The men of Canterbury were going to need all the weapons they could muster, for marching against the city was a powerful force of Vikings, the largest yet known. The Viking raids had begun in 793 when the isolated island monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumberland was looted and destroyed, the monks being slain. As the years passed the Vikings came more and more often, and in greater numbers. In 840 a force of 37 ships, each carrying around 50 men, attacked Southampton. Three years later 2,000 Vikings attacked Carhampton, but were driven off.
In 850 a vast army of some 15,000 Vikings was seen cruising up the Channel. They pillaged much of Devon, then climbed back in their ships and headed east, coasting off Kent until they reached Thanet, then still an island. There they landed, built a fortified base and settled down for the winter. The Vikings were clearly intending to pillage their way through England the following spring, and as the nearest city to Thanet Canterbury would be a prime target.
The Vikings came from the same military culture as the English, favouring the combination of shield and spear used in the shield wall tactic. They did, however, introduce some innovations that did much to account for their success in battle. The first was the judicious use of their ships to flee from an unfavourable situation. At this period Viking armies tended to stay close to the beach or river where their ships were drawn up. If they found themselves facing a larger force, they would simply run off to get aboard their ships and go to search for easier victims.
Once battle was joined, the Vikings put into practice a variation on the shield wall. Instead of forming up in a straight line, the wall was pushed forward at one or more places to from a “hog’s snout”, or wedge shape. The best equipped and most experienced men were put into the “hog’s snout”, which penetrated and broke up the enemy shield wall as the two armies met.
One new weapon the Vikings brought with them was the ferocious Danish axe. This monstrous weapon was carried on a haft over five feet long and had a curved blade around 11 inches wide. In the hands of a skilled veteran, this axe could slice a man in half with ease. One record exists of such an axe cutting down through a man’s helmet and skull to penetrate to the heart. It was a savage weapon and greatly feared, though the fact that it had to be used two-handed meant that the wielder could not carry a shield into battle.
Since the Battle of Lydd, Kent had been part of Mercia so it fell to King Brihtwulf of Mercia to defend the city and surrounding country. The problem was that the Vikings might clamber into their ships to attack almost anywhere along the eastern coast of England. Rather than mass his men in Kent, Brihtwulf seems to have ordered his army to muster at London as the spring weather heralded the coming of the campaigning season. He would then have waited to see where the Vikings went before marching to meet them.
As things fell out, the Viking army took the obvious course and marched on Canterbury. The local men manned the walls, and sent hurried messages off to London to summon the royal army to their aid.
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