Michael Livingston

Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England

(Oxford: Osprey, 2021), 224 pp. $28.00

Michael Livingston is carving a wide path in medieval military studies, through prolific publications and especially organizing primary source books in conjunction with other academics on notable medieval battles that have cemented his reputation among medieval military historians. Such is the case for his The Battle of Brunanburh: A Casebook (Exeter University Press, 2011), wherein he and his collaborators (mostly) posited a location for the battle in northwest England, north of Chester. Livingston’s modus operandi, as is the case for other English language medieval historians well known to the DRM crowd, is to parse every known primary source (or even including other secondary sources from the Middle Ages and even the Early Modern period), and read these with the sensibilities of logistics, transport, and strategy in order to triangulate what is and especially what isn’t known about the location of battles.

Undoubtedly if you study early medieval military history and especially that of the British Isles, the Battle of Brunanburh in 937 is a household name, even though non-military historians usually consider it “obscure.” The poem by the same name from which the title of Livingston’s book is taken is a staple of old English literature, so it’s likely that the battle is known even to those who have little interest in its military content. The question of where exactly the battle was fought, however, has been the matter of speculation for decades, having been forgotten centuries ago.

The book is ostensibly about the location of the Battle of Brunanburh, although this particular piece of information isn’t really dealt with until chapters 8 and 9. A 1995 article perspicaciously noted that, “The site of the battle has never been firmly established; twenty-eight out of thirty references to the poem in [a 1957] Bibliography … propose various sites, but all that is agreed on is that it was somewhere along the western coast of England between Chester and Dumfries. The debate is still open and will probably never be resolved without dramatic archaeological or documentary finds.”[1] Livingston’s book leads up to an exciting reveal about the former, and an exhaustive inductive process from the latter that argues—quite convincingly in this reviewer’s reading—for the site of the battle being on the Wirrall Peninsula, between the Dee and Mersey northwest of Chester, and west of modern Bromborough (whose name many have long agreed evolved from at least a ‘Brunanburh’) and somewhere around OS grid ref. SJ 310 821.

Those wanting a close look at the archaeology of the battlefield 937 will need to look elsewhere. Livingston spends 6 of the 12 chapters explicitly dealing with the dynastic evolution and conflicts of the numerous kingdoms of ninth and tenth-century British Isles (really an interplay of nearly a dozen kingdoms between the Vikings, the Irish, and those on the big island now containing Wales, Scotland, and England) that brought the forces to clash at Brunanburh. Beyond that, a large portion of the last six chapters keep referencing the various motivations and interconnections, even though it seems that the archaeology (dealt with quite briefly in ch. 11) may be tantalizingly “conclusive.” Much of the military analysis proper is about how the armies would have come together on that site, and then much of the leadership decisions and military maneuvers are largely speculative reconstructions based upon the Wirrall location and its topography. Other reviewers remain rather adamantly unconvinced, arguing for sites in Yorkshire because John of Worcester mentions the Humber in association with the battle. Livingston pretty convincingly discredits John as a source (though still uses bits of him in places as it suits his analysis), and it appears that he and Michael Wood have been at loggerheads over the location for a decade and more.

Livingston very much wants his texts to live upon the landscape and his deductions about how armies move to come to life in these pages. He proposes a four-pronged methodology, “the reconstruction toolkit” (113–117): “Follow the roads” that gets at the necessity of transport for armies; “No man is a fool” that helps explain individuals’ reactions to battle and the evolution of the fight after the forces engage (here he is very much in the tradition of Keegan’s Face of Battle); “A battle is its ground” that speaks to the strategic–topographic thinking of the combatant leaders deciding where to (try to) engage in battle; and “Men move like water” that thinks about movement towards least resistance of the armies’ clashing elements (I also can envision this like the emergent properties of bird flocks in flight). Unavoidably, far too often he has to explicitly move into speculation because there is so much about the battle, the campaign, the people, and, indeed, the whole period that we know that we don’t know—though it is hardly Livingston’s fault that we don’t and he is more than honest in constantly reminding the reader of the fact; it is, indeed, one of the major takeaways from the book.

Livingston writes with a breezy ease and this volume is clearly intended for a popular audience as Osprey has begun to extend beyond its slim Man-at-Arms/Campaign/Warrior/Vanguard/Elite/Weapon/etc. volumes into monographs. Numerous authorial asides show up that help the reader understand the historical process of interpreting sources and coming to small or mid-level conclusions (i.e., figuring out a vexing connection) to build a story, as do brief novelistic and emotive observations and the occasionally well-used mal mot of profanity that keep the reader alert and invested in what otherwise can be an interminable list of unfamiliar names and places. At times and a bit unpredictably his prose moves into the voice of atmospheric fiction—wind-swept hills as Æthelstan[2] squints out across the plain and all (Livingston also writes fantasy novels, as well as being a professor of military history at The Citadel), and I would have no compunction in handing this to an undergraduate in a course on medieval warfare, or some small extracts of it for a sections on “Dark Age” historiography (yes, he touches on that term as the bane of early medievalists  at the very opening of ch. 1).

Livingston does a really nice job showing how numerous named individuals are known from the sources and how what is “known” about their history in the ninth and tenth century is really triangulation and speculation to make a convincing whole. He often lays his cards on the table stating where he admits we don’t know, but makes it clear where his assumptions then become his givens in the argument—for example that the ‘English Ivar’ and the ‘Irish Ivar’ in the sources are both the same Ivar the Boneless of Ireland (50–53). If anything, Livingston swings the needle very far in the other direction from an earlier era of historiography who simply stated conclusions about early medieval leaders as uncontested facts. Here, at times the entire history of Wessex and Mercia seemed to be a three-generation story that we really don’t know that much about, despite them being the Alfredian core at the “birth of England” (which, by the way, Livingston pegs as the agreement between Æthelstan and the northern kings at Eamont Bridge in Cumbria in 927, rather than the arrival of the “Anglo-Saxons” in the post Roman turmoil of the sixth century).

There are admittedly a few slight problems with the book, but little that will overly frustrate its message. There are some small map label errors and sometimes the nuance in the grayscale maps is hard to interpret. The maps of the Wirrall Peninsula and the battle site itself  really need to be better: the first, a false-color lidar map with some overlayed words gives a poor rendering of the overall geography (the lidar shows the topography, but I wanted the geography more clearly set out before one gets to that point), and the second is a tight but too-sparse line drawing of the battle area (somewhat still embargoed due to further archaeological fieldwork). I ended up reading the geographical sections with Google Maps open to figure out where Livingston was talking about (though it turns out OSmaps.com is more useful). Even then, given the landscape changes and development in over a millennium, the need for a good clear map in the book of his reconstruction of the Wirrall became evident. Also, given the complexity of the numerous dynasties involved, I  would have like to see some genealogies and relational charts. Next, it is worth mentioning only about a half-dozen of the set of 34 quite beautiful color plates set in the middle of the book are actually referenced in the text, though they do form a rather nice photo essay of the whole book at a chapter subsection break just as king Æthelstan is becoming the center of the story. As noted, there’s very little military analysis of the battle itself, which is perhaps surprising given that this is an Osprey title, but not surprising given how little information the original sources ever say about it.

Overall, this is an engaging, quick read and one that those without previous convictions about the location of the battle are likely to find quite convincing. The archaeological lynchpin to the location still remains slightly under-confirmed in this book—though in a contemporaneous issue in Medieval Warfare magazine (vol. 10, no. 3 [Aug/Sep 2020]), Livingston is more forthcoming about the finds by Wirral Archaeology—though his methodology has much to offer as one contemplates other under-determined battle sites in history.

Steven A. Walton
Michigan Technological University

[1] OK, I admit that this was me, but it is nice to have been possibly insightful: Steven Walton, “Words of Technological Virtue: “The Battle of Brunanburh” and Anglo-Saxon Sword Manufacture,” Technology and Culture, 36, no. 4. (Oct., 1995): 987–999 [DOI: 10.2307/3106921] at 997n37.

[2] I like the ligature ‘Æ’ while Livingston/Osprey chooses to call him simply ‘Athelstan.’