The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (49 page)

Among the beneficiaries of this latest wave of Danish incursions into England were the merchants of the
Duchy of Normandy across the English Channel. Although the Vikings never threatened the integrity of the
Frankish kingdoms as directly as they did those of England, they had occupied the coast around the mouth of the Seine and sailed upriver to attack
Paris. At the start of the tenth century, the French king purchased their allegiance in exchange for
the land they already inhabited, and the Duchy of Normandy became a buffer between the
French heartland and further incursions from the sea. A major commercial and political force in their own right, in Æthelred’s time the Normans engaged in coastal fishing, especially for
whales, and carried on an active commerce with the British Isles, Scandinavia, the Faeroe Islands, and Iceland. Their chief exports included grain, salt, iron, and lead, while the merchants of
Rouen also specialized in wine, sealskins, whale oil, salted whale meat, and blubber, as well as slaves. Slavery was a constant of medieval trade and a striking part of the life stories of even the most prominent figures of the time. A teenaged
Saint Patrick was enslaved in Ireland before joining the church in the fourth century, and four hundred years later
Bede wrote of a fellow
Northumbrian who was taken south to London and sold there to a Frisian merchant.
Olaf Tryggvason, a contemporary of Æthelred’s who became king of Norway, was traded as a young boy for “
a precious garment” before ending up in
Kiev. While the northern European slave trade lacked the organization and scale of that of the Mediterranean or Indian Ocean, it was no less savage and degrading.
Warner of Rouen’s blistering tenth-century satire,
Moriuht,
follows the wanderings of its Irish protagonist in search of his wife, Glicerium, after her abduction. When Moriuht attempts to follow Glicerium’s kidnappers,

Sold in Northumbria and again in
Saxony, he earns his freedom from a widow by sleeping with her and then makes his way to Rouen. In a nearby port “full to bursting with the merchandise of wealth supplied by Vikings,” Moriuht finally redeems Glicerium for “half a penny” and their daughter for “a quarter of a coin with … half a cooked loaf of bread.” Warner regards his fellow academic as a fool and exaggerates his literary failings and sexual proclivities for comic effect, but his horrific depiction of enslavement rings true. The brutal rape and humiliation of captives regardless of sex or age, the appallingly low value of human life, and the division of families were as typical of medieval slavery as they are today.

Æthelred II was hardly troubled by such run-of-the-mill indignities, but he did object to the Normans’ willingness to trade with his enemies. A treaty with
Richard, duke of Normandy, officially closed all ports to raiders of the other’s territories, but the terms were unenforced. In 1002 Æthelred tried to
enhance this ineffectual agreement by marrying Richard’s daughter, Emma. This political marriage failed in its chief purpose due to Æthelred’s decision the same year to
massacre all the Danes in England—men, women, and children—which only invited more Danish pressure and ultimately brought about the end of Anglo-Saxon England. Denmark’s
Svein Forkbeard was well positioned to avenge the massacre and he led repeated attacks on England from 1002 to 1013, when Æthelred fled to Normandy and Svein ascended his throne. Three years later, Svein’s son
Knút (or
Canute) became king of England; he added Denmark to his crown after his brother’s death and Norway after the death of (Saint)
Olaf Haraldson. A judicious and able ruler, Knút’s deft diplomacy included marrying Æthelred’s widow,
Emma of Normandy. The exhaustion on all sides after forty years of nearly constant war and the fact that one person ruled Denmark, England, and Norway led to a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Knút’s creation of a North Sea empire was a remarkable accomplishment, but one that owed as much to timing and luck as anything else. The culmination of Danish rule in England, which lasted a generation, marks the precipitous highpoint of the Viking age. Knút died in 1035, and seven years later England was ruled again by the native
Edward the Confessor, while Olaf Haraldson’s son,
Magnús the Good, was king of Norway and Denmark.

The only significant rival to Magnús’s rule was his uncle,
Harald Sigurdsson (known as Hardradi, or “the Ruthless”), whose peripatetic career demonstrates the reach of Viking influence across Europe. Following the death of his half brother, Olaf Haraldson, Harald fled to the court of
Yaroslav the Wise in Kiev. As a member of the Byzantine emperor’s
Varangian Guard, he fought for the Byzantines in Bulgaria, Sicily, Asia Minor, and the
Holy Land before returning to Norway to claim the crown in 1047. Norway prospered during Harald’s nearly two-decade reign, but he waged almost incessant war against Denmark’s
Svein III until his overwhelming victory at the
battle of Nissa in 1062. Although Svein “
Leapt from the bloodied gunwales, / Leaving his fallen comrades,” he kept his throne, and two years later he and Harald came to terms.

Another outlet for Harald’s restless aggression opened with the death of England’s Edward the Confessor in 1066. His brother-in-law
Harald Godwinson succeeded him, but there were three other pretenders to the throne. William, duke of Normandy and Emma’s great-nephew, claimed that Edward had made him his heir—plausible enough considering that Edward had been reared in the Norman court—and that Harald Godwinson had made himself William’s vassal. Svein III was theoretically heir to all the territories once ruled by his uncle, Knút. Harald Hardradi’s pretensions to the throne were
weakest, based as they were on reports that Edward had promised the crown to Harald’s predecessor,
Magnús the Good. Yet
Harald Hardradi was first off the mark, and with a fleet of
250 or more ships and an army of twelve to eighteen thousand men he sailed up the
Ouse River and forced
York’s surrender. His victory was short-lived and five days later, on September 25, Harald Godwinson surprised the Norse at Stamford Bridge in a battle so stunning that the survivors needed only twenty-four ships to return home with their fallen king.

In the meantime, William of Normandy had spent months planning an invasion of England. He finally sailed on September 27, and the next day landed on the
Sussex coast. Racing south, Harald reached London a week later and after five days set off to catch William before the Normans became entrenched. On October 22 his weary army assembled atop Senlac Hill, nine miles from Hastings, where it collapsed under repeated assaults by William’s cavalry, archers, and infantry. William fought his way to London where he was crowned on Christmas Day. His English domains remained under threat from internal dissent and foreign intervention and he could assert his authority only when he had both ships and armies at his disposal, which according to the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
was not very often. When Denmark’s
Knút II and Robert of
Flanders threatened to invade in 1085, William “
travelled into England with a greater raiding-army of mounted men and infantry from the kingdom of France and from
Brittany as had ever sought out this country before.” As additional security he embarked on a scorched-earth policy and had “the land near the sea laid waste, so that if his enemies landed they would have nothing on which to seize so quickly.” This desperate policy shows the degree to which the Norman descendants of Viking raiders had abandoned the role of sea hunter to become the hunted. The events of 1066 marked a new epoch for northern Europe, but for the moment Norman England seemed vulnerable.

Sources for the massive naval expeditions of 1066 reveal little about how Harald Hardradi, William the Conqueror, or Harald Godwinson managed to gather the great numbers of ships they required. Generally speaking, northern European fleets were assembled as needed on the basis of obligations owed one’s overlord. As far back as the first century,
Tacitus referred to Germanic chiefs relying on warrior
cohorts of a hundred men selected from each district under their rule, and it is possible that a similar practice applied to maritime communities in
Scandinavia and the British Isles. According to the seventh-century
Census
[or
History
]
of the Men of Alba
, every twenty households in the kingdom of Dalriada (northern
Ireland and southern
Scotland) were required to supply two ships and twenty-eight crew when summoned—all told, 177 ships and 2,478 crew.

Apart from the ad hoc levies of the
Census,
British rulers seem to have
been largely indifferent to naval affairs prior to the ninth century, and while
Alfred the Great is frequently credited as the founder of the English navy, the only evidence for a fleet is a brief mention of his design for ships to be sailed against the Danes. The number of ships, where they were based, how they were administered, paid for, or manned—all these are unknown, as are details about the hundred-ship fleet deployed by
Edward the Elder at Brunanburh. Later in the tenth century
Edgar and
Æthelred II evidently established, or continued, a system to finance the fleet by mandatory
levies of ships and men, called the
ship-soke
, in which administrative divisions equivalent to three hundred households were required to furnish one ship and sixty men. Select crews of sailor-warriors were levied on the basis of one man per five households, each of which contributed 3½ shillings to his maintenance for two months. Æthelred also hired English and Danish mercenaries. The
ship-soke
had parallels in Norway, where
Harald Fairhair instituted the first large-scale ship levy in the ninth century, when every three households had to provide one crewman and his maintenance for two and a half months. This evolved into a more sophisticated levy of ships, men, and provisions throughout Scandinavia called a
leidang
.

Under normal circumstances, it seems that almost anyone could be sent up for service with the fleet, for
Olaf Tryggvason was obliged to set firm guidelines for the crew of the
Ormr inn Langi
(“long serpent”), his flagship at the
battle of Svold: “
No man younger than twenty years of age was to serve on this ship, and none older than sixty. No effeminate cowards or beggars were to come aboard, and hardly anyone was allowed aboard unless he was distinguished in some way.” Such strict guidelines probably did not apply in 1066, when
Harald Hardradi gathered at least 250 ships for his invasion of England, and William’s fleet numbered between 700 and 3,000 ships (the sources do not agree) manned by 7,000 crew who ferried another 7,000 soldiers and knights together with their gear and horses.

In their brisk
telegraphic style, the captions of the
Bayeux Tapestry merely hint at the logistical complexities and organizational sophistication required to coordinate such a formidable undertaking: “
Here William orders the ships to be built. Here they pull the ships to the sea. These men carry weapons down to the ships. And here they pull a cart loaded with weapons. Here William crosses in a large ship over the sea and comes to Pevensey. Here the horses disembark. And here the soldiers hurried to Hastings to requisition food.” Well aware of the Norman threat,
Harald Godwinson had “
gathered a greater ship-army and also land-army than any king in the land had ever gathered before,” but his experience highlights the drawbacks of the temporary levies. William delayed so long in putting to sea that Harald was forced to relax his watch on
the coast because “the men’s provisions were gone, and no one could hold them there any longer. Then the men were allowed to go home, and the king rode inland, and the ships were sent to London.” Although disbanding the fleet freed Harald to deal with
Harald Hardradi, it left his southern flank exposed.

Such a casual system for raising a fleet could work only so long as the weapons involved were what sailors would own anyway. Northern Europeans had no long-range weapons like ballista or
catapults and the nature of their ship design precluded ramming, so ships sailed as transports and became platforms for hand-to-hand combat more by accident than design.
Oddr Snorrason offers a lengthy depiction of
Olaf Tryggvason’s last stand in the
Ormr inn Langi
at the
battle of Svold (one of the only fleet engagements of the
Viking age to have been described in any detail), where Olaf faced the scores of ships marshaled by his enemies with only four of his own. Olaf had his ships chained together, with the
Ormr inn Langi
in the middle because it was “much longer and higher in the gunwales than other ships. That made for a good battle stage as if it were a fort.” Against this Eirik Håkonsson had a ship called
Járnbarðinn
(“Ironprow”), which was “extensively reinforced with iron and sharp spikes” at bow and stern as protection against boarders, an unusual configuration for the time. Eirik’s victory is attributed to his embracing Christianity and removing the idol of Thor from the bow of his ship, and to his erecting a large tower on the
Járnbarðinn,
from which to drop heavy beams on Olaf’s ship. Advantageous conversions were common enough, but the latter tactic seems to have been an improvised stratagem for which Viking ship design was not well suited. Nonetheless, it appears to have worked in this case and Olaf and his eight surviving comrades ended the battle by throwing themselves into the sea. The Swedes and Danes had “posted small boats around the larger ships so that they could fish out those who dove overboard and bring them to the chieftains,” and all save Olaf were pulled from the water. Whether he drowned or escaped has been debated ever since.