EPILOGUE
1066 AND BEYOND
Rebellion and Conquest
Within a Europe-wide perspective, the Viking Age is conventionally viewed as extending from approximately 800 to 1050. By the mid eleventh century, the society and polities of Scandinavia had experienced a number of changes which served to bring them much more into line with the rest of Europe: above all, conversion to Christianity and the establishment of strong, centralized kingships. But the history of the Vikings in England is usually narrated according to a more precise bracket of dates, namely 793 (the date of the attack on Lindisfarne) and 1066 (the date of the Battle of Stamford Bridge, prologue to the Battle of Hastings). There are good grounds, however, for extending the narrative of Viking Age Yorkshire, at least in outline, by ten or fifteen years beyond 1066. The great change in life in Northumbria came in the decade after 1066, not in that year itself, in terms of northern England’s experience of Norman rule, and the consequences of this for the Northumbrian – that is, the native Anglo-Scandinavian – aristocracy and gentry. The 1060s and 1070s saw the greatest tumult and changes in the north since the 860s and 870s, and it is these events and changes that this last chapter will sketch out, before finally glancing at some of the echoes and memories of Yorkshire’s Scandinavian heritage up to the present day.
Edward the Confessor died on 5 January 1066, leaving no offspring. Cnut, the Danish conqueror, had reigned from 1016 to 1035, before being succeeded by his sons Harthacnut (1035-40) and Harold Harefoot (1040-42). With the deaths of Harthacnut and Harold (and also of Cnut’s other son, Swein, who did not rule in England), the line of Cnut and Swein Forkbeard came to an end, and the house of Alfred re-occupied the throne of Anglo-Saxon England, in the person of Æthelred’s son, Edward. Edward had spent the years of Danish rule in Normandy, and his return to England marked the beginnings of the French or Norman impact on English politics and culture, a full twenty-five years before the Battle of Hastings.1
In Northumbria, the events of 1066 really began a year earlier, in 1065. And the story of 1065 begins a decade earlier, in 1055. In that year, as we saw in the previous chapter, Earl Siward died, and was buried in the church which he had had dedicated to St Olaf, in York. As his replacement as earl of Northumbria, King Edward appointed Tostig, son of Earl Godwine (and brother-in-law of the king himself), a member of the most powerful aristocratic family in England.2 Tostig was the first earl of Northumbria to be appointed with no prior connection to either the northern or eastern Danelaw, or to the region of Bernicia; the power-base of the Godwinesons lay firmly in the south.3 But he was half-Danish: Godwine’s wife was Gytha, the sister of Cnut’s brother-in-law, and both Tostig and a number of his brothers bore Norse names – including his brother Harold (Old Norse Haraldr). His own wife, Judith, was sister of the count of Flanders, and both Tostig and Judith were remembered as generous patrons of the church, not least in Durham.4
Tostig spent much of his time in the south of England, and at the royal court, and his deputy on the ground in Yorkshire seems to have been a local thegn named Copsig (Old Norse Kofsi).5 Some of our sources do, however, show Tostig acting in close connection with Ealdred, as, respectively, earl of Northumbria and archbishop of York. So, for example, Tostig accompanied Ealdred to Rome in 1061, only for them both to be set upon by brigands on their way home.6 While Tostig was away, the Scots raided Lindisfarne and annexed Cumbria, so undoing much of the hard work that Siward had put into defending Northumbria’s northern borders.7 But it was the events of autumn 1065 that proved decisively that Tostig’s decade as earl was a disaster. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records (here quoted from version D):
All the thegns in Yorkshire and in Northumberland came together and outlawed their Earl Tostig and killed his bodyguard, and all they could get at, both English and Danish, and took all his weapons in York, and gold and silver and all his treasure they could hear about anywhere.8
The near-contemporary (and pro-Tostig) Life of King Edward states that ‘many were slaughtered in the cities of York and Lincoln’, and that ‘whosoever could be identified as having been at some time a member of Tostig’s household was dragged to the torments of death without trial’.9 But the fullest account of these events is given in a later source, John of Worcester’s early twelfth-century Chronicle, and this enables us to identify some of the leaders of the revolt, and also some of the causes:
After the feast of St Michael the Archangel, on Monday, 3 October, the Northumbrian thegns, Gamalbarn, Dunstan, son of Æthelnoth, and Glonieorn, son of Heardwulf, came with 200 soldiers to York, and, on account of the disgraceful death of the noble Northumbrian thegns Gospatric (whom Queen Edith, on account of her brother Tostig, had ordered to be killed in the king’s court on the fourth night of Christmas by treachery), Gamal, son of Orm, and Ulf, son of Dolfin (whose murders Earl Tostig had treacherously ordered the preceding year at York in his own chamber, under cover of a peace-treaty), and also of the huge tribute which Tostig had unjustly levied on the whole of Northumbria, they, on that same day, slew first his Danish house-carls, Amund and Ravenswart, hauled back from flight, beyond the city walls, and on the following day more than 200 men from his court, on the north side of the River Humber. They also broke open his treasury, and, having taken away all his goods, they withdrew.10
The three rebel leaders seem to have been prominent thegns from the West Riding, and we should note the cultural diversity of their names: one Norse, one English, and one Irish.11
Tostig himself was not in York or Northumbria, but down south in the king’s company. The rebels soon voiced their demands, and marched southwards to try to enforce them:
And they sent for Morcar, son of Earl Ælfgar, and chose him as their earl, and he went south with all the people of the shire, and of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and Lincolnshire until he came to Northampton. And his brother Edwin came to meet him with the men that were in his earldom, and also many Welsh came with him. Thereupon Earl Harold [Tostig’s brother] came to meet them, and they entrusted him with a message to King Edward, and also sent messengers with him, and asked that they might be allowed to have Morcar as their earl. And the king granted this and sent Harold back to them at Northampton.12
In other words, Edward gave in to the rebels’ demands, seemingly against his will (the Life of King Edward claims that the king wished to crush the rebellion, but ‘horror was felt at [the prospect of] what seemed civil war’).13 Tostig and his family and retinue departed into exile, going first to the court of Judith’s brother in Flanders. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records two other elements in the dénouement of the rebellion. First, that while the rebels were waiting for the king’s response, they ‘did much damage round Northampton’, killing the locals, burning their houses and corn, and capturing both cattle and even (the Chronicle claims) people, to be taken back north with them: it seems significant that, like Swein Forkbeard before them, the northern rebels waited until they had come to Watling Street, the old Danelaw boundary, before they began to waste the surrounding countryside.14 And second, the Chronicle records that Edward conciliated the rebel forces at Northampton by ‘renew[ing] there the law of King Cnut’.
This last piece of information leads us on to the question of the grounds for the rebellion. Why did the revolt take place? What had Tostig done, or not done? These issues have been much discussed.15 ‘Whatever his particular oppressions,’ as one modern historian has written, ‘there is good reason to think that his general offence was insufficient regard for traditional modes of northern government’.16 For whatever reason, it was clearly felt by the rebels that the laws of Cnut – drafted by Archbishop Wulfstan II of York – were more acceptable to northern sensibilities than the policies and practices of the current regime; perhaps they were viewed as a safeguard against unfair or over-intrusive government.17 The sympathetic Life of King Edward claims that the rebellion was an ungrateful response to the admirable firmness with which Tostig had brought law and order to the unruly north: ‘this distinguished earl, a son and lover of divine peace, had in his time so reduced the number of robbers and cleared the country of them by mutilating or killing them and by sparing no one, however noble, who was caught in this crime, that any man, even with any of his goods, could travel at will even alone without fear of attack’.18
Two further explanations for the revolt, as we have seen, are given by John of Worcester. The first, an alternative perspective on the Life of King Edward’s interpretation, is that Tostig had unjustly killed a number of important Northumbrian thegns: those named are a certain Gospatric, Gamal, son of Orm, and Ulf, son of Dolfin. Although definitive identifications are impossible, the first of these was probably a member of the family of the earls of Bamburgh; the second was probably the father of Orm Gamalson of Kirkdale (though possibly his son); and the third was probably the son of a Northumbrian thegn who had been killed fighting alongside Earl Siward in Scotland. All three, in other words, were members of prominent Northumbrian families, and all three seem to have had some connection, either through descent or marriage, with the earls of Bamburgh.19 So it looks as if Tostig may have been trying to eliminate political rivals in the north, perhaps even weighing in on the famed ‘Northumbrian bloodfeud’.
John of Worcester’s second explanation is that Tostig had ‘unjustly levied’ a ‘huge tribute’ on Northumbria. We should therefore remind ourselves that the earliest references to Yorkshire as a shire date from the early 1060s, immediately before the rebellion, and that one of the main reasons why Anglo-Saxon kings imposed the shire system was for purposes of tax-collecting, and maximizing revenue. Is it a coincidence that the first appearance of Yorkshire as a shire comes just before the Northumbrian revolt? It may be so, but it seems more likely that it was these new burdens of the southern yoke, legal as well as financial, that provided the kindling to be sparked into flame by Tostig’s killing of prominent thegns.
All our sources, then, whatever their stance, indicate that it was Tostig’s authoritarian ways that provoked the rebellion, as he endeavoured to impose, either justly or unjustly, a degree of central control not hitherto experienced in the north; and this rebellion erupted shortly, it seems, after the formal institution of the county of Yorkshire. So it may be an irony, at least for later generations of Yorkshire patriots, that the creation of the county of Yorkshire was a profoundly unwelcome act in the locality: the name and institution of Yorkshire may have represented to contemporaries not proud northern independence, but oppressive southern rule. But we should note the limit of the rebels’ demands. What they wished for was to change their earl, not to get rid of earls altogether; this was a movement demanding reform and devolution, but not separation from the kingdom of England.20
The appointment as Tostig’s successor of Morcar, of the Leofwineson family of the earls of Mercia, re-asserted a late tenth-century pattern in which Mercia and Northumbria belonged together as a sort of political ‘greater north’ of Anglo-Saxon England beyond the Thames. Morcar himself returned control of Bernician Northumbria to Oswulf of Bamburgh, grandson of the Earl Uhtred who had been killed in 1016.21 Tostig’s estates in the north were carved up and re-distributed: Morcar received the majority of the estates, but a number passed into the possession of his brother, Earl Edwin, and also of Tostig’s elder brother, Harold Godwineson.22 King Edward died just a few weeks after the Northumbrian revolt, his decline accelerated by the stress of events. And the day after Edward’s death, Harold Godwineson was proclaimed king, even though he was not of royal descent. William of Malmesbury records that, on Harold’s accession, ‘the only people to put off taking allegiance were the Northumbrians, ‘with all the pride of their race’ [a quotation from the Latin poet Statius]; as they frequently put it, they did not care to see their northern granite subject to those softies in the south [australi mollitiei]’.23 This explains why, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Harold made a visit to York immediately after his proclamation as king, to secure his recognition in the north.24
But of course Harold was not the only person in 1066 who believed that they had a claim on Edward’s throne.25 The belief in Normandy was that, at an earlier date, Edward had indicated Duke William to be his chosen heir; moreover, Harold Godwineson had supposedly recognized William as his lord when he himself was in Normandy. Yet a third claimant to the throne was King Harald Hardrada of Norway, who demands introduction at this point.
Harald was the half-brother of the St Olaf whom Earl Siward had venerated, and in the years after Olaf’s death in 1030 he had enjoyed service and adventures out in Byzantium, as a member of the Varangian Guard of Scandinavian mercenaries.26 Following the demise of Cnut’s dynasty, in 1046 he had returned to Norway and claimed a share of the throne from his nephew Magnus, Olaf’s son. Magnus died the following year, after which Harald assumed sole rule of the kingdom. His nickname, seemingly a contemporary one, comes from the Old Norse harðráði ‘hard-rule’, and later saga accounts depict him as a stern and old-fashioned warrior-king.27 He was also distinguished as an energetic patron of poets, and seems to have composed poetry himself: a later Icelandic text known as Skáldatal or the ‘List of Poets’ records that no fewer than thirteen poets composed in his honour – the highest number known for any Scandinavian king.28 Harald believed himself to have a claim on the English kingdom via his nephew Magnus, who had supposedly reached an agreement with Cnut’s son Harthacnut, then king of England and Denmark, that whichever of them outlived the other would inherit the other’s domains; and for much of his reign Harald had been at war with Harthacnut’s successor in Denmark, Swein Estrithson.29 The final impetus that sent Harald towards England in 1066 may have been supplied by the exiled Tostig, who established an understanding that he would support the Norwegian king in any attack on England. But we should realize that this was not Harald’s first move in that direction: back in 1058, the Chronicle records, ‘a naval force came from Norway’, and Irish sources indicate that this was a serious fleet, with purposes of conquest, led by Harald’s son (also called Magnus).30
Very little is known about this Norwegian assault of 1058, whereas that of 1066 is well recorded in contemporary or near-contemporary sources from both the English and Scandinavian sides.31 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle offers a relatively full account, while Harald’s patronage of poets meant that his English expedition was celebrated and commemorated in a sizeable body of skaldic verse.32 Such verse, and perhaps other oral traditions, were later to be blended with continental Latin sources to provide the basis for very extensive narratives about Harald’s last campaigns in thirteenth-century kings’ sagas; but while such sources undoubtedly have some value, they also contain a fair dash of imaginative fiction, and it is the skaldic poetry which should be prioritized as more authoritative.33
Among the versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it is the C-text that gives the fullest account of Harald’s campaign, though the D-text is also important.34 Version C records that Harald and Tostig had a rendezvous at the River Tyne (the D-text says Scotland), and then sailed up the Humber and Ouse towards York, with Harald’s fleet of 300 ships. John of Worcester claims that Harald’s fleet was in fact 500-strong, and Gaimar, in his History of the English, specifies 470. These two twelfth-century sources also disagree as to where Harald came ashore: John of Worcester says Riccall [ER], some ten miles south of York, while Gaimar states cryptically ‘at St Wilfrid’s’, which (it has been suggested) may be a reference to Brayton [WR] near Selby, five miles further south than Riccall, where the church is dedicated to St Wilfrid.35 As soon as Harold Godwineson learned of Harald’s landing, he marched north ‘day and night as quickly as he could to assemble his force’.36 But he did not arrive in time for the first battle:
Then before Harold could get there Earl Edwin and Earl Morcar assembled from their earldom as large a force as they could muster, and fought against the invaders and caused them heavy casualties, and many of the English host were killed and drowned and put to flight, and the Norwegians remained masters of the field.37
This battle took place at Fulford, just south of York, on 20 September 1066; the place is named by both the History of the Kings and Gaimar.38 Modern investigations have suggested that the precise site of the battle was in the low ground around the stream now known as Germany Beck.39 Further details of the battle, of a heroic, panegyric sort, are supplied by some of the commemorative verses composed by Harald’s skalds. Arnórr Þórðarson, for example, declares that ‘The leader reddened weighty iron blades ruthlessly on the English hard by the Ouse, and never will greater slaughter come upon a bold host’, while other verses state that many English perished around the stream: Steinn Herdísarson records that ‘many people died in the river; submerged men drowned; not a few warriors soon lay [dead] around young Morcar’, while the anonymous Haraldsstikki claims that the English forces ‘lay fallen down in the marsh, hacked by weapons, so that the battle-bold Norwegians could walk across on corpses alone’.40 Some of the dead may have been buried at St Andrew’s Church, Fishergate: a group of a dozen mid to late eleventh-century male skeletons have been uncovered there showing weapon injuries.41
Neither Morcar nor Edwin were killed at Fulford, but the battle did leave the city of York in Harald’s power. He and Tostig entered the city, and exchanged hostages to secure their position. Moreover, Harald was supplied with provisions from the city and ‘settled a complete peace, arranging that they [the hostages? a Northumbrian force?] should all go with him southwards and subdue this country’.42 It is, of course, notable that Harald should have chosen to begin his attempted conquest in the north, as if there was expectation of less resistance there, or perhaps even a positive reception.
Five days after the Battle of Fulford, Harald and most of his army were seven miles east of York at Stamford Bridge [ER], ‘because they had been promised for certain that hostages would be brought to them there out of all the shire’.43 Stamford Bridge, on the River Derwent, was well placed for such a purpose in terms of its nodal position in the local road system. But this meant that it was also easily accessible from the south, and on 25 September Harold Godwineson and his army, having passed through York, fell upon Harald’s Norwegian force, who seem to have been wholly unaware of the nearness of the English king:
Then Harold, king of the English, came against them by surprise beyond the bridge, and there they joined battle, and went on fighting strenuously till late in the day. And there Harald, king of Norway, was killed and Earl Tostig, and numberless men with them both Norwegians and English, and the Norwegians fled from the English.
This is the version of the near-contemporary C-text, to which a later hand has added an anecdote of the battle of a sort found elsewhere in heroic poetry:
There was one of the Norwegians there who withstood the English host so that they could not cross the bridge nor win victory. Then an Englishman shot an arrow, but it was no use, and then another came under the bridge and stabbed him under the corselet. Then Harold, king of the English, came over the bridge and his host with him […]44
A more expansive version of this anecdote is found in William of Malmesbury (‘Called upon to surrender […] he spurned the invitation and kept taunting the enemy, saying they were a poor lot if they could not deal with a single man’).45 Heroic postures are also prominent in the skaldic accounts of the battle, mostly associated with Harald himself: according to Stúfr Þórðarson, for instance, ‘the warden of spears’ rain [i.e. Harald], who not at all heeded his life, went there, exultant, through battle like the wind’, while Arnórr Þórðarson (no relation) states that ‘the prince, shunning mediocrity, had no small courage in himself, and the battle-swift heart of the king did not tremble in the helmet-din [i.e. battle]’.46 But there is also a touch of criticism of the king, for having led himself and his warriors into defeat, with Harald’s old-style heroic virtues themselves proving his downfall, and perhaps also proving no longer appropriate in the changed world of the eleventh century: so, Arnórr attributes Harald’s death in ‘the blizzard of steel’ to ‘excess of heroism [ofrausn]’, but Þjóðólfr Arnórsson remarks less equivocally that ‘people have paid a dire penalty […] Harald commanded troops onto this expedition westwards needlessly [þarflaust]’.47 Nonetheless, Arnórr re-assures his listeners that ‘the death of the fearsome king was not unadorned […] All the liegemen of the gracious prince chose much rather to fall beside the battle-swift commander than wishing quarter’.48
The D-text of the Chronicle tells that, after the battle, the English army pursued the fleeing Norwegians right back to their ships (presumably still at Riccall): ‘some were drowned, and some burned, and some destroyed in various ways so that few survived’.49 One who did survive was Harald’s son Olaf (later known as Olaf ‘the Quiet’, and king of Norway 1067-93); another was the earl of Orkney. After they had sworn pledges of peace to Harold, Olaf and the remnants of the Norwegian fleet were allowed to creep home, only 20 or 24 ships out of the several hundreds who had made landfall only a few days earlier.50
The graves of those who died at Stamford Bridge have so far not been discovered; a cemetery at Riccall has been found and excavated, but the bodies uncovered were those of the local population (between the seventh and twelfth centuries), not the Norwegian dead.51 Tostig himself, according to William of Malmesbury, was buried in York (‘recognized by the evidence of a wart between the shoulder-blades’, which suggests that his body may have been mutilated or even decapitated).52 William also states that Harold Godwineson entrusted to Edwin and Morcar the booty acquired through his victory, whereas Gaimar gives that role to Archbishop Ealdred of York, and also adds that Harold left the magnate Merleswein in command on the ground.53 But Harold had no time to linger in the north: news reached him that William of Normandy had landed at Pevensey in Sussex on 28 September, a mere three days after the Battle of Stamford Bridge. And so Harold’s men fought a second time, sixteen days after the first, and on 14 October 1066 the last Anglo-Saxon king of England was defeated and killed at the Battle of Hastings. Two months later, on Christmas Day at Westminster, William was crowned king of England by Archbishop Ealdred of York.54 The word ‘Norman’ comes, of course, from ‘Northman’: the duchy of Normandy was established in the early tenth century as a Scandinavian polity, though it had changed and evolved over the following century and a half of French influence.55
William did not begin his reign in England by stripping the native aristocracy and gentry of their lands and giving them to his own followers, at least not in the north. But such a course of action was soon expedited by a series of revolts against his rule: in other words, it was not the events of 1066 that led to the fall of the Northumbrian elite, but those of the few years that followed.56 These revolts were motivated variously by grievance, resistance, and disenfranchisement, and in response to heavy burdens of taxation. In William Kapelle’s view, these early northern revolts against Norman rule also marked the continuation of a strain of Northumbrian separatism which was of long standing and had previously expressed itself most forcefully in the 1065 rebellion against Tostig; indeed, Tostig, in this view, may be blamed for feeding and provoking this rebelliousness, which was eventually to lead to disaster rather than reconciliation in the years after 1066.57 Even in the twelfth century, Hugh the Chanter, in his History of the Church of York, attributes to Lanfranc, the Norman archbishop of Canterbury, the opinion that ‘it was expedient for the union and solidarity of the kingdom that all Britain should be subject to one man as primate; it might otherwise happen […] that some one of the Danes, Norwegians, or Scots, who used to sail up to York in their attacks on the realm, might be made king by the archbishop of York and the fickle and treacherous Yorkshiremen, and the kingdom disturbed and divided’.58
To begin with, in January 1067, William received the submission of a number of magnates, including Edwin and Morcar, and Tostig’s old deputy, Copsig.59 But then the rebellions began, not helped by William’s appointment of the abhorred Copsig as earl of Bernician Northumbria. (His earldom was short-lived, as he was murdered within a month of taking up the office.60) Edwin and Morcar rebelled briefly against William in 1068, but were soon brought back into submission when William came north to York and built a castle there, probably the one at the site later known as Clifford’s Tower.61 A more substantial revolt was put together in the months following, centred around the person of Edgar ‘the Atheling’, a grandson of Edmund Ironside who had spent most of his life in exile in Hungary.62 Edwin and Morcar were not among Edgar’s supporters, but the group did include some who had been part of the short-lived rebellion of 1068: Earl Gospatric of Bamburgh; Merleswein, the Sheriff of Lincoln whom Harold Godwineson had left in charge of York in 1066; the sons of Carl, inheritors of the ‘Northumbrian bloodfeud’; and a powerful Yorkshire thegn named Arnkell or Arnketill, whose urban estates in York may be commemorated by the later place-name Arkilltofts.63 Our fullest source on these Northumbrian rebellions is the twelfth-century writer Orderic Vitalis, in his Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiastica), who gives an eloquent account of the nobles of the north being driven by ‘anger at the loss of their patrimonies and the deaths of their kinsmen and fellow countrymen’.64
Early in 1069, William’s garrisons at both Durham and then York were attacked by the rebels, but again the king was quickly able to re-assert control. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (D-text) records:
The atheling Edgar came to York with all the Northumbrians, and the citizens made peace with him. And King William came on them by surprise from the south with an overwhelming army and routed them, and killed those who could not escape, which was many hundreds of men, and ravaged the city […] And the atheling went back to Scotland.65
William then built a second castle at York, at Old Baile, in a further attempt to secure the city. For the rebels were still at large: they had been routed and weakened, but not definitively beaten.
However, internal revolts formed only half of William’s problems in the north after 1066, as indicated by the speech put into Lanfranc’s mouth by Hugh the Chanter. The other half was the continuation of attacks from mainland Scandinavia, as Harald Hardrada’s defeat at Stamford Bridge had not extinguished the desires of Scandinavian kings to re-conquer England; and it is possible that such subsequent attacks preferred to come up the Humber because they expected a supportive reception from the people of the north.66 In late summer 1069 King Swein Estrithson of Denmark sent a fleet of 240 or 300 ships, led by his sons and their uncle, to attack England. Swein himself told Adam of Bremen that he had a claim on the throne of England: supposedly (and incredibly), Edward the Confessor had designated Swein ‘to be, on his death, the next heir to the English throne, even if Edward had sons’.67 Swein’s fleet sailed up the Humber and met the leaders of the English rebels – Edgar atheling and his supporters, now joined, significantly, by Waltheof, son of Earl Siward – together with (in the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle D-text) ‘the Northumbrians and all the people, riding and marching with an immense army rejoicing exceedingly’. It was just a few days later, at this profoundly ominous moment, that the venerable Archbishop Ealdred died, and was buried in York. Ealdred had had a difficult time since he had crowned William as king: according to Orderic, in 1068, for example, ‘the city of York [had been] seething with discontent, and showed no respect for the holy office of its archbishop when he tried to appease it’, while John of Worcester records that Ealdred was ‘much affected with distress’ at the arrival of Swein’s fleet.68
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continues:
So they all went resolutely to York, and stormed and razed the castle and captured an incalculable treasure in it, and killed many hundreds of Frenchmen and took many with them to the ships. And before the shipmen got there the Frenchmen had burned the city, and had also thoroughly ravaged and burnt the holy minster of St Peter.69
This loss of York in September 1069 has been described as ‘the heaviest defeat which the Normans ever suffered in England’.70 William of Malmesbury preserves a vignette of Waltheof slaughtering ‘many of the Normans single-handed, beheading them one by one as they issued from the gate’, while Orderic states that, when the Danes reached York, ‘a general rising of the inhabitants swelled their ranks’.71 The Conqueror’s response was ferocious. He marched north again to suppress the rebellion, this time for good, and forced the Danish fleet to over-winter at the Isle of Axholme, on the south side of the Humber. William himself spent Christmas 1069 in York, ceremonially wearing his crown to demonstrate forcefully that it was he who was the king of England.72 In the spring, though, a further Danish fleet appeared in the Humber, led by King Swein in person. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that ‘the local people came to meet him and made a truce with him – they expected that he was going to conquer the country’.73 But by now the Danish assault was petering out in rather pointless fashion, and its final activities before withdrawal in 1070 played out south rather than north of the Humber, in the revolt associated with Hereward ‘the Wake’.
The Chronicle also states that, as an aftermath to his re-capture of York in 1069, William exacted a terrible punishment on the territory of Yorkshire itself: he ‘utterly ravaged and laid waste that shire’.74 This is the so-called ‘Harrying of the North’, and several twelfth-century writers elaborated on the appalling destruction and displacement that William caused.75 But the extent and significance of the Harrying have been much discussed by modern historians, especially in the light of Domesday Book’s designation of many estates as ‘waste [vasta]’ in 1086.76 Many interpreters would now take the view that, while William’s army undoubtedly caused a very great deal of suffering – more than enough to create an unparalleled impression on twelfth-century commentators – there is also a limit to what they could have achieved within a finite, three-month period of winter. So, Domesday’s ‘waste’ might indicate not only land that had been rendered unfarmable on account of the Harrying, but also land that happened not to be tenanted or cultivated at the time of inquiry, or even, possibly, land whose position under the plough was simply not known by the Domesday commissioners. It is certainly true that many Yorkshire estates declined in value and yield between 1066 and 1086, but the Harrying of the North may not have been the only reason for this; as we have just seen, the years immediately after the Conquest were a time of enormous turmoil and uncertainty – not unlike, of course, the 860s and 870s – and, as an index of this, several coin hoards have been found in Yorkshire from this period.77
The English rebellion and Danish attack of 1069-70 were not quite the last of their kind, though they were by far the most serious for William, and by early 1070, with the Danes departed, the Harrying accomplished, and the English rebels either in submission or permanently removed to Scotland, William’s military subjugation of Yorkshire was effectively complete. In 1071, though, Edwin and Morcar rebelled again, for the last time: Edwin was killed and Morcar subsequently imprisoned.78 Siward’s son, Waltheof, had been forgiven by the King for his part in the 1069 rebellion, even so far as to be married to the king’s niece, and in 1072 he was appointed as earl of Bernician Northumbria (at which point, as we saw in the previous chapter, he played the final move in the ‘Northumbrian bloodfeud’).79 But in 1075 Waltheof was involved in plans for yet another rebellion. William seemed at first to offer him forgiveness once more; but in 1076 he was beheaded for treason – William’s only political execution in England – and soon he was being culted as a saint.80 As we have seen, Waltheof had a Norse poet in his retinue, named Þorkell Skallason, and Þorkell’s words form a fitting epitaph for this last major casualty of northern rebellion:
William, who reddened weapons, the one who cut the rime-flecked sea from the south, has indeed betrayed the bold Waltheof under safe conduct. It is true that killings will be slow to cease in England, but my lord was brave; a more splendid munificent prince will not die.81
Waltheof’s death further marked the end of the rule in Northumbria of the long line of Bamburgh earls.
1075 also saw the last assault launched by Swein Estrithson, again led by one of his sons, Cnut. ‘Two hundred ships came from Denmark’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘and they dared not fight with King William but went to York and broke into St Peter’s Minster and captured a large amount of property there and so departed’.82 And then after that, there were no more Danish attacks, though a threatened one in 1085 (again by Cnut, by now king of Denmark) caused great anxiety, and may have been one of the motivations for the Domesday survey.83
In the midst of this political and military turmoil, changes were also afoot in the ecclesiastical sphere. After the death of Ealdred, the next archbishop of York was the Norman Thomas of Bayeux, appointed in 1070, who promptly re-built the minster from the ground up, on a different alignment, in a clear break from the pre-Conquest past.84 New monasteries also began to be founded, patronized by Norman nobles, the first of which was Selby Abbey in 1069.85 A significant twist here, though, is that at least some of the early founders of these post-Conquest monasteries were inspired by Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, and by the vision of ancient Northumbrian piety which that text propagated: so we should be careful to think of continuities, or at least re-commencements, as well as abrupt breaks with the past.
But it is the secular sphere that especially concerns us here, rather than the ecclesiastical. It was the sequence of revolts in the north that led to the loss of land and wealth by the Northumbrian elite: after every revolt that William stamped out, further nobles were deprived of their property. As early as 1069 at the latest (and possibly a year or two earlier), one of William’s writs begins ‘King William greets in a friendly fashion all my thegns in Yorkshire, both French and English’, so indicating that at least some Norman lords were settled in the county by this point.86 But as he did with Waltheof, William’s tendency, at least at first, was sometimes to show leniency, and the most prominent rebels were not automatically deprived of their lands after they had (re-)submitted to the king: so, for example, the sons of Carl were still in possession of their estate at Settrington in 1073 or 1074, when Waltheof’s forces set upon them and killed them.87 Nonetheless, as Domesday Book attests, a gradual re-distribution of lands took place in Yorkshire during and after the years of rebellion, by the end of which, ‘nearly all of the families belonging to [the Anglo-Scandinavian] aristocracy were either deprived of their lands or reduced to the level of subtenants’.88 William’s main practice was to re-distribute land according to lordship rather than territory: that is to say, his Norman followers received the whole package of properties previously held by one or more Anglo-Scandinavian lords, rather than a particular parcel of land that cut across pre-Conquest lordships, and in Domesday Book these 1066 lords are known as the antecessores or antecedents of the 1086 lords. But by the mid 1070s, it may be that all the major Anglo-Scandinavian lords had been dispossessed, and so it is possible that William complemented the ‘antecessorial’ approach with a ‘hundredal’ or territorial one, giving to a particular Norman lord most or all of the remaining properties within a particular hundred or wapentake.89 It will have been at this stage, probably, that the minor land-holders and sokemen, Stenton’s ‘free peasantry’, lost their lands or were reduced to the status of subtenants or villeins, with burdens owed to their new Norman lords.90 If we revisit the minor lordlings whom we met in the previous chapter, those small local figures who held only one piece of land in one place, we can observe their demise in the pages of Domesday Book: the land of Reiði in Little Hatfield [ER] passed to Drogo de la Beuvrière, that of Búi in Anley [WR] to Roger the Poitevin, and that of Mylnu-Grímr in Croome [ER] to the king himself.91
Some 1066 land-holders did still remain in place in 1086, but not many as a proportion of the whole; and Ann Williams has shown that the chances of survival were greatest for those who fulfilled a role in regional administration, for example as a reeve or other local official.92 And no doubt there were many people in Yorkshire for whom the Norman Conquest brought less momentous changes, such as lesser craftsmen and non-free peasants at the bottom of the social scale – though even here, the burdens placed upon them after 1066 may have been greater than before, as part of the more oppressive tenurial revolution which the Conquest effected.93 So the fundamental story of the late 1060s and early 1070s is of the dispossession and subjugation of numerous individuals, many of them far from grand, whose families may have held for up to two centuries the lands or rights which they lost after 1066. As the Norman motte-and-bailey castles were being built across the county, this loss of land and status was, by at least one important means of measurement, the end of Anglo-Scandinavian Yorkshire.
After the Viking Age: Yorkshire’s Scandinavian heritage
Not everything changed immediately, of course, and no doubt the majority of those who lost land and independence nonetheless stayed put. Signs of Scandinavian culture did not suddenly vanish in the 1080s, even though a new Norman elite was now in place; indeed, some features only come properly into view after the Conquest. So, for example, the 1106 letter concerning the customs of York Minster reveals that a number of local ‘lawmen’ (lagamen) played a prominent role in York’s governance, as they did in other Anglo-Scandinavian cities such as Lincoln, and one of the 1106 figures is described as lawman ‘by hereditary right’.94 Names of York moneyers become even more dominantly Norse in the first 75 years of Norman rule.95 It has been suggested that earlier Scandinavian art-styles, Jellinge and Borre – or at least echoes of those styles – may have persisted later in York than in Scandinavia itself, even into the twelfth century, and twelfth-century sculpture from Kirkburn [ER] has been seen as bearing traces of the Urnes style.96 A celebrated piece of ironwork on the twelfth-century door of Stillingfleet church [ER] shows a ship of seeming Scandinavian design.97
Nor did contacts and connections between England and Scandinavia cease with the waning of the Viking Age, though they did change in nature and frequency.98 Military conflict was replaced by mercantile and ecclesiastical exchange, though the Norwegian king Eysteinn Haraldsson raided down the east coast of England in 1151, including at Whitby.99 Trade between England and Scandinavia became increasingly lucrative, focused especially on fish, with ships sailing out of Hull, Scarborough, and other Yorkshire ports. The hundred years from 1400 onwards, for example, are dubbed ‘the English century’ in Icelandic historiography, and at that time Icelandic merchants and sailors were certainly to be found in the cities of Hull and York.100
But as the post-Conquest centuries proceeded, Northumbria’s Viking past began to seem more remote. One sign of this is the manner in which Latin historians’ accounts of England’s Viking Age grow more and more colourful, with stereotyped tropes of fire and the sword, and gruesome embellishments such as babies spitted on spears.101 It was also at this point that the Scandinavian settlements started to perform one of their most important functions, offering an aetiological or originary explanation as to why certain features of culture or conduct were different in the north of England from the south (and this question is, of course, one that endures to the present day in scholarly debate: how far does the Danelaw’s Scandinavian history provide an explanation for regional difference?). Many of the origins claimed were far-fetched, though, such as Gerald of Wales’ late twelfth-century assertion that the distinctive Yorkshire practice of part-singing was derived from ‘the Danes and Norwegians, who so often invaded those parts of the island and held them longer under their dominion’.102
Tales of the Viking Age also began to feature in vernacular poetry and story-telling, in Anglo-Norman and Middle English, though there is nothing from medieval Yorkshire to compare with the great Lincolnshire legend of Havelok the Dane, centred on the port of Grimsby (though it is often said that the historical prototype of the hero was Olaf cuaran, king of York in the 940s).103 The legends of Earl Siward might seem the most likely counterpart from north of the Humber, but Eleanor Parker has argued recently that our extant tales about Siward (in Latin) are more plausibly to be associated with the region around Crowland in Lincolnshire, where Siward’s son Waltheof was culted as a saint.104 The story of the fall of York in 866 did, however, receive considerable elaboration, as recorded above all in Geffrei Gaimar’s verse-history (also composed in Lincolnshire): Gaimar has a long story which explains the Danish conquest of York on the grounds that Osberht, one of the two kings in Northumbria in 866, had raped the wife of a local nobleman called Buern Bucecarle, who then ‘organized and brought the Danes over here from Denmark’ (in a thirteenth-century Latin version of the story, it is the other king, Ælle, who is the villain).105 Gaimar also claims that the Great Army that subsequently arrived was made up three elements: an ‘elite corps’ on horseback, a sizeable contingent in ships, and ‘more than 20,000 foot soldiers as well’.
Re-tellings and re-interpretations were taking place in Scandinavia, too, culminating in the Icelandic sagas of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the sagas, the north of England’s Viking past is certainly not forgotten, but it is re-imagined and re-packaged for a new set of contexts, with a liberal helping of fantasy and forgetfulness.106 Stories about the fall of York are among the most important to be elaborated in Scandinavian tradition as well (as noted in Chapter 2), as also the Stamford Bridge campaign of two centuries later. There is also an awareness of the history of Scandinavian settlement in Yorkshire, as for example in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla:
Northumbria is reckoned to be a fifth part of England. [Eric Bloodaxe] had his residence in York, where it is said that earlier the sons of Loðbrók had resided. Northumbria had been mostly inhabited by Norwegians after the sons of Loðbrók conquered the land. Danes and Norwegians had often made raids on it after rule of the land had passed from them. Many place-names there are derived from the Norse tongue, Grímsbœr [Grimsby] and Hauksfljót [?] and many others.107
One particular site for which a Scandinavian origin was proposed was Scarborough [NR]: according to Kormak’s Saga, the settlement there was founded by the poet Kormak and his brother, Thorgils skarði (hence Old Norse Skarðaborg ‘Skarði’s fortification’). Modern place-name study, however, gives little support for this romantic tradition, and suggests instead an Old English, pre-Viking origin for the name (probably scearde burh ‘the notched fortification’, perhaps a reference to the old Roman signal station on the headland).108
Language was the most enduring feature of Scandinavian culture in England, as it was elsewhere in the British Isles. William of Malmesbury, in the twelfth century, wrote that ‘the whole speech of the Northumbrians, especially that of the men of York, grates so harshly upon the ear that it is completely unintelligible to us southerners’.109 William’s observations enjoyed a long shelf-life: in the late fourteenth century, they were still being used in John Trevisa’s translation of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon: ‘Al the longage of the Northumbres, and specialych at York, ys so scharp, slyttyng and frotyng and unschape [piercing and grating and ugly] that we southeron men may that longage unnethe [scarcely] undurstonde’.110 William himself attributed this to the Northumbrians’ ‘proximity to barbaric tribes and their distance from the kings of the land’, but other southern commentators had a different explanation for the harshness of northern speech: according to Gerald of Wales, southern English was ‘purer than elsewhere’ because ‘it retains more features of the original language and the old ways of speaking English, whereas the northern regions have been greatly corrupted by the Danish and Norwegian invasions’.111
In some respects, of course, Gerald was absolutely right (though ‘corrupted’ is a value term that no modern linguist would use). What distinguished northern English of the twelfth century from more southerly varieties was the presence of a large number of loanwords from Old Norse (as well as some possible influences in syntax and grammar). Although significant numbers of Norse loanwords are recorded in Old English texts, they are vastly outnumbered by the quantity that are first recorded in Middle English, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.112 Partly this may be a trick of the evidence, as we have relatively few vernacular texts from the north of England from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but that is unlikely to be the whole story. Rather, we should imagine that the greatest influence of Norse upon the English language occurred when Norse speakers finally gave up their own language (at different times in different places), as they – or more likely, the next generation – switched to speaking English. At this point, Norse words, constructions, and (perhaps above all) pronunciations were imported into English, so that a heavily Scandinavianized variety of English came to be spoken in the north.113 Take, for example, the minor river-name Backstone Beck [NR], first recorded as Bacstainbek (‘bake-stone beck’) only in 1314.114 The form of its middle element (‘stone’) shows derivation, or influence, from Old Norse steinn rather than Old English stān. Whether the place-name was an early coinage or a late one, examples such as this indicate the remarkably long-lived effect that Norse speech habits had on Yorkshire phonology for centuries after the demise of Old Norse as an independent language.
Classic Norse loans include words such as egg, ill, leg, skill, skirt, sky, take, want, and window.115 But in addition to these, we find examples of English and Norse variants existing side-by-side, often with subsequent differentiation of meaning (for example, whole and hail, and leap and lope) – a monument to the Danelaw’s dual linguistic history. Among the most important loans in English are the pronouns they, them, and their; and she may possibly show Norse influence as well. Many of the Norse loans were subsequently generalized through other varieties of English – in other words, they spread geographically beyond the areas of Scandinavian settlement, as other English speakers adopted them, and this process was greatly assisted by heavy migration to London from the central and southern Danelaw.116 But not all loanwords spread, and many remained geographically restricted in their distribution, never entering into standard written English, and awaiting, as it were, discovery and cataloguing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century interest in regional dialect. A few Yorkshire examples – from among many – include femmer ‘weak, frail’, gizzen ‘to sneer’, gleg ‘clear-sighted’, and hawbaw ‘a clumsy fellow’ (seemingly from Old Norse haugbúi ‘mound-dweller, ghost’).117
Norse personal names lasted longer in the north than the Norse language itself did; indeed, the continued use of Norse personal names in Yorkshire can be regarded as the most tenacious feature of Scandinavian culture in the high medieval period. The common practice among the peasantry of Yorkshire (including the upper peasantry) of giving Norse names lasted into the early thirteenth century.118 Norman and Biblical or saints’ names were already entering the northern name-stock in the twelfth century, but the generational shift becomes more apparent in the early thirteenth century, when legal records present us with a series of Yorkshire examples in which a father bears a Norse name but his son bears a Norman or Biblical/saint’s one: Walter son of Gamal, Geoffrey son of Grimkell, Thomas son of Siward, and so on.119 David Postles therefore concludes that, at least before the thirteenth century, not only were non-Norman names free from any sort of ‘social dishonour’ among the peasantry of the north, but even that the giving of such names might possess an ‘oppositional or resistant nature to a dominant discourse of culture, that of the new overlords’.120 Such an oppositional practice has not, it should be said, been observed among scholars studying naming patterns further south, so it may be that here we have yet another symptom of that Northumbrian instinct towards separatism which the Scandinavian settlements in the north re-inforced.121
When it did come, though, the change in naming practices was profound, and the repertoire of names shrank greatly, not only in Yorkshire but across the country, so that a very small number of names were used over and over again; in the 1379 poll tax for the East Riding, for example, 33% of adult males were called John, and 21% William.122 It is this reduction in range which signals that the triumph of Norman and Biblical/saints’ names in England, and the abandonment of native names, was a very different process from that in which Norse names were introduced into northern and eastern England four centuries earlier. The Norse names, it may be recalled from Chapter 4, represented a diverse and ever-changing repertoire, and indicate that what was transplanted to England was a living, evolving tradition of naming, rather than just a closed list of a very small number of names.123 But even in the shift to the new set of names, we should not assume that a global ‘fashion’ or ‘prestige’ is the best explanation: rather, it seems that an important factor in name-choice may have been the name of the local lord of the manor, who increasingly elected to stand as sponsor or god-parent to children being baptized; so the naming indicates spiritual kinship.124
The demise of native personal names, and their replacement by a much more limited set of Norman/Biblical names, is related to another development in naming practices at approximately this time or a little later, the rise of hereditary surnames.125 The most common categories of surnames are those which derive from place-names, from personal names, from occupational names, and from nicknames. It is in the first two of these categories, and above all the first, that the surnames of Yorkshire show a strong Scandinavian character. Surnames derived from place-names are usually subdivided into locative names (that is, names from a particular place, such as Askwith or Quarmby) and topographical names (names from a natural or man-made feature, such as Fell or Sykes); and clearly a very large number of surnames of the locative type have arisen from Norse settlement-names in Yorkshire (Beckwith, Danby, Gowthorpe, Holtby, Huby, Lazenby, Scargill, Skelton, Slingsby, Snaith, Stainton, and hundreds of others). Surnames derived from Norse personal names are much fewer in number, for the obvious reason that Norse names had largely been ousted by Norman names by the time that hereditary surnames took shape.126 Nonetheless, plausible Yorkshire examples include Gamble, Kettle, and Oddy (from Old Norse Gamall, Ketill, and Oddr).127 Finally, we should note that surnames ending in –son are especially common in the north of England (Robinson, Smithson, and so on). It is quite possible that the Scandinavian practice of patronymics and metronymics (Orm Gamalson, for example) was a contributory factor in the evolution and frequency of this type of surname, but it was probably not the only one, and some scholars have cautioned against seeing a Scandinavian genesis for such names.128
As the Middle Ages gave way to the early modern period, then, the Scandinavian heritage in Yorkshire was carried forward most pervasively in terms of the county’s place-names and locative surnames; but of course the fact that such names had a Scandinavian origin was more or less forgotten. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most of the historical figures and events of Viking Age Northumbria had slipped out of memory, though a few were remembered: the fame of Earl Siward, for example, was perpetuated by his appearance in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. But at a popular level, the beginnings of learned antiquarianism – which involved, as it did, the local collecting of traditions – revealed that ‘the Danes’ had come to play a very full role in England’s folklore, and not only within the old counties of the Danelaw.129 Indeed, it has been said that ‘more references to the Danes occur in popular lore of the [early modern] period than to any other invading host, from the Romans to the Normans’.130 In particular, folk traditions were eager to interpret prehistoric earthworks and tumuli as the monuments and burial mounds of the Danes, a considerable number of which remain so labelled on modern Ordnance Survey maps. Examples from Yorkshire include Danes’ Dyke near Flamborough, and Danes’ Graves at Nafferton and Skipwith [all ER]. A variant on this is the biographical tradition that the hill of Siward’s Howe in York was in fact the earl’s burial mound.131
In their colourful, larger-than-life villainy, the characterization of the Danes in much early modern folklore is also similar – and, presumably, related – to that found in Latin histories of the later Middle Ages. An illustrative example from Yorkshire may be the story of St Alkelda or Alhhild. Only two churches in the country are dedicated to this obscure saint, at Giggleswick [WR] and Middleham [NR]. No medieval texts mention Alkelda, and her very existence has been doubted, but local traditions recorded in post-medieval sources claim that ‘Alkelda was a Saxon princess, strangled for her faith by two Danish women at the time of the Viking invasions’.132 The remembrance of Vikings as persecutors of the church was also kept alive through the ghastly tradition of ‘Danes’ skins’: until quite recently, a number of churches sported (supposedly) the flayed skins of Danes nailed to their doors, including Stillingfleet [ER] in Yorkshire.133
From the mid eighteenth century onwards, antiquarianism and literary culture began to be influenced by a new, and better informed, interest in ancient Scandinavia, as Old Norse texts began to be read again by British scholars, and to be translated by poets such as Thomas Gray as part of an interest in Gothic primitivism.134 But the real take-off for Viking studies came in the nineteenth century, when a wider range of Norse texts and resources was made available for Anglophone readers, and the study of the past was revolutionized by new movements in philology and history.135 An especially important landmark was the publication in 1852 of J.J.A. Worsaae’s An Account of the Danes and Norwegians in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Written by a brilliant Danish archaeologist, this was the book that, more than any other work, encouraged the British people to regard their Viking past with enthusiasm rather than distaste, and to celebrate the Scandinavian contribution to Britain’s making and greatness.
Worsaae’s book also coincided with a wider shift in British (and especially English) self-perceptions. From the middle of the nineteenth century, it has been argued, the English started to view themselves as an essentially ‘mongrel’ people, beneficially shaped by successive waves of immigration and cultural contact into a whole that was greater than any of its constituent parts.136 For just one reflection of this view, we might turn to the verse-drama Harold (1877) by the Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson – in which two of the characters, incidentally, are ‘Aldred, Archbishop of York’ and ‘Gamel (son of Orm), a Northumbrian Thane’. Tennyson’s drama is concerned not only with the Battle of Hastings in 1066, but also with the 1065 Northumbrian rebellion against Tostig, and its aftermath. Act IV Scene I is set ‘in Northumbria’, in the brief period between the battles of Fulford and Stamford Bridge. Harold, newly arrived from the south, is met by a crowd of surly Northumbrians, and an anonymous local tells him that ‘Thou art but a West Saxon: we are Danes’, to which Harold pointedly responds:
My mother is a Dane, and I am English;
There is a pleasant fable in old books,
Ye take a stick, and break it; bind a score
All in one faggot, snap it over knee,
Ye cannot.137
In other words, the people of Northumbria need to realize not only that they are indeed part of England, but also that the English are made up of both Danes and West Saxons combined, and are the better and stronger for it. One could not find a better illustration of the new attitude to the Scandinavian past, and to English identity, which took hold in the second half of the nineteenth century.
But Worsaae’s demonstration of Britain’s Viking history was worked out in particular at a local or regional level, rather than a national one, with the Victorian proliferation of antiquarian study and antiquarian societies.138 Yorkshire produced its fair share of eminent antiquaries in the nineteenth century, many of them clergymen, of whom just two may be cited here to exemplify the quickening of interest in the county’s Scandinavian past in the decades after 1850. The first is Isaac Taylor (1829-1901), who distinguished himself in various fields, including the history of alphabets, and from 1875 until his death was vicar of Settrington [ER] – the scene of the last killings in the ‘Northumbrian bloodfeud’, where Waltheof’s soldiers massacred the sons of Carl. Taylor was a pioneering scholar of place-names, with his two works Words and Places (1864) and Names and their Histories (1896) highly influential and much reprinted; he was also an important early student of the Yorkshire Domesday.139
The second example is John Christopher Atkinson (1814-1900), often known as Canon Atkinson, as – like Taylor – he was appointed a canon of York Minster.140 For over half a century (from 1847), Atkinson was the vicar of the remote rural parish of Danby [NR], and his most famous work is Forty Years in a Moorland Parish (1891), an undisputed classic of folkloric antiquarianism. But among his many other works, Atkinson also produced an impressive Glossary of the Cleveland Dialect (1868), in which he traced Norse etymologies for many local words, and was the first scholar to note the importance of the lost Thingwala place-name in the vicinity of Whitby.141 He also reported the Kildale weapon burials to the Society of Antiquaries, thereby stimulating a correspondence with Worsaae in Denmark.142 In Forty Years in a Moorland Parish, amid a host of other topics and inquiries, Atkinson probed deeply into the Scandinavian origins of the Danby region: his essential view was that ‘the people of his own district continued for ages to be a Danish-speaking people’, on the grounds that it was ‘impossible to suppose that of the scores of subordinate local names […] the preponderating amount could have been given by any other than a folk continuing to speak Danish for generation after generation’; in other words, Atkinson perceived the important point that it is likely to be minor place-names rather than major ones which give the best guide to the intensity of Scandinavian settlement.143
As Atkinson’s example indicates, and as noted earlier, the second half of the nineteenth century was also the boom period for the collection and celebration of local dialect vocabulary – especially as such vocabulary was felt to be under threat from increased mobility and standard education. The climax on a national scale was the compilation of the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905) by the Yorkshireman Joseph Wright (1855-1930) – an extraordinary figure, who began by working in the mills at Saltaire as a boy, but ended up as Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford.144 As a result of work done for Wright’s Dictionary, the Yorkshire Dialect Society was founded in 1897, the Transactions of which regularly cast light on the Norse provenance of much local dialect.145 From 1904, one energetic member of the Society was Frederic W. Moorman, Professor of English Language at the University of Leeds, where he established a tradition of dialect study and attempted to close the gap between academic philology and working-class self-expression; he also published a study of the place-names of the West Riding.146 Moorman died in 1919, in a drowning accident; his successor at Leeds was none other than J.R.R. Tolkien, trained under Wright at Oxford, who in 1928, as another member of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, was to write an approving foreword to a glossary of Huddersfield dialect, pointing out to its readers that ‘this dialect is full of Scandinavian words, some rare, some found in many other places’.147
In York, the city’s Viking remains were also beginning to attract attention. Here a crucial figure was the architect George Benson (1856-1935), who in the early years of the twentieth century was the first person properly to identify and record Viking Age structures.148 An important contemporary was George Augustus Auden (1872-1957), a doctor in York, who reported on local finds to the Viking Club of London – and, for good measure, passed on his Scandinavian enthusiasms to his son, the poet W.H. Auden.149 In 1908, the Cumbrian antiquary W.G. Collingwood published his survey of Anglian and Viking Age sculpture from the city, as part of his ground-breaking survey of the whole of Yorkshire.150
With figures such as Moorman and Collingwood, in the early decades of the twentieth century, we find ourselves truly at the beginnings of modern study, with no fundamental interruptions or revolutions in understanding; we are back where we began in Chapter 1. So we can now conclude by reflecting briefly on the role played by the Viking past in Yorkshire’s contemporary culture and identity.
Yorkshire’s Scandinavian heritage is now regarded as a given thing – in some respects, the central fact in the county’s pre-industrial history – and this can be observed in many ways. Fictional Yorkshire place-names, for example, are often given a Scandinavian flavour by ending in –by, from James Herriot’s Darrowby to J.L. Carr’s Oxgodby in A Month in the Country (1980). More swaggeringly, in 2013 Yorkshire County Cricket Club decided to re-name its one-day team as the Yorkshire Vikings. ‘We wanted a new name that has relevance to the region’, the Club’s Commercial Director explained; ‘the Vikings have been ingrained in Yorkshire for over 1000 years and are woven into the fabric of the County’s history’.151 One contemporary view of the Vikings, then, invests them with a set of values and associations that are, for Yorkshire audiences at least, fundamentally positive: Yorkshire’s Viking legacy can be deployed to express a form of regional pride, an inherent, independent northernism that can be made sharply contradistinctive to ideas of the south, and of government from the south.
It is therefore no surprise that the Vikings play an important role in heritage tourism, in business and advertising, and in the articulation of local identities – a role greatly facilitated by the fact that (like the Romans, but unlike, say, the Anglo-Saxons) the Vikings possess ‘brand identity’, a well-established set of traits and visual hooks, from longships and interlace to beards and (unhistorical) horned helmets. The launch event for the name-change of the Yorkshire Vikings took place at the Jorvik Viking Centre in York – far and away, of course, the most important Viking tourist site in the British Isles, which has attracted over 17 million visitors since it opened in 1984. The Centre also runs an extremely popular ‘Jorvik Viking Festival’ in the February half-term holidays, which swells the city’s tourist population on an annual basis. On account of its ‘theme park’ qualities, and the power of its tourist pull, it is not always appreciated what a serious exercise in archaeological reconstruction the Jorvik Viking Centre represents. Not only is the Centre on the site of the Coppergate dig itself, but the buildings and interpretation are very closely modelled on the Coppergate finds; so one is touring the excavation site as the same time as one is marvelling at the reconstructed sights and sounds. A less famous, but in many ways complementary, attraction, just outside York at Murton Park, is the Yorkshire Museum of Farming’s Danelaw Centre for Living History, a hands-on Viking village that is popular for school visits and re-enactment events.
In terms of business and advertising, an extraordinary array of firms and services, especially in the vicinity of York, play on Yorkshire’s Viking past, presumably on the assumption that ‘Vikings connote qualities such as dynamism, success, and go-getting’.152 The York phone book for 2013/14 lists, among others: The Viking Loom (a craft shop), Viking Management Systems, and Viking Vehicle Services; Jorvik Physiotherapy, Jorvik Podiatry Centre, and Jorvik Supreme Flooring; and Yorvik Electrical Contractors and Yorvik Homes. It is not possible to walk around the city of York without seeing the image of a Viking on an advertizing hoarding or the side of a bus.
Local village and civic identities are also bound up with the Viking past. The modern street names of Stamford Bridge commemorate the events of 1066 – Viking Road, Hardrada Way, Tostig Close – as do monuments, pub-signs, and even a floral planter in the shape of a Viking ship. Controversy has arisen over plans to build a new housing development on the likely site of the Battle of Fulford.153 The village of Burnsall [WR], home of an important array of Viking Age sculpture, has recently instituted its own ‘Viking Festival’. And in the millennium celebrations of 2000, many local communities looked back 1000 years to identify and commemorate Scandinavian origins. In all this popular and communal engagement with Yorkshire’s Viking past, it goes without saying that – as has been the case ever since the time of Gerald of Wales – some of the meanings and identifications that are claimed are unimpeachably well-founded, whereas others are romantic over-interpretations, and at least a few are pure fantasy.
It is, perhaps, a reductive question to ask what, in the final analysis, modern Yorkshire owes to its Viking past in terms of historical inheritance – and our engagement with history is not to be justified or quantified simply in terms of its demonstrable contribution to present existence. But it is not superficial to point out that, as this book has explored, the 200 years of Viking Age Yorkshire (866-1066) represent a period in which permanently important changes took part in the region – many, though not all, to be attributed to the arrival of the Vikings themselves. The Vikings cannot be said to have created Yorkshire itself: the county, as a county, was formally a West Saxon institution, and the extent of the Viking kingdom (which became the county) had earlier been the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Deira. But still, the Scandinavian centuries were a defining period, not only on account of the events and developments of the period itself, but also for the regional sense of self, and sense of difference, which the period consolidated and bequeathed. These centuries saw both the ‘urban moment’ for the city of York, and the ‘village moment’ for many smaller settlements, when prior patterns of land-holding were shaken up, and homes and streets were laid out in their enduring form. Churchyards were founded, parish churches were built and re-built, and a geography of habitation took shape which was familiar for generations afterwards – and still is, in the county’s non-urbanized areas. And although the county of Yorkshire cannot strictly be said to have been a Scandinavian creation, it may be that the ridings were.
It was also in Yorkshire’s Viking period, very importantly, that many places in the county received the names that they still possess. To repeat the statistics given in Chapter 1: according to one calculation, approximately 49% of place-names in the East Riding in Domesday Book are either Old Norse in origin or Scandinavianized in form, 46% in the North Riding, and 31% in the West Riding.154 These figures, of course, apply only to major names: many thousands of minor names, most of them first recorded after Domesday Book, are also Norse in some way, and speak of the defining role that the Scandinavians played in the naming of Yorkshire. So if we want to appreciate the importance of Yorkshire’s Viking past, probably the best thing we can do is just to look at a map, or at the signposts and name-plates of the county – which point eloquently to a rich history as well as to the places of the present.