How did the ancient social bond of loyalty between leader and follower fare as a time-honoured theme of vernacular poetry when straightforward adherence to an ancestral set of aristocratic warrior values had become overlaid with an extended network of public relationships and an individual's concern for his spiritual fate? The Battle of Maldon may seem deceptively simple as our principal evidence. But its late-tenth-century character cannot be adequately appreciated without an understanding of the changed social outlook it was reflecting and without a recognition of its artistry as a branch of the ‘mixed’ state of verse which developed when, not later than the ninth century, the symbolic system was adapted to human existence redefined by Christ's redeeming incarnation and ascension. These twin lines of enquiry, then, will be followed in this chapter, including discussion of some features in the ninth-century poetic ‘mix’ which have not yet been pointed out in this book.

The declaration of heroism by Byrhtwold signals for us the new points of reference for behaviour in a crisis. A trusty retainer of probably relatively humble origins, his invocation was less a standard appeal to corporate aristocratic values than a call for his companions to exercise the virtue which he, as an individual, sensed was directly relevant to the predicament he and they were in after the death of their leader, Byrhtnoth. Byrhtwold exerted leadership not by invoking an inherited code of experience through a generalizing word such as æfre or a, ‘always’, but by setting a personal example of applying to himself a precept directed to his ‘us’ in ‘our’ (ure 313b) particular desperate circumstances.