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novel. Currently there is a debate whether Bishop Asser did write that life, or whether it was forged a hundred years after Alfred’s death, and I am utterly unqualified to judge the arguments of the contending academics, but even if it is a forgery it contains much that has the smack of truth, suggesting that whoever wrote it knew a great deal about Alfred. The author, to be sure, wanted to present Alfred in a glowing light, as warrior, scholar and Christian, but he does not shy away from his hero’s youthful sins. Alfred, he tells us, ‘was unable to abstain from carnal desire’ until God generously made him sick enough to resist temptation. Whether Alfred did have an illegitimate son, Osferth, is debatable, but it seems very possible.

      The biggest challenge Alfred faced was an invasion of England by the Danes. Some readers may be disappointed that those Danes are called Northmen or pagans in the novel, but are rarely described as Vikings. In this I follow the early English writers who suffered from the Danes, and who rarely used the word Viking which, anyway, describes an activity rather than a people or a tribe. To go viking meant to go raiding, and the Danes who fought against England in the ninth century, though undoubtedly raiders, were pre-eminently invaders and occupiers. Much fanciful imagery has been attached to them, chief of which are the horned helmet, the berserker and the ghastly execution called the spread-eagle, by which a victim’s ribs were splayed apart to expose the lungs and heart. That seems to have been a later invention, as does the existence of the berserker, the crazed naked warrior who attacked in a mad frenzy. Doubtless there were insanely frenzied warriors, but there is no evidence that lunatic nudists made regular appearances on the battlefield. The same is true of the horned helmet for which there is not a scrap of contemporary evidence. Viking warriors were much too sensible to place a pair of protuberances on their helmets so ideally positioned as to enable an enemy to knock the helmet off. It is a pity to abandon the iconic horned helmets, but alas, they did not exist.

      The assault on the church by the Danes is well recorded. The invaders were not Christians and saw no reason to spare churches, monasteries and nunneries from their attacks, especially as those places often contained considerable treasures. Whether the concerted attack on the northern monastic houses happened is debatable. The source is extremely late, a thirteenth-century chronicle written by Roger of Wendover, but what is certain is that many bishoprics and monasteries did disappear during the Danish assault, and that assault was not a great raid, but a deliberate attempt to eradicate English society and replace it with a Danish state.

      Ivar the Boneless, Ubba, Halfdan, Guthrum, the various kings, Alfred’s nephew Æthelwold, Ealdorman Odda and the Ealdormen whose names begin with Æ (a vanished letter, called the ash), all existed. Alfred should properly be spelt Ælfred, but I preferred the usage by which he is known today. It is not certain how King Edmund of East Anglia died, though he was certainly killed by the Danes and in one ancient version the future saint was indeed riddled with arrows like Saint Sebastian. Ragnar and Uhtred are fictional, though a family with Uhtred’s name did hold Bebbanburg (now Bamburgh Castle) later in the Anglo-Saxon period, and as that family are my ancestors I decided to give them that magical place a little earlier than the records suggest. Most of the major events happened; the assault on York, the siege of Nottingham, the attacks on the four kingdoms, all are recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or in Asser’s life of King Alfred which together are the major sources for the period.

      I used both those sources and also consulted a host of secondary works. Alfred’s life is remarkably well documented for the period, some of that documentation written by Alfred himself, but even so, as Professor James Campbell wrote in an essay on the king, ‘arrows of insight have to be winged by the feathers of speculation’. I have feathered lavishly, as historical novelists must, yet as much of the novel as possible is based on real events. Guthrum’s occupation of Wareham, the exchange of hostages and his breaking of the truce, his murder of the hostages and occupation of Exeter all happened, as did the loss of most of his fleet in a great storm off Durlston Head near Swanage. The one large change I have made was to bring Ubba’s death forward by a year, so that, in the next book, Uhtred can be elsewhere, and, persuaded by the arguments in John Peddie’s book, Alfred, Warrior King, I placed that action at Cannington in Somerset rather than at the more traditional site of Countisbury Head in north Devon.

      Alfred was the king who preserved the idea of England, which his son, daughter and grandson made explicit. At a time of great danger, when the English kingdoms were perilously near to extinction, he provided a bulwark which allowed the Anglo-Saxon culture to survive. His achievements were greater than that, but his story is far from over, so Uhtred will campaign again.

THE PALE HORSEMAN

      THE PALE

       HORSEMAN

      BERNARD CORNWELL

       Copyright

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

      Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2005

      Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780007149933

       Ebook Edition © July 2009 ISBN: 9780007338825

       Version: 2017-05-25

      THE PALE HORSEMAN

      is for

       George MacDonald Fraser,

       in admiration

      Ac her forlo berað; fugelas singað, gylleð grœghama.

      For here starts war, carrion birds sing,

      and grey wolves howl.

      From The Fight at Finnsburh

      CONTENTS

       Cover

      

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