Dunster: A Castle at War - Jim lee

The Saxon Royal Vill then moved to the next parish at Dunster before moving to Watchet. The old medieval track from Carhampton in the Dunster direction went over the hill to Gallox Ford and Park Street. The existing A39 road would have been under salt marshland. Assuming the Saxons moved the centre of administration from Carhampton to Dunster following these Viking attacks, the road pattern leads from Gallox Bridge and Castle out to the quayside (in Old Deer Park). The original road west to Minehead would have been St George’s Street, a continuation from West Street, and before then Gallox Bridge and Carhampton track.

The Vikings sailed in longships with central masts and thirty oarsmen, fifteen either side. Sleek and fast, they were all-weather vessels. The longship gave the Vikings the ability to strike fast and be long gone before any response could be made by the local defence force. Long and slim, it could be rowed at about eight knots and, from around the 8th century on, sailed at about 20 knots. The shallow draft gave the Vikings the opportunity to penetrate deep inland, up rivers where previously the population had thought that they were safe from pirate attacks. These Norse pirates were disciplined fighters, but in their raids they slaughtered, burned, robbed and raped. They carried off the most beautiful women and took men to sell as slaves. Only the Kingdom of Wessex held out against them under the leadership of Alfred the Great, until the Danish territory called the Danelaw was established north-east of the frontier with Wessex and English Mercia.

From a vantage point on Dunster Castle’s Keep Garden, the whole scenario opens with the Viking islands of Steep Holm and Flat Holm clearly visible and Carhampton and Watchet areas easy to identify, with the South Wales coastline prominent to the north.

The Vikings called the Bristol Channel the Long Fjord and gave the island of Lundy its name (Puffin Island). Viking place names are everywhere along the Severn coastline. Some places, among them Anglesey, Bardsey, Milford and Fishguard, were given Scandinavian names, and Swansea is said to have been founded by Sweyne Forkbeard, who was shipwrecked in the bay there. Forkbeard was the son of King Harold Bluetooth and father of Canute, the great Danish King and king of all England, famous for trying to hold back the tide because as King of England he thought he was entitled to sit on the sea without getting wet. Names of Norse origin can be found in the Gower Peninsula, including Worms Head - worm was the Norse word for dragon, and the Vikings believed the island was a sleeping dragon. Skomer, Gateholm and Skokholm islands on the Pembrokeshire coast also reflect Viking incursions.

Tusker Rock, an island in the Bristol Channel just off the coast at Ogmore-by-Sea, took its name from Tuska, a Danish Viking who inhabited the fertile Vale of Glamorgan with his fellow warriors. The names of Skokholm (Norse for ‘wooded island’), Ramsey, Grassholm and Skomer islands also betray Viking origins.

The establishment of the Saxon mint at Watchet drew the unwelcome attention of these Vikings, who staged several raids between AD 918 and AD 997. During the 9th century the sea-cliff hill fort known as Daws Castle (now a Scheduled Ancient Monument) was built as part of defensive measures against these attacks. The remains of the enclosure can still be seen. They would have been more extensive, but much has been lost in landslips over the centuries.

The coins struck within its walls were part of King Alfred the Great’s royal Saxon mints in Wessex, one of several in the region with Axbridge, Bath, Bruton, Taunton and Crewkerne among others. The first Saxon king to issue coinage from Watchet, the silver penny, was Thelred 11 (Aethelred), King Alfred the Great’s father. King Alfred, born in Wantage, Oxfordshire in 849, was King of Wessex from 871 to 899. He was the only English King to be given status of ‘The Great’. Seven years after he became king we read that in May 878 Alfred rode to ‘Egbert’s Stone’ east of Selwood, where he was met by ‘all the people of Somerset and of Wiltshire and of that part of Hampshire which is on this side of the sea and they rejoiced to see him’ (Anglo–Saxon Chronicle). Together they defeated an invading Danish army which occupied most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex.

In the mid-10th century, the reign of Harald Bluetooth as King of a newly unified and powerful Denmark marked the beginning of a second Viking age. Large-scale raids, often organised by the Viking royal leaders, hit the coasts of England once more when the line of kings descended from Alfred the Great was faltering.

A fresh wave of Scandinavian attacks from the late 10th century ended with the conquest of this united kingdom by Sweyn Forkbeard in 1013 and again by his son Cnut in 1016, turning it into the centre of a short-lived North Sea empire that also included Denmark and Norway. However the native royal dynasty was restored with the accession of Edward the Confessor in 1042.

Writing of several other Viking raids and great naval armaments the Anglo–Saxon Chronicles gives the following information:

[917]. Here in this year a great raiding ship-army came over here from the south from Brittany. And the king had arranged that there should be positions on the southern side of the Severn mouth from Cornwall in the south west and eastwards as far as Avonmouth, so that they durst nowhere seek land on that side. However, they then stole up by night on two certain occasions: on the one occasion east of Watchet, and on another occasion at Porlock; then on each occasion they were hit, so that few came away, except only those who swam out to the ships. And then they settled out on the island at Flatholme until the time came that they were very short of food, and many men perished with hunger, because they could not reach any meat. Then they went from there to Dyfed and then out to Ireland, and this was in harvest-time.

A.D. 987. This year was the port of Watchet plundered.

A.D. 997. This year went the Danes about Devonshire into Severn-mouth, and equally plundered the people of Cornwall, North-Wales (50), and Devon. Then went they up at Watchet, and there much evil wrought in burning and manslaying. Afterwards they coasted back about Penwithstert on the south side, and, turning into the mouth of the Tamer, went up till they came to Liddyford, burning and slaying everything that they met.

In the end Somerset played an important part in defeating the spread of the Danes in the 9th century. King Alfred established a series of forts and lookout posts linked by a military road, or Herepath, so his army could cover Viking movements at sea. The Herepath has a characteristic form which is familiar on the Quantocks: a regulation 20m wide track between avenues of trees growing from hedge-laying embankments. The Herepath ran from the ford on the River Parrett at Combwich, past Cannington hill fort to Over Stowey, where it climbed the Quantocks along the line of the current Stowey road to Crowcombe Park Gate. Then it went south along the ridge, to Triscombe Stone. One branch may have led past Lydeard Hill and Buncombe Hill back to Alfred’s base at Athelney. The main branch descended the hills at Triscombe, then along the avenue to Red Post Cross and west to the Brendon Hills and Exmoor.

A peace treaty with the Danes was signed at Wedmore and the Danish king Guthrum the Old was baptised at Aller. Burhs (fortified places) had been set up by 919, such as Lyng. The Alfred Jewel, an object about 2.5 inches long, made of filigree gold, cloisonné-enamelled and with a rock crystal covering, was found in 1693 at Petherton Park, North Petherton. Believed to have been owned by Alfred the Great, it is thought to have been the handle for a pointer that would have fitted into the hole at its base and to have been used while reading a book.

However, by 1066 the Danes had finally settled peacefully in England. All was about to change, however, because the Anglo-Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, had no son, and when he died in January 1066 storm clouds gathered and William, Duke of Normandy, who had a legitimate claim to England’s throne, was waiting to attack. William had never recognised King Harold as king as he was only Edward the Confessor’s brother-in-law, whilst he made claim through his grandmother, Emma, who had married the Anglo-Saxon king, Aethelred the Unready. Soon the Saxon hill fort at Dunster would gave way to a Norman Castle.