A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (30 page)

The eighth century has been called the ‘age of the minsters’, as it was also the flourishing time of the emporia, at home and abroad – London and Alcuin’s York in England, Dorestad in Frisia. The merchant centres diminished almost to extinction during the ninth century and many of the great churches disappeared (the first abbey at Peterborough was destroyed in the 870s). This coincided with an upsurge in Viking incursions.

The invaders, raiders and origins

Early contacts of the Scandinavian homelands with Western Europe and the Mediterranean involved trading in the traditional products of the region, such as amber, skins, furs and, no doubt, slaves. It has been argued that Sutton Hoo and some of the objects found there indicate links between the East Anglian dynasty and Sweden from the very beginnings of the Anglo-Saxon period.
Beowulf
tells of a raiding expedition from southern Sweden to the lands of the Rhine basin dated to the sixth century. In the fifth century Swedish settlements on the island of Gotland were reaching across the Baltic. Here, in the region of Stockholm and in parts of Denmark, huge finds of Islamic coins running into the thousands testify to vigorous exchanges, whether by way of war or of trade in the ninth and tenth centuries.

Of course, the prime military secret of the sea rovers’ success was the long double-ended ship that they used, with dragon-headed prow and (sometimes stern) posts. Developed over centuries, it had evolved by the eighth century into one of the most beautiful of human artefacts, as is clear from the famous Gokstad ship. This was an open long boat, clinker built (that is, with overlapped planking, secured with iron nails), upwards of 45 feet (14 m) long and powered by a square-rigged sail and some forty oarsmen.

For the victims a Viking raid was terrifying enough, even without the Hollywood-style horned helmets of tradition. If they wore helmets at all, and hardly any have been unearthed by archaeologists, these were most probably conical in shape, like those shown on the Bayeux Tapestry. The raiders struck fear wherever they went and, thanks to England’s many rivers, whose meandering reaches were navigable to the shallow-draft dragon ships far inland, were often able to achieve near total surprise – especially when they were able to seize horses. Grave goods in Danish burial sites often include stirrups and harness fittings, suggesting that Danish Vikings at least were experienced horsemen, capable of hard riding across country. In 860 a ‘great pirate force’ crossed the Channel from raiding in Francia and appeared before the West Saxon capital of Winchester, which lies 12 miles (19 km) inland. Winchester was saved from the sack by a combined force drawn from the counties of Hampshire, under its ealdorman Osric, and Berkshire under Ealdorman Æthelberht. The raiders sailed back to their interrupted campaign in Francia.

The Vikings’ reputation has been sanitized over the past thirty years or so, and attention has turned to their home lives and trading activities in Dublin, York or Scandinavia. From an English point of view they represented a murderous marauding banditry. Back home they were those adventurous seafaring heroes bringing back wealth and honour to their communities. Silver hoards more than 100 pounds (45 kg) in weight have been found buried in the Viking
homelands. Why is not obvious. One supposes that enemy raids were not to be feared here! Maybe, in the absence of bank vaults, burial was the only solution. Julian Richards, in his
Blood of the Vikings
, intriguingly suggests that ‘maybe it was just simply showing off, burying so much wealth being the ultimate way to demonstrate to your neighbours that you had silver to spare.’ One thinks of the ‘potlatch’ ceremonies among the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest Pacific coast of North America, in which great quantities of wealth, measured in blankets, are disposed of in competitive status displays; in another type of potlatch valuable sheets of copper were actually ‘destroyed’ when sunk out at sea.

The origin of the term ‘viking’ (generally spelt with a capital ‘V’) is debated. One theory derives it from the southern stretch of the Oslofjord, known as the Vik, and the supposition that the first ‘Vikings’ came from there. According to another view, it was used in the Scandinavian homelands to describe (usually) young ‘pirates’, who went ‘a-viking’ for a season or two in search of adventure and riches, under a captain or chieftain of a ship or flotilla. For as long as the leader was successful his followers gave allegiance, very much as a household warrior did to his lord. As always the point of view is vital. In the villages and fjords to which they returned laden with wealth and treasures, the term denoted adventurous young tearaways, violent perhaps but above all heroic members of the war band, a credit to the homeland. Their victims, possibly prejudiced, did not share this view. For a start, profit and plunder were the purpose of their ventures, not heroism. The raiders preferred to operate from a fortified encampment from which they could pillage and terrorize an unarmed (it was to be hoped) population and to whose protection they could return should fighting men come on the scene. In the words of Patrick Wormald, the Vikings, if not actually mad, ‘were probably bad and certainly dangerous to know’.
²
In any case the victims had various words for their oppressors: ‘heathen’, ‘pagans’, ‘North men’, even ‘Danes’were just a few.
In a famous entry for the reign of King Beorhtric (d. 802), the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
speaks of the first of ‘the Danish men who sought out the land of the English race’.
³

Perhaps the terminology hardly mattered, since in both the English Danelaw and French Normandy the raiders did eventually settle in conquered territories. Little wonder if Frankish and English chronicles tended to view the Vikings or
Nortmanni
as a scourge from God as punishment for the failure of their societies to live according to his precepts. Did not the Old Testament warn ‘Out of the north shall an evil break forth upon . . . the land’ (Jeremiah 1:14)?

The northern world: Ireland, Isle of Man, Orkneys

The Vikings’ countries of origin are not always clear, though the ‘Vikings’ of Russia came from Sweden, while the colonizers of Iceland towards the end of our period, and from there to Greenland and then on to ‘Vinland’, the Scandinavian colony on the mainland of North America, were mostly Norwegians and of Norwegian descent. The same is true of the Scandinavian populations of Ireland, the Orkney and Shetland Islands, the Hebrides, the Faroes and the Isle of Man. Excavations in the 1990s by a team from the University of York at the village of Tarbat, on the north-east coast of Scotland, revealed smashed sculpture and charred building rubble together with sword-hacked skeletal remains, all of which together pointed to a religious site – a Pictish monastery probably – sacked by Vikings.

Ireland soon came under attack. The written sources record Vikings raiding no fewer than fifty sites, but one assumes many more places suffered without benefit of memorial. For the general memory endured. Written in the twelfth century, the
Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaibh
(‘Wars of the Irish with the Foreigners’) keened
over the depredations of ‘this ruthless, wrathful, foreign, purely pagan people . . . upon the suffering folk of Ireland . . . men and women, lay and priest, noble and base, old and young . . .’
⁴
Sometimes, regrettably, it seems that Viking followed in the footsteps of Christian. The rival kings of the island and their war bands traded rapine and slaughter with an even hand, recruiting ‘the foreigners’ as mercenaries both on land and sea. Between the 840s and the 940s the monastery at Clonmacnoise in the heart of Ireland was ravaged six times by the Vikings and eleven times by Christian cohorts.
⁵
Expelled from Ireland in 902, the ‘foreigners’ returned in 917; lured by slave trading, the Scandinavian presence was reestablished on the river estuaries at Dublin, Wexford, Cork and Limerick.

In Britain, too, slavery was endemic. In the west ‘stock’ was acquired in raiding among Welsh princes, in tribute paid by these princes to ‘foreign’ raiders, by princely claimants sometimes allied with the slaving fleets,
⁶
and from cross-border raiding between England and Wales. In the 1060s and 1070s Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester campaigned long and hard to stop the slave trade from Bristol to Ireland.
⁷
From the late ninth century Anglo-Saxon wills contain instructions about the freeing of the testator’s slaves, while the Lichfield Gospels contains some such texts in Welsh for the early tenth century. Apparently the powerful Wessex dynasty of Godwine profited from the trade in the eleventh century.

The European dimension

From the 780s or 790s, when three shiploads of sea raiders landed on the south coast and pillaged into Wessex, to 1016, when Cnut of the royal house of Denmark became king in England, the country was subject to sporadic attacks of plunder and settlement of greater or lesser intensity from ‘Viking’ sea rovers. The period of the attacks can be divided between the ‘First Viking Age’, from about
780 to about 900 and the ‘Second Viking Age’ from the 980s onwards. This chapter deals with the first,
chapter 11
with the second. During that first age England shared a common fate with the coasts of Scotland and the Isles, the kingdoms of Ireland, the territories of the Carolingian empire and its successor states, and the river networks of Russia from Novgorod to Kiev and from west to east. According to the early twelfth-century
Povest Vremennykh Let
(‘Account of Years Gone By’), also known as the
Chronicle of Nestor
or
Kiev Chronicle
, which covers events in the land of Rus from the 850s to the 1110s and is the only European vernacular annals to match the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
in scope, the country owed its name to a Scandinavian people under their leader Rurik. Invited in by the feuding citizens of the northern emporium of Novgorod to sort out their differences, Rurik extended his influence southwards to found the city of Kiev.

In Western Europe things were bad enough in Charles the Great’s later years for the emperor to order the construction of a fleet of ships to patrol the coast north of the Seine estuary against the pirate shipping there. Warfare amongst his descendants and the decline of Frisian sea power in the ninth century opened the way to worse depredations. From the 830s to the 880s we find records of raids into the Low Countries (the great emporium of Dorestad was sacked as many as four times in the 830s alone), into Provence, down the Gironde and Garonne to Bordeaux and up the Dordogne, up the Loire as far as Orléans, up the Seine to Paris and beyond, raids into Picardy as far as Amiens, and up the Rhine as far as Cologne.

Did these raiders, one wonders, sometimes enjoy the tacit approval of their own authorities, so to speak – rather like the English privateers of Queen Elizabeth, who robbed the Spanish treasure fleets lumbering back across the Atlantic with their plunder from the Amerindian civilizations? In the 830s we find King Harthacnut I of Denmark assuring the Carolingian emperor Louis
the Pious that he would execute the ringleaders of a Viking band that had been raiding in Francia the previous year. At this time the pagan Danes and Danish Vikings did not necessarily observe undertakings made to Christian rulers – no doubt, like later Christian crusaders in dealings with Muslim powers, they did not regard pledges made to nonbelievers as binding. Louis’s son Charles the Bald tried to buy off one war band, only to find its leader making a deal with another. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
comments on certain of these raids, notably in northern France, in some detail (though it has much less to say about the Viking presence in the northern Isles and Ireland). The
Annals of St Vaast
, compiled at the monastery near Arras, fill out a harrowing picture of ramparts in ruins, people led off for slaves, houses in flames:

Along the open streets the dead are lying – priests, laymen, nobles, women, youths and little children. Everywhere tribulation and sorrow meet the eye, seeing Christian folk [killed or] brought to utter ruin and desolation.
⁸

By strengthening old Roman forts or building new forts and combining
pagi
or districts in the area, the counts of Flanders would lay the basis of their power as protectors in the region.

Reports by European chroniclers tell of rapid raiders switching pressure points at will, their flotillas banking well up the river courses, delivering warrior troops that seized horses and rode and looted at will across country. If superior forces arrived the raiders quit the region and in the last resort would retreat back to their ships and depart for some other land – only to return once an army had been disbanded and the territory was defenceless again. The Winchester–Francia pattern noted at the head of this chapter was typical. The ideal defence was attack, with a standing army at the ready, fortified defence positions and, ideally, a specialized fleet standing by. This was precisely the defensive formula Alfred the Great of Wessex was to adopt, as we shall see in the next chapter.

The Wessex front

King Beorhtric of Wessex (786–802), who, it will be remembered, had been married to the notorious Eadburh of Mercia and was almost certainly a client king to her father Offa, was followed on the throne by King Ecgberht, described as the eighth bretwalda by the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
By 830 he had extended the sway of Wessex northwards to the Humber and eastwards into Essex. The triumph was brief. Not only did Wiglaf of Mercia claw back his position but in mid-decade Ecgberht (who died in 839) confronted a new danger – a seaborne attack by Viking raiders on the Isle of Sheppey in the Thames, the first such since the death of Beohrtric’s reeve at Portland some forty years before. After Sheppey, thirty-five shiploads descended on the coast of Somerset; the king ‘held the place of slaughter’. Two years later a great pirate ‘ship army’ came to Cornwall and found eager allies among the local British. Once again the West Saxons were victorious under their king, crushing the combined force at Hingston Down on the Cornish side of the Tamar river. For the next thirty years Ecgberht’s son and grandsons faced almost annual fire-fights against such coastal incursions from what the Chronicles variously call ‘heathen men’ and Danes. Southampton, Winchester, London were just some of the places to suffer.