7

The Danelaw I

Occupation

If, as we have already suggested, the success of the Viking raiders in Ireland is partly to be explained by the fragmentary disposition of power in that country and the way in which this inhibited a coherent military response, then the same might be said of England at the time. From the chaos that followed the Roman withdrawal in the fifth century and the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the sixth century, a number of separate and competing kingdoms had emerged. The largest of these were Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Wessex, Sussex and Kent. Among the more significant of the smaller territories were the kingdom of the Hwicce, extending over parts of present-day Wor cestershire, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire; Lindsey, between East Anglia and the southern parts of Northumbria; and Bernicia and Deira, which appear to have been located within Northumbria itself. By the time the Viking raids began, most of these smaller kingdoms had been absorbed by larger and more powerful neighbours to leave a nucleus of four regional powers: Northumbria in the north-east, stretching from the Tees to the Firth of Forth; East Anglia on the central and south-east coast; Mercia in the central midlands with Wales on its western border; and, in the south-west of the country, Wessex, the territory of the west Saxons. Sussex and Essex, the territory of the south and the east Saxons, were both absorbed in about 825 by Wessex, which emerged as the major power in the land from a long-standing rivalry with Mercia. Yet regional loyalties remained the dominant factor of political life. In 731 Bede had insisted, in the title of his greatest work the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, that an entity such as ‘the English people’ did indeed exist. The reality was, however, that England at the start of the ninth century remained essentially a geographical notion. It was in no sense a ‘united kingdom’.

An incident reported in the Royal Frankish Annals for 809 illustrates the absence of a centralized political and military power. Driven from the throne by a rival claimant in 808, the Northumbrian king, Eardwulf, had travelled to Rome to enlist papal and imperial support for his efforts to regain power. He returned with envoys from Leo III and Charlemagne. Later, on the party’s way back to Rome, it was attacked at sea. A deacon named Aldulf was kidnapped, taken ashore and held until the payment of a ransom by the Mercian king, Cenwulf. The Annals call the kidnappers only ‘pirates’, but the attack has the hallmarks of a Viking enterprise, and the fact that they were able to hold their captive in England while negotiating his ransom is an indication that there must have been numerous fringes of lawlessness between the few and widely separated regions over which the various English kings had control.

This apparently isolated episode is the only bridge between the raids on the north-east of the 790s, and an attack in 835 on the marshy island of Sheppey, off the coast of Kent in the Thames estuary, which marks the opening of a second and very different phase of Viking activity in England. From this point onwards, scarcely a year goes by without a reference in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to a Viking raid, or of a battle fought between English forces and the ‘Heathen men’. In 838 Egbert, king of Wessex, triumphed at Hingston Down over a ‘great naval force’ that had sailed up the Tamar and made common cause with an army of Cornishmen. In 840 a fleet of thirty-three ships was defeated at Southampton by alderman Wulfheard. Fortunes were reversed in a battle later in the same year at Portland; fifty years earlier, the murder there of the reeve Beaduheard by Norwegians from Hordaland had signalled the start of the violence that was to follow. There was a ‘great slaughter’ in London and Rochester in the east in 842, presumably by Danish Vikings, and in 843 a fleet of thirty-five Viking ships triumphed again in a battle at Carhampton, near Mine-head, in the Bristol Channel. Two years later the men of Somerset and Dorset were victorious in a battle fought at the mouth of the river Parrett.

So far the raiding had been a seasonal activity. The fleets would arrive in the spring, raid throughout the summer and early autumn, and head for a safe base with the approach of winter. For the raiders in the west this would probably be one of the arc of longphort bases along the east coast of Ireland: Dublin, Wexford, Waterford and Cork; the home-base of the Vikings who concentrated on the Thames as their point of entry was probably Denmark. All this changed in 851, when a fleet numbered by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at 350 ships entered the Thames and attacked London and Canterbury and drove King Brihtwulf of the Mercians and his army across the Thames into Surrey. Afterwards they made camp at Thanet and for the first time spent the winter in England. An attempt by a combined force of men from Kent and Surrey to drive them off failed and both of its leaders were killed. In 855 the Vikings moved their winter quarters a step closer to London and made camp on Sheppey. In the south-west of the country, a large Viking force that had been active on the Somme crossed the Channel and penetrated as far inland as Winchester before being halted and driven back over the Channel again.

By the time of the invasion of the Great Heathen Army in 865 England consisted of four main kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex.

The desultory violence of the years since 835, and the wolfish escalation of the threat that came with the establishment of winter camps, were all a prelude to the arrival in East Anglia, in 865, of a force that evidently surpassed all previous forces in size and discipline. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle referred to it as ‘the Great Heathen Army’, and its arrival altered completely the terms of the Viking presence in England, for it came with grand territorial ambitions that it was able to realize in a little over a decade. For most of those years its activities became, understandably, the obsession of the chroniclers. It was under the command of brothers named Halfdan and Ingvar, believed to be the sons of Ragnar Lodbrok. Horses were obtained locally and the army, seemingly following a plan of action, rode north across the Humber estuary and headed for York. Two claimants to the throne of Northumbria, Osbert and Aella, were so preoccupied in fighting each other they failed to recognize the severity of the outside threat until it was too late and the city had fallen. Though they succeeded in breaking back into York both were killed in the subsequent fighting, the Northumbrians were compelled to recognize the invaders as their overlords and the Viking kingdom of York became an established fact. A puppet ruler named Egbert was installed on the throne.

In 868 part of the army marched back into Mercia and the fortress at Nottingham was taken. The rivalries of living memory were irrelevancies by this time and at the request of Burgred, king of the Mercians, the Wessex king, Ethelred, and his brother Alfred both took part in a failed attempt to starve the army out. In 869 the army returned to York and remained there for a year before moving back down the coast to East Anglia. Edmund, the East Anglian king, confronted it on 20 November and his forces were defeated and he himself killed. In 871 the army moved against Wessex. The winter of 870-71 was spent in Reading and in the spring Halfdan and a leader named Bagsecg led their men against Ethelred and Alfred. A series of bloody engagements followed - at Ashdown near Crowborough, at Basing in Hampshire, Englefield near Reading, and Meretun. Bagsecg was among the many raiders killed at Ashdown, but the army seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of men and good leaders. The results were indecisive, but this was Wessex heartland, and the willingness of the Viking army to engage so often and so far from its base must have been daunting for Ethelred and Alfred.¹ Ethelred died that year and was succeeded by his brother. Four weeks after his crowning, Alfred faced the army again, its ranks swollen by the arrival of a ‘great summer army’ that had arrived in the region, and had to concede defeat. At the close of a year which had seen nine full battles south of the Thames, Alfred and the Danes made a peace settlement. The following year the army asserted its superiority over Mercia with the imposition of another peace agreement.

In about 873 King Egbert of York was deposed and fled to Mercia with the archbishop, Wulfhere, and for the next three years King Ricsige ruled, possibly as a Viking puppet, although this is not certain. In 874 the Mercian King Burgred was driven abroad. Here, as they would do on other occasions, the Vikings showed a political shrewdness in their dealings with the conquered. They split the opposition by handing the crown to Ceolwulf, a member of a rival dynasty with a valid claim to the Mercian throne, though the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle preferred to dismiss him as ‘a foolish king’s thegn’, who gave his masters hostages and promised them the disposition of the kingdom whenever they should require it and his full military support.²

Still a large, disciplined and coherent force, and now under the leadership of Halfdan, Guthrum, Oscytel and Anwend, the army rested for the winter of 873-4 at Repton, on the banks of the Trent, just south of Derby. Repton had been a Christian cult centre and a seat of Mercian royal power from the late seventh century.³ As such it would have been the focus of a well-organized network of supply and tax-gathering that the invaders could exploit with the minimum of effort. St Wystan’s Church itself was incorporated into the D-shaped structure the army dug to defend itself, with its straight side using the cliff that would, in those days, have been the south bank of the river. In what may have been a symbolic display of contempt as much as a practical necessity the church’s tower was used as a gate-house.⁴

In the following year the army divided. Possibly in connection with events following the death or the enforced exile of King Egbert, Halfdan marched north to consolidate his hold on Northumbria, staying the winter at a camp on the Tyne and raiding among the Picts and the Strathclyde Britons.⁵ His activities in Bernicia, in the north of the kingdom, so disrupted life at Lindisfarne that, like the monks of Noirmoutier before them, the brothers finally abandoned the monastery and set off on the search for a safe haven for the bones of Cuthbert, their patron saint and protector, which lasted for seven years. Following Ricsige’s death in 876, Northumbria beyond the Tyne was nominally given to Egbert II. Halfdan shrewdly reinstated Wulfhere as archbishop of York, agitating a rivalry with the see at Canterbury and dabbling in the same tribal waters that had seen Cornishmen align themselves with Vikings against the Anglo-Saxons some thirty years earlier.⁶ The final entry for 876 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle summarizes the events of the year in words of biblical simplicity: ‘And that year Healfdene [Halfdan] shared out the land of the Northumbrians, and they proceeded to plough and support themselves.’⁷

Meanwhile Guthrum, Oscytel and Anwend, having taken Mercia, made their way from Repton to Cambridge and stayed there for the next year. Guthrum seems to have had his sights set on the prize of Wessex. Evading Alfred’s forces, he and the army slipped out of Cambridge by night and occupied a fortress site at Wareham in Dorset that had, in times of peace, been a nunnery. Alfred was forced to treat with him. Guthrum and his army promised to leave Wessex and handed over hostages as security. It was on this occasion that the Chronicle, for the first time close enough to pass on details of the cultural practices of the invaders, noted that Guthrum swore his oath on a holy ring, and that this was ‘a thing which they would not do before for any nation’.⁸ Guthrum himself must have made the claim. In this he was following the advice of Odin in ‘The Sayings of the High One’:

If there’s a man whom you don’t trust,
but from whom you want nothing but good,
speak fairly to him but think falsely.⁹

Instead of leaving the kingdom, he and his men slipped away under cover of night and rode to Exeter. Alfred pursued but was unable to overtake them before they had occupied a fortress. There was another exchange of hostages, more swearing of oaths.

In January 878 the army left Exeter, rode to Chippenham and began driving people from their homes and taking over the land. A brother of Ingvar and Halfdan, whom the Anglo-Norman chronicler Gaimar names as Ubbi, was also in the region at the time, having spent the winter at Dyfed in south Wales with a fleet of twenty-three ships.¹⁰ Alfred’s biographer, the Welsh monk Asser, tells us that Ubbi had first ‘slaughtered many Christians’ before departing for Devon. Ubbi was killed in battle with several hundred of his men. The Chronicle adds the detail that ‘there was captured the banner which they called “Raven” ’. The Annals of St Neots, created in about 1105, relate that the original - for each separate army probably had its own flag - had been woven by the three sisters of Ingvar and Ubbi, and that observations of it were used to predict the outcome of battle. The raven was associated with Odin, on whose whim the fortunes of war depended: a lifelike fluttering of the bird in the wind was a sign of impending victory, just as its lifelessness presaged defeat.

If the raven flag failed to flutter for Ubbi and his men it must have blown gloriously for the remainder of the Viking army, for as Guthrum’s men drove out some of the West Saxons and received the submission of others who stayed, Alfred was now reduced to the humiliation of flight, heading west to Athelney in north Somerset. For some time, says Asser, his life became one of ‘great distress amid the woody and marshy places of Somerset. He had nothing to live on except what he could forage by frequent raids, either secretly or openly, from the Vikings as well as from the Christians who had submitted to the Vikings’ authority.’¹¹ The homely legend of his being scolded by a farmer’s wife, ignorant of his true identity, for letting her cakes burn is laid to this difficult time of his life.¹² A more tangible and exalted trace of his presence in the region was the accidental find, in 1693, of the exquisite ‘Alfred Jewel’ at a site four miles from Athelney. This small, gold-framed image in cloisonné enamel shows a seated male figure in a green smock holding what may be a flower and is inscribed, in the Wessex form of Anglo-Saxon, ‘Ælfred Mec Heht Gewyran’ (‘Alfred had me made’).¹³ Its function is uncertain. It may have been a book-mark or pointer for use with Alfred’s own translation of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care, copies of which were sent to each of the Wessex bishoprics.

From his marshy refuge Alfred turned the tables and embarked on a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the invaders, which soon gathered momentum. In May 878, backed by the men of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire, he engaged the Danish forces in a decisive battle at Evington in Wiltshire. Guthrum’s men were beaten and driven back to their camp at Chippenham. After a fourteen-day siege they emerged to make peace. Asser describes what happened next:

When he heard their embassy, the king (as is his wont) was moved to compassion and took as many chosen hostages from them as he wanted. When they had been handed over, the Vikings swore in addition that they would leave his kingdom immediately, and Guthrum, their king, promised to accept Christianity and to receive baptism at King Alfred’s hand; all of which he and his men fulfilled as they had promised. For three weeks later Guthrum, the king of the Vikings, with thirty of the best men from his army, came to King Alfred at a place called Aller, near Athelney. King Alfred raised him from the holy font of baptism, receiving him as his adoptive son; the unbinding of the chrisom on the eighth day took place at a royal estate called Wedmore. Guthrum remained with the king for twelve nights after he had been baptized, and the king freely bestowed many excellent treasure on him and all his men.¹⁴

Mixing cultural and conversion diplomacy, Athelstan was the Christian and Anglo-Saxon name given to Guthrum when he was raised from the font, showing that Alfred, like the Carolingians across the Channel, put his faith in a policy of complete assimilation. This time Guthrum/Athelstan kept his word to leave Wessex. In 880 he led his army into East Anglia and shared out the land there. With this, the heart of the area that later came to be known as the Danelaw was complete.

But old habits die hard. Asser complains that, in 885, the East Anglian Vikings ‘broke in a most insolent manner the peace they had established with King Alfred’. In the main, however, it seems Guthrum was satisfied to have achieved the respectability of kingship. Alfred could not be as content with his share of the peace. The Viking menace was hydra-headed. In 882 he fought a small naval battle against a Danish fleet, and in 885 engaged with a large force which had crossed from France and besieged Rochester. Alfred’s unexpected arrival threw the aggressors into disarray and they fled back across the Channel, leaving behind their prisoners and their horses. He made his way into East Anglia, ‘in order to plunder that area’ and probably punish Guthrum’s men for having supported the attack on Rochester.¹⁵ Initially successful, his ships were finally driven from the mouth of the Stour by a fleet assembled by these same East Anglian Danes. The frequency with which Vikings were making use of the Thames as a port of entry into England clearly demanded Alfred’s urgent attention. It was vital to control London and, in 886, he attacked and re-took the city, an act that entrained the submission to him of ‘all the English people that were not under subjection to the Danes’.¹⁶

At some point between this action and Guthrum/Athelstan’s death in 890, he and Alfred came to a formal written agreement that marked a watershed in relations between the two sides. Its prologue recognized the reality of the status quo, invoking a peace between ‘all the English race and all the people which is in East Anglia’.¹⁷ The boundary between the neighbours was settled as running ‘up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to the Watling Street’.¹⁸ Legal parity between the two populations was affirmed, with a fine set at eight half-marks of refined gold for the killing of either a Dane or an Englishman. The wording of the treaty confirms that trade links already existed between the parties, with terms agreed for the cross-border buying and selling of slaves and other goods.

Wessex during the time of King Alfred, with a line marking the division of territory, later known as the Danelaw, that was agreed on by Alfred and the Viking chieftain Gurthrum in about 886.

 

The sixteen-year period between the invasion of the ‘Great Heathen Army’ and its subsequent conquest of eastern Britain and the establishment of the Danelaw became a seminal moment in the creation of Scandinavian history, and its events and main characters a radiant for some of the most potent legends and myths that are still associated with the Viking Age. Ragnar Lodbrok’s after-name ‘Hairy-Breeches’ and the equally mysterious after-name of his son, Ivar ‘the Boneless’; the alleged Viking practice of a form of torture and execution known as ‘the Blood-Eagle’; the death and canonization of Edmund, former king of the East Angles; and the origins of the Viking kingdom of York - all are linked in a tangled web of legend with its origins in this long seminal moment. It is worth stepping aside from the narrative to look briefly at the origins and development of this legendary history, to remind ourselves once again of how close much of Viking Age history is to ‘the idiom of legend’.

The earliest reference to a possible historical model for Ragnar Lodbrok is in the ‘Ragnarsdrapa’ by the Norwegian Bragi the Old, dated to the first half of the ninth century and surviving only in fragments in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda. It is a ‘shield-poem’, so called because it appears to describe a number of scenes painted on a shield. The ‘Ragnarsdrapa’ is the oldest known example of skaldic art, and Bragi himself the earliest skald whom we know by name. We learn from the poem that the shield was a present to Bragi from his lord, a certain Ragnar. As we noted earlier, this may have been the ‘Reginfred’ who attacked Paris in 845 and who also, according to Saxo Grammaticus, raided in the Baltic in the same decade.

The first references to the name ‘Lodbrok’ occur almost simultaneously in about 1060. Summarizing the earliest history of the Norman dukes, William of Jumièges writes of a certain ‘Lothroc’ that he was a king of the Danes who expelled a very large number of people from his territory. Adam of Bremen makes no mention of a ‘Ragnar’, but in writing of the Viking chieftain Ivar he gives the name of his father as ‘Lodparch’.

Ari the Learned was the first to bring the names together in The Book of the Icelanders, in which he identifies Ragnar Lodbrok as the father of the Viking leader Ingvar/Ivar, and includes himself among Ragnar’s descendants, from which it is clear that Ragnar was already a semi-legendary figure.¹⁹

The association of the name Ragnar with ‘hairy breeches’ does not occur until the Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok and his Sons, a tale that also offered its thirteenth-century audience an explanation for the invasion of England that cast the Danes as the injured party in search of revenge. Ragnar’s heroism is established early on in the saga when he travels to Gotland in response to a challenge to save a princess and win a kingdom by killing an enormous serpent that is threatening both. Protected from its venom by a pair of leather trousers boiled in pitch, he is successful. Saxo tells a similar story but adds the detail that Ragnar used a cushioning of hair beneath his clothes for extra protection, and as a final insurance leapt into the icy seawater so that his breeches would freeze solid before his meeting with the serpent.

Much later on in the saga, during a raid on England, Ragnar is captured and put into a snake-pit by his enemy King Aella, dying only when his tormentors finally realize the secret of his immunity and remove the snake-proof breeches. Ragnar’s last words are carried back home to his sons: ‘The little pigs would grunt if they knew how the father-pig suffered.’²⁰ Determined to avenge Ragnar’s death, the sons then raise a great army and invade Northumberland. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers to the Viking attack on York in 867 and the death of the city’s defenders, including its king, Aella; but it does not name any of the Viking leaders, nor does it go into detail concerning the circumstances of Aella’s death. The Saga is much more forthcoming, describing how the captured king was executed by having ‘the blood-eagle’ cut on his back. Saxo similarly states that Aella’s back was carved ‘with the figure of an eagle, exultant because at his overthrow they were imprinting the cruellest of birds on their most ferocious enemy’, and gives Ivar as the name of the son responsible for this.²¹

It is possible that these late literary descriptions of ‘the blood-eagle’ derive from a verse that survives only in fragmentary form, composed in about 1030 by the Icelandic poet Sigvat, in which he exults that ‘Ivar, who dwelt at York, carved the eagle on Aella’s back.’ The Orkneyinga Saga, from about 1200, offers a fully detailed account of the practice, describing how Torf Einar avenged his father’s murder by applying ‘the blood-eagle’ to the killer’s back, cutting the ribs away at the spine and pulling out the lungs from behind. The victim in this case was dedicated to Odin.²² Snorri Sturluson tells the same story in Heimskringla. But precisely what Sigvat meant by saying that Ivar ‘carved the eagle on Aella’s back’ has been much discussed.²³ Snorri and the author of the Orkneyinga Saga took it literally and presumed it to have been a form of execution by torture, in which case the loss of blood involved in the initial stages of such a ritual would have killed the victim well before the fancied resemblance to an eagle was finally achieved. Conceivably, however, Sigvat intended to convey only that Ivar had killed Aella, and to do so poetically by conjuring the image of an eagle, perched on the back of the dead king and working into his flesh with talons and beak, no doubt a common sight in the aftermath of any battle.

Of Ivar’s reputation as a cruel man, however, there can be no doubt. Adam of Bremen calls him the most gruesome of all the Danish petty kings who ravaged in Francia.²⁴ More even than as the torturer of Aella, his notoriety among Christians derived from his role as the murderer of Edmund, king of East Anglia, in 870. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is again succinct: there was a battle, the Danes ‘had the victory, and killed the king and conquered all the land’.²⁵ Within twenty years a cult of martyrdom had grown up around Edmund’s death which acquired a dramatic symbolic power across the mission fields of Europe. The first account that links Edmund with Ivar the Boneless is that of Abbo of Fleury in the Passio Sancti Eadmundi, a biography of the saint-king written sometime between 985 and 987. According to Abbo, an army under Hinguar and Hubba (Ivar and Ubbi) invaded England and captured Northumbria. Hinguar/Ivar then made his way south into East Anglia and triumphed over Edmund’s army. The king himself was not among those killed or captured, so Ivar mounted a hunt for him and eventually located him in the village of Hellesdon, in Norfolk. He sent a message demanding that Edmund accept Ivar as his lord and share his kingdom with him. Edmund replied that he would do so on condition that Ivar accept baptism from him. The offer was rejected. Ivar had Edmund seized and brought before him, tied to a tree and scourged. Provoked by his insistent calling on Christ, Ivar’s men are said to have used him as target practice for their archery. Finally his head was cut off and thrown away in the undergrowth.

The thirteenth-century English chronicler Roger of Wendover used details from Abbo’s story for an account of the king’s death in which it is, beyond doubt, a martyrdom:

In between the whip lashes, Edmund called out with true belief in the Saviour Christ. Because of his belief, because he called to Christ to aid him, the heathens became furiously angry. They then shot spears at him, as if it was a game, until he was entirely covered with their missiles, like the bristles of a hedgehog (just like St Sebastian was). When Ivar the pirate saw that the noble king would not forsake Christ, but with resolute faith called after Him, he ordered Edmund beheaded, and the heathens did so.²⁶

The origin and meaning of Ivar’s after-name ‘the Boneless’ (Ívarr inn beinlausi) is as impenetrable as any of the Great Heathen Army myths and legends. The explanation in the Ragnars Saga is that he was unable to walk and had to be carried everywhere.²⁷ ‘Boneless’ may have been a forbidden or noa-name for the wind, reflecting Ivar’s prowess as a seaman. The name has been associated with sexual impotence, and with sexual potency. A modern suggestion is that he suffered from the medical condition known as brittle-bone disease.²⁸ Another theory suggests that the name arose from a confusion between the Latin adjectives exosus meaning ‘detested’, and exos meaning ‘boneless’.²⁹ A further possibility is that his after-name should properly be interpreted as Ivar ‘the Snake’, a metaphorical deduction from the literal meaning of ‘inn beinlausi’ as a creature ‘without bones’ or ‘without legs’ or ‘without feet’, and a thoroughly appropriate cognomen for a man of such legendary slyness and cruelty.³⁰

Excavations on the site of the Repton camp which was the Great Heathen Army’s base in 873 have unearthed finds that, while they hardly confirm any of the theories, have given rise to speculation on the historical person behind the Ivar legends. A number of mounds and burial chambers have been examined within the D-shaped fortress the army built on the Trent. Perhaps the most striking of these, located in what is now the Vicarage Garden, was a chamber containing the carefully stacked remains of some 264 individuals. The majority of these were tall, well-built men.³¹ The bones had originally been stacked in charnel fashion against the walls, but had been seriously disturbed by digging done in about 1686. In 1726 an elderly labourer named Thomas Walker, who had been involved in the work, was asked about the discovery:

About Forty Years since cutting Hillocks, near the Surface he met with an old Stone Wall, when clearing farther he found it to be a square Enclosure of Fifteen Foot: It had been covered, but the Top was decayed and fallen in, being only supported by wooden Joyces. In this he found a Stone Coffin, and with Difficulty removing the Cover, saw a Skeleton of a Humane Body Nine Foot long, and round it lay One Hundred Humane Skeletons, with their Feet pointing to the Stone Coffin. They seem’d to be of ordinary Size. The Head of the great Skeleton he gave to Mr Bowers, Master of the Free School. I [i.e. Walker’s interlocutor] enquired of his Son, one of the present Masters, concerning it, but it is lost; yet he says that he remembers the Skull in his Father’s Closet, and that he had often heard his Father mention this Gigantick Corps, and thinks this Skull was in Proportion to a Body of the Stature.³²

It is possible that Repton was a Viking war-grave, and the bones those of warriors who had died elsewhere and been taken there for burial.³³ The Annals of Ulster for 873 report the death of a Viking chieftain named Imar/Invgar/Ivar, and the Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok and his Sons preserves a tradition that Ivar the Boneless was buried in England. Putting together these details, Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle, the archaeologists who excavated the site between 1974 and 1993, have cautiously advanced the hypothesis that Ivar the Boneless may indeed have been an exceptionally tall man who, for whatever medical reasons, had to be carried from place to place, and that the remains of the giant at the centre of this grouping might just conceivably be his.³⁴

The drama of this rich web of legends about Ragnar Lodbrok, his sons, the invasion of the Great Heathen Army, King Aella and ‘the blood-eagle’, and the martyrdom of St Edmund cannot, however, obscure the fact that, from the Scandinavian side, we have almost nothing to go on beyond a handful of names in trying to work out the details of the invasion of England by the Great Army in 865. What is abundantly clear - from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, from other contemporary annals and from Asser’s biography of King Alfred - is that this was a well-led, organized, tactically sophisticated and highly mobile military force with very efficient lines of communication. It was perhaps only a lack of manpower that prevented it from making a full take over of England at this point.

 

Following Alfred’s victory at Edington in 878 and the Danish occupation of East Anglia, much of the attention of the keepers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was diverted to the activities of Viking forces on the continent. When Viking attacks on Alfred’s kingdom resumed in earnest in 892, they encountered resistance of a different order from that of previous raids. Alfred’s bonds with the people of Mercia from his marriage, in 868, to the Mercian princess Ealswith, were much strengthened in 889 by the marriage of his daughter Ethelfled to alderman Aethelred, who was the power in that part of the kingdom that remained in Anglo-Saxon hands. The main routes into Wessex were now protected by a network of fortified sites or burhs, so disposed as to make any one of them accessible to men living within a twenty-mile radius. Alfred introduced a rota system of conscription that divided the army into two, ‘so that always half its men were at home, half on service, apart from the men who guarded the boroughs’. ³⁵ By 885 he had also strengthened his navy sufficiently to defeat the Vikings in a battle in the mouth of the Stour and capture sixteen of their ships. His successes in dealing with the army that came over from the continent in 892 in a fleet of 250 ships under the Viking Hastein/Hasting owed much to the efficiency of these reforms. They finally conveyed the home advantage his forces should always have had, despite the assistance Hasting received from his fellow-Scandinavians settled in East Anglia. Alfred’s forces stormed the fortress at Benfleet that Hasting was using as his base and put the garrison to flight, breaking up or burning the ships and capturing all the goods and the women and children sheltering inside and taking them to London. Hasting’s wife and two of his children were among them, a hint that the thought of further colonization was on his mind. Though this engagement is the first reference in the Chronicle to Hasting, he and Alfred had obviously encountered one another before, perhaps as part of the peace-and-baptism agreement between Alfred and Guthrum/Athelstan in the handing-over of East Anglia:

And Hæsten’s wife and two sons were brought to the king; and he gave them back to him, because one of them was his godson, and the other godson of Ealdorman Ethelred. They had stood sponsor to them before Hæsten came to Benfleet, and he had given the king oaths and hostages, and the king had also made him generous gifts of money, and so he did also when he gave back the boy and the woman.³⁶

By the summer of 896 it had become clear to Viking leaders that Wessex was never going to become their prize. The army split up, some disappearing into the Danelaw territories of Northumbria and East Anglia. Others, ‘those that were moneyless’, got themselves ships and crossed the Channel to try their luck on the Seine.³⁷

Hasting’s story shows that Alfred had evidently not given up on conversion diplomacy and as we noted earlier with certain reservations, it seems the cultural transformation of the Heathen Viking Guthrum into the Christian East Anglian Athelstan had been successful. The restraint in the notice of his death in the Chronicle in 890 implies respect: ‘And the northern king, Guthrum, whose baptismal name was Athelstan, died. He was King Alfred’s godson, and he lived in East Anglia and was the first to settle that land’. As proper kings do, he had issued coins, and the fact that he did so under his baptismal name suggests that the respect was mutual.³⁸ It was an encouraging sign of the willingness of some Vikings to accept that the religion which they rejected with such ferocious contempt represented a higher form of culture than Heathendom, if only in its aspirations towards a better way of living. For many, though, the religious divide remained a factor in sustaining the sense of ‘otherness’ necessary to attack, enslave or kill without provocation the innocent and the unarmed. There are even recorded cases of Heathen Vikings turning the tables and encouraging apostasy among their Christian associates or allies. Sometime in the 860s, Pippin II of Aquitaine, a grandson of Louis the Pious who was also a monk, not only went over to the Vikings and fought with them but renounced his vows and became a worshipper of Odin. The Annals of St-Bertin mention another monk who joined the Vikings and practised their form of worship, and was executed for apostasy upon capture.³⁹

 

Most of the graves excavated at Repton were those of men who had died violent deaths. One had been killed by spear thrusts to the head including one that passed through the eye. A fierce blow across the top of the thigh may have castrated him and explain the presence between his legs of a jackdaw bone and a boar’s tusk, perhaps symbols respectively of Odin and Frey. Marks on the spine suggest that he was disembowelled after death. His sword had been broken and sheathed in a fleece-lined scabbard, and a knife, key and a Thor’s hammer amulet completed his grave-goods.⁴⁰ Other finds from the same camp indicate that these men also traded as they went, using silver and gold bars for currency as well as coins. There are even signs that metalworking in copper and silver was practised.⁴¹ Viking warriors were known to be willing to trade on their travels, though as the Frankish soldiers lured by a false signal of surrender into the Viking camp at Asselt in 882 discovered to their cost, it could be a risky business. For a dedicated Viking Age trader, however, we must turn to the redoubtable Ottar, who hailed from Hålogoland, high up on the north-west coast of Norway, in his own words ‘the furthest north of any who lived in the north’. At some point, probably late on in Alfred’s reign, he found himself in Wessex, lecturing King Alfred’s courtiers on his life, his home, his travels and his plans.⁴² He gave his audience invaluable information on the little-known lands to the north and east of Britain which Alfred added to his translation of Orosius’ History of the World as a supplement.

Given the state of affairs in Wessex and England during most of Alfred’s reign, and bearing in mind the extreme suspicion with which Louis the Pious had greeted his Rus visitors in 839, our inclination is to find Ottar’s presence at Alfred’s court in every way remarkable. The non-warlike Scandinavian native was not unknown in Wessex. On visiting a newly opened monastery at Athelney, Asser wrote of his surprise at finding among the largely foreign brotherhood a young monk ‘of Viking parentage’. He provided his own explanation of the presence of so many foreigners there: Viking terror had been so effective against the Church that few free-born natives could be found willing to risk their lives by taking holy orders.⁴³ Even so, and even though a specific goal of his journey seems to have been to see the king, for the report tells us that ‘he still had unsold 600 tame deer at the time when he had left to visit the king’, and though Alfred is referred to as ‘his lord’, it seems inconceivable that Ottar should have arrived in England alone and on his own initiative.⁴⁴ It is possible, though unlikely, that he was one of the party who spent twelve days with Guthrum at Alfred’s court as part of the baptismal agreement after the battle at Edington. More credibly, he may have been one of Guthrum’s advisers later, at the negotiations for the treaty of Wedmore.

In about 890 a merchant from the north of Norway named Ottar described his travels to King Alfred’s courtiers. His route from Hedeby to London is conjectural.

The homely account Ottar gives of life in the far north of Norway is in striking contrast to the violence otherwise associated with the Scandinavian homelands during the Viking Age, and his talk of his tame reindeer and twenty pigs is a world away from Odin, human sacrifices, blood-eagles and raven banners. The description of his journey down the west coast of Norway to the trading town at Sciringsheal in the south, now identified as Kaupang, just outside present-day Sarpsborg, is uninterrupted by any sudden urge to go ashore and plunder an isolated settlement, and the next leg of the voyage from Sciringsheal to Hedeby, still thriving eighty years after the forcible resettlement of Reric’s traders there in 808, is described entirely in terms of the navigational challenges involved.

The form in which the information occurs in the narrative often suggests that Ottar, or Ohthere as the Anglo-Saxons called him, was answering a question. We might see him seated and ringed around by one or more of the curious scribes at Alfred’s cosmopolitan Winchester court. A learned courtier leans forward, chin in one hand, quill pen in the other: Could you make the journey from Hålogoland to Sciringsheal within - say - a month? If you had the wind with you? And duly makes a note of Ottar’s reply: ‘He said, that you could not sail there in a month, even if every night you sheltered and every day had a favourable wind.’ The question of his economic and social status comes up:

He was a very wealthy man by the standards they use to judge wealth, that is to say, in deer. At the time of his visit to the king he had six hundred unsold tame deer. They call these animals reindeer, and six of them are decoy-deer. These are very valuable among the Sami, for they use them to trap the wild reindeer. He was one of the most powerful men in his country, yet he owned no more than twenty cows, twenty sheep and twenty swine, and the little bit of earth he ploughed, he ploughed with a horse. But their wealth consists mainly in the tax paid to them by the Sami. This tax takes the form of hides, feathers, whalebone, and rope made of whaleskin and sealskin.⁴⁵

The tone implies that Ottar struggled to convince his Anglo-Saxon hosts to share his own idea of himself as a wealthy man. But he freely admitted that the farming land in his country was poor: ‘whatever of it can be used for grazing or ploughing all lies along the coast. Even that is very rocky in some places, and wild mountains lie to the east and above, all along the cultivated land.’ The land of the Norwegians in the late ninth century was ‘very long and very narrow’, which is an accurate description of modern Norway, and from Ottar’s report it is clear that the main regional identities as ‘Norwegians’, ‘Danes’ and ‘Swedes’ were already in existence at that early date.

One of the many enigmas of the report arises in Ottar’s description of his journey south along the coast of Norway to Sciringsheal:

He also said that one had to sail along the coastline. And on his starboard side he had first Ireland, and after that the islands that lie between Ireland and this land. After that it is this land, until he arrives at Skiringssal, and all the way Norway is on the port side.

Ireland, the Orkneys, Hebrides and Britain would not have been visible landmarks for Ottar on his journey south, and this information may have been provided by the scribe for the benefit of native readers of the Orosius in which this was to appear. It has also been suggested that, if Ottar himself provided this information, he was in fact referring to embarkation points for journeys to these particular destinations when sailing from the west coast of Norway.⁴⁶ This may explain the apparent oddity of his having ‘Ireland’ and not ‘Ice land’ on his starboard side. Some assume it to be a scribal error and amend the name. One argument for letting ‘Ireland’ stand is that, from the perspective of an observer in Wessex, it might have been natural to regard Ireland as an island in the north. Another is that the discovery and settlement of Iceland was so recent that it could not possibly have had time to establish itself as geographical reference point.