Battle of Brunanburh

Published Sep 23, 2024, 1:00 PM

The Battle of Brunanburh took place in 937, and is often referred to as the battle that made England. But there are a LOT of questions about that battle, including how it played out and where it took place.

Research:

  • “Battle of Brunanburh.” The Anglo Saxons. https://www.theanglosaxons.com/battle-of-brunanburh-poem/
  • Anderson, Anne. “Battle of Brunanburh: The Site Argument.” Liverpool Daily Post. Sept. 18, 1937. https://www.newspapers.com/image/891771637/?match=1&terms=brunanburh
  • Blakemore, Erin. “England Was Born on This Battlefield. Why can’t historians find it?” National Geographic. May 24, 2023. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/battle-of-brunanburh-england-anglo-saxon-victory?loggedin=true&rnd=1725286067852
  • Bolton, W. F. “‘Variation’ in The Battle of Brunanburh.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 19, no. 76, 1968, pp. 363–72. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/512805
  • Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Athelstan". Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Aug. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Athelstan
  • Castelow, Ellen. “Battle of Brunanburh 937AD.” Historic UK. Nov. 25, 2014. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Battle-of-Brunanburh/
  • Cavill, P. (2022). The Battle of Brunanburh: The Yorkshire Hypothesis. English Studies, 104(1), 19–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2022.2154045
  • Cavill, Paul. “Vikings: Fear and Faith in Anglo-Saxon England.” Harper Collins. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/-sczsteve/Cavill_2001.pdf
  • “The Danes in Lancashire, or the Battle of Brunanburh, and the Probable Locality of the Conflict.” Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Advisor. Jan. 17, 1857. https://www.newspapers.com/image/392902369/?match=1&terms=brunanburh
  • Halloran, Kevin. “The Brunanburh Campaign: A Reappraisal.” The Scottish Historical Review, vol. 84, no. 218, 2005, pp. 133–48. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25529849
  • Hardwick, Charles. “Where was the Batt;e of Brunanburh fought?” The Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Advertiser. July 12, 1856. https://www.newspapers.com/image/392945292/?match=1&terms=brunanburh
  • Livingston, Michael. “Never Greater Slaughter: Brunaburh and the Birth of England.” Osprey. 2021.
  • Loxton, Alice. “What happened at the Battle of Brunanburh?” History Hit. Oct. 25, 2019. https://www.historyhit.com/what-happened-at-the-battle-of-brunanburh/
  • McDonald, J.E. “Stockport and the Battle of Brunanburh.” Wimslow and Alderley and Knutsford Advertiser. Sept. 22, 1933. https://www.newspapers.com/image/887178425/?match=1&terms=brunanburh
  • Neilson, Geo. “Brunanburh and Burnswork.” The Scottish Historical Review, vol. 7, no. 25, 1909, pp. 37–55. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25518148
  • Sartore, Melissa. “Who was the first king of England? The answer is … complicated.” National Geographic. May 2, 2023. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/first-king-of-england-aethelstan?loggedin=true&rnd=1725286069300
  • Whitelock, Dorothy. "Alfred". Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 Aug. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alfred-king-of-Wessex
  • WIRRAL ARCHAEOLOGY. “The search for the Battle of Brunanburh, is over.” Liverpool University Press Blog. October 21, 2019. https://liverpooluniversitypress.blog/2019/10/22/the-search-for-the-battle-of-brunanburh-is-over/
  • “Wirral Archaeology and the Search for the Battle of Brunanburh.” Wirral Archaeology. https://www.wirralarchaeology.org/pages/wirral-archaeology-and-the-search-for-the-battle-of-brunanburh/
  • “Walton-Le-Dale in the Olden Time.” The Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Advertiser. June 20, 1863. https://www.newspapers.com/image/392939927/?match=1&terms=brunanburh
  • Wood, M. (2013). Searching for Brunanburh: The Yorkshire Context of the ‘Great War’ of 937. Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 85(1), 138–159. https://doi.org/10.1179/0084427613Z.00000000021

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I don't know how today's topic got on my list. Yeah, I asked you this and you were like, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know how it did. And I will confess to you. It's a bear. Like it was a bear to research, it's a bear to sort out all the stuff because it's a lot of like proto England things going on where stuff goes by seven different names yep. So you've got to try to pick one and run with it and hope that you've chosen correctly. It's like the cup of a carpenter in history form by. Yeah. But we're talking about the Battle of Brunnenburgh and it's first of all, it's an old English poem that appears in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, but that poem tells the story of an actual battle that took place in nine thirty seven. It is often referred to as the Battle that made England. There are so many questions about this battle, including how it played out and where it took place, those questions and the debates about theories to answer them have become their own interesting story. We're going to talk about that near the end of the episode. Uh, it is quite fascinating. We'll talk a little bit too, and behind the scenes about the claims that this one was forgotten and what that really means. But we're going to tackle the Battle of Brunnenburgh and hopefully get most of the details right. When the Battle of Brunnenburgh took place, there were multiple groups jockeying for control of what is now northern England, with multiple different kings involved. And then this is further complicated by the fact that within these groups were subgroups made up of alliances as people tried to strengthen their forces. Even who these subgroups are also complicated because we have the Anglo Saxons. Of course, that is why the whole thing is related and the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. Just that term though, has its own problem. Yeah, the term Anglo Saxon can incorporate a lot of different Germanic peoples that all came to Britain. This was at a time that just a group of cultures, we're all operating under one umbrella and one ruler, and then there was all just a whole bunch of other people who were united against the Anglo Saxons. There's a lot of history that leads up to this battle. We're going to start centuries earlier to try to give a broad overview of how things progressed. This is kind of the same thing that I ran into with Eustace the Monk, where I Keith needed to go, needed to go one step earlier and earlier to get a full sense of how things developed. Yeah, and this is obviously going to be a very what I like to call a quick and dirty version of this history. So prior to the fifth century, there were Roman forces controlling Britain, although there were non Roman people who lived there. Those are typically called the Gaels, Picts, and Britons. But the Romans left in the early four hundreds and that created a power vacuum that other groups rushed in to fill, often through violent conquest. So the Angles, Jutes and Saxons were the major players in this move westward from the European continent to gain a foothold in the area of the British Isles. This resulted in multiple kingdoms being established on the island of Great Britain, Wessex in the south, Mercia in the central part of the island called the Midlands, East Anglia to the east, and Northumbria to the north of Mercia. This was really not a peaceful arrangement, and the borders of all these kingdoms were frequently in a state of conflict, particularly the border that separated Mercia from Northumbria. In Northumbria was York, which was considered a key location for any power that wanted to control the northern part of the island. By the eighth and ninth centuries, there were even more groups arriving in Britain hoping to capitalize on the available resources there and claim land for themselves. And all of these disparate groups were not only divided by their desires for power and wealth, there was also a spiritual ideology split among them that made any efforts at international relations really fraught by judgment. So, while the Saxons were largely Christian by this point, some of the cultures in play were pagan and the Saxons had come to view Paganism as backwards and kind of a primitive way of life. Initially, all of this bad relationship went very badly for the Saxons and their lands and their numbers were diminished under the leadership of King Alfred the Great, and then as Danish forces advanced on Alfred and the Saxons, the Saxon footprint grew quite small as they receded into the west, with only Wessex remaining. But then by the late ninth century, Alfred was able to kind of put together an army and push back a little bit when he made some groundback. Alfred was also pretty good at establishing ally ships and managing diplomatic efforts. He understood he did not necessarily have the manpower or the foothold, so while he was not able to regain all of the Saxon holdings he had once had, he did manage to bring a degree of stability to the area before his death in eight ninety nine. Alfred, by the way, is pretty interesting. He might be an episode on his own at some point, but germane to this story. Alfred's son, Edward the Elder, was next on the throne and he ruled until nine twenty four. He was able to further expand the Saxon lands again, and there was amidst all of this definitely a generational familial gold to get all of the Saxon kingdoms together united under one king who would be a descendant of Alfred. As the Saxons were gaining ground, though in the eight hundreds, there were also Norse invaders taking coastal lands in northern Britain and Ireland. Those territories would come under the rule of the Earls of Northumberland, Norse earls of Viking descent. By the time of the battle we're talking about today, they were ruled by an Leaf Guthrison. Scotlands, which at the time was known as the Kingdom of Alba, was also consolidating its power as the various groups there had come together for their mutual benefit. King Constantine the Second was ruler of Scotland and Strathclyde, which that just south of Scotland in the Lowlands, was ruled by Owen. The boundaries of all of these kingdoms and the fifes within them, as well as the Anglo Saxon Lands were just in a state of almost continuous flux. Everybody wanted to become the dominant power. Yeah, there was just constant pushing of boundaries literally of like, but if I just take over some more of this land, I will expand my power. So Ethelstan of Wessex, who was the grandson of Alfred, ascended to the Anglo Saxon throne in nine twenty five, becoming ruler of Wessex, Mercia and East Anglia. He was born sometime in the eight nineties, and he had been raised in Mercia by his aunt ethel Fled. She had the title of Lady of the Mercians, and she had ruled there and was a very active participant in the fighting to gain and retain land and power. Sometimes she and Edward are talked about almost as like a duo at this time, her brother Edward being the person on the throne after Alfred. So all of this is to say it was not as though Ethelstan had been raised away from the persistent conflict that just automatically came with being part of the ruling family. Ethel Fled, his aunt, who raised him, died in nine eighteen, after Ethelstan had reached adulthood. By the time he became king at the age of thirty, Ethelstan was keenly aware that he had to be firm in that role to deal with the constant challengers to his power from both without and within. At one point, claims that he was an illegitimate claimant to the throne led to an unsuccessful plot by another noble to try to blind him. Within his kingdom, though he appears to have been a pretty even handed ruler. He made just laws. For example, they were intended to provide material care for the poor, to handle juveniles involved in crimes in ways that recognized their youth, and didn't treat them as adults when they were being sentenced. Although he had detractors in the corridors of power in the first decade of his rule, he won the loyalty of the people, and early in his reign, Ethelstan invaded York, which was held by Vikings at the time, and this was to prevent the Vikings from moving any farther into Anglo Saxon territory, but it also sent a very clear message that Ethelstan was ready, willing and able to engage in military conflict. To protect and expand his kingdom, he further consolidated the groups that had been united under Alfred and Edward, developing the Kingdom of Angleland. And to make all of this work, he had all of the leaders of the smaller kingdoms and fifes under him swear their loyalty to him on paper. Coming up, we'll talk about all the suspicion and intrigue that ultimately led to the Battle of Brennenborough for us who will pause, though for a sponsor break. The entirety of the British isles during this time has been described as pretty messy by various historians, and that's accurate. There were so many men and various icons of power angling for position. Each island was fractured by various factions in some way, and Ethelstan was pretty open about wanting to unite all of these varying kingdoms of Britain under his rule. So the other leaders who were in the picture always suspected that he might invade, even if there were agreements or tradees in place, and that made them reluctant to abide by any such agreements. And that's kind of how things next escalated. Ethelstan invaded Scotland and Strathclyde in nine thirty four, following a broken pledge made by the rulers of those countries to be loyal to Ethelstan and not befriend the Norsemen. Probably Again, this history is open to a bit of interpretation due to the sparse and disparate accounts, but Constantine is said in one account to have married his daughter off to anlav gulfridson, so if that was the case, there was clearly an effort being made to develop a relationship between those two kingdoms, and Constantine paid a steep price when it came to angering the Anglo Saxons with this move. The year after Ethelstan launched this invasion, Constantine io ended up swearing allegiance to Ethelstan, as did Owen of Strathclyde, having both surrendered to the Saxon forces. There is another angle on this that really shows what a tangled situation was happening. At the very beginning of Ethelstan's reign, he had married his sister off to an Irish Norse king, Cythric, trying to work out his own agreement, but he was really not okay with other people trying to do the same thing after he decided the Norse were his enemies. This shift happened after Cythric died and Gutfrith of Ivar, his brother, took the Northumbrian throne. Ethelstan did not want to make an alliance or an agreement with Guthfrith, although the specifics of exactly why are really unknown, so that then transferred onto his successor, on Guthhferson. All this does pretty clearly evidence the fact that Ethelston was making his decisions based on what would protect and expand his own kingdom. Though so that allegiance with Constantine and Owen that he made them swear after he invaded only lasted a couple of years because everyone knew that Ethelstan was going to be unstoppable if he went unchallenged. So in nine thirty seven, Constantine and Owen, who were related, formed an alliance with Onlaf Guthferson, who ruled Viking Northumbria and Dublin at the time. As an aside, we've been calling him on Lafft, but you will sometimes see his first name listed as Oloff instead of Onlaft just if you are looking online. That's the same person. And the plan of this little group was to take on Ethelstan, regain their power in land, and seize parts of England for themselves. They also just wanted to stop Ethelstan in his tracks, because they knew he was a very real threat to their own kingdoms. So at this point all of these different power players had formed up into two groups, ethel Stan, leader of the Anglo Saxons, and everybody else who wanted to take him down. The alert that there was a Viking invasion fleet on the Ireland facing coast went out in August of nine thirty seven. This is recorded in John of Worcester's account Chronicle of Chronicles as quote, I'm luff, the Pagan king of the Irish and many other islands, incited by his father in law Constantine, king of the Scots, entered the mouth of the River Humber with a strong fleet. But this account is one that was written in the twelfth century, almost two hundred years after this whole thing actually happened, so it's not necessarily a reliable source. Yeah, there is a lot of discussion among historians of John of Wooster's account, which in many cases has kind of been taken at face value, but that may have caused some confusion to the historical record. But regardless, Ethelstan is said to have been a little bit slow in responding to this news of an army of newly Allied forces landing on Saxon territory, and this has been interpreted in a number of different ways. While it obviously would seem at first glance like this was just the result of being taken unawares by the attack, some historians have put forth the idea that this was also a strategic psychological move on Ethelstan's part, as he wanted his enemies to believe he was taking his time to amass a huge response force. And this is where we get to the Battle of Brenenborough. Although at the time people just called it the Great Battle, the battle itself is believed to have happened on a piece of land that the various parties all agreed to, but we do not know where that piece of land was. There have been a lot of theories over the years, and many historians have pieced together as much information as they can sifted through clues in the epic poem to try to triangulate which places seem like the most likely possibilities. This will probably not be conclusively known unless some major archaeological find happens, but people are compelled to just keep looking because this was such a decisive battle, and we will get to some of those theories about where it might have been In a bit. We also mentioned at the top of the show that the very nature of the battle, meaning the style in which it was fought, has also been debated over the centuries. So one possibility, and kind of the most popular, was that they engaged using the shield wall approach, meaning that each side would assemble, as the name suggests, in a formation so that their shields formed all wall that the approaching opponent would have to breach to strike. Meanwhile, any attacking side would form a similar wall, but instead of holding stationary they would be on the move, pushing forward, and then this would become a very close combat situation where each side would be trying to find the gaps at the bottom or the tops of the shields or in between shields as men shifted so that they could stab a spear or sword through. It is a lot of pushing back and forth. If you ever watch historical reenactments of this, to me, it looks utterly miserable and terrifying, because it's like being trapped in a space with people trying to stab you while you are also trying to stab them, and nobody can really see clearly what's going on. This is the most commonly accepted take on how this conflict was fought, largely because it's how it was described in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. The battle itself is described in the first three stanzas of that poem, which are these. In this year, King Ethelstan, lord of earls Ring, giver of warriors, and his brother as well, Edmund Etheling achieved everlasting glory in battle with the edges of Swords near Brunneborough. They cleaved the masked shields, hewed the battle wood, the relics of hammers of the Heir of Edward, as it suited their heritage, so that they often in battle defended their lands, treasures and homesteads against every one of the hateful foemen were felled the Scottish people, the ship's sailors faded, were destroyed. The fields grew slickened with the blood of men. After the sun passed upwards over the earth in the morning time, the remarkable star, the bright candle of God, the eternal Lord, until that noble creation sank to its rest. There lay many warriors seized by the spear. The northern men over their arrowed shields Likewise, the Scottish also were we saddened by war. The West Saxons in their ranks rode down the long long day, the hateful people chopping down the battle fleers from behind so sorely with sharply ground swords. Bless you Tracy for reading that. That is only a small part. It is like a seventy three line poem, so it's not like massive and epic, but it's long, and as described in those stanzas, ethel Stan's forces were ultimately successful. They were able to find those gaps between shields and had the stamina to keep pushing through an entire day of battle. Once the shield wall of the invading forces was really breached by Ethelstan's army, Constantine, the Second and an Lofts armies scattered in a chaos, and their respective leaders returned home. In the end, according to the Anglo Saxon Chronicle narrative, five kings, seven earls, and an army too large to count had all been killed. After the battle, Ethelston proclaimed himself the king of all Britain Rex Toodius Britannia, even though this had not resulted in all the kingdoms of the British isles being brought together. So while by some accounting it was technically a victory for Ethelstone, it had also depleted his resources so much that he could not even think about expanding the kingdom any further. He only lived a couple of more years, though, so even if he hadn't exhausted his possibilities in the Battle of Brunnenburg, he still probably wouldn't have been able to do a whole lot in terms of military rallying and land expansion. He died on October twenty seventh, nine thirty nine. We're going to pause here to hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going, and when we come back, we're going to talk about all of the efforts to figure out the details and location of Brennanburgh and how historians have been in heated debate about it for a while. This battle is referenced and talked about in dozens of texts from the era and after it, but they still give us precious little detail, and the details that do exist often contradict one another from narrative to narrative. The name Brunnenburgh is even given differently in various sources. I think there's something like nine different names given for this field of battle, but this isn't the only difference in accounts of the battle, which is part of why there are a lot of ideas about where it happened and how. And while the battle is usually noted as having happened in the autumn of nine thirty seven, some writings place it in the summer. This seems to be because it's like that August, September, October time, which you know, even today people will call different seasons. There's also the possibility that the shield wall form of battlefield engagement may not have been used. It may have involved a cavalry charge that's not proven though, and it might have involved trench warfare. For example, the Norse army is said to have dug trenches and reinforced them with timber as part of their preparation for this conflict, but that doesn't come up in all of the accounts. So many many questions surround this battle, even though it is considered incredibly important and decisive in forming the boundaries of the countries in the British Isles as we know them today. The main thing most people would like to know more than how the battle played out is where the heck had happened. And there have been more than three dozen possible places that have been put forth as possibilities. We will not go over all of them, but we will talk about a couple of the most popular and most hotly debated of them. One of the big problems, of course, is that the place names have changed. But another problem relates to our recent episode on the Doomsday Book. There wasn't a comprehensive survey of England's until William the Conqueror had one done and turned it into usable data in ten eighty six. That was almost one hundred and fifty years after this battle happened. Yeah, places had names, and there were some documentations, but in terms of like just comprehensively making a list and surveying everything and laying it out, there really wasn't. In twenty twenty two, Paul Cavill of the University of Nottingham published a paper detailing what he called the Yorkshire hypothesis. And this paper is actually a rebuttal to the work of Athelstan historian Michael Wood, who wrote several articles about it starting in nineteen eighty, including the twenty thirteen article Searching for Brennenborough, the Yorkshire context of the Great War of nine thirty seven, and all of his work. All of Wood's work suggests that Yorkshire is the location of Brennenborough. Cavill's paper deconstructs Wood's work point by point, noting, quote, the propositions of Woods are um are not easily reduced to simple terms that can be enumerated, but for clarity that is here attempted. So then he goes through all of these, and one such point made by Cavill plays out as follows quote. The prima facie argument for a Yorkshire site of the battle depends very substantially on the account that records the Hiberno Norse forces landing in the Humber, originating in John of Worcester's Chronicle. There are many reasons why John of Worcester's Humber Entry account of Brennanburgh is suspect. It is, for example, just one theory of many advanced by early writers as to where the battle might have taken place, but given much more prominence than any of these, partly because John was an influential historian and his work was used by others. In addition, it has been shown that the formulaic features of John's writing might suggest that he resorted to assumption based on parallels elsewhere in his history to fill a puzzling gap in his and other's knowledge. That's a problem. I mentioned earlier that the John of Worcester account a lot of people have run with, and now there are a lot more people going yeah, but why did we assume he was accurate? Over time, that Yorkshire hypothesis, which for a while had a lot of support, has kind of fallen out of favor. The most supported theory today places the location of the battle on the Wirral Peninsula in northwest England, and specifically near the town of Bromborough in Cheshire County. This peninsula is bounded by the Liverpool Bay to the north, d Estuary on the west and Mercy Estuary on the east side. This is a location that would have been accessible for troops approaching England by sea from both Ireland and Scotland. This location, being the likely side of the battle, got some support in recent years from archaeological finds of weapon remnants. That effort was headed up by a volunteer project called worl Archaeology, just collected a wide range of objects on the peninsula from a span of time. According to their website, they've collected quote artifacts spanning over to millennium, which includes objects from the early medieval period and a great deal of iron. The Worl Archaeology site says of their project, quote, we know that locating ancient battlefields is an extremely challenging enterprise, and we also acknowledge that this will be a long term endeavor and that it will take many years to collect and identify material before any assessment or judgment can be made. But we believe that we have all the physical and topographical features present, combined with a reliable theoretical assessment of the political landscape of the period and logistical issues that would have been overcome. This slighte of thinking has also been included in the work of historian Michael Livingston, who wrote the books The Battle of Brunnenburgh, A Casebook and Never Greater Slaughter Brunnenburgh and The Birth of England. In both of these books, though through different approaches, Livingston makes the case for the world location. Livingston lays out details from all of the texts that reference the battle to note the parallels in topography to existing places. This is something that others have done as well and ended up coming to different conclusions as Livingston himself or the situation quote, no map, medieval or modern has a place clearly marked Brunnenborough on it, much less the other clues our sources give us about the battle. As a result, people have been free to theorize its location almost anywhere in Britain, and they have. Livingston also breaks down how the search methods for finding Brennanburgh have kind of fallen into two groups. The people who work with a theory about what the campaign's target was to determine the most likely sight, and then the people who try to work from noted place names and narrative accounts to try to match them up with existing places or features of the landscape and then figure out what the goal of the whole thing was. Livingston is very open that he is in the latter group, and through his work analyzing the various available texts, he comes up with a checklist of attributes that the brennan Borough site needed to have, including that it needed to be on the west coast of Britain, it needed to be near an uncultivated field, and that it needed to be near a river. That had a water crossing. There are other items on the checklist. One of them is that it has to be near some sort of hill, because brunn my understanding is is a reference usually to a hill, so it's like saying brennan Burgh is like saying a borough near a hill. Livingston ties all of the items on his checklist back to specific details in various narrative accounts, and usually ones that can kind of be verified by crossover information from other ones, and his conclusion through all of this is that it was on the world with the archaeologis finds there as supporting evidence. Although these papers we've been talking about that hash out the whereabouts of the site are recent, this discussion and sometimes argument has been going on for a very long time. Though there are often mentions of the Battle of Brunnenborough being forgotten for a while. The battle of where it happened has been active in newspapers at least since the mid eighteen hundreds. One article appearing in the Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Advertiser in eighteen fifty six, under the heading where was the Battle of Brennenborough fought, opens with a plea to the paper's editor by a man named Charles Hardwick, and it says, quote, Sir, I was somewhat surprised to perceive in your last paper a letter signed by a subscriber to the forthcoming History of Preston, in which the writer takes exception to my announcement at the dinner of the Historic Society that I had concluded, after much investigation, that the Battle of Brennenborough might have been fought in this neighborhood. As I consider a newspaper scarcely the proper medium for the discussion of such a question, I should have declined replying to your correspondent, and left my evidences to exert what influence they might upon public opinion. But that an erroneous impression as to my motive might have resulted from such a course, I conceive it would be logically sufficient for me to request that my position may be judged upon after I have published my reasons. I will, however, believing your correspondent's advice to be both courteous and sincere for his satisfaction, inform him that I am perfectly aware of the difficulties he mentions, and likewise of the discrepancies to which he alludes he is wrong, however, in supposing the site is at all positively determined upon by any authority. The most probable hypothesis at present rests upon the merest conjectures, and Bromborough on the World Peninsula is not a new contender in these arguments either. In nineteen thirty seven, a woman named Anne Anderson, identifying herself as the Honorable Secretary of the Bromborough Society, wrote a letter to the Liverpool Daily Post that makes it sound as though that group was operating on the belief that Bromborough was the spot. Anderson has, it appears, written to the paper before with this information, and that letter got a great deal of response. So Anne writes, quote, it may interest your readers to hear my line of argument. She makes several points. One that there was probably just one Brunnenburgh in nine thirty seven, quote, just as there is but one Bromborough today. Two that the d and the mercy which bound the world have long been embarkation and debarkation points to and from Ireland. Three that there is a German map from eighteen eighty that places Brunnenburgh on the Wirral right about where Bromborough is and four that if you work through the logistics of how an invasion from the forces involved had to work, they probably met on the Isle of Man and then made their way over and that made the Wirral the most logical place. Anne Anderson would have likely loved the archaeological work that has gone on in recent years in the area, but even today there are still plenty of detractors that feel that the evidence at hand is not enough for certainty. It may remain a history mystery forever, but in the meantime people will keep digging, literally and figuratively. I yearn for a moment when there's in unearthed where it's like, no, it's inscribed and it says is this spear made for the Battle of Brennenborough. Yep, that's probably not going to happen, But in the meantime I have two pieces of listener mail. The first is from our listener Kimberly, and it's about one of my favorite topics, waffles. It also features a dog that like, I want to steal your dog. It's the cutest man a very cute kitty as well. Kimberly writes, High Holly and Tracy, I've been thinking about sending this email for four years, ever since you first released your waffle episode, and since it was just the Saturday Classic, it feels like my reminder to finally sit down and write. You only just mentioned at the end waffle type foods from other countries, including Italian pizzeles. My mom's family is of Italian heritage and we make pizzels every year for Christmas, along with several other Italian foods. You say in the episode that pizzels are deep fried. While I can't speak for every recipe from every region of Italy throughout history, I have never personally known them to be made that way. We use a special iron with long handles that's placed over a burner and turned halfway through to cook both sides. It sounds a lot like the earlier version of waffle irons that you talked about. Actually, the result is a patterned wafer type cookie about four to five inches in diameter. We always just eat them like a plain cookie, but I have seen recipe that roll the pizzel into a cone and call for a filling. Baking them is a time consuming process as you make one at a time. Since multiple family members own pizzel irons. We will try to get two of them going at once to speed up the process. My aunt bought an electric iron a few years ago and absolutely loves it. It makes more than one at a time, like a segmented waffle maker, so baking does go faster. And then Kimberly shares pictures of her pizzel iron and her very cute dog that I kind of want to steal, who is named Luna Lovegood, and her rescued cat, Nubia Tuesday. The cat, she says, wants to be held twenty four to seven, and we adopted the dog four years ago to keep her company. We specifically chose a dog who had a positive history with cats. I had visions of them snuggling up together napping in the sun. It turns out the cat hates all other animals. Still, after four years, she hisses and growls every time she sees the dog. I keep hoping for a miraculous attitude change. Thanks for your time, Giberlate listen. You can't always predict how animals are going to react to other animals, even if they've had a history. You just never know. I love it. Thank you for sharing your pizzel info. I fully believe that they're made in different ways by different people, as are most things. It's kind of like the way you can say you make you know almost almost anything. Like listen, ask how somebody makes barbecue in the US, and you'll get a different answer depending on where you're at, and people will be angry about it. Some people will be angry. I just want to eat all the delicious stuff. How do you make it great? Can you make it for me? I will say. After we ran that episode as a classic, one of my good friends texted me was like, I want to have a waffle frolic and I was like, yeah, me too, so we'll bring it back. I'm still on it. I also wanted to answer our listener, Lance, who wrote us a short email to ask if I was going to be at dragon Con this year. Lance, Since Holly, we plan on going to dragon Con on Sunday, September first. We will be going to many of the Star Wars events, but if it works out, we would like to see you as well, if you are attending and available. I didn't see this until after Dragon Con. I kind of did a drive by version of dragon Con this year. We went for like a couple hours a day, and I tended to like hide out in a bar. We went to the dealer's room one day, which was almost a two hour wait just to get in. Oh, it was like yeah, it was it was a little bananas. And then we just kind of did that when we were very tired. So I just I've been so busy lately that I haven't had like the mental or emotional energy to go see a lot of people in a crowd of people that is a big sea that's very overwhelming. Well, and not being local to Atlanta anymore, I am, it's not on my list of things to do. But even when I was in Atlanta, the amount that Dragon con grew between the time that I started going and the last time that I went, Like it got to a point where I was like this too much. Yeah, and we're definitely back to beyond pre COVID levels, Like you know, it like many other things, like the travel industry had like obviously the gap where nobody was doing that and they had canceled it, and then like the post the post lockdown surge has just been ceaselessly growing. So it's a lot. It's still you know, has fun. I love seeing friends and stuff, but I get a little easily overwhelmed times. Anyway, if you would like to write to us, ask us if we'll be a place, I may or may not see it in a timely manner, but you could still try. You could do that at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. 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Stuff You Missed in History Class

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