2

 

THE EARLY VIKING KINGS OF YORK

 

The Fall of York

 

We can begin our narrative proper with the entry for the year 867 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Under that year the Chronicle records the fall of York to the great Viking army that was then at large in the country:

 

In this year the army went from East Anglia to Northumbria, across the Humber estuary to the city of York. And there was great civil strife going on in that people, and they had deposed their king Osberht and taken a king with no hereditary right, Ælle. And not until late in the year did they unite sufficiently to proceed to fight the raiding army; and nevertheless they collected a large army and attacked the enemy in York, and broke into the city; and some of them got inside, and an immense slaughter was made of the Northumbrians, some inside and some outside, and both kings were killed, and the survivors made peace with the enemy.¹

 

King Alfred’s biographer, Asser, adapting the Chronicle’s account shortly after its composition, clarifies (or embellishes) a few of its details, especially with regards to the battle at York:

 

Osberht and Ælle combined forces and assembled an army, and went to the city of York. On their arrival, the Vikings immediately took to flight, and endeavoured to defend themselves within the fortifications of the city. When the Christians noticed their flight and panic, they too determined to pursue them within the fortifications of the city and to breach the wall; and this they did. For in those days the city did not yet have firm and secure walls. After the Christians had breached the wall as they had intended, and the majority of them had got into the city along with the Vikings, the Vikings, driven on by grief and necessity, attacked them fiercely, cut them to pieces, put them to flight, and overthrew them inside and outside. Virtually the entire force of Northumbrians was annihilated there, and the two kings were killed; but the remainder, who escaped, made peace with the Vikings.²

 

The word translated as ‘Vikings’ here is pagani ‘pagans’ in the original Latin, and so Asser makes the battle for York a conflict explicitly between Anglo-Saxon Christians and Scandinavian pagans.³ But other sources saw Osberht and Ælle’s defeat as being directly tied to their actions as enemies of the church: the History of St Cuthbert claims that both kings had stolen estates from the community of St Cuthbert, and even that Ælle had been staying at one of these stolen estates (Crayke [NR], ten miles north of York) prior to their unsuccessful attack on the Viking army in York.⁴

It is also worth considering a further version of the fall of York, in Symeon of Durham’s Tract on the Church of Durham. Although it is a later source, Symeon’s Tract gives us the fullest account of these events, and seems to be coherent in the narrative that it offers:

 

In the year of Our Lord’s Incarnation 867 […] the aforementioned heathen army captured York on 1 November and ranged hither and thither, filling everywhere with blood and lamentation. They destroyed monasteries and churches far and wide with sword and fire, and when they departed they left nothing except roofless walls.⁵

 

Symeon records that the Viking army did not on this occasion go any further north than the River Tyne, and his narrative continues:

 

Driven by necessity, the kings of the Northumbrians (that is, Osberht and Ælle) were reconciled to each other, and the Northumbrian peoples gathered together a not inconsiderable army and strove in every way possible to cripple the enemy’s power.

So, led by two kings and eight counts, they burst into York on 21 March, and fought stubbornly, some on the inside, some on the outside. At first the enemy was terrified by the sudden arrival of the attackers, but then they resisted fiercely, and on both sides there was savage fighting. At length both the aforementioned kings fell with most of their men.⁶

 

Symeon’s account thus makes clear what is ambiguous in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, namely that there were in fact two battles at York.⁷ In this period, the ‘chronicle year’ began on 24 September, with the so-called Caesarean Indiction, so we would now allocate the first battle, on 1 November, to 866, and it has been suggested that the Vikings may have attacked deliberately on this date – All Saints’ Day – as it was a major Christian feast-day, and any assault would have the maximum disruptive effect; attacking on feast-days was a well-established Viking ploy.⁸ In this first battle, the Viking army captured York; in the second battle, four and a half months later on 21 March 867, the Anglo-Saxon forces attempted unsuccessfully to regain the city. At York as elsewhere, the Vikings clearly had a talent for exploiting factional strife in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.⁹ That Symeon had good sources regarding the fall of York is suggested by the fact that, in another of his works, he reveals the unique detail that, upon the capture of the city in 866, the archbishop of York, Wulfhere, withdrew to Addingham in Wharfedale [WR].¹⁰

The fall of York in 866-67 is well recorded in English sources, and features in Irish and Welsh annals as well. But the significance of the event was also appreciated on the Scandinavian side, and a number of Old Norse texts narrate or allude to it. However, where the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and later versions construct their account in terms of regional history, and the demise of the kingdom of Northumbria, the Scandinavian sources make everything much more personal. The earliest extant Norse source to allude to the fall of York – a poem – dates from the 1020s or 1030s, a full century and a half after the event itself. The text concerned reveals starkly how traditions about the conquest had been re-shaped since the 860s:

 

And Ivar, who resided at York [Jórvík], had Ælle’s back cut with an eagle.¹¹

 

The poet here is the important skald Sigvatr Þórðarson, framing and commencing his encomium to King Cnut, the Danish conqueror of England, with a meaningful backward glance to the first Scandinavian conquest of the country. But instead of the teeming crowd-scenes of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Asser, and Symeon, Sigvatr reduces the fall of York to an interpersonal conflict between two individuals. On the English side is Ælle (and Osberht is not mentioned at all): instead of being dismissed as ‘a king with no hereditary right [ungecynd cyning]’ (as in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), Ælle seems in Norse tradition to have become a sort of representation of Anglo-Saxon inheritance and rule, frequently invoked in the context of Scandinavian triumphs in England.¹² On the Scandinavian side is his conqueror, Ivar, known in later Old Norse sagas as Ívarr inn beinlausi ‘Ivar the Boneless’. Those sagas, especially the Story of the Sons of Ragnarr (Þáttr af Ragnars sonum), present an elaborate, family-based explanation for Ivar’s desire to defeat Ella (as the Norse sources call him) and conquer Northumbria: they tell how Ella captured Ivar’s supposed father, the legendary Viking Ragnarr loðbrók ‘hairy trousers’, and villainously put him to death in a snake-pit; whereupon Ivar and his brothers, as self-respecting Viking sons, had no alternative but to take their revenge upon Ella, conquering his kingdom and putting him to death by the shameful method known as the ‘blood-eagle’, in which a victim’s lungs were pulled out and gorily arranged in the shape of an eagle’s wings.¹³

The genuineness or otherwise of the blood-eagle has been much debated.¹⁴ It is clear that, with these Old Norse sources, we are observing a process in which historical traditions are re-configured and re-imagined, primarily (one assumes) through a sequence of oral re-tellings. Sigvatr’s stanza is our earliest Norse source for these versions, and so it is worth noting that, first, these re-tellings and re-configurations seem to have taken place within the Viking Age itself, rather than in the later, post-Viking period; and second, that these colourful oral stories still retain some substance of historical worth. As we know from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the deeply obscure Ælle/Ella was indeed the king of York at the time of the city’s fall. With regards to the leader or leaders of the Viking army that vanquished Ælle, later sources record more varied traditions, but ones which can nonetheless be reconciled. Sigvatr Þórðarson, as we have seen, acclaims Ivar as the conqueror of Ælle. The History of St Cuthbert, however, attributes that role to a Scandinavian called Ubba (Old Norse Ubbi), who is associated in his campaign with another war-leader called Halfdan (Old Norse Hálfdanr; Healfdene in English sources).¹⁵ It seems likely, however, that in historical reality Ivar, Ubba and Halfdan were brothers, three of the leaders of the Viking Great Army.¹⁶ Ivar, above all, was an exceptionally important figure for the history of Viking Age Britain: probably of Danish origin and known in English sources as Inwær, in Irish ones as Imair, and in Latin ones (in England at least) as Hinguar, he effectively established the dynasty of Scandinavian kings who were to rule in England and Ireland in the ninth and tenth centuries.¹⁷

The traditions and stories surrounding the fall of York in 866-67 were thus extensive, diverse, and long-lived. And no wonder: the consequence of the event was that for nearly a century, until the expulsion and death of Eric Bloodaxe in 954, York formed the centre of a Scandinavian kingdom in the north of England. The purpose of this and the next chapter, then, is to offer an account of the military and political events of the nine decades between 866 and 954 – a time that more than one scholar has called ‘the Viking century’ in Yorkshire.¹⁸ But before such a narrative can begin, we should briefly take stock of both Northumbria and Scandinavia at the start of our period.

 

The Beginnings of the Viking Age

 

Looking back to the time before the Vikings came, King Alfred, in the preface to his translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care (Cura Pastoralis), recalled ‘how – before everything was ransacked and burned – the churches throughout England stood filled with treasure and books’; and, moreover, how ‘there was a great multitude of those serving God’.¹⁹ Of no part of the country was this truer than pre-Viking Age Northumbria. Gregory had sent a mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons in 597, and in the reign of Edwin (616-33), Northumbria had taken a decisive shift to Christianity. Edwin himself was responsible for the construction of the first minster in York, within the grounds of the old Roman fortress.²⁰ Christian learning and culture flourished in the north-east of England, at least at elite level, and our evidence for this is both archaeological and textual.²¹ Above all, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in the early 730s, gives a powerful account of the progress of Christianity within England as a whole, and in Northumbria in particular: Bede’s pages contain a host of memorable saints, kings, and miracles, and Bede also articulated a potent and influential vision of the Anglo-Saxons unified as one people, under the authority of one archbishop, and in a New Covenant with God as one of his chosen peoples.²²

But although Bede may have seen the Anglo-Saxons as forming one Christian people (the gens Anglorum, as in the title of his work), they were not unified politically. Instead, at the time when Bede was writing, the various Anglo-Saxon polities had shaped themselves into seven main kingdoms – the so-called Heptarchy – of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Wessex, Sussex, Kent, and Essex. By the time of the arrival of the Viking Great Army in 865, these seven had been reduced to four, as Sussex, Kent, and Essex had all come under the sway of Wessex.²³ As noted in the previous chapter, Northumbria itself originally comprised two separate kingdoms, Bernicia to the north of the River Tees and Deira to the south. These had become united politically by the mid seventh century, but it is clear – not least from their subsequent histories in the Viking Age – that the territories covered by these two kingdoms were not simply amalgamated, and their differences effaced.

In terms of the old Bernicia, Bede’s Jarrow probably represents the high-point of Christian culture and scholarship; in terms of Deira, that accolade surely belongs to York in the second half of the eighth century, the time of Archbishop Ælberht and the great scholar Alcuin (though York was also an important trading centre in the Anglian period). Under Alcuin’s leadership, the cathedral school at York became one of the greatest centres of learning anywhere in Europe at the time: it was for that reason that Alcuin was recruited by the Frankish ruler Charlemagne, the most powerful monarch in Europe, to advance his own programme of cultural renovation.²⁴ At some point in the 780s or early 790s, probably after he had moved to Charlemagne’s court, Alcuin used Bede’s Ecclesiastical History as a source to compose an encomiastic poem about his home city. York is presented as an earthly paradise:

 

Through York flows the Ouse, its waters teeming with fish,

along its banks stretch fields laden with flowers,

all about the countryside is lovely with hills and woods,

and this beautiful, healthy place of noble setting

was destined to attract many settlers by its richness.²⁵

 

There is an unintended irony in the last line. Alcuin was thinking of the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons, but in the century following there were to be other settlers, from the north, who were attracted by York’s richness and fertility.

Alcuin’s poem also gives us a sense of York’s extraordinary literary wealth in the pre-Viking period, providing a catalogue of the library that Ælberht had built up at the Minster school:

 

There you will find the legacy of the ancient fathers:

All the Roman possessed in the Latin world,

Whatever famous Greece has transmitted to the Latins,

Draughts of the Hebrew race from Heaven’s showers,

And what Africa has spread abroad in streams of light:

The perceptions of father Jerome and of Hilary,

Of bishop Ambrose, Augustine, and

Of saint Athanasius, the writings of astute Orosius,

The teachings of Gregory the Great and of pope Leo,

The glowing words of Basil and Fulgentius,

Of Cassiodorus and John Chrysostom;

The teaching of Aldhelm and of Bede the master,

The writings of Victorinus and Boethius,

And the ancient historians Pompey and Pliny,

Of keen-minded Aristotle and of Cicero the great rhetorician […]²⁶

 

So the list goes on, referencing many more classical and Christian writers. This list, perhaps more than any other source, gives us a sense of the cultural heights attained in pre-Viking York, and its poignancy is greatly increased by knowledge of the calamity that was soon to befall the city.²⁷

A complementary account of some of the physical treasures of pre-Viking Northumbria can also be found in Alcuin’s poem. Alcuin’s evocation of some of the artworks with which York Minster was adorned by Archbishop Ælberht is revelatory:

 

In the spot where Edwin, the warrior king, was baptized

the bishop raised a great altar

and covered it with gold, silver, and jewels,

dedicating it in the name of St Paul,

the universal teacher, whom he loved with all his heart.

High above this altar he hung a chandelier,

which held three great vessels, each with nine tiers.

At the altar he erected the noble standard of the cross

covering it entirely with most precious metals.

It was all on a grand scale and built on a lovely design,

weighing many pounds in pure silver.

He erected another altar and covered it too

with pure silver and precious stones,

dedicating it both to the martyrs and to the Cross.

He ordered a large cruet to be made in pure gold

and of great weight, from which the priest

celebrating holy mass could pour wine into the chalice.²⁸

 

Although York Minster was of course exceptional, another poem gives us a sense of the similarly precious treasures with which a lesser church or monastery might be endowed. Æthelwulf’s On Abbots (De Abbatibus) is an early ninth-century Latin poem, influenced by Alcuin’s poem on York, which commemorates the leaders and history of an un-named monastery in Northumbria, a dependent cell of Lindisfarne; the most likely – though not certain – identification is that the monastery concerned was that at Crayke, near York (later to be seized by Ælle prior to his defeat and death in the fall of York in 867).²⁹ Like Alcuin, Æthelwulf celebrates the treasures of his church:

 

Many men wished to hang up numerous bowls, which would give soft light in the rectangular church, and others set up ensigns of shining metal […] Some gave orders for the writing of sacred books […] and these are covered by plate of bright ductile gold; and similarly men adorned the altars of the blessed church. And somebody dressed the altar of our lady, who is noble by origin, in the flames of gems and in yellow gold.³⁰

 

For Alcuin and Æthelwulf, such treasures were offerings to the glory of God; for Scandinavian raiders, of course, they would be just loot, waiting to be plundered. We now possess very few high-quality artworks from pre-Viking York and its environs, but the famous Anglian ‘Coppergate Helmet’ is one surviving example of what eighth-century York was capable of: secular rather than ecclesiastical, but nonetheless decorated with a Christian inscription.³¹

Another remarkable object that we possess from pre-Viking York is a fragment of stone sculpture, recovered from the church of St Mary Bishophill Junior, which depicts two men facing one another.³² These men are not clerics or saints, and, although secular figures are rarely shown on pre-Viking sculpture, there is no reason to doubt that what we have here is a portrait of two prosperous citizens from early to mid ninth-century York. They wear long garments, with belts or girdles. The one on the left has a hood, and also a horn hanging from his belt, while the one on the right has a decorative collar, and a short sword which he is grasping with his left hand. Both seem to have moustaches, and the one on the right sports a very full head of hair. It is not clear what they are standing on. In terms of actions, the two men may be clasping hands, perhaps in greeting or agreement. They themselves, or certainly their children or grandchildren, will have lived to see the fall of the city to the Scandinavians in 866.

It is from Northumbria to Scandinavia that we should now turn. The peninsula of mainland Scandinavia in the late Iron Age (sometimes called the Vendel Period) was a region of petty kingdoms.³³ It was also, of course, pagan. Denmark, as the most southward-facing and ‘Europeanized’ part of Scandinavia, was a partial exception to both these statements, where state formation had advanced the furthest by the late eighth century, and the force of Christian missionaries (and neighbouring Christian kings) was beginning to be felt. But even Denmark cannot be said to have been securely converted before the mid tenth century, and the regions of Norway and Sweden remained pagan even longer. Nonetheless, the eighth and ninth centuries saw an extraordinary eruption out of Scandinavia, continuing into the tenth and even eleventh centuries, as raiders, traders, and settlers surged out both east and west: the Viking Age.

What were the causes of this Viking expansion? Why did the region of Scandinavia exhibit movements and behaviours in the eighth to tenth centuries of a sort that the rest of northern Europe had experienced some four centuries earlier (for example, in the migration of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to Britain)? The reasons have, of course, been much debated.³⁴ A traditional explanation for Viking Age expansion was over-population in Scandinavia – in other words, an insufficiency of resources in terms of land, food, or wealth – and this explanation goes back at least to the eleventh century. The German cleric Adam of Bremen, writing his History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen (Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum) in the 1070s, claimed of the Norwegians in particular that ‘poverty has forced them […] to go all over the world and from piratical raids they bring home in great abundance the riches of the lands’.³⁵ As an extra twist to the over-population argument, it has been suggested that there may have been a disproportion in the sex ratio in Viking Age Scandinavia, with men significantly outnumbering women – a disproportion exacerbated, or even unwittingly caused, by the apparent infanticide of female babies.³⁶ There may be considerable truth in the ‘insufficiency of resources’ argument, but the point is perhaps better made if one thinks in terms of a drag-chain rather than a push-chain: that is, it may be more revealing to ask what attracted Scandinavians to Britain and continental Europe, rather than what propelled them out of their homelands. The answer is that England and Frankia were immensely rich countries, both in terms of moveable wealth – loot – and agricultural resources.³⁷ As Alfred the Great was to recall, eighth-century England, and the churches of Northumbria in particular, had more than enough treasures to attract the eye (as also did Ireland), and such prosperity may well have acted as a magnet either for those wishing to better their lot through migration, or (at least to begin with) for young men who wished to establish themselves in life through the acquisition of wealth – especially at a time when there seems to have been very little silver or gold circulating in Scandinavia.³⁸ Substantial amounts of British and Irish metalwork – much of it stripped from ecclesiastical settings – have been found in ninth- and early tenth-century graves in Norway, and especially female graves: this suggests that insular loot had an important role to play in Viking Age gift-exchange and marriage settlements.³⁹

Political developments on a larger scale are also likely to have been a factor in the Viking explosion. The eighth to tenth centuries in Scandinavia were a period in which the practices and ideologies of kingship were changing in important ways.⁴⁰ Competition for power and resources seems to have led to a volatile and unstable political environment, in which a new form of more predatory kingship came to the fore – an escalation of the Iron Age world of multiple small kings, each supported by their own warband.⁴¹ As the period progressed, power came to reside in fewer and fewer hands, and the reach of a more centralized kingship grew longer and stronger. In Norway, the key figure was Harald Fairhair (Old Norse Haraldr hárfagri ), to be remembered as the king who, to a large degree, unified the country under one ruler; his key battle, at Hafrsfjorden, was fought in probably the 880s.⁴²

Later Icelandic sagas present a romanticized, but not purely fictitious, account of the consequences of Harald’s unification. Norwegians who were unable to tolerate the rise of such tyranny, and who had the necessary means at their disposal, vacated the country, and sought new lands in which to live free from royal compulsion. As Egil’s Saga states:

 

King Harald took careful stock of the noblemen and the powerful farmers and all those whom he suspected of possible revolt. He made each do one of two things, either enter his service or leave the country […] Many men fled away from this oppression out of the country, and many waste lands were then settled, both east in Jamtland and Halsingland, and in the west lands, the Hebrides, the Dublin area, Ireland, Normandy in France, Caithness in Scotland, the Orkneys, Shetland and the Faroes. And at that time Iceland was discovered.⁴³

 

The sagas’ claim that Viking Age migrants were a freedom-loving elite, a sort of egalitarian aristocracy, is obviously coloured with a large dash of myth-making; but the fundamental idea, that Viking Age movement was a response to the re-distribution of scant resources in mainland Scandinavia, undoubtedly rings true, and is consonant with other indicators.

Finally, there was a technological element in the onset of the Viking Age. Up until the eighth century, long-distance travel by sea in northern Europe involved hugging the coast, moving along the land in a series of steps, as ship-building, or navigational skills, or nautical ambition, seem not to have been sufficient for cross-ocean voyages. The Viking Age changed all that. Advances in seamanship, and breakthroughs in construction (aided, no doubt, by more centralized powers of coercion and organization), meant that a ship could now be built and crewed which could sail directly, and swiftly, across the North Sea, from Norway to northern Britain; and a shallow keel meant that the same ship could penetrate far inland up-river.⁴⁴ As Alcuin was to write, ‘such a voyage was not thought possible’.⁴⁵ The same shipbuilding skills that could convey a party of raiders to the Northumbrian coast could equally well facilitate long-distance trade, and also transport families of settlers, with their goods and animals, over the Atlantic to Ireland and the Northern and Western Isles of Scotland, to the Faroes and Iceland, and, in time, even to Greenland and North America.

Technological developments, political and economic pressures, and individual ambitions all combined to produce the most appalling of smash-and-grabs. The monastery of Lindisfarne was attacked in 793, apparently without warning, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s record of the event is well-known (in the northern D and E versions; it is not in the Alfredian A-text):

 

In this year dire portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people. They consisted of immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine immediately followed those signs, and a little after that in the same year, on 8 June, the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne, with plunder and slaughter.⁴⁶

 

Fiery dragons do not lie: the ominous signs noted by the Chronicle – and also by Alcuin, who recorded bloody rain falling from the roof of York Minster – are a means of predicting, and communicating, the full horror of what was to follow later in the summer.⁴⁷ A famous piece of sculpture from Lindisfarne shows a band of warriors brandishing swords and axes in terrifying fashion.⁴⁸ This cannot be proven to be a commemorative image of the 793 raid, and it may be a representation of one of the signs of the end of the world; but even so, it seems probable that its unparalleled iconography has been shaped by Lindisfarne’s experience as the object of Viking attack: the axes, in particular, are a tell-tale Scandinavian sign.

When he heard the news of the 793 raid, Alcuin sent out a number of heart-felt and traumatized letters, including to the survivors of the Lindisfarne community itself.⁴⁹ He wrote to its abbot, Higbald:

 

When I was with you your loving friendship gave me great joy. Now I am away your tragic sufferings daily bring me sorrow, since the pagans have desecrated God’s sanctuary, shed the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope and trampled the bodies of the saints like dung in the street […] What assurance can the churches of Britain have, if St Cuthbert and so great a company of saints do not defend their own? Is this the beginning of greater suffering, or the outcome of the sins of those who live there? It has not happened by chance, but is the sign of some great guilt.⁵⁰

 

Alcuin had read Bede closely, and he took from the earlier writer the idea that the English people, like the Israelites of the Old Testament, enjoyed a covenantal relationship with God. And so, in the midst of his sense of sheer shock, and his fear for the future (‘Is this the beginning of greater suffering?’), Alcuin reached for the idea of the covenant, with its resultant implication that God was chastising those whom he loved, on account of their sin or backsliding, and using the Vikings as his agents for doing so: ‘it has not happened by chance’.⁵¹ Alcuin also composed a 240-line poem on the sack of Lindisfarne.⁵² There is relatively little in the poem on the raid itself (‘how painful to everyone was that day when, alas, / a pagan warband arrived from the ends of the earth’); rather, as he does also in his letter to Higbald, Alcuin situates the event within both general reflections on earthly mutability and a sequence of prior Biblical and Christian examples of reversal and impermanence. But current times do seem more grievous:

 

Why should I only deal mournfully with distant times

And lament the miserable days of the ancients in my poetry,

When throughout the world the present age endures worse things

And the earth now grieves in doleful subjection?

 

This ‘doleful subjection’ is to pagan forces, and Alcuin again invokes a covenantal interpretation of recent events (‘So too omnipotent God tested the saints through savage blows’).

It is not quite clear whether Lindisfarne should enjoy the unenviable distinction of being the first place in England to be raided by Viking ships. For one thing, in a letter to the Northumbrian king Æthelred I (the same letter in which he had written that ‘such a voyage was not thought possible’), Alcuin reveals that the Northumbrian aristocracy, in the wicked luxuriousness of their lifestyle, seem to have been copying Scandinavian fashions, which would indicate at least some form of prior contact. ‘Consider the luxurious dress, hair and behaviour of leaders and people’, Alcuin writes to the king. ‘See how you have wanted to copy the pagan way of cutting hair and beards. Are not these the people whose terror threatens us, yet you want to copy their hair?’⁵³ Although some scholars have wished to claim extensive contacts across the North Sea in the eighth century, the evidence for this is very meagre, and our contemporary sources are marked by a sense of shock at the newness and unexpectedness of the Viking attacks.⁵⁴

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also offers an alternative candidate for the first Viking raid on England, in its entry for the year 789:

 

In this year King Brihtric married Offa’s daughter Eadburh. And in his days there came for the first time three ships [of Northmen] and then the reeve rode to them and wished to force them to the king’s residence [cyninges tun], for he did not know what they were; and they slew him. Those were the first ships of Danish men which came to the land of the English.⁵⁵

 

This is the entry as it stands in version A (and the cyninges tun, to which the reeve tried to force the shipmen, is more likely to have been a place of imprisonment than a royal villa).⁵⁶ Later or alternative texts expand on a number of points: versions C, D, and E of the Chronicle add that the ships came from Hordaland (in western Norway), while Æthelweard records that the name of the unfortunate reeve was Beaduheard, and the Annals of St Neots claim that this incident took place at Portland in Dorset.⁵⁷ The Chronicle’s entry is clearly retrospective, recognizing the significance for the future of an event that can hardly have seemed portentous at the time (‘Those were the first ships of Danish men which came to the land of the English’). ‘Danish’ (Denisc) is here used, as often in the Chronicle, as a catch-all term for Scandinavians, and it does not indicate precise geographical knowledge; ‘heathen’ (hæðen) is the most frequent alternative, as noted in the previous chapter and as seen in the 793 Lindisfarne entry. Since Brihtric reigned from 786 to 802, Beaduheard’s death at Portland cannot be dated to an exact year.

Alcuin had been fearful that Bede’s Jarrow would suffer the same fate as Cuthbert’s Lindisfarne, and he wrote to the community there, appealing again to the idea of a covenant:

 

Who is not afraid of the terrible fate that has come upon the church of St Cuthbert? So mend your ways, lest the righteous perish for the sins of the wicked […] You live near the sea from which this danger first came. In us is fulfilled what once the prophet foretold: ‘From the North evil breaks forth, and a terrible glory will come from the Lord’ [Jeremiah 1.14, Job 37.22]. See, the pirate raids have penetrated the north of our island.⁵⁸

 

But to no avail: Jarrow was attacked the following year, in 794, in a raid recorded in versions D and E of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. But after that, perhaps surprisingly, the Chronicle goes quiet for a few decades. This is not likely to be because Viking raids slackened off; indeed, they may have been becoming so frequent as to be no longer quite so newsworthy. But the Chronicle itself becomes less expansive in its entries for this period, and some years have no entry at all. That the English were continuing to suffer Viking tribulations at this time is, however, forcefully demonstrated by a sequence of early ninth-century Mercian charters that testify to Scandinavian raids and even camps in Kent, while Roger of Wendover records under the year 800 that, in Northumbria, ‘the most impious army of the pagans cruelly despoiled the churches of Hartness and Tynemouth, and returned with its plunder to the ships’.⁵⁹ We should therefore be aware that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s coverage of Viking raids in the first half of the ninth century is, for whatever reason, patchy and incomplete.⁶⁰

But in 835 the Vikings do re-appear in the Chronicle: ‘In this year heathen men ravaged Sheppey’.⁶¹ In 836 King Ecgberht of Wessex (Alfred’s grandfather) is said to have ‘fought against the crews of 35 ships [25 in some versions] at Carhampton, and a great slaughter was made there, and the Danes had possession of the battle-field’, while in 838 a ‘great naval force [micel sciphere]’ arrived in Cornwall.⁶² In the 840s, the reporting of attacks increases further, all clustered in the south of England, but that this is probably an illusion created by the Chronicle’s Wessex-centred perspective is again suggested by an event recorded by Roger of Wendover, under the year 844:

 

Æthelred, king of the Northumbrians, was expelled from the kingdom, and Rædwulf succeeded to the kingdom; and when, hastily invested with the crown, he fought a battle with the pagans at Elvet [in Durham], he and ealdorman Alfred fell with a large part of their subjects, and then Æthelred reigned again.⁶³

 

Roger’s chronology may be askew here by a decade or more, and numismatic evidence suggests that Rædwulf may have reigned until the late 850s.⁶⁴ Either way, it is clear that by the mid ninth century Viking armies were at large in Northumbria, and fighting major battles.

An ominous shift is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 851:

 

For the first time, heathen men stayed through the winter on Thanet. And the same year 350 ships came into the mouth of the Thames and stormed Canterbury and London.⁶⁵

 

King Æthelwulf (Alfred’s father) fought an important battle against this army at a place called Aclea, and the Chronicler, composing in the early 890s, writes that the king ‘inflicted the greatest slaughter on a heathen army that we ever heard of until this present day’. Notwithstanding this success, Viking forces continued to arrive through the 850s and 860s, over-wintering in Sheppey as well as Thanet (with thus an implied target of London and the interior). Eventually, in 865, the Chronicle records that a ‘great army [micel here]’ came to England and over-wintered in East Anglia.⁶⁶ This 865 ‘Great Army’ was led by Ivar and others of his family. It was intent on conquest and not just plunder, and its scale of ambition has been described as ‘breathtaking’.⁶⁷ In terms of national history, it must be regarded as one of the most important military forces ever to have entered England. And as we have seen, its first success, the following year, was the capture of York.

 

The First Viking Kings of York

 

As we begin to trace the Scandinavian rulers of York, it must be admitted that the history and chronology of northern Britain during the period of Viking kings, 866 to 954, is often confused and difficult to reconstruct. The current scholarly understanding of the period began in the 1970s with the work of Alfred Smyth, who combined English and Irish sources to construct a unified history of the Viking kingdoms centred on York and Dublin.⁶⁸ Smyth showed persuasively how the histories of these two Viking cities were inextricably related, at least in political and dynastic terms, with Viking leaders appearing first in one place and then the other, and often succeeding one another across the Pennines. Smyth’s work did not escape criticism by any means, especially for his use of late and debatable sources; but his work on Viking Age York and Dublin remains a very significant achievement, and it put the study of the subject on a new footing.⁶⁹ More recently, Smyth’s framework and chronology have been re-assessed by Clare Downham and Alex Woolf, who have sought to query, confirm, or reject Smyth’s interpretations, often on a point-by-point basis; and the account that follows draws very gratefully on the work of these and other scholars.⁷⁰

As we know, our story proper begins in 866. The army that attacked York on 1 November had arrived the previous year:

 

A great heathen army came into England and took up winter quarters in East Anglia; and there they were supplied with horses, and the East Angles made peace with them.⁷¹

 

Although this statement occurs in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 866, the Chronicle’s year begins on 24 September, and so (as it is recorded taking up winter quarters) the Viking army must have arrived in late 865. Where exactly the Great Army came from is not clearly stated in our sources: mainland Scandinavia would seem a self-evident assumption, but it is also highly likely that at least some of the leadership and army had already been campaigning in Britain (especially Ireland) and Frankia.⁷² As Shane McLeod has shown, a trail of pre-865 Carolingian coins found in England indicates that at least some members of the Great Army arrived with Frankish wealth in their pockets; in Yorkshire, examples have been retrieved at Settle [WR], York Minster, and Coney Street, York.⁷³ As for what the Great Army was doing for the first twelve months after its arrival in late 865, this is also unclear: presumably it was assembling its provisions in East Anglia, before moving north for the assault on York in late 866, and perhaps also waiting for re-inforcements to arrive.⁷⁴

How big was a micel here ? The size of early medieval armies is a matter of dispute, and in any case it is clear that the Great Army was exceptional and not typical.⁷⁵ In the 1960s the historian Peter Sawyer argued that contemporary accounts of the magnitude of Viking armies were greatly exaggerated, and that they were to be numbered only in the mere hundreds, not thousands.⁷⁶ These claims were definitively answered by Nicholas Brooks, however, who demonstrated that major Viking armies were likely to comprise several thousand members at least.⁷⁷ Brooks’ argument was based on a number of grounds: the consistency between insular and continental sources in estimating the size of Viking fleets; the size of the fortifications the major Viking armies occupied and the (better recorded) size of the Anglo-Saxon forces required to withstand them; and (of course) the scale of devastation of the Viking armies and their success in war: in terms of speed and decisiveness, the military conquests of the Great Army were unlike anything seen in Anglo-Saxon England in the previous three centuries. Archaeological investigations at two Viking ‘winter-camps’ in England have recently strengthened Brooks’ case yet further: these were massive sites, clearly occupied by a very large number of people.⁷⁸ At least a couple of recent estimates have placed the strength of the Great Army as somewhere in the region of 10,000, though it is possible that this is still an under-estimate.⁷⁹ Moreover, although the family of Ivar probably had Danish origins, it should not be assumed that the Great Army was ‘mono-ethnic’; on the contrary, Viking armies, especially large ones that remained in the field over a lengthy period, were likely to be composite and cosmopolitan in their make-up.⁸⁰ For fifteen years the Great Army’s campaigns were the main focus of Viking activity in western Europe, a fact which gives a good indication of the size and importance of the enterprise.⁸¹

After the fall of York, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the army as moving down into Mercia in late 867, to over-winter in Nottingham and, after inconclusive fighting, to make peace with Burgred, king of the Mercians. And then in late 868 the army returned to York, ‘and stayed there one year’, before moving south again in late 869 through Mercia and into East Anglia, to over-winter in Thetford and defeat and kill King Edmund of the East Angles – rapidly to be commemorated as St Edmund, the first English saint (but not the last) to be martyred at the hands of the Vikings.⁸² The Great Army, the Chronicle records, ‘conquered all the land [þæt land all geeodon]’ of the East Angles, and it may be significant that this phrase is not used earlier to describe their success in Northumbria, at York.⁸³ From East Anglia, the Great Army went westwards, in 871, into Wessex, and from this point the Chronicle’s narrative becomes a good deal fuller and more emotive – the reason being, of course, that this is the moment at which the Viking army came into contact and conflict with Alfred the Great, the crucial figure behind the Chronicle’s compilation.

According to the Chronicle, the Great Army over-wintered in London in 871-72, making another peace with the Mercians, and then late in 872 moved northwards again, at least for a time, when it returned briefly to Northumbria – for reasons that will be explained shortly – and then over-wintered in Torksey in Lincolnshire (where the site of its winter-camp has been discovered by metal-detectorists, and many objects recovered).⁸⁴ The next year it moved to Repton in Mercia, where Viking fortifications have been excavated.⁸⁵ There, they drove out King Burgred and appointed a puppet-king called Ceolwulf in his place (dismissed by the Chronicle as ‘a foolish king’s thegn’), and – we should note the recurrence of the phrase – ‘conquered all the land [þæt land all geeodon]’.⁸⁶ At Repton, in late 874, it seems there was a division in the Great Army: one part, led by the kings Guthrum, Oscetel, and Anwend, went to East Anglia, while another part, led by Halfdan, went north:

 

Halfdan went with part of the army into Northumbria and took up winter quarters by the River Tyne. And the army conquered the land [þæt land geeode] and often ravaged among the Picts and the Strathclyde Britons.⁸⁷

 

In the entry for the following year, 876, there occurs a famous sentence that is cryptic and under-stated, but of utmost importance for our present concerns: ‘And that year Halfdan shared out the land of the Northumbrians, and they proceeded to plough and to support themselves’.⁸⁸

There is one archaeological site in Yorkshire that offers a more material access to these events of the early to mid 870s. In 2004 the so-called ‘Ainsbrook hoard’ was reported, found by two metal-detectorists somewhere at a riverine location ‘within striking distance of York’ (‘Ainsbrook’ is a code-name, devised so as not to reveal the location of the site to other metal-detectorists; the find-spot is also sometimes referenced as simply ‘a riverine site in North Yorkshire’).⁸⁹ The site was initially reported as a possible Viking boat-burial on account of the presence of a large quantity of iron rivets, though this view was soon abandoned; two bodies were subsequently excavated, which have been given a ‘radiocarbon determination’ in the tenth century.⁹⁰ The ‘Ainsbrook hoard’, as first reported, included weights and scales, silver ingots, two swords, and a small number of Anglo-Saxon coins, including three of King Burgred of Mercia: these enable it to be dated to sometime after 874.⁹¹ The same site, through metal-detectorist activity, had previously yielded hundreds of small finds, such as weights, brooches, ingots, hack-silver and even hack-gold (that is, chopped up pieces), fragments of weapons, and lots of Northumbrian coins (suggesting activity on the site prior to the Viking arrival). Some high-quality Viking loot was also uncovered, such as a gilded copper-alloy book mount and an ornamental stud, perhaps from an ecclesiastical vessel. Moreover, the site was located within a ditch, and the area enclosed was enormous – some 76 acres. All these features suggest that its closest similarity is with the better-recorded Viking winter-camp at Torksey (from 872-73), though the size of the ‘Ainsbrook’ site is even greater than that of Torksey.⁹²

A speculative interpretation would therefore be as follows. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle conscientiously gives the locations of the Great Army’s winter-camps in 871-72 (London), 872-73 (Torksey), 873-74 (Repton), and 874-75 (by the Tyne). But it does not identify a winter-camp for 875-76. This may mean that Halfdan’s army was dispersed before the winter (and after 24 September, when the Chronicle year begins), in which case the famous settlement of Northumbria should be dated to 875 rather than 876. But if Halfdan’s army did stay together through one last winter, just prior to his sharing out of the land, then the ‘Ainsbrook’ site may be best interpreted as the location of their camp – or at least of one of their camps. The numismatic evidence (Burgred’s 874 coins) would fit perfectly with this suggestion. ‘Ainsbrook’ is thus far and away the most important Viking Age site in Yorkshire currently awaiting publication, and when full details are made available they will no doubt change significantly our understanding of aspects of the 860s and 870s.

At this point we need to pause to take stock of where we have got to, and to ask a number of questions. The first is the nature of the conquest of York in 866. To begin to understand this we need to supplement the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s account with those of other sources. Symeon of Durham, in his Tract on the Church of Durham, records that, after the defeat of Osberht and Ælle at York in 867, ‘the Danes set up Ecgberht as a king over the surviving Northumbrians, but he ruled only over those who lived to the north of the river Tyne, and that under the authority of the Danes’; the History of the Kings gives a similar account, and adds that Ecgberht ruled for six years.⁹³ Symeon then records that, a little later, ‘the Northumbrians expelled their king Ecgberht and their archbishop Wulfhere from the kingdom, and set up as their king a certain man called Ricsige’.⁹⁴ The History of the Kings more or less agrees, and states in 873 that ‘Ecgberht, king of the Northumbrians dying, had Ricsige as his successor, and he reigned for three years. And Wulfhere was re-instated in his archbishopric’, and in 876 that ‘King Ricsige of the Northumbrians died, and Ecgberht the second reigned over the Northumbrians beyond the River Tyne’.⁹⁵

This is all a bit puzzling, but collation with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does enable us to make sense of some parts of the narrative. The otherwise unmotivated visit to Northumbria made by the Great Army in the entry for 873 must have been due to the expulsion of Ecgberht and Wulfhere, the former of whom, we should recall, had been appointed as a puppet-king. But it is not clear whether Ecgberht was re-instated (and then died), or whether the Great Army chose to endorse Ricsige’s rule instead; it is also unclear whether there is any connection between the Great Army’s 873 visit and the re-instatement of Wulfhere as archbishop.

Let us re-quote the key statements from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 875 and 876:

 

875. Halfdan went with part of the army into Northumbria and took up winter quarters by the River Tyne. And the army conquered the land [þæt land geeode].

876. Halfdan shared out the land of the Northumbrians, and they proceeded to plough and to support themselves.⁹⁶

 

The obvious explanation is that the 866-67 conquest brought the Deiran part of Northumbria (that is, effectively, the area of Yorkshire) under direct Scandinavian control, but that the Bernician part, beyond the Tyne, was governed via a sub-king; and this would explain why Asser describes Halfdan as ‘king of one part of the Northumbrians’.⁹⁷ This does indeed seem possible, except that the expulsions and re-instatements of 873 involved the archbishop of York as well as King Ecgberht, suggesting a native revolt within Deiran Northumbria as well as Bernician, unless the archbishop was not actually to be found in York; and we are ignorant of who was left in charge of York and Deiran Northumbria after 867, even if Halfdan was regarded as its ultimate ruler. To solve these problems, a couple of scholars have proposed that Archbishop Wulfhere himself may have been the Vikings’ ruler in southern Northumbria in this period (though if such was the case, one might perhaps have expected Symeon of Durham, our best-informed source on Archbishop Wulfhere, to have said so, unless he wished deliberately to conceal the fact).⁹⁸ As an alternative explanation, Alex Woolf has suggested that it was the whole of Northumbria which lay under the rule of Anglo-Saxon sub-kings between 866 and 876, and that the apparent distinction between Deira and Bernicia in these years was only drawn by Symeon himself in the early twelfth century.⁹⁹ This too is possible, and it clears up some of the mystery; but it does not explain why the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle should claim that Halfdan ‘conquered all the land’ of the Northumbrians in 875 (since on Woolf’s model it had already been conquered in 866), and nor does it really leave room for both Halfdan and Ecgberht II to be rulers of Northumbria from 876 onwards.

Perhaps we might refine or supplement these interpretations by suggesting that there was, in some way, a two-stage conquest of Northumbria: a first stage in 866-67, in which the Viking army conquered York and somehow became able to dictate the terms of political rule in Northumbria (both Deiran and Bernician), and a second stage in 875-76, in which they dispossessed the ruling elite of land and power, and subjugated Northumbria (especially Deiran Northumbria) directly to themselves. This is perhaps supported by the Chronicle’s recurrent statement that the Viking army ‘conquered the land’: in the original Old English, the phrase literally means that they ‘went through’ the land – implying an on-the-ground thoroughness to their conquest that had perhaps not occurred up to that point. Furthermore, we might possibly read the Chronicle’s references to Northumbria in 875 and 876 as referring solely to Deiran Northumbria: place-name evidence, as noted already, indicates that there was little subsequent Scandinavian settlement north of the Tees valley, and we shall see in Chapter 3 that in the early tenth century the degree of political control exerted by Scandinavian kings over Bernician Northumbria fluctuated considerably, often to the degree of being non-existent. So Halfdan’s settlement of 875-76 would look to be the point at which a unified Northumbria broke along the old fault-line between the two kingdoms.

But even if we interpret our sources as indicating a two-step conquest, we must be careful not to downplay the significance of the 866 fall of York. Although the Great Army, in its early years of conquest, preferred the option of setting up Anglo-Saxon subject-kings, and although there is no positive evidence for ruling Scandinavian kings resident in Northumbria before 875-76 (except, perhaps, for the year the Great Army spent at York in 868-69) this does not mean that the events of 866 were unimportant, with business proceeding as usual afterwards, with just a different overlord. Quite the contrary: the Scandinavian conquest of York was a deeply disruptive event, and our best evidence for this is monetary.

The pre-Viking Age kingdom of Northumbria had a thriving but largely self-contained coin economy, especially in the circulation of brass stycas.¹⁰⁰ But this economy seems to have come to an abrupt end at the time of the Viking conquest of York; Osberht, one of the two kings defeated and killed by Ivar’s forces, is the last Northumbrian ruler to whom stycas can be attributed, and although stycas have been found at the putative winter-camp of 875-76 (perhaps used in 868-69 also?), it is significant that no coins were minted under the puppet-kings of 867-75.¹⁰¹ Similarly, no coins dating from after the 860s have been found in Fishergate, the part of York that seems to have been the wic or trading emporium of Anglian York: this suggests severe discontinuity in the trade economy of the city (and therefore the region), and the Fishergate site ceased to be used in the 860s.¹⁰² Coins stopped circulating in Northumbria in any significant quantity, and important so-called ‘productive sites’, such as that at South Newbald [ER], where trade had been conducted and from which many pre-Viking coins have been retrieved, were suddenly abandoned.¹⁰³ Over twenty Northumbrian coin hoards have been dated to the mid 860s, including six from York itself.¹⁰⁴ All of this amounts to a clear sign of a society, and a city, in crisis. As one numismatist has written, what this mass of hoard evidence suggests is that ‘the issue of coin was interrupted not by some administrative breakdown but by some violent disturbance’: the Viking conquest of 866 delivered a profound shock to the kingdom of Northumbria.¹⁰⁵

A simpler question, in the midst of all this, is what had happened to Ivar – remembered in Scandinavian tradition as the military genius at the head of the Great Army and the man responsible for the capture of York in 866. The answer is that he had turned his attention to Ireland, and as a result he received little attention from English chroniclers compared with Irish ones – though Æthelweard explicitly recognizes him as the leader of the Great Army and twice characterizes him as a tyrannus (‘tyrant’).¹⁰⁶ He died in Ireland in 873, and the Annals of Ulster acclaimed him as ‘king of the Norsemen of all Ireland and Britain’.¹⁰⁷ Ivar’s sons seem to have restricted their attention to Ireland, but his grandsons and great-grandsons, as we will see, played a central role in the politics of tenth-century York. We should also note here the usage in Irish sources of the terms ‘White (or Fair) Foreigners’ and ‘Dark Foreigners’ to refer to the Scandinavians. The significance of these terms has been much debated: according to some scholars, the terms indicate a contrast between Norwegians and Danes, but more recently it has been argued that the import is rather of ‘old’ and ‘new’, with the ‘New (Dark) Foreigners’ being the dynasty of Ivar and its supporters, in which case the distinction would be more chronological than ethnic.¹⁰⁸

The rule in Northumbria of Halfdan, apparently Ivar’s brother, was short-lived. Irish annals indicate that, like his brother, his next campaign was in Ireland, where he too was killed, at Strangford Lough in 877.¹⁰⁹ The History of St Cuthbert more colourfully claims that ‘the wrath of God and of the holy confessor [Cuthbert] fell upon him’ when he was in Northumbria, and that as a consequence ‘he began to rave and to reek so badly that his whole army drove him from its midst, and he was chased far across the sea and was never seen again’.¹¹⁰ The third brother, Ubba, seems to have been killed in Devon in 878.¹¹¹

‘Halfdan shared out the land of the Northumbrians, and they proceeded to plough and to support themselves’. The nature, extent, and consequences of the Scandinavian settlement, recorded so tersely by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, will form the subject of Chapter 4; in the present chapter, we are concerned rather with the political and military history of the Vikings in Northumbria. And so we should turn to the next known king of York, Guthred or Guthfrith (Old Norse Guð(f)røðr), an obscure figure to whom an extraordinary story is attached. This story is told in the History of St Cuthbert, following on immediately from the departure of Halfdan:

 

At that time St Cuthbert appeared in the night to the holy abbot of Carlisle named Eadred, firmly commanding him as follows: ‘Go’, he said, ‘over the Tyne to the army of the Danes, and tell them that if they wish to be obedient to me, they should show you a certain young man named Guthred son of Harthacnut, the slave of a certain widow. In the morning you and the whole army should offer the widow the price for him, and at the third hour [take him] in exchange for the price; then at the sixth hour lead him before the whole multitude so that they may elect him king, and at the ninth hour lead him with the whole army upon the hill which is called Oswigesdune and there place on his right arm a golden armlet, and thus they shall all constitute him king’.¹¹²

 

According to the History, Abbot Eadred did exactly as Cuthbert commanded him, and with success: the Viking army responded with obedience rather than violence, and Bishop Eardulf (officially of Lindisfarne, but by now on the move) then appeared, bringing with him the body of St Cuthbert, ‘over which the king himself and the whole host swore peace and fidelity as long as they might live, and this oath they faithfully observed’.

This unlikely tale is, however, confirmed to a degree by Æthelweard’s Chronicle, which records Guthred’s death in 895:

 

Guthred, king of the Northumbrians, died on the nativity of St Bartholomew, the apostle of Christ [24 August]. And his body is entombed in the city of York in the high church.¹¹³

 

Guthred is the first Viking ruler known to receive such Christian obsequies, and his burial in York Minster does seem to indicate a new phase of Christian kingship among the Scandinavians in Northumbria – though Æthelweard does also describe him, cryptically, as a ‘hateful king [rex foetidus]’. His description of Guthred as ‘king of the Northumbrians [rex Northhymbriorum]’ should also be noted: as remarked in Chapter 1, Æthelweard appears often to use the term ‘Northumbrians’ in the sense of ‘Scandinavian settlers in Northumbria’, as opposed to the native English population, and Asser also seems to refer to ‘the Northumbrians’ in this sense, when he records an alliance that was formed in the 880s between (presumably) Guthred and the sons of Rhodri Mawr, king of Gwynedd.¹¹⁴

Of course, the story of Guthred, as told in the History of St Cuthbert, raises more questions than it answers.¹¹⁵ To begin with, why should a slave be distinguished by a patronymic (‘Guthred son of Harthacnut’)? In the Viking Age, the Scandinavian use of patronymics was not primarily for purposes of identification, but rather ‘as a means of boasting of the bearer’s family connections’.¹¹⁶ So the implication may be that Guthred was really a royal and divinely-anointed child concealed in domestic service – a sort of proto-Havelok (to invoke a more famous legend from medieval Lincolnshire) – and this implication is made explicit in a later version of his story, in the Chronicles of the Church of Durham (Cronica Monasterii Dunelmensis), a text which may date from the late eleventh century but is more likely to be later.¹¹⁷ Guthred’s name is one that is well attested in the ninth century among Scandinavian leaders in Ireland, so it is quite possible – whether or not one places any credence on the story in the History of St Cuthbert – that he was part of the dynasty of Ivar; this would certainly help to explain his acceptance at York.¹¹⁸ On a larger scale, the story of Guthred raises the question as to whether the Scandinavians of Northumbria were already Christian at the time of his accession to the throne, or whether the story is acting as a kind of fable or allegory, precisely to represent their process of conversion. The question of conversion and Christianization will be explored more fully in Chapter 5, but certainly from this point onwards we cannot assume that the Viking kings of York, and their followers, were pagan – though as we shall see, some of them unquestionably continued to be so.

Of the events (and indeed the length) of Guthred’s reign we know little, though the little that we do know does not really support the History’s claim that the Scandinavians of Northumbria ‘faithfully observed’ their oath of peace and fidelity for as long as they lived. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has a long and confusing entry for the year 893, which records a wide-ranging campaign around the south coast of England by the Scandinavian armies of Northumbria and East Anglia, in spite of the fact that previously ‘the Northumbrians and East Angles had given King Alfred oaths’.¹¹⁹ Æthelweard adds that, in a separate incident that year, one ‘Sigeferth the pirate [piraticus] arrived from the land of the Northumbrians with a large fleet, ravaged twice along the coast on that one expedition, and afterwards sailed back to his own land’; the sequel, the following year, was an apparent peace embassy from Wessex to York led by the ealdorman Æthelnoth, and when this embassy is combined with Guthred’s alliance with the sons of Rhodri Mawr, we can gain a sense of the York Viking kingdom putting down roots, and engaging in diplomatic relations and not simply military ones.¹²⁰ From entries such as these, the clear picture also emerges that, although previous decades had witnessed settlement by Scandinavians in areas they had conquered, such areas still maintained, or could rapidly raise, substantial armies, perhaps reinforced from overseas. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, well into the tenth century, continues to use the word here (‘army’) to refer to the Scandinavian communities now to be found in England, as if they are only semi-demobbed; the equivalent Latin usage can be found in the History of St Cuthbert’s story of Guthred, where Abbot Eadred is commanded to go to the ‘army of the Danes [exercitus Danorum]’.¹²¹

The History of St Cuthbert preserves one more story about Guthred, narrated out of chronological sequence at the very end of the text (and thus likely to be of eleventh-century provenance); it is also strangely inconsistent on this very subject of the ability of Northumbria’s Scandinavian kings to raise an army with ease.¹²² The History tells that an army of Scots ‘crossed the Tweed with an innumerable multitude and devastated the land of St Cuthbert and despoiled the monastery of Lindisfarne’. In response Guthred, oddly, could only raise ‘a very small army’ (perhaps the rest of his warriors were away plundering Wessex?). Assailed, like the great King Alfred, by ‘many and various cares’, Guthred is saved from despair by the appearance of St Cuthbert in his dreams. The saint re-assures him with the promise of a miracle the next day when Guthred confronts the Scottish host: ‘at the first clash’, he predicts, ‘the earth will be opened up and will let them drop alive into Hell’. And so it happens: early the next morning the Scots are punctually ‘swallowed alive by the gaping earth’. The coherence and chronology of this story are highly problematic, to say the least, and transparently indebted to a Biblical exemplar (Psalm 106:17); the History itself declares the story to be ‘a miracle of God and St Cuthbert greatly to be heeded and praised’.¹²³ Moreover, the very last paragraph of the work, immediately following, celebrates Guthred as the king who laid down the law that any land acquired by St Cuthbert (or rather, by his community) should be the saint’s forever and immune from any other claims; ‘and if anyone were to attempt in any way to infringe on this, he would be damned with eternal anathema’. Guthred, then, was remembered strongly, well over a century after his death, as a Christian king – indeed, as the ideal type of the Scandinavian convert king – and his commemoration as the guarantor of St Cuthbert’s estates is a remarkable accolade.

In order to track the Viking kings of Northumbria in the decade after Guthred’s death, we need to turn to the evidence of coins – a form of evidence which is now both very full and very revealing.¹²⁴ As we saw earlier, pre-Viking Northumbria had a thriving coinage based on brass stycas, which came to a sudden end at the time of the Scandinavian conquest. The minting of coins did not then return to York until some thirty years later; but thereafter, from about 895 right through to 954, the Scandinavian rulers of York oversaw the production and circulation of a substantial coinage in their names.

Thirty years is a long time in monetary terms, and the disjunction between the end of the stycas and the beginning of the Scandinavian coinage meant that the Viking kings of York had to start ‘from scratch’: there was probably no minting expertise to draw on in late ninth-century Northumbria, no surviving moneyers to turn to.¹²⁵ In spite of this, the Scandinavian coinage of York bursts upon the scene in the mid 890s with an independence, innovativeness, and sheer vigour that are startling. The first two Scandinavian kings of York for whom we possess coins – and in abundance – are, according to the coin inscriptions, rulers called SIEFREDVS or SIEVERT and CNVT.¹²⁶ (A solitary coin in the name of Guthred has also been found, but this seems to have been struck in the southern Danelaw, which has its own, separate coinage history.¹²⁷) The first name, SIEFREDVS/SIEVERT, equates to the Old Norse name Sigfrøðr, and the ruler concerned is presumably to be identified with the Sigeferð piraticus who raided southwards from Northumbria in 893; his coins are ascribed to the period c.895-900. Sigeferth seems to have come to Northumbria from Ireland, as the Annals of Ulster record that in 893 there was a ‘great dissension’ among the Scandinavians of Dublin and ‘they became dispersed’, with one party following an earl called Sigeferth.¹²⁸ However, a ruler with the second name, Cnut (Old Norse Knútr), whose coins are dated c.900-905, is entirely absent from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Æthelweard’s Chronicle, the Annals of Ulster, or any other contemporary work – a fact which offers a sobering reminder of the incompleteness of our textual sources for this period. But Alfred Smyth pointed out that a number of later Icelandic sagas preserve a story of an invasion of Northumbria by a Scandinavian leader called Knútr, who fought two battles, one north of Cleveland and one at Scarborough [NR]; and it may well be that this story represents a distant echo of the rule of the CNVT REX named on York coinage.¹²⁹ It is also perhaps worth recalling here that Guthred’s father, according to the History of St Cuthbert, was called Harthacnut (Old Norse Hörðaknútr) – a name sometimes represented only by its second element, Cnut. Since, as we shall see in later chapters, Scandinavian naming patterns often alternated every two generations (so that grandsons were given their names of their grandfathers), it is possible – if the chronology works – that the Scandinavian ruler on these coins was Guthred’s son (it is also conceivable, though surely not likely, that he was Guthred’s father). That this suggestion has value is supported by the recent discovery (in a hoard found at Silverdale, Lancashire, in 2011) of a unique coin bearing the inscription AIRDE CONVT: this looks, just about, like an acceptable rendering of the name Harthacnut (though the cross-bar on the initial A is missing), and the coin has been given a provisional dating bracket of c.900-910.¹³⁰ Perhaps, then, the same ruler issued coins occasionally under the full name of Harthacnut, but more usually under the short form of Cnut.

Independence, innovativeness, and vigour: more should be said about these three qualities of the early York coinage. Its independence can be appreciated from a negative characteristic. Although the Scandinavian rulers of York seem not to have had any local expertise to draw on, they did not therefore turn to the moneyers of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia for either their personnel or their practices.¹³¹ It is true that the new coins were silver pennies, as in Southumbrian England, not brass stycas, but the weight standard of the new coins was not derived from contemporary Anglo-Saxon usage: rather, it corresponded both to the weight standard of the old Northumbrian stycas – suggesting that some coins were still available in York to act as a model in this regard at least – and also to the standard of the recently instituted coins of the southern Danelaw (suggesting, perhaps, co-operation between the new Viking polities in northern and eastern England). Nor did the early issues copy the Anglo-Saxon habit of naming the moneyer on the coins produced under his authority. And when the York coinage did, a little later, start to include the names of moneyers, these were very often continental names – suggesting that the Scandinavian authorities of early tenth-century York turned to Carolingian Frankia for technical support rather than to Anglo-Saxon England; indeed, even the shape of the extant York coin-dies resembles Carolingian ones rather than Anglo-Saxon.¹³²

The innovativeness and vigour of the coinage complement its independence. The early coins of York boast many features of decoration that are hard to parallel elsewhere, and collectively demonstrate no fewer than forty different designs.¹³³ It goes without saying that, in order to produce such a confident and varied suite of designs, and to operate such a well-organized coinage, considerable bureaucratic machinery is required; and this is a point that will be discussed further in Chapter 6, when we consider the city of York itself in the Viking period. Many of these design features are conspicuously Christian in their iconography, and are seemingly inspired by Northumbrian Christian art, rather than by other coins produced elsewhere – apparently confirming that, as the History of St Cuthbert suggests, the early Scandinavian rulers of York had converted to Christianity from Guthred onwards. So, for example, the early York coins are decorated with crosses of various shapes and formats; they are inscribed with Latin quotations from the liturgy; and most remarkably of all, one design sets out the four letters of the name ‘CNVT’ in cruciform shape, so that reading clockwise does not work, and one is required instead to make the sign of the cross with one’s eyes – a devotional arrangement that is, in Mark Blackburn’s words, ‘quite unprecedented on any European coinage’.¹³⁴

As we shall see increasingly in this narrative, the first half of the tenth century was an extremely unstable time in Northumbria. One reflection of this instability is the number of hoards which have been recovered dating from this period. At the time of writing, nearly twenty hoards have been discovered in northern England that date from the first three decades of the tenth century.¹³⁵ The largest is the Cuerdale hoard (c.905-10), and the second largest the Vale of York hoard (though it is, in fact, a distant second: Cuerdale contained over 7,500 coins compared to the Vale of York’s 617). These hoards vary in their composition: some are made up only of coins, and some of other forms of silver (such as arm-rings, ingots, and hack-silver), but the majority are mixed, comprising both coins and bullion. A number of the most important hoards were discovered in the nineteenth century (such as the Cuerdale hoard, found in 1840), and their contents have neither been fully preserved nor fully recorded; but several have recently been uncovered through the contemporary activity of metal-detectorists (such as the Vale of York hoard, found in 2007), and these have been much more exhaustively catalogued.

It is precisely because of the immensity of the Cuerdale hoard that we possess the varied coins of Sigeferth and Cnut in such great abundance – even though, textually speaking, they are among the most obscure of the Scandinavian rulers of York. Cuerdale is on the River Ribble, near Preston in Lancashire, and the valleys of the Ribble and Aire are thought to have constituted the main route between Dublin and York.¹³⁶ The Scandinavians of Dublin suffered a great defeat in 902, as the Annals of Ulster record: ‘The heathens were driven from Ireland, i.e. from the fortress of Áth Cliath […] and they abandoned a good number of their ships, and escaped half dead after they had been wounded and broken’.¹³⁷ One consequence of this expulsion seems to have been the shadowy conquest of the Wirral area by a Scandinavian leader named Ingimund.¹³⁸ Another is likely to have been the putting together of the treasure deposited at Cuerdale. In addition to its 7,500 coins (over 3,000 of which were from York), the Cuerdale hoard contained 30 kg of silver bullion, in the form of jewellery, ingots, and hack-silver, and the styles and affinities of much of this metalwork reveal that the bullion hoard was assembled in, or exported from, Ireland. But the presence in the hoard of vast numbers of York coins indicates that this bullion from the west was combined with coinage from the east to create an unparalleled store of wealth. One obvious interpretation is that this was, in some way, ‘an army pay-chest’, compiled for the purposes of campaign in either Ireland or England.¹³⁹

To return to our chronology of kings: in 900 a further ruler had appeared in Northumbria, but this one was not Scandinavian. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (here quoted from the C-text) gives us the essential account:

 

In this year Alfred the son of Æthelwulf died […] Then the atheling Æthelwold, his father’s brother’s son, rode and seized the residence at Wimborne and at Twinham, against the will of the king [Alfred’s son, Edward ‘the Elder’] and his councillors. Then the king rode with the army till he encamped at Badbury near Wimborne, and Æthelwold stayed inside the residence with the men who had given allegiance to him; and he had barricaded all the gates against him, and said that he would either live there or die there. Then meanwhile the atheling rode away by night, and went to the Danish army [here] in Northumbria, and they accepted him as king [underfengon hym to cinge] and gave allegiance to him.¹⁴⁰

 

Æthelwold was the son of Æthelred I of Wessex, Alfred’s older brother and immediate predecessor as king. This indicates the problem: Alfred and his supporters seem to have wanted to introduce a principle of father-to-son inheritance, whereas previously succession to the throne had not followed such a clear line, and kings were succeeded not just by their sons but by other male relatives who were accorded the throne-worthy title of æðeling.¹⁴¹ The point is made very clearly through the A version of the Chronicle, the most ‘Alfredian’ manuscript: the sentence that records Æthelwold’s acclamation as king in Northumbria is conspicuously absent from A’s account, as if the very idea of Æthelwold being king at all, anywhere, must not be recognized. And the family of Alfred did triumph in this respect: all the tenth-century kings of Wessex and England traced descent from him. The numismatic evidence, though, confirms what the A-text wishes to deny: a small number of York coins exist which were minted in the name of a ruler ALVVALDVS, a recognizable rendering of the name Æthelwold.¹⁴²

Two years later Æthelwold, backed by the Northumbrian here, attacked the south of England. The Chronicle records that he ‘came hither across the sea [hider ofer sæ]’ – a surprising phrase to use if Æthelwold was simply sailing down the east coast of England, unless he had made an unrecorded visit to Scandinavia (or conceivably Ireland or Frankia) to gather more troops.¹⁴³ Æthelwold persuaded the Scandinavian here in East Anglia to join his campaign, and together they harried across Mercia and into Wessex itself. In return Edward the Elder took his army into Scandinavian territory in the southern Danelaw, and the climactic battle was fought between Æthelwold’s forces and Edward’s Kentish contingent. Of this battle, Æthelweard’s Chronicle declares poetically that ‘they clashed spears, brandished swords, and in either hand the spear was much shaken’.¹⁴⁴ The site of the battle is given in the Mercian B-text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as æt þam Holme, and the most plausible identification of this place is Holme in Huntingdonshire.¹⁴⁵ The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also preserves a roll-call of the distinguished Kentish dead, and additionally names several of their opponents:

 

On the Danish side King Eohric was killed, and the atheling Æthelwold, whom they had chosen as their king, and Brihtsige, son of the atheling Beornoth, and Ysopa the hold and Oscetel the hold and also very many with them, whom we cannot name now. And a great slaughter was made on both sides, but more of the Danes were killed, though they remained in possession of the battle-field.¹⁴⁶

 

Eohric (perhaps Old Norse Jórekr) was probably the Scandinavian king of East Anglia, and hold (Old Norse höldr) is a Scandinavian term of high rank. As for Brihtsige, son of Beornoth, his identity is unknown, though Dorothy Whitelock’s view was that ‘the names suggest that these were descendants of ninth-century kings of Mercia’.¹⁴⁷ As the tenth century progressed, the Battle of Holme continued to be remembered as an important event, especially in Kent; over fifty years later, for example, a charter granting land to Christ Church, Canterbury, looked back to the time when ‘all the men of Kent were summoned to the battle at the Holme’ – as well it might, for the donor’s father was one of the men of Kent killed there.¹⁴⁸ Although the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle judges the Danes to have ‘remained in possession of the battle-field’, they had lost both their leaders, and Edward seems to have emerged in the stronger position: the consequence was a peace treaty, agreed at Tiddingford in Bedfordshire, between Edward and both ‘the East Angles and the Northumbrians’.¹⁴⁹

This concord did not endure, however, and the Chronicle for 910 disapprovingly states that ‘the army in Northumbria broke the peace, and scorned every privilege that King Edward and his councillors offered them, and ravaged over Mercia’. This may not have been without provocation, for in the previous year, according to the Chronicle, Edward sent an army into ‘the territory of the northern army [norðhere]’ which ravaged and raided for five weeks and ‘killed many men of those Danes’.¹⁵⁰ The hostilities of 910 resulted in an even greater battle than that of Holme, fought at Wednesfield, near Tettenhall in Staffordshire.¹⁵¹ The northern annals preserved in the History of the Kings do not state the outcome of the battle, but the southern Anglo-Saxon Chronicle claims a decisive victory for the West Saxons:

 

[Edward] sent his army both from the West Saxons and the Mercians, and they overtook the Danish army when it was on its way home and fought against it and put the army to flight and killed many thousands of its men. And there were killed King Eowils and King Halfdan and Earl Ohter and Earl Skurfa, and Othulf the hold, and Benesing the hold, and Olaf the Black and Thurferth the hold, and Osfrith Hlytta, and Guthfrith the hold, and Agmund the hold and Guthfrith.¹⁵²

 

Æthelweard’s Chronicle adds a third king killed at the battle, named Ivar.¹⁵³ These Old Norse names, some garbled in the recording, are the closest we can get to identifying individual members of the Scandinavian ruling elite in early tenth-century Northumbria.¹⁵⁴ Most of them are now irretrievably obscure, though the presence of a nickname or two (such as Olaf ‘the Black’) suggests that they may have been more than just names to those recording their demise. But we can at least discern something of the hierarchy among the Scandinavian aristocracy in England: kings, earls, and holds. Furthermore, it is possible that the recurrence of the names of previous rulers (Ivar, Halfdan, Guthfrith or Guthred) might indicate some family connection with those earlier kings. Were the defeated Ivar, Halfdan, and Eowils all kings of Northumbria, or were two of them based elsewhere, and if so where? Did the death of all three kings at the Battle of Tettenhall mark a point of crisis for the Vikings of York?

Our poor knowledge of York kings in this period is not aided by the city’s coinage, to which we should now return to conclude this chapter. The Christian iconography of Sigeferth and Cnut was continued in the next series of issues, the so-called St Peter coinage.¹⁵⁵ But these coins do not have the name of the king on them, and state instead SCI PETRI MO (‘St Peter’s mint’ or ‘money’). The dedication of York Minster is to St Peter, so the Christian message of these coins seems both local and ecclesiastical or institutional; their model, very clearly, is the series of St Edmund coins produced in the southern Danelaw from the late ninth century onwards – coins which do somewhat different work in expressing the Christian affiliations of the new Scandinavian rulers there, as St Edmund, king of East Anglia, had been martyred by Ivar’s Great Army in 869 in the very process of conquest.¹⁵⁶ It may be reasonable, as with the coins of Sigeferth and Cnut, to see clerical input in the design of the St Peter coinage, though how extensive this was can be disputed, as we shall see in the next chapter; one feature of some of the coins is the presence of a pagan Thor’s hammer. We do not know which ruler instituted the St Peter coins: it might have been one of the kings killed at the Battle of Tettenhall, or it might have been an unnamed and unrecorded predecessor, ruling after Cnut. Remarkably, though, the St Peter coins were the only coinage-type minted at York between c.905 and 927 – with one spectacular interruption, as we will soon see in the next chapter, as we follow the story of York’s Viking kings forward into their last decades.