Burrow Mump !
“I have just collected some geese from the old lady who lives in the shade of Burrow Mump. It seems that she has been in these parts forever and she seems to know everything that is going on.
She warned me to be careful on my return trip to Athelney…..strange folk are looking for the king!
Apparently there have been a number of great battles fought between my King Alfred and the Danes…..Vikings we call them….pirates of land and sea. They have been on our lands for many years, and now they have emptied our treasuries and the churches coffers, they are trying to take our farm land.
Men from my village went off to fight with the king, but they haven’t yet returned.
The king was defeated and forced to flee……. Now he is somewhere in our marshes. They are vast and I suspect the Danes will have little joy. It will be like looking for a brooch pin in a thicket. When she warned me, I looked down from the heights of the Mump..….little moved in the marshes, just a few birds and a couple of eelers in their punts.
So I made the return trip…..It was uneventful. The geese were tethered onto my boat and they were clearly disturbed by their ‘pitched’ feet ( they had to walk all the way from Bath and the farmer who raised them had tarred their feet in order to protect them as they waddled….I’ll have to do something to get that muck off when I return to my home.
As I enter the village….on a small humped island surrounded by salt water and marsh grass….I can tell immediately that there is a commotion. Our blacksmith calls me over….. he tells me that some of our young fyrdsmen have returned from battle AND they have brought rich strangers with them. Our village folk are erecting a new stockade fence around the island.
Is it the king?”
In 878AD after a succession of defeats at the hands of the Danes, King Alfred retreated to a small village called Athelney, deep in the heart of the salt marshes of Somerset. From here, messengers were sent out to the militias ( fyrds) of Devon, Somerset and Dorset….a new army eventually gathered and drove the Vikings back. As a successful king, he forced the pagan Danes to accept christianity and to stay within lands that they had conquered in the Northern half of England….Wessex was safe.
He went on to create ‘fortress’ towns….mustering points called burghs, a coast guard and small navy and to demand that a chronicle of events be kept in the abbeys and churches of the land…Today we call them the Anglo Saxon Chronicles.
This is a great part of England to explore….Glastonbury Tor, Cheddar Gorge, Wells Cathedral, Worle….. all await!
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