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The king of Mercia requested help from the king of Wessex to help fight the Vikings. A combined army from Wessex and Mercia besieged the city of Nottingham with no clear result, so the Mercians settled on paying the Vikings off. The Vikings returned to Northumbria in autumn 868 and overwintered in York, staying there for most of 869.
He gave each of his Wessex counties a fictionalised name, such as with Berkshire, which is known in the novels as "North Wessex". [citation needed] In the book and television series The Last Kingdom, Wessex is the primary setting, focusing on the rule of Alfred the Great and the war against the Vikings. [47] Wessex remains a common term for the ...
It was the first of a series of battles that took place following an invasion of Wessex by the Danish army in December 870. [1] [2] By 870, the Vikings had conquered two of the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Northumbria and East Anglia. At the end of 870 they launched an attempt to conquer Wessex and marched from East Anglia to Reading, arriving on ...
King Æthelred of Wessex, who had been leading the conflict against the Vikings, died in 871 and was succeeded on the throne of Wessex by his younger brother, Alfred. [35] The Viking king of Northumbria, Halfdan Ragnarrson (Old English: Healfdene )—one of the leaders of the Viking Great Army (known to the Anglo-Saxons as the Great Heathen ...
The Great Heathen Army of Vikings first arrived in 865 and within a decade they had conquered the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia, Mercia and Northumberland. Shortly before Alfred the Great was named king in 871, the Vikings had also attacked Wessex where Alfred defeated them at the Battle of Ashdown. Despite this victory, Alfred was still ...
The House of Wessex then briefly regained power under Æthelred's son Edward the Confessor, but lost it after the Confessor's reign, with the Norman Conquest in 1066. All kings of England since William II have been descended from the House of Wessex through William the Conqueror 's wife Matilda of Flanders , who was a descendant of Alfred the ...
Viking expansion was the historical movement which led Norse explorers, traders and warriors, the latter known in modern scholarship as Vikings, to sail most of the North Atlantic, reaching south as far as North Africa and east as far as Russia, and through the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople and the Middle East, acting as looters, traders, colonists and mercenaries.
In late December 870 the Vikings invaded Wessex and occupied Reading. Several battles followed in quick succession, Englefield, a West Saxon victory, Reading, a Viking victory and Ashdown on about 8 January, a West Saxon victory. Two weeks later, King Æthelred and his brother, the future King Alfred the Great, were defeated at