The Vikings

The treaty between Alfred and Guthrum, with its reference to the distinct parties to the agreement as ‘all the English race and all the people which is in East Anglia’, starkly recognized that the invasion of the Great Heathen Army in 865 had brought about a far-reaching change in England’s demographic make-up.¹ As we saw earlier, the boundary between the new 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’.² The first use of the term ‘Danelaw’ to define the regions where Scandinavian influence was most intense does not occur until 130 years after the share-out of land, in two legal compilations made by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, which use the Anglo-Saxon terms ‘on Deone lage’ and ‘on Dena lage’.³ No surviving documents relate to the separate acts of settlement of the eastern part of Mercia and of Northumbria, but a document dated to the second half of the eleventh century lists the shires comprising the Danelaw as Buckinghamshire, Middlesex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire.⁴ For the familiar reason that the Vikings practised little self-documentation not much is known for certain of how things developed in these areas during the intervening years. The raiding and the hostile settlement had far-reaching consequences for Anglo-Saxon England. The seven kingdoms, which had been reduced to four by the time of the Lindisfarne raid and to two by the time of Alfred the Great, underwent a final rationalization under Alfred’s successors into one kingdom under the rule of one king. The creation of an English monarchy laid the foundations for a model of kingship so efficient that later Scandinavian kings and conquerors were able to take over England and run it in their own interests with a minimum of administrative adaptation. The sixty or seventy years that the process took culminated in the expulsion from York, in 954, of the city’s last Scandinavian ruler, the Norwegian Erik Bloodaxe. His eviction and subsequent death signalled the end of independent Scandinavian power in England.

It is tempting to describe this process as the re-taking of the Danelaw, as though it involved a single and coherent campaign aimed at wresting back territories wrongly taken from ‘us’ by ‘them’. The moral basis for such an attitude is what Norwegians call hevd, a right established not in law but in possession and usage over time. This is the right Alcuin was unconsciously invoking in his letter to Ethelred, king of Northumbria, after the Lindisfarne attack, that it was ‘nearly three hundred and fifty years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such a terror appeared in Britain as we have suffered from a pagan race’. In this he was overlooking the fact that the Vikings were simply doing to him what ‘we and our fathers’ had done to the Britons 350 years earlier. Hevd led Alcuin to consider the Angles and the Saxons the rightful owners of England, but hevd is a relative concept. The irony of Alcuin’s position is that the genetic survey carried out for the BBC by the team from UCL in 2000 found it impossible to distinguish between the DNA of the fifth-century Saxon invaders and ninth-century Vikings. The notion of a persisting racial identity is one of history’s most obstinate and mischievous myths. It was natural, however, that the English should have seen the Scandinavian settlers in the east of the country as usurpers and thieves from whom it was right and proper to attempt to recover stolen property. It was just as natural for the Scandinavian settlers to nourish dreams of appropriating an even larger share of the new country, and to collude with and harbour those of their own cultures and countries when one or another leader arrived with an army that seemed capable of realizing these dreams. Call it what we will, tribal, racial or cultural solidarity set the political agenda for the unfolding of events over the next 100 years.

The campaign to repossess the occupied lands got off to an inauspicious start. Ethelred I, the last of Alfred’s three brothers to hold the throne of Wessex before him, left an infant son Aethelwold at his death. Grown to manhood, Aethelwold rose and contested the succession of Alfred’s son Edward in 899. Driven out by Edward, he persuaded the Viking Northumbrians of York to accept him as their leader. Shortly afterwards, with the help of East Anglian Danes, he mounted a military challenge to Edward. It failed, and he met his death on the battlefield at Holme. The last East Anglian king whose name we know, Eohric, fell with him. That the direct threat to Wessex from Danish East Anglia should have been so rapidly neutralized lends credibility to Dudo’s account in his Norman history of the trouble Guthrum had with his disobedient and rebellious English subjects, whom he was able to subdue only with the help of Rollo. East Anglia was, in any case, always going to be the most difficult part of Danish-occupied territory for the invaders to hold on to. Alfred’s treaty with Guthrum was a personal agreement between two leaders that established the dividing line between their territories. It made no claim to regulate the terms of the Scandinavian settlements in Northumbria and Mercia. That Mercia in the midlands should have been the next to fall, after a longer resistance, and York in the far north after one even longer, is a direct reflection of the relative distances of the Danish kingdoms from Wessex.

We saw earlier how the old rivalry between Wessex and Mercia had fallen away as their leaders made common cause against the invaders, and how Alfred’s marriage to a Mercian princess, and the marriage of his daughter Ethelfled to Ethelred, the leader of English-occupied Mercia, strengthened the dynastic bonds between the two kingdoms. Throughout the early years of his campaigning, Edward continued to enjoy the support of Ethelred and his Mercians. The inspiration to continue Alfred’s policy of creating fortified burhs at strategically important points across the territory under English control came from that quarter. In the west, Mercia’s vulnerability to raiders using the Bristol Channel, and the open invitation to Irish-based Viking fleets in the north-west of the British isles to penetrate inland via the Dee and the Mersey, had to be urgently addressed. Struggles for power among the invaders themselves remained concentrated on Dublin. The brief respite that followed the intervention of the king of Lochlain in 853 ended with the death of his successor in 873. Three turbulent decades followed, at the end of which the Vikings were driven out of Dublin by Caerball, leader of the Leinster Irish. This expulsion has been associated with the Cuerdale hoard, found in May 1840 by workmen repairing the embankment on the south side of the river Ribble at Cuerdale, near Preston. Until dwarfed by the discovery of the Spillings hoard on Gotland in 1999, it remained the largest trove of Viking silver ever unearthed. Among the numerous items in the hoard were bossed penanular brooches and thistle brooches, stamped arm-rings and neck-rings, rings from east of the Baltic, Slavic beads, Carolingian and Pictish items, a coin from Constantinople, a handful of Kufic dirhams, a large number of coins from Anglo-Saxon mints and some 5,000 coins minted within the Danelaw.⁵ The dates on the coins give a terminus ante quem of around 905, which accords nicely with the expulsion from Dublin. After a failed attempt to settle in Anglesey, an army of expelled Norwegians under Ingamund landed in the Wirral peninsula, between the Dee and the Mersey, and demanded to be allowed to stay. Ethelred’s health had failed by this time and his role in the negotiations was taken by Ethelfled. She gave her permission. Aware, however, of the attractions of wealthy Chester, she had the city walls repaired in 907, and established a garrison there that could control the peninsula. The Wirral, and those other parts of north-west England later occupied by Norwegians, never formed part of the physical entity of ‘the Danelaw’; and perhaps it was for this very reason they thrived in their historically rather neglected colony. Over 600 place-names of Scandinavian origin on the Ordinance Survey maps of the Wirral area amply demonstrate the size and permanence of their settlement.⁶ The DNA traces tell the same story: in a study of the Y-chromosome of 150 Liverpool men carried out by a team from the University of Nottingham in 2007, findings showed that 50 per cent were likely to have been of Norwegian descent.⁷

Following her husband Ethelred’s death in 911, Ethelfled raised no protest when Edward annexed Oxford and London, which were clearly easier for Wessex to defend than Mercia; and her action in fostering Edward’s son Athelstan further strengthened the regional and dynastic ties. She continued the remarkably successful policy of creating burhs along the strategic routes that led into Mercia from the west, fortifying Bridgnorth in 912 to control the middle reaches of the Severn; Stafford and Tamworth along Watling Street the following year; Warwick, to guard the use of the Fosse Way, possibly in response to a raid in 914 by Vikings based in Brittany who landed in South Wales; and Runcorn in the Mersey estuary.⁸ In the east she drove the Danes from Derby in 917, after fierce fighting in which four of her personal favourites were killed inside the walls of the town.

The Chronicle gives vivid detail of the fighting in the crucial year of 917, with Viking armies from Northampton being frustrated in their attempts to take Towcester and an East Anglian army being repelled with heavy loss of life by the men of Bedford.⁹ The English were greatly encouraged by their successes, and a large army of men from Kent, Surrey and Essex seized Colchester after another fierce battle. By the close of the year Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire were under Edward’s control, as well as the whole of East Anglia. Ethelfled’s forces took Leicester in 918, and in June of that year she received the submission of the Danes of York.¹⁰ The Viking kingship there was as little settled as East Anglia. By the following year the leadership had changed again, reverting to another reputed grandson of Ivar the Boneless, Ragnald, who seems to have held it once before, in 911, briefly but long enough to strike his own coins. This was probably the same chieftain who fought a sea-battle off the Isle of Man in 914 and, as a king of the Dubhgall or ‘black foreigners’, fought the Irish in the area around Waterford in 917. After ravaging in Ireland and Scotland he faced an alliance of English and Scots forces at Corbridge, and in 919 threatened and then took York. His second, brief reign ended with his death in 921, at which he was succeeded by Sihtric, another of Ivar’s grandsons.

Edward was a talented maker of diplomatically rewarding matches and established good contact with the rulers of Flanders, as well as marrying his daughter, Eadgifu, to Charles the Simple. In other ways he showed himself a man of vision and foresight. The ‘Burghal Hidage’, a listing of the burhs dated to some time after 914, contains a conscription formula that reflects the military purpose behind these creations. But in time these burhs transcended their military origins and, with their garrisons, mints and trading populations, came to play a major role in the development of cities and townships in England, so that they can properly be entered on the long list of negative credits attributable to Viking violence. Edward brought new thinking to his enlarged kingdom. The new Mercian shires he created along with burhs took their names from towns, with the area administered from Gloucester being known as Gloucestershire, from Hereford as Herefordshire and so on.¹² The boundaries of these new shires cut across the traditional boundaries of the old kingdoms. In so doing they added impetus to the breakdown of familiar geographical regions and political institutions which Viking raiding and settlement had begun, accelerating and simplifying the way to the eventual creation of a single English kingdom.

Early in 926 he gave his sister Eadgyth in marriage to Sihtric of York, having first issued the traditional demand that Sihtric convert to Christianity. According to Roger of Wendover, Sihtric soon followed the equally traditional Viking response of abandoning the new religion at the first opportunity, along with his new wife, and returning to his old gods. When Sihtric died in 927, his son by an earlier marriage, Olaf, attempted to succeed him with the support of a leader of the Dublin Vikings. Athelstan, wearied as so many Anglo-Saxon and Frankish Christian rulers had been before him by the casual attitude of Vikings towards conversion, drove him out and for the first time a Wessex king ruled directly over York. A small coin hoard unearthed on a farm in Harrogate has been associated with this particular period of unrest in the north-east.¹⁶ One of the coins bears the Latin inscription Rex totius Britannia (King of all Britain), a claim Athelstan repeated in the charters of his reign, where he also styled himself ‘Emperor [using the Byzantine word basilius] of the English and of all the nations round about’. As the first Anglo-Saxon king to make such claims, Athelstan’s gestures show that his goal was indeed the unification of England under one king.

Yet his kingdom remained far from secure. Constantine, king of the Scots, challenged him in 934, and when that challenge failed Constantine allied himself with that Olaf whom Athelstan had driven out of York. They were joined by Owen, king in the Welsh-speaking kingdom of Strathclyde in the south-west of Scotland, and while Athelstan and his men were campaigning in the south of England, Olaf’s army of Irish-Norse Vikings and Northumbrian Norwegians raided and caused havoc in Mercia. In 937 Athelstan with his brother Edmund at the head of a large army marched north and confronted them in a great battle at Brunanburh, now identified with some certainty as Bromborough in the Wirral peninsula .¹⁷ The battle lasted all day, and by the end of it the alliance was destroyed and the northern threat to the kingdom removed. Olaf made his way back over the sea to Dublin and Constantine returned to Scotland, abdicating in 943 after a reign of forty years to spend the last ten years of his life as a monk at St Andrews. Brunanburh was the outstanding event of Athelstan’s reign¹⁸ and, as such, the stuff of literature. The battle was immortalized in a Latin poem from which William of Malmesbury quotes, and it was noted in a number of histories and annals, including the Annals of Ulster. Its most famous memorial is the Anglo-Saxon poem that is in its entirety the entry for that year in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

In this year King Athelstan, lord of nobles, dispenser of treasure to men, and his brother also, Edmund atheling, won by the sword’s edge undying glory in battle round Brunanburh. Edward’s sons clove the shield-wall, hewed the linden-wood shields with hammered swords, for it was natural to men of their lineage to defend their land, their treasure and their homes, in frequent battle against every foe. Their enemies perished; the people of the Scots and the pirates fell doomed. The field grew dark with the blood of men, from the time when the sun, that glorious luminary, the bright candle of God, of the Lord Eternal, moved over the earth in the hours of the morning, until that noble creation sank at its setting. There lay many a man destroyed by the spears, many a northern warrior shot over his shield; and likewise many a Scot lay weary, sated with battle.

Two years after the battle at Brunanburh Athelstan died, and Olaf returned from Ireland to press his claim to York once more. As coins from the mint at Derby show, this time he succeeded. Again Wessex found itself faced with a Viking kingdom spanning the north of England, with potential allies in the north-west and along the east coast, and with Dublin and the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea as strategically vital components. The union of Dublin and York under one ruler might have proved an irresistible military force had Olaf not died in 941. His cousin, Olaf Sihtricsson, inherited that same potential; but after a campaign by Athelstan’s successor Edmund he was compelled to accept Christianity and relinquish the territory gained by Olaf south of the Humber. The following year, in 944, the Danes of York rejected him, and the disintegration of the kingdom continued apace. After a short and provocative reign, Erik Bloodaxe, the oldest of Harald Finehair’s sons, had been driven from the throne of Norway by his brother, Håkon Athelstansfostri. According to his saga in Heimskringla, Håkon was helped in his campaign by ships and men provided by Athelstan, just as Athelstan had provided military and naval support for another of his foster-sons, Alan Barbetorte, in the campaign to reclaim Brittany that began in 936.²⁰ The account given by Snorri of Håkon’s adoption by Athelstan²¹ is obviously legendary and nothing is known of how the friendship between the English and Norwegian kings came about; by himself as by others, however, Athelstan was regarded as a very important king indeed in Europe at the time. William of Malmesbury, in the De Gestis Regum Anglorum, says that ‘foreign kings rightly considered themselves fortunate if they could buy his friendship either by marriage alliance or gifts’,²² and goes on to describe a visit paid to Athelstan after his recapture of York by two Norwegian emissaries, Helgrim and Osfrid, who brought with them a king’s gift of a ship from Harald Finehair to Athelstan, ‘which had a gold beak and purple sail, surrounded inside with a dense rank of gilded shields’. A passage in Egil’s Saga may provide evidence of a tradition of further ties between the Norwegian and English royal houses at this time, when a young Norwegian named Thorstein, involved in a property dispute back home in Norway, visits Athelstan’s court with a plea to the English king to ask his foster-son Håkon to intercede on his behalf in the dispute.²³ The claim in the Historia Norwegie, that Erik Bloodaxe made his way to England after being driven out by Håkon, and was warmly received by the king, baptized and ‘appointed earl, commanding the whole of Northumbria’, likewise suggests continuing good relations between the royal families of England and Norway.²⁴ The English king involved may have been Athelstan, but more likely it was later, during the reign of King Edred. Snorri Sturluson tells a similar story of Erik’s being baptized and given York to rule by an English king. Erik appears to have been an acceptable choice to the Northumbrians until the arrival of his wife, Gunnhild. The pair were driven out and Gunnhild returned to Denmark with her sons. Roger of Wendover says that Erik was betrayed, ambushed and killed as he made his way across remote Stainmore in Westmorland in 954. Two twelfth-century Norwegian sources, the Historia Norwegie and the Ágrip, tell a different story and make the intriguing claim that, after being driven from York, Erik set out on a Viking expedition to Spain and was killed there. Whichever story is correct, both describe the ignominious and lonely death of a nearly-man. Erik was known as ‘Bloodaxe’ during his own lifetime, after killing two of his own brothers who may have become a focus of discontent with his rule. Unfortunately for him, brother Håkon was out of his reach and had a powerful protector. The image of a short, broad sword on a silver penny struck during one of his brief reigns at York serves as a fitting epitaph to his violent and uncompromising character. Erik was the last independent king of York. With his death, the territories that had constituted the Danelaw were, after almost 100 years, in English hands once again.

Though the English repossession of York has the neatness and drama of concluding a ‘campaign’ to re-take lands lost to the invaders, the battle at Brunanburh in 937 seemed to contemporaries and near-contemporaries of greater significance. Another presence at Brunanburh on the English side was that of Oda, bishop of Ramsbury in Wiltshire. The poet does not mention him, but later stories place him there and credit him with miraculously restoring Athelstan’s sword.²⁵ The legend adds interest to the otherwise bald account of the battle in the ‘F’ annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which note only that Athelstan and Edmund triumphed ‘with the help of Christ’. That Christian legend should place this particular man on this particular field of battle has a cultural significance that probably equals the military significance of Athelstan’s victory, for Oda’s father was, in the whispered tones of one source, ‘said by certain people to have come to England with Ubba and Ivar’. He was, in other words, the son of a Heathen Viking.

Visiting the newly reopened monastery at Athelney, Alfred’s biographer, Asser, had been surprised to find so many foreign monks there and attributed it to the fact that Viking violence had frightened the native English away from the monastic life. Among the foreign novices he was surprised to note ‘someone of Viking parentage who had been brought up there’; how much more would the elevation, within a half-century, of a first-generation Danish immigrant to the highest church office in the land have surprised him. Oda was the kind of immigrant the royal house of Wessex must have dreamt of, and it is hardly a slur on his character and on the many talents he showed as bureaucrat, diplomat and Christian leader to wonder if his appointment, four years after Brunanburh, to the archbishopric of Canterbury might reflect an early grasp, among the English intelligentsia, of the benefits of ‘positive discrimination’ towards the right kinds of Danish settlers. As the proud boast sounded in the last few lines of the poem on Brunanburh shows, tribal and cultural self-awareness were an essential part of social identity in early medieval times. Oda’s antecedents as the child of a Viking father were no secret, and the authorities will have hoped that his success might encourage other settlers to follow him.

As archbishop of Canterbury under Athelstan’s successor, Edmund, Oda continued to enjoy royal favour. In 940 he negotiated on behalf of Edmund with the kingdom of York, still then in Danish hands and represented on the Danish or northern side by Wulfstan, archbishop of York. With Wulfstan and a number of other bishops, Oda was responsible for the series of injunctions that made up Edmund’s first law code and covered issues such as the celibacy of the clergy, the penance for killing, sexual offences, the payment of tithes and other church dues, the maintenance of churches and the excommunication of perjurers.²⁸ As a scholar he took it upon himself to make a compilation of early English canonical materials, for the enlightenment ‘of King Edmund and of the whole people subjected to his excellent rule’. Tentatively dated to the first years of his pontificate, this document has been interpreted as a clear indication of Oda’s intention to reaffirm the Church’s most basic principles, values and moral obligations, as well as to restate the moral and political obligations of the king and his court to the Church.

Perhaps the most pregnant of his reforms concerned East Anglia, which was probably Oda’s birthplace and his earliest childhood home. The bishopric there had been a casualty of the Vikings in the 860s, since which time it had been supervised from London. Some time in the mid-950s Oda re-established it at Elmham. He also made improvements to the cathedral church at Canterbury, and added to Canterbury’s collection of relics, importing the bones of St Ouen from Rouen in Normandy, another part of the world in which the descendants of Vikings were trying hard to make the transition to Christian values. We know too little of Oda’s life to compare his influence on Athelstan, and on Edmund later, with the sort of influence Alcuin had on Charlemagne; but Edmund’s appointment of Dunstan as abbot of Glastonbury, which heralded the monastic revival of the second half of the tenth century, may well have owed something to Oda’s influence and to his enthusiasm for the cause of reform, as might the appointment of Ethelwold to the abbey at Abingdon, by Edmund’s successor, Edred. In 957 Oda was given the estate of Ely. Once, before the arrival of the Danish armies, Ely had been the most important of the East Anglian religious houses, and it may well have been his intention to restore it to its former glory. If this were so, it was thwarted by his death in 958. In the years following, the programme of rebuilding and revitalizing a monastic life that had been so thoroughly demoralized by Viking hostility is known, after its leading light, as the Age of Dunstan. Archbishop Dunstan and his supporters enjoyed the great benefit of building on work that had been started before their time by others, including, perhaps pre-eminently, Oda - acting from Christian conviction, certainly, but perhaps fired as much by a personal desire to make some reparation for the role played in its demoralization in the first place by his own people.

If literary legend only enhanced Oda’s role on the English side at Brunanburh in 937, it was probably entirely responsible for the presence there of Egil Skallagrimsson, the poet, warrior, drunkard, killer and eponymous hero of the saga. Along with Oda and the seafaring trader Ottar from Hålogoland, he completes a fascinating trio of non-royal Scandinavians whose fates brought them into contact with the kings of Wessex as they struggled to come to terms with the Viking menace. Strict chronology was not a concern of the author of Egil’s Saga, but the internal evidence of the story is that his life and adventures spanned the period from 910 to about 990.²⁹ Like the skilled storyteller that he was, the author was careful to involve his main character in a crucial role in some of the most important historical events of his time, and in Egil’s case this included the battle at Brunanburh.³⁰ Certain details in Egil’s Saga indicate that the author knew a great deal of the history relating to the engagement. When he calls the field of battle ‘Vinheith’ he sounds a close echo of the name ‘Wendune’ given as the site by Simeon of Durham; he also offers a plausible explanation for the long delay between the announcement of the battle, and Athelstan’s eventual arrival at the site, telling us that Athelstan was so shocked at the size of the force ranged against him that at first he gave way before it and made his way south, in order to build up an army as he travelled northwards through the country, ‘for people thought it would be a slow mustering, in view of the numbers needed’.³¹

[Olaf] sent men of his up on the moor to the place appointed for battle. They were to find tent sites, and make ready before the army came. When the men reached the place agreed on, hazel stakes were put up indicating the site where the battle was to be. The place needed to be chosen carefully so that it should be on level ground where a great host was to be drawn up. As it was, the moor where the battle would be was level, but on one side a river flowed down, and on the other there was a big wood. King Athelstan’s men had pitched their tents where there was the shortest distance between the wood and the river, and even so that was a long stretch. Their tents went the whole length between wood and river. They had organized their tents so that there was no one in every third tent, and few people in any. When King Olaf’s men came up it was crowded in front of all the tents and they could not go into them. King Athelstan’s men said that all the tents were full of men, so that there was barely room for their army.³²

The day appointed for the battle passes, and still Athelstan himself has not arrived from the south. His men send a message to King Olaf, offering him a silver shilling for every plough in the kingdom if he will forgo the hostilities and lead his forces back over the border into Scotland. Olaf’s men advise him to reject the offer, certain that the English will improve upon it, and this is done. Athelstan’s messengers request a truce lasting three days, one in which to ride back with the offer, a second for them to discuss it with their king, and a third for the return journey. The request is granted. Three days later they are back with the improved offer. Once again the invaders’ greed gets the better of them. Olaf says he will accept, on condition that Athelstan throw in the whole of Northumbria, along with all its tributes and dues. The messengers negotiate another three-day truce in which to deal with this new demand. But by this time Athelstan has arrived with his army. His men explain their delaying tactics to him, and now at last he gives his true response:

The counter-offer is duly refused, and battle is joined. Egil’s involvement is explained as the result of an incident described earlier in the saga, after a character called Eyvind the Braggart has been employed by Harald Bluetooth to take charge of Danish defences ‘against the Vikings’.³³ One of Eyvind’s first actions in this capacity is an attempted ambush of Egil and his crew that goes badly wrong for him and in which Egil kills most of his men. It is in flight from the repercussions of these killings that Egil makes his way to England, where he learns that King Athelstan is advertising for mercenaries and that the rewards are likely to be high. During the battle he acquits himself with great distinction. Afterwards he terrifies friend and foe alike with his demeanour as he sits at Athelstan’s celebratory table, still fully armed, glowering, his shaggy eyebrows riding up and down his forehead, alternately tightening and relaxing his grip on the hilt of his sword, neither drinking nor socializing until the wise Athelstan, discerning a need for appreciation, takes his own sword from its scabbard, removes a ring from his own arm and slipping it over the point of the sword offers it to Egil, who duly raises his own sword in acknowledgement and takes the king’s gift on its point.

Gaunt monuments like this one, known as niðstöng or shame-poles, are found scattered across saga literature. Egil’s variant is grotesque enough in its own right, but it has been slightly censored by the author and in the context of the saga the force of it remains obscure. In its unadulterated form it contained an accusation of homosexuality that emerges more clearly in a passage in the Vatnsdaela Saga, in which the brothers Thorstein and Jokul challenge two other men, Finnbogi the Mighty and Berg the Bold, to a duel. Bad weather prevents Finnbogi and Berg from reaching the duelling site, though not the brothers. When it becomes clear that their opponents are not going to show, Thorstein and Jokul take a pole from a sheep-fold and carve a man’s head at one end of it. An insult is then carved in runes along the pole, a mare is killed, its breast opened and the pole stuck inside the opening. The gruesome apparition is then turned to face in the direction of Finnbogi’s farm.³⁵ Jokul has already warned Berg that ‘you must now turn up to the duel if you have a man’s heart rather than a mare’s’, and the symbolic force of his construction when his opponents fail to show lies in the open identification of Finnbogi as a female of the species.

A still more complex version of the insult is found in the Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Hitardal People. The friendship between two men who both love the same woman ends when one of them tricks her into marrying him by falsely reporting the death of the other. The bad feeling between the former friends simmers for years. It reaches its bizarre climax one day when a carved wooden statue appears on the boundary of the liar’s property. The carving shows two men standing close together, one behind the other, one with a black hat on his head. Both are bent forward. ‘People thought ill of the encounter, ’ the author tells us, ‘and said that it was not good for either of them who stood there; but it was worse for the one who stood in front.’ Specific prohibitions in the laws of the Norwegian Gulathing and in the Icelandic Grágás reflect the seriousness of the homosexual insult:

Though Thorvald was allocated the less shameful ‘active’ role in the poem, the offence remained great enough for him to slough off his Christianity and kill his tormentor. In sorrow at his companion’s failure to observe the Christian injunction against killing, the bishop is said to have abandoned the mission. Njal’s Saga also offers examples of how the sexual insult was used by Heathens intent on resisting what were perceived as the feminine values of Christianity. In a dramatic scene at an althing meeting, the Christian Njal leads his party in assembling a pile of goods as compensation to Flosi’s party for the murder of Flosi’s kinsman, Hoskuld. Njal tops off the pile with a silk scarf and a pair of boots. Flosi does not want reconciliation, and no one will answer him when he picks up the scarf and mockingly demands to know whose contribution this might be. Njal’s son, Skarphedin, then asks who he thinks it might be and Flosi replies, as offensively as possible, that he suspects it might be Njal, ‘that beardless man, because a lot of people, when they look at him, are unsure whether he’s a man or a woman’. The reference is to the practice, introduced by Christian missionaries and followed by the convert Njal, of going clean-shaven. Skarphedin counters the offence to his father by reclaiming the silk scarf and tossing a pair of dark blue breeches to Flosi, assuring him that he will have more use of those. Flosi asks why, and Skarphedin tells him: ‘People say that every ninth night you’re the bride of the Swine Mountain troll, and that he turns you into a woman.’ Njal’s brave attempt to solve the conflict in the spirit of Christianity drowns as the primitive emotions aroused by these exchanges flare up into full-scale violence.

Oda might serve as the extreme and accelerated personification of a general process of assimilation and integration that followed the Viking occupation of territories in the Danelaw and in other parts of England and the British Isles. This process of assimilation is difficult to trace or characterize, not least because the size of the Scandinavian settlement remains uncertain. Between the setting-up of the Danish kingdoms which was complete by about 880 and the Norman conquest of England in 1066, there must have been a continuous flow of Danish and Norwegian immigrants into the occupied areas, though there is no documentary evidence of it. Documentary evidence does not become available until the creation of Domesday Book in the eleventh century. With the help of various charters of the twelfth century, attempts have been made to estimate the size of the settlements based on the evidence of personal names. About 60 per cent of Lincolnshire farmers, 40 per cent of East Anglian farmers, and roughly 50 per cent of the northern Danelaw had names of Scandinavian origin.⁴¹ Even here we are on uncertain ground, for the vagaries of fashion might be leading us into the false assumption that everyone with a Scandinavian name was, in fact, of Scandinavian descent.

Place-names might seem to offer a reliable guide to the extent of the settlements, but this is another complex matter with many variables and imponderables, and without the work of specialists such as Eilert Ekwall, Margaret Gelling, W. H. F. Nicolaisen and Gillian Fellows-Jensen to guide us we should be able to make very little sense of it as evidence. There are major concentrations of Scandinavian places-names in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and relatively few in East Anglia, which survived as a fully independent Danish kingdom only until 902 and after that as some kind of compromised unit until the death of a last and unnamed Scandinavian king in battle in 917. They are almost entirely absent from the southern parts of the Danelaw that included Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Middlesex. Though never formally part of the Danelaw, the areas of north-west England, from Cheshire through Lancashire and Cumbria up to the lower fringes of Galloway, are also rich in Scandinavian place-names.

Assessments of the quality of the land settled have been attempted on the basis of place-names. It seems that the first settlers from the disbanded Great Heathen Army did not change the names of the places in which they chose to settle. Not until the increased levels of settlement and cultivation after 900 did the Danes give new names to the parcelled-out areas of the old English estates and to the new settlements created by draining or clearing tougher terrain. Settlement names that used a number of Old Norse words for ‘marsh’ probably reflect new reclamations of marshy land in the area in this early period of Scandinavian settlement in the Danelaw. Redcar in North Yorkshire and Broadcarr in Norfolk both contain the element kjarr, meaning ‘brushwood’ and indicating an area of marsh overgrown with brush-wood. ⁴² Mosi meaning ‘moss’ is found in the Lancashire Chat Moss and Rathmoss, and in Cumberland in the names Mosser and Mosedale. River names are the most resilient of all classes of toponyms,⁴³ and here the Scandinavians followed in the footsteps of the Anglo-Saxons who had, in their time as colonists and settlers, adopted a high percentage of native British names for rivers. Though there are few rivers with entirely Old Norse names, a number in the northern Danelaw like the Beela, the Greta and the Liza use the Old Norse suffix á, meaning ‘river’.⁴⁴ Water was a major factor in the choice of settlement site, as names of fords, bridges and connecting causeways indicate. Both Ferrybridge in the West Riding of Yorkshire and Ferriby in Lincolnshire, meaning ‘ferry settlement’, are built on the Old Norse ferja, meaning ‘ferry’.

Gil, denoting a ‘ravine or a deep narrow valley with a stream’, as compounded in Lowgill and Long Gill in the Forest of Bowland, is found across those areas of north-west England such as Cumbria and the Lake District, which bear such a striking resemblance to the homeland of the Norwegians who settled there. The establishment of settlements after the land had been cleared of trees is suggested by the presence in their names of such Old Norse elements as lundr, skógr, vithr, with -thveit, meaning a ‘clearing’, the most common among these. Like the names reflecting farms and settlements established after the draining and clearing of marshy land, they suggest many of the later settlers created new farms rather than simply taking over existing ones. These terms seem generally to be used for the secondary development of places with less good potential, very often on higher ground, which may indicate that not all the new settlers had the pick of the land.⁴⁵ The numerous town and topographical names with -thveit in and around the Lake District, such as Bassenthwaite, are often found on valley slopes which would have required a considerable amount of clearing before they could be used for farming.⁴⁶ Place-names with -thorp, of which almost 600 examples have been recorded,⁴⁷ seem likewise to have been used for land that was at least initially not promising, not the pick of the settlements and required a lot of clearing. The most common Scandinavian place-name element found in the Danelaw is -by, which occurs in nearly 900 place-names in England (and Scotland). In Scandinavia, names ending in -by would most often be compounded with a topographical feature; in England almost two-thirds of the recorded instances involve a personal name, probably that of the first Scandinavian settler:⁴⁸ Rollesby in Norfolk was probably settled by Rolf, Ormesby in South Lincolnshire by Ormar, and Scratby in Norfolk by Skrauti.⁴⁹ Occasionally, where an older English name caused problems of pronunciation for the settlers, it would survive in an adapted form. Thus Shipton became Skipton, Cheswick became Keswick and Charlton became Carlton.⁵⁰ A rare example of an English place-name being replaced was Anglo-Saxon Norðworðig, meaning ‘northern enclosure’, which the invader-settlers renamed ‘Derby’, denoting ‘a place with deer’.⁵¹

A wealth of words passed into the English language as a result of the Scandinavian settlements. Among the most striking adoptions were the Old Norse personal pronouns ‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘their’, replacing Old English ‘hie’, ‘him’ and ‘hiera’. Many words with an initial sk sound, such as sky, skill and skin, derive from Old Norse, as do everyday words like anger, husband, wing, thrive, egg, bread and die. The history of the word ‘egg’ highlights some of the difficulties in interpreting the evidence of common borrowings. In competition with Old Norse egg, Anglo-Saxon æg survived into the sixteenth century as eye (pl. eyren), and as late as the end of the fifteenth century was still causing confusion. William Caxton complained of the difficulties in the Eneydos in 1490: ‘What sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren, certaynly it is harde to playse every man.’

Opinions differ over the implications of borrowings at such a fundamental level; it may indicate that a minority of Scandinavian settlers enjoyed, from the start, a high social status which encouraged a local desire to copy their language; or the fact that borrowing took place at this mundane level, rather than at the higher levels at which Norman French later influenced the vocabulary of government and culture, might suggest that Danish influence on Anglo-Saxon English came about through the sheer numbers of those speaking it, rather than from their elevated social status.⁵² Again, fashion is notoriously hard to plot into such analyses, since it moves as readily up as down the social scale. Despite the apparent brevity of the period of Scandinavian dominance in East Anglia, Scandinavian names remained common there into the twelfth century, and while the persistence for centuries of feminine names such as Thora and Gunnhild might indicate that settlers imported their wives from home rather than marrying local women, it might equally reflect an enduring fashion for these names. Alcuin, we recall, rebuked the king of Northumbria and his courtiers for copying the hair-styles of the Heathens, and the monks in the monasteries for preferring to listen to Beowulf while they dined rather than Christian texts. One of the most common male names used in the Danelaw was ‘Halfdan’, meaning ‘half-Dane’. ‘Thor’ was another.

Opinion varies as to how long Norse survived as a spoken language in those areas of the British Isles in which Scandinavian speakers settled. In Normandy, as in Kiev, the native tongues were linguistically so remote from Old Norse that a quick adoption of the native languages was a necessity of life. It seems, however, that there were sufficient similarities between North Germanic Old Norse and West Germanic Anglo-Saxon for them to be mutually comprehensible with a little effort and good-will, facilitating the import and export of words as convenience, density of linguistic population, and fashion dictated, and encouraging a much longer survival of Old Norse in the Danelaw than in Kiev or Normandy. The inscription on a stone, found in 1902 at a farmhouse in Pennington in Cumbria, mixes Old Norse and English runes. The presence of Norman decorative features on the base of the stone dates it to the twelfth century and shows that Norse was, if not still spoken, at least not forgotten in the area. Owing to the thoroughgoing nature of the Norwegian colonization of Shetland and the Orkneys a local form of Old Norse known as Norn may have been spoken into the eighteenth century, before finally giving way to Scots.

Some of the monumental art associated with the Scandinavian invaders and settlers of England and the islands of Britain shows a similar combination of Irish or Anglo-Saxon sources with imported Scandinavian styles. A well-known example is the stone cross found at Middleton, in Yorkshire, which depicts in its lower panel a warrior in a peaked helmet with his spear, axe, sword, shield and knife. Above the panel is the cross, and on the other side a Scandinavian creature in the Jelling style, which we have encountered before on Harald Bluetooth’s great stone. The sculptor of the great stone cross found at Gosforth in Cumbria used Christian elements inspired by the high crosses of the Irish monasteries, in combination with Scandinavian mythological scenes and ornamentations in the ring-chain Borre style, so named after a characteristic example of the style on a metal fitting found at Borre, in the Norwegian Vestfold. On its eastern face is a representation of Christ bleeding on the cross; close by is a woman holding out a drinking horn, a representation of a Valkyrie, familiar from Gotland picture-stones that depict the welcoming of the dead hero into Odin’s Valhalla; a scene on the south face appears to show Odin and Mimir; another showing two figures fishing from a boat may illustrate the story of Thor’s encounter with the Midgard serpent. The 4.5-metre-high monument is evidently a reproduction in stone of a cross made in wood. In another of its many syncretic moments it symbolizes both Yggdrasil, the tree of life of northern Heathendom, and the cross of Christianity. Some scholars now believe that, far from being a spontaneous effect, this mingling of styles in monumental form was a technique deliberately employed by Scandinavian chieftains, in particular those from Norway, as a way of re-creating in the minds of followers in the new country visible and traditionally accepted symbols of power familiar to them from ‘the old country’, in circumstances where, by the very fact of recent settlement, no such physical manifestations of past landed power existed.⁵³ The incorporation of Heathen imagery into the monuments was, in this perspective, both a reassurance and an affirmation of continuity within change.

Although the areas of England occupied by the Great Army and its descendants never formed a coherent political unit corresponding to Wessex and Mercia, for the medieval annalists and historians who coined the term ‘Danelaw’ it was the insistence of the invader-settlers on importing their own law and administration into the areas in which they settled that became the defining characteristic of the new model of England that arose as a result of the Viking invasions.⁵⁴ One of the more striking results of this insistence was that Old Norse lagu- was presently adopted into English as ‘law’, replacing Anglo-Saxon æ. The ‘by-’ element in modern English compounds relating to local government, such as ‘by(e)-laws’ and ‘by(e)-elections’, derives similarly from the Old Norse word meaning ‘town’ or ‘settlement’. The invader-settlers brought the tradition of the thing meeting with them, familiar to Norwegians from the Eyrathing in Trondheim, the Gulathing in western Norway, and the Borgarthing from the Sarpsborg region to the south of Oslo, and to Danes from the thing held at Viborg. The Tynwald on the Isle of Man, which still meets annually on 5 July, is etymologically the same word as thingvellir, where the Icelandic althing met from the earliest days of the Free State until 1798. Ingimund and his group of exiled Norwegians established a thing at what is now Thingwall in the centre of their settlement on the Wirral peninsula. ⁵⁵ Thingwall is very likely the place where Ingimund, dissatisfied with the offer of land made to them by Ethelfled, stood and exhorted his men to join him in an attack on Chester - ‘Let us beseech and implore them first. And if we do not get them willingly in this way, let us contest them by force.’⁵⁶ The settlers divided Yorkshire into separate administrative units which became known as Ridings, a noun derived from Old Norse thriðjungr, meaning ‘the third part’. These Yorkshire Ridings were later divided into areas called wapentakes, derived from the word vápnatak, meaning ‘weapon-taking’. In the Scandinavian homelands the word referred to the raising of weapons as a gesture of assent to a decision or verdict reached at a thing meeting; in England the meaning was extended to cover both the actual assembly itself, and the area represented by the assembly.⁵⁷ From King Ethelred’s laws (III), issued at Wantage in 997, it is apparent that the wapentake was the basic unit of local administration for the areas that fell under the group of districts known as the Five Boroughs, namely Derby, Stamford, Lincoln, Nottingham and Leicester, corresponding to the hundred in the rest of England.⁵⁸ Domesday Book of 1086 used the terms indiscriminately, suggesting that by that time there was no real difference, and that the form chosen was largely a matter of the majority voice of the local population.⁵⁹ The North, West and East Ridings of Yorkshire survived as local government districts of the county until well into the twentieth century.

There is not enough surviving evidence to enable us to judge whether parallel law codes were necessary because the societies involved cultivated fundamentally different ethical systems, or whether they were largely a symbolic statement of separate cultural identity by the Scandinavians. There is no doubt that certain legal matters and crimes were treated differently under the distinct law codes. A legal stipulation from the time of Edward the Elder on the subject of fugitives allowed for their separate treatment in Wessex, and in ‘the eastern or northern kingdoms’. In Wessex, the laws of Wessex were to apply; in the Danelaw areas, the issue was to be settled ‘in accordance with the provisions of the treaties’.⁶⁰ Evidence of a separate legal culture is still found in the law code issued at Wihtbordesstan by King Edgar in 963. Clause 2.1 strikes a note of ambiguity as the king stipulates that: ‘It is my will that secular rights be in force among the Danes according to as good laws as they can best decide on. Among the English, however, that is to be in force which I and my councillors have added to the decrees of my ancestors, for the benefit of all the nation’:⁶¹ his ‘will’ in the matter appears only to affirm that, as far as the Danes are concerned, it is an irrelevance. Other clauses in the same law code hint at a change in attitude in which the distinct nature of the Danelaw as an area is still recognized, but only up to a point. Edgar presents himself as showing largesse towards the settlers, allowing them to live by laws familiar to them from their homelands, as a reward for their loyalty, ‘which you have always shown me’. Yet he also announces a measure concerning stolen property which is to be ‘common to all the nation, whether Englishmen, Danes or Britons, in every province of my dominion’.⁶² By the end of the tenth century and the reign of Ethelred, the position seems to have been that, while differences of procedure were acceptable, different standards of justice were not.⁶³

As we saw earlier, the Wessex dynasty’s policy of building fortified burhs across the length and breadth of England as landmarks in the gradual repossession of formerly Viking territories led to the growth of towns and cities in England during the Viking Age. The Vikings’ fortification and expansion of the five midland towns of Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln and Stamford in the attempt to counter the Anglo-Saxon retaliation was likewise a contributory factor in the growth of these towns. But it was the rapid expansion of the city of York, essentially the capital of Viking-occupied territories in the east of England, that was the major contribution of the Vikings to the development of urban life in England. Originally fortified by the Romans to control the Celtic tribes in the region, the settlement was abandoned after almost four centuries of occupation. Following a period of neglect, it was taken over by the Anglo-Saxons. As Eoferwic, it became the capital of the northern kingdom of Deira. The pattern of streets laid down by the Romans was restored and the walls fortified. With the coming of Christianity to the region the town enjoyed a widespread prestige and prosperity which survived its incorporation in the seventh century into the kingdom of Northumbria. It was this prosperity that attracted Viking raiders to York in the first place. From the time of the arrival on the east coast of the Great Heathen Army in 865, Eoferwic was the scene of almost constant fighting between invaders and natives. Once they had triumphed, the Vikings showed an accommodation to the Church that allowed the archbishopric of York to carry on as usual. Indeed, Wulfstan of York was said to have preferred Scandinavian to West Saxon masters and the rule of Eric Bloodaxe, after his acceptance as king of York in 948, to the rule of Edred.⁶⁴

With settlement came the freedom to indulge commercial instincts. The act of capture and the subsequent infighting had wiped out most traces of previous settlements. If they wished to go on living there, the Vikings had no choice but to reconstruct what they had destroyed. Streets and houses were rebuilt, workshops opened. Through a century of uncertainty and fighting the city prospered and grew. Pressure of space within the narrow streets led, in time, to the replacement of the earlier wattle-and-daub buildings with two-storey structures in timber. According to Byrhtferth of Ramsey, by the year 1000 it had a population of 30,000. Even the more sober modern estimates of 8,000 to 10,000 based on Domesday Book still suggest a city that was large by contemporary European standards.⁶⁵ This rapidly swelling population left behind plentiful archaeological documentation of its thriving social and commercial life, and of the activities of craftsmen and women working there in textiles, metal, leather, wood, glass and bone. Byrhtferth tells us that merchants came to York ‘from all over the place’. A coin minted in Samarkand in the early tenth century has been found there, as has a cowrie shell stemming from either the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden. The city’s bread was made from flour ground by lava millstones imported from the Rhineland, its wine traded from Germany, its silk from Constantinople. Such remarkable social and commercial enterprise has even led to an identification of Viking and late Anglo-Saxon York as the site of the first true manifestation in England of an urban middle class that is more conventionally located to the London of some six or seven hundred years later.⁶⁶ Here the transition from raiders to traders ran its full course.