LEWISTON — It was a bloody battle and a disastrous one for the nobles, but the lessons from Maldon in Essex, England, more than a 1,000 years ago have not been lost to history.
Students from Bates College on Monday brought the battle to life for about 400 history students at Lewiston High School.
Dressed as Danish Viking raiders and Anglo-Saxon warriors, two groups of Bates students who used their May term at the college to study medieval re-enactment clashed in violent fashion on the high school’s football and soccer field.
The re-enactment was based on a poem written by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon author from the time that highlights the focus and emphasis the ancestors of the English placed on honor, nobility and fair play.
As the story goes, the Anglo-Saxons were outnumbered and facing 93 ships of Viking raiders. The Vikings, however, were at a tactical disadvantage: They had to cross single file a narrow band of land surrounded by high tides.
Refusing to surrender to the Vikings and pay a tribute or a bribe to avoid bloodshed, the Anglo-Saxon leader Brithnoth elected to allow the Vikings access to the battleground, even though he knew his forces would be overwhelmed. The move was made after the Vikings appealed to Brithnoth’s sense of honor and requested a fair fight based on a level playing field. And while Brithnoth lost the battle and his life, the story has long been viewed as an example of the English commitment to the principles of fairness and nobility at all costs.
Corky Harrer, a Bates student from Minneapolis, said he and his classmates had been working about four weeks on the re-enactment, including making costumes and writing a script based on the ancient poem, titled “The Battle of Maldon.”
Some of the lines, Harrer said, came directly from the poem. “But others, while you try to use the tone of the original poem, you just kind of make them up,” Harrer said. He said the performance at the high school was a highlight of the class.
In explaining the script and the poem to the high school students, Harrer said the author, while anonymous, was certainly “biased” toward the Anglo-Saxon side of the story.
The Anglo-Saxons in the poem are all named, Harrer said. Not so for the Vikings, for whom the Bates students had to come up with names.
Lewiston High School history teacher Kate Chase said the re-enactment was a hit with the students, who seemed to be paying close attention based on their questions.
“I think it helps seeing it happen before their eyes,” Chase said. “I think if I’m just up there talking to them, they might not get it as much, but having the visual and the script, because it the added to the poem, helped a lot.”
The re-enactment was a project of the college’s Harward Center for Community Partnerships. It will be performed again Thursday for Bates students and faculty on campus.
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