FOR AROUND FORTY years after the initial attacks in England, Scotland, Ireland and France the Viking raids remained isolated affairs, damaging enough to coastal areas, but not representing a mortal threat to the existence of the kingdoms that endured them. It was the growing political instability in Francia from the 830s that allowed the Vikings to establish themselves as more than mere nuisances and to threaten for a time to overturn the whole political order of north-western Europe.
The catalyst was the death of the Frankish king, Louis the Pious, in 840. The succession dispute that ensued pitched three of his sons – Lothar, Louis the German and Charles the Bald – and his nephew, Pippin II, into a bitter struggle that shattered the unity of the Carolingian empire and opened it up to a wave of opportunistic Viking raids. By the time the quarrelsome siblings had patched up an agreement at Verdun in July 843 (which gave the west of the realm to Charles, the area east of the Rhine to Louis and a middle kingdom to Lothar, while ignoring the claims of Pippin II to Aquitaine1), the Vikings had already struck.
In the north-east Lothar felt obliged to create a buffer against them by granting the Danish chieftain Harald the island of Walcheren at the mouth of the Scheldt, while in the lands under Charles the Bald’s control, Rouen and the monastery of Saint-Wandrille suffered raids in 841, followed by Quentovic – which had already been struck several times between 834 and 838 – and Nantes in 842–3. In the last attack the Vikings descended on the town on the feast day of St John (24 June), beginning an oft-repeated pattern of assaults on cities at times when the Norsemen knew they would be crowded with pilgrims and traders, so increasing the chances of acquiring slaves and easily transportable valuables.
In a foretaste of what was to come, the monks of Saint-Wandrille handed over 26 pounds of silver in exchange for the monastery itself being spared and the ransoming of sixty-eight hostages. If the Franks expected that this tactic would do anything other than attract more raiders, then they found – just as the Anglo-Saxons would a century later – that they were sorely mistaken. The relentless tempo of the raids is echoed in the writings of ecclesiastical chroniclers. Ermentarius of Noirmoutier (whose own monastery was the subject of repeated attacks) summarised the widespread feelings of despair:
The number of ships increases, the endless flood of Vikings never ceases to grow bigger. Everywhere Christ’s people are the victims of massacre, burning and plunder. The Vikings over-run all that lies before them, and none can withstand them . . . Ships past counting voyage up the Seine, and throughout the entire region evil grows strong. Rouen is laid waste, looted and burnt: Paris, Beauvais and Meaux are taken, Melun’s stronghold is razed to the ground, Chartres occupied, Evreux and Bayeux looted, and every town invested.2
In the half-century between 841 and 892, barely a year passed without a major Viking raid on some portion of Francia, and the attacks came to centre on three main groups, based respectively in the Loire, Seine and Somme, river systems that gave the Norsemen access equally to escaping by sea and to penetrating deep inland to assail towns that hitherto would have felt themselves immune to ship-borne attack.3 The raids were particularly severe against the western kingdom of Charles the Bald with its long, exposed coastline, while the Frankish defence against the Vikings was weakened both by the chronic feuding between the sons of Louis the Pious and by the occasional tendency of Frankish factions to employ Viking bands as mercenaries. In 857 Pippin II of Aquitaine4 went so far as to renounce Christianity and join the Loire Vikings, his lack of enthusiasm for his native religion possibly aggravated by his enforced stay in a monastery after his brother Charles had him tonsured in 852.5 Pippin’s apostasy ended badly for him, as in 864 he was captured ‘through a trick’ by Ranulf, Count of Poitou, handed over to Charles, sentenced to death as a traitor to Christendom and executed. Equally threatening, in 865 the Breton ruler Salomon joined forces with the Danish Viking Hasteinn to attack Maine and Touraine, threatening to open up yet another front against the beleaguered Frankish ruler.6
As long as the Viking raids had been confined to coastal communities and monasteries (such as a raid on Saint-Wandrille in 841) they were disruptive enough, but then in 845 the Vikings sailed up the Seine and attacked Paris for the first time. The appearance of this group, led by Ragnar,7 led to fears that the Franks were being punished for their sins in the same way that God had punished the Israelites. Charles and the Frankish defenders fled in panic to the monastery of Saint-Denis, prompting the Vikings to hang 111 captives in full view of the king. The capital was only saved further depredations by an epidemic of dysentery, which struck down many of the raiders. Nonetheless, Charles was still forced to pay a huge tribute to get the Vikings to move on. The Franks did have the satisfaction of divine vengeance on Ragnar – at least in the eyes of the author of the Translatio8 of Saint-Germain – for he is said to have suffered a terrible death on his return to Denmark, his stomach swelling and bursting open as his diseased guts spilled out, a punishment for his earlier sacking of the monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
The bribe paid to Ragnar’s group in 845 was a colossal 7,000 pounds of silver, but Charles’s authority was still sufficiently strong that it took him just three months to raise this vast sum. Although over the next few years the raiders concentrated on Frisia, Brittany and Aquitaine, leaving the central core of Charles’s realm untouched, they then returned to the Seine in force, exacting further tributes in 853, 858 and 860. The nature of the raids, too, began to change. In 852, the Vikings overwintered for the first time on the Seine, a development that (just as it would later do in England) marked their permanent entry onto the Frankish political landscape. Their penetration up the Seine also deepened, and in 856 they built a fortified camp at Jeufosse, just 40 miles from Paris, from where they could raid at will into the Vexin (on the river’s right bank).
The 860 tribute payment (of 5,000 pounds of silver) was made by Charles to Weland, the leader of a newly arrived Viking band, and was in exchange for besieging (and expelling) yet another Viking force under Björn Ironside, which had based itself on the island of Oissel in the Seine. Björn, with hunger beginning to bite, simply offered Weland an even larger payment (of 6,000 pounds of silver) to be allowed to slip away, an inducement that his duplicitous countryman had no qualms in accepting.9 The two groups then headed down the Seine and split up to overwinter at various points along the river.
Charles’s inaction at these growing threats was in part forced on him by yet another bout of dynastic in-fighting, which began when his son, Louis the Stammerer, revolted in January 862. Finally in 864, emboldened by his success in trapping Weland behind a dam that he had ordered built to block the Vikings’ line of retreat and in enforcing the Norse leader’s submission and baptism, Charles abandoned his supine policy of waiting for the raiders to come and then buying them off, in favour of a more positive approach. At an assembly held at Pîtres in 864, he ordered stronger measures. Although almost half the decrees issued after the meeting concern currency reforms, one of them forbade the selling of mail-coats, weapons or horses to ‘foreigners’ (by which he must firmly have had the Vikings in mind), while the most important measure concerning the protection of the realm ordered the whole male population to build defensive works, such as bridges and causeways (and to perform garrison duties by manning them). The intention was to repeat along the length of the Seine the stratagem that had trapped Weland in 862, by constructing fortified bridges that would impede the Vikings’ freedom of movement and, it was hoped, stop them from ever getting as far as Paris again. The campaign culminated in the building of the imposing Pont de l’Arche, a bridge at the confluence of the Seine and Eure, protected by two fortresses on either side of the river.
Although the Seine was temporarily rendered more secure by these moves, the Vikings continued their depredations along the Loire and the Somme. The antipathy between Pippin II of Aquitaine and his cousin Charles the Bald heightened the vulnerability of Aquitaine in particular, and the huge loss of life at the Battle of Fontenoy in 841, when his army (combined with that of Lothar) was decisively defeated by Charles, is blamed for weakening the Frankish capacity to resist Viking raiders in the region. As a result, Scandinavian bands had penetrated Garonne and attacked Toulouse as early as 844, while Bordeaux was captured by Norsemen in 848. An already dire situation was then made worse by Pippin II’s defection to the Vikings in 857. Pippin’s revolt did not prosper, and although the Vikings sacked Angoulême in 863, they suffered heavy losses; and an attack on Toulouse later that year brought a sharp response from Charles, leading to Pippin’s capture.
Even with their convenient local ally removed, the Viking raids in Aquitaine continued until a major Aquitainian counter-attack in 868, when they ‘offered prayers to God and St Hilary and boldly attacked the Northmen. They killed some and drove the rest to take flight.’10 Angoulême was refortified in the same year and thereafter the Vikings largely ceased their activity in the region.
The response to Scandinavian raids in the north-west of Francia was complicated by the existence of the fiercely independent province of Brittany. Raiding there had begun with an attack on Nantes in June 843, and it was probably no coincidence that this coincided with the revolt of Nominoë, who had administered Brittany on behalf of the Carolingians. The attacks then developed much along the same lines as elsewhere, with a series of strikes against monasteries such as Saint-Martin-Tours (in 853). In the same year, Viking loyalty to their own once again displayed itself when Sidroc, whom the Bretons had employed to dispose of another Viking leader, Godfred (who had just sacked Nantes), allowed his prey to slip away to safety at Redon.11 The Breton position deteriorated after the death of their ruler Salomon in 874, which was followed by a debilitating civil war and an increase in the level of Norse attacks, as once again the Viking raiders exploited the slightest sign of political weakness amongst their victims. The situation grew more severe in the 880s, as the Vikings overran part of the county of Nantes in 886 and then used this as a base to take over most of the rest of Brittany. Only a strong series of counter-attacks by the new Breton duke, Alain I, drove the Vikings out and provided some respite to the beleaguered province. But in 907 he died, and the Breton defences were further weakened by a dispute over his succession, leaving the territory’s defenders dangerously divided.
While an agreement in 911 between Charles the Simple and a Viking band led by Rollo (which resulted in the foundation of the Duchy of Normandy12) curbed raiding in the core of Francia, it had the unintended consequence that those Norsemen who wished to carry on pillaging turned their intentions instead to Brittany. Finally, in 919, a massive Viking fleet from the Loire launched a full-scale invasion, prompting the flight of most of the Breton nobility. The reality of Viking control was recognised in 921, when Robert of Neustria13 formally ceded Nantes to Rögnvald, the fleet’s leader. It looked as if Brittany, just like Normandy, would become a permanent Viking colony. But after an occupation lasting almost thirty years, the Breton ruling family returned in the shape of Alain I’s son, Alain Barbetorte. Having spent the intervening time in England at the court of Athelstan of Wessex, he landed at Dol in 936. The following year he stormed the Viking fortress at Saint-Aignan just outside Nantes, killing many of the Norsemen and causing the survivors to take to their ships and flee down the Loire. When Alain took possession of Nantes soon after, he found it deserted and so neglected by the Vikings that he had to cut through thick weeds to reach the great basilica of St Felix. In 939 at Trans, near Rennes, he defeated the last force of Loire Vikings, putting an end to almost a century of raids against Brittany.
Because Viking rule over Brittany was short-lived, evidence of their occupation is correspondingly slight. There are a number of earthwork forts of probable Viking construction, such as Camp de Péran, near Saint-Brieuc, and another double set of earthworks at Trans, where pottery dating from 920–80 was found. Unlike Normandy (or the English Danelaw), Brittany only has a clutch of place-names identified as being of Scandinavian origin, all containing the element La Guerche (from Old Norse virki, a fortress).14
Far more spectacular, and unparalleled in the rest of France, is the Viking ship burial found eroding from a cliff on the ÎIe de Groix, a few miles off the south Breton coast. Unlike the most important ship burials (a rite in which the deceased body was interred in a ship that was then buried in a mound) found at Gokstad and Oseberg in Norway,15 the Île de Groix vessel was burnt before being placed in a turf mound. The boat, which was around 40 feet long, contained the remains of two males – one a grown man, the other an adolescent – who were interred together with their weapons, riding gear, some jewellery and a host of other grave-goods before the earth of the 15-foot-high mound was heaped back over the vessel containing them. The burial yielded one unique item, a circular band that probably represents the stern ornament of a ship, the ‘tail’ of a dragon and the counterpart to the far more numerous finds of dragons’ heads for Viking-ship prows.16 The grave cannot be dated more closely than 900–1000 and the identity of the principal occupant is unknown, although, given the richness of the grave-goods (indicating that its occupant was almost certainly a pagan), it is tempting to suppose that it is one of the leaders of the Viking raids of the 910s that led to the establishment of the fleeting Viking state of Brittany.
In the rest of Francia, Viking activity died down somewhat in the 870s. It was events in England that reignited the Viking threat, when the resounding defeat inflicted on them by Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, at Edington in 878 led to a large number of Norsemen retiring south across the English Channel.17 They were said also to have been encouraged by hearing of disputes amongst the Franks,18 a state of affairs caused by the death in rapid succession of Charles the Bald (in 877) and his son Louis the Stammerer (in 879), which led to the division of the kingdom between Louis III and Carloman II. Louis III turned out to be an effective war leader, inflicting a significant defeat on the Vikings at Saucourt in 881, but to the great misfortune of Francia he died in August the next year, when he fell from his horse while chasing after a girl on whom he had amorous designs.
The eastern Frankish kingdom suffered a similar series of dynastic misfortunes when Louis III’s son was killed after a fall from one of the palace windows, which meant there was no male heir when Louis died in 882. After Carloman II (the ruler of western Francia) was in turn fatally wounded in 884 in a hunting accident, Charles the Fat (who had succeeded Louis III in 882) inherited both parts of the realm.19 But it was one in which the Vikings had been marauding almost unopposed for three years, having overwintered in the royal palace at Nijmegen, and having attacked a string of cities, including Cologne, Bonn, Neuss and Aaachen (Charlemagne’s old palace, in which the Vikings are said to have stabled their horses).
Having plundered the Rhineland, the Norsemen, led by Godfred and Sigfred, moved ever close to the Frankish royal heartland around Paris. Neither the acceptance of baptism by Godfred nor the payment of a tribute of 2,000 pounds of silver by Charles did much to halt the Danish army’s progress. In 884, they sacked Louvain and the following year stormed the Pont de l’Arche, which for all Charles the Bald’s fortifications miserably failed to hold them off. By November, they had reached Paris and proceeded to lay siege to it. Nearly a year later, the Vikings had still not succeeded in forcing the defenders to surrender, despite the terrible privations suffered by those trapped inside the city; but neither had the Franks, led by Count Odo, managed to break out of the siege. In the end, unmoved by Odo’s desperate pleas to send a relief force, Charles the Fat simply took the way of least resistance and ordered the Parisians to permit the Viking army free passage along the Seine into Burgundy. Charles also agreed to pay the Norsemen 700 pounds of silver, which Odo himself was forced to raise. The damage to the king’s reputation was so severe that in 887 he was deposed in favour of Odo, who was seen as the valiant (and betrayed) defender of Paris.
As ruler of the west Frankish kingdom,20 Odo still had a Viking problem to contend with. In 889 the Vikings once again threatened Paris, but further damage was avoided by the devastating defeat inflicted by the east Frankish king, Arnulf, on a large Viking army at the Dyle near Louvain in 891, and by a famine the following year, which made supplies difficult to obtain. These setbacks persuaded the Viking leader Hasteinn that there were better pickings to be had on the other side of the Channel (together with a tribute payment that he managed to extort from Odo) and he departed for England, where he engaged in a four-year campaign that stretched across the breadth of the country.21
Over the next decade, pressure grew on the Seine (particularly with the prospect of Viking-controlled Brittany expanding its borders to absorb more of western France). When a new Viking army arrived under Rollo and began to raid near Chartres in 911, Charles the Simple (who had replaced Odo as king in 89822) preferred not to confront them directly, but instead ceded them land on the Seine, which would become the future Duchy of Normandy. In return, Rollo agreed to prevent other Viking bands from raiding Frankish territory.23
All along, it had been political weakness and dynastic division that had enabled the Vikings, first to raid with little centralised response, and then to lodge themselves in the Frankish river estuaries. There had always been some localised opposition to them (such as the mustering of ships and warriors by the bishops of Orléans and Chartres in 854, which prevented an attack on the former), but as dynastic divisions and civil war hampered effective royal direction of the defenders, the Vikings easily found alternative targets. That they failed (save in Normandy) to translate this initial success into permanent occupation is a result both of the stiffening of Frankish resistance that began with Charles the Bald’s fortification campaigns and of the appearance of Viking-ruled areas in northern England, Scotland, Ireland and Normandy, which acted as a siphon for ambitious emigrants who saw that their compatriots’ strength offered easier pickings there.
Apart from Normandy (and to an extent Brittany), the Vikings left little trace of their activities in France. Most of the monastic houses they attacked survived and recovered (though Saint-Wandrille was abandoned between its destruction in 852 and its reoccupation by Abbot Maynard in the 860s), and displacements of the population were temporary. Even those towns most badly affected, such as Quentovic and Dorestad, still survived for a time after the initial Viking onslaught. Those words of Scandinavian origin that entered the French language did so via the medium of the Norman-French dialect which was shaped by a decades-long period of direct Scandinavian colonisation. They include homard (‘lobster’, from the Old Norse humarr), vague (‘wave’, Old Norse vágr) and quille (‘keel’, Old Norse kjölr). Archaeological evidence of the Norse campaigns in Francia is even sparser, represented in the main by a rich female burial at Pîtres in Normandy, which included Norse-style brooches, artefacts from the Viking camp at Péran and the Île de Groix ship burial, and sporadic finds from elsewhere, including a scattering of axe-heads dropped by the invaders in various rivers.24
The first area of Europe in which the Vikings were able to establish political control – and which, paradoxically, has often been omitted almost entirely from accounts of their conquests – was Frisia. Situated on the North Sea coastline of the modern Netherlands and Germany, it had gradually been conquered by the Franks over the course of the eighth century, with the river estuaries and the west being annexed after the death of the Frisian king, Radbod, in 719. The rest was subsumed in stages, with most of the east falling into Frankish hands in 734. Finally, with the conquest of neighbouring Saxony by Charlemagne in 797, Frankish lands were brought right up to the border with Denmark.
Containing as it did the trading emporia of Quentovic and Dorestad, Frisia was a tempting target for the early Viking raiders. Even harder to resist was the Carolingian rulers’ temptation to destabilise their new Danish neighbours, which Louis the Pious succumbed to as early as 814, when he accepted an oath of loyalty from the Danish king, Harald Klak, who had been expelled the previous year. In 815 Louis ordered an invasion to restore his new – and, it was hoped, grateful – client to the throne. Although that campaign was abortive, in 819 Frankish pressure resulted in Harald’s restoration. Yet just seven years later, Harald travelled to Ingelheim to be baptised – with Louis acting as his godfather, and the Empress Judith acting as sponsor for Harald’s wife – and the reaction back home against this over-cosiness with the Franks caused Harald to be chased out of Denmark yet again.
As part of the arrangement for his baptism, Harald had been given the district of Rüstringen, in the far north-east of Frisia, to hold as Louis’s client. This effective cession of land to a Danish potentate was an extraordinary event, and marked the beginning of seventy years in which parts (and sometimes the whole) of Frisia were held by a succession of Viking chieftains, with the full legal approval of the Carolingian rulers. While Harald only lasted two years in his benefice before his name disappears from the record, another (and almost certainly different) Harald was in 841 given land around Walcheren by Lothar I (on whose behalf he had raided Frankish lands in the 830s in an attempt to destabilise Lothar’s brother, Charles the Bald).25
Although the second Harald died in 850, his son Godfrid (who had been in Denmark) then proceeded to ravage Frisia, together with his cousin Rorik. The pair’s raiding bands seized Dorestad, which Lothar, making the best of a bad situation, gave to Rorik as a benefice. Although the cousins soon returned to Denmark, Rorik came back to Frisia in 855, when he is said to have taken most of it (probably as far south as the Waal and in the east to the borders of the lands of Louis the German).
Rorik held Frisia for at least the next eighteen years. He is last mentioned in the sources in 873 when he visited Louis the German in Aachen to swear him fealty, but it is possible that he remained in power until 882. Frisia enjoyed a surprising period of peace under Rorik and there are only two Viking raids recorded there during the period of his rule: the first in 857 when he was absent in Denmark, and the second in 863 when he was accused of allowing Viking pirates free passage through his lands on their way to raid Xanten. The only hiccup in his reign came in 867, when Rorik was driven from Frisia by a mysterious group referred to as the Cokingi. This was a short-lived interlude, however, and by 870 he was back in power and was recorded as holding talks with Charles the Bald in Nijmegen.
By 882, Rorik was almost certainly dead, as his lands were then granted to Godfred, who may well have been another exiled member of the Danish royal family. He received them as part of another expedient deal by Charles the Fat, who chose to make Godfred his client, with possession of Frisia as the inducement, in return for desisting from his devastating campaign of raiding in Francia. Godfred, who was baptised as part of the arrangement, also received the notable prize of a high-born Frankish wife, Gisela, the illegitimate daughter of Lothar II. Godfred became too deeply entangled in Frankish politics, however, and in 885 was involved in a conspiracy with his brother-in-law Hugh, whom he in turn attempted to betray by demanding that Charles the Fat grant him an even larger stretch of land around Koblenz, in return for his continued loyalty. Godfred was summoned to discuss the matter with Duke Henry of Franconia and, as a result of a staged quarrel, was mortally wounded.
For a long time there was no concrete evidence of the seven-decade-long Viking occupation of Frisia with but a single place-name, Assendelft (the older form of whose name, Ascmannedilft, may refer to Ascmann, a local north German name for Vikings) and just half a dozen Norse artefacts to show for it. This reinforced the idea of a very ephemeral occupation and certainly gave no sense of actual Viking settlement in Frisia. The discovery of two hoards in 1995–6 and 2001 near Westerklief in Wieringen began to change this pattern. The first hoard weighed 3½ pounds and included arm-rings, ingots and seventy-eight Carolingian pennies, whilst the second, somewhat smaller, find included ninety-five Arabic coins, the largest such find in Europe south of Scandinavia.26 Another hoard found at Tzimmeringen in 1991 consisted of no fewer than 2,800 coins, and some thirteen coin hoards have now been located dating to the century between 816 and 915.27 As Viking hoards are not normally found in areas where Scandinavians had not actually settled (why bring such portable wealth if there was no intention to stay?), this may indicate a more permanent presence than was hitherto suspected. Situated in the northern reaches of Frisia, Wieringen might well have acted as a convenient base from which to dominate the Scheldt Valley, just as Walcheren would have allowed the Vikings to exploit the southern part of the province.
The impact of the Scandinavian occupation of Frisia was felt even further afield, in England. The Viking army that attacked York in 867 was said to have been led by Ubba, who is described as dux Fresciorum (Duke of the Frisians). It is even possible that his group may have made their way from Frisia after Rorik’s expulsion in 867, showing how quickly the ripples of events in one part of the Viking world might reach another. Furthermore, a Viking army that descended on the River Thames in 878 is recorded as having returned to Ghent the following year, and, although this is a little way south of Frisia proper, it does show that Norse command of the southern part of the North Sea coast was becoming a severe problem for Anglo-Saxon rulers (just as it already was for their Frankish counterparts). Some evidence that Frisians may have settled in England is provided by a handful of place-names that include a reference to them, combined with an Old Norse suffix (such as Firsby and Friesthorpe).28
Just as there was a pause in Viking raids in France after the initial attacks, so England seems to have experienced a respite in the first quarter of the ninth century. While the concentration of our main sources on events in Wessex in the south may give a false impression of events in the north (where there may well have been attacks), it is equally wrong to argue that the silence of the sources means there were definitely unrecorded Viking incursions. In any case, a series of small-scale raids of the 830s was followed by a more serious attack on Southampton and Portland in 840. The western part of Wessex endured further strikes during the next few years, and in 843 King Aethelwulf (839–858) suffered a defeat near Minehead at the hands of a thirty-five-strong Viking fleet. Despite these setbacks, the English experienced occasional successes, such as the victory by local levies against a Viking fleet on the River Parrett in Somerset in 848, and the Vikings did not threaten to overwhelm the Anglo-Saxon defences.
A dangerous new development occurred in 850. Whereas previously the raiders had retired to their home bases in winter (probably to ports in Ireland for those preying on the west, or to Denmark for those attacking the east coast of England), that year an unprecedentedly large fleet – the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it at 350 ships – arrived and sacked Canterbury and London. Instead of returning home, it overwintered on the Isle of Thanet. Although this army was defeated by Aethelwulf at Acleah,29 another Viking force appeared and spent the winter of 854/5 on Sheppey, even closer to London. A third Viking fleet, which had been marauding around the Somme, crossed the English Channel in 860 and went on to sack the Wessex royal capital of Winchester the following year, before being driven off and returning to Francia. A pattern was becoming established, which would repeat itself time after time over the next half-century, of raiders probing the defences of England and then retiring to Francia if Anglo-Saxon resistance became too stubborn.
The Vikings had raised themselves from nuisance to threat, but the danger to Wessex and its neighbours was still far from critical. All that changed in 865 when a ‘great army’ (micel here in Anglo-Saxon) arrived in England. Unlike its predecessors, it did not simply overwinter, but remained for more than a decade, destroying one by one the armies (and the independence) of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Its sheer size, probably numbering in the thousands rather than the dozens or, at best, hundreds of previous bands, marked a definitive change in the nature of the Viking menace.30 It was commanded by a pair of warrior brothers: Halfdan the Wide-Embracer and Ivar (or Ingvar) beinlausi (‘the Boneless’). The latter is probably the same as the Imair who is recorded as being active in Ireland in the early 860s, so it is probable that at least part of the Great Heathen Army had made its way across the Irish Sea to England. Exactly how Ivar obtained his curious nickname is the subject of much speculation, including the suggestion that he may even have had some kind of condition that rendered his bones brittle (and so may not have been able to walk unaided).31 Whether or not they were truly the sons of Ragnar Loðbrok (‘Hairy Britches’), a legendary Viking who became associated with the Ragnar who attacked Paris in 845, is more doubtful.32
Having passed a very profitable season pillaging the towns and monasteries of East Anglia, Ivar and his companions proceeded north. They made their way directly to York, arriving on 1 November, just as the city was packed with notables attending the All Saints’ Day services in the cathedral. Those inside included the two Northumbrian kings Aelle and Osberht, who had been too preoccupied by quarrelling with each other to make serious preparations against a Viking attack. As the congregation worshipped, the Viking host stormed into the city. Both Aelle and Osberht managed to evade capture and returned to the city once the foreigners had departed. And so in March 867 the Viking army, which had overwintered at the mouth of the River Tyne, was forced to come back and take York all over again.33
This time, Osberht was killed in the fighting, and King Aelle fell into the Vikings’ hands and was put to death. Ivar and Halfdan are said to have performed the ‘blood-eagle’ ritual on him34 and thus avenged themselves for the death of their father, Ragnar Loðbrok. According to Ragnar’s Saga he had become jealous at the fame that his sons were winning in Britain, so he sailed over from Denmark and attacked Northumbria, only to be defeated and captured by Aelle. The Viking raider refused to reveal his name, and so the infuriated Northumbrian king had him cast into a pit of venomous snakes. As the serpents crawled over him and injected their deadly venom, Ragnar – in true heroic Viking fashion – sang a rousing death-song, the Krákumál: ‘We swung our swords so long ago, when we walked in Gautland . . . since then people call me Hairy Britches . . . I stabbed the spear into the earth’s loop’. Finally, as the poison overcame him, Ragnar uttered a dying prophecy: ‘How the piglets would squeal if they knew the fate of the boar!’
Having installed a puppet ruler, Egbert, in York,35 in 868 the Vikings descended on Mercia, taking Nottingham, but failing to inflict a decisive defeat on its king, Burgred. They then returned to York for a year, before striking out at East Anglia in 870 and murdering King Edmund. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle confines itself to the brief note that Ivar’s band ‘had the victory, and killed the king and conquered all the land’,36 but a cult of martyrdom soon grew up around Edmund, and the late-tenth-century Passio Sancti Edmundi37 adds a number of gruesome details. According to this account, Edmund initially escaped Ivar’s clutches, but, when offered the chance to surrender, said that he would do so only on the condition that Ivar accepted baptism. Edmund was then captured and, for his insolent insistence on Ivar’s conversion, was tied to a tree and used as target practice by the enraged Vikings. He was beheaded and his head discarded; according to legend, a great wolf came to guard the spot where it lay, crying out ‘Hic, hic’ (‘Here, here’) to help those searching for the dead king’s remains. When the two parts of Edmund’s body were finally collected by the East Anglians, the head miraculously reunited itself with his torso in time for its burial in Bury Abbey.
With Northumbria and East Anglia conquered, the Great Heathen Army next turned its attention to Wessex, which was attacked in the late autumn of 870. A skirmish at Englefield was followed by a decisive Viking victory at Reading on 4 January 871. Four days later, at Ashdown, the Wessex levy (or fyrd) drew up in an attempt to stop the Norsemen reaching the crossing of the Thames at Wallingford. Facing the Vikings (led by Halfdan and a new leader, Bacseag) was King Aethelred of Wessex (865–71) and his younger brother Alfred.
The Battle of Ashdown that followed nearly resulted in an early death for Alfred, as Aethelred was delayed (at prayer, it was said). When the Vikings tried to outflank his diminished shield-wall, Alfred launched his warriors in a premature attack that would have resulted in their being overwhelmed, had his brother not returned in the nick of time. As the battle swirled around a thorn tree that acted as a rallying point, the Vikings were gradually forced back, and when Bacseag was killed, the Norse army broke and fled. Of the slaughter that followed, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle laconically recounts that ‘both enemy armies were put to flight, and many thousands were killed’.38 Halfdan, having lost five jarls in the slaughter, retreated to Reading, but soon regrouped and delivered stinging defeats to the Anglo-Saxons at Basing and Meretun.39
Ashdown was Alfred’s first major military engagement and the start of a seven-year period that would establish his myth-encrusted reputation as one of England’s doughtiest defenders. It was just as well that he was a leader of real calibre, for he succeeded to the throne on 15 April 871 after Aethelred died (though whether he had been wounded in one of the recent battles or died of natural causes is unknown). The new king faced a potential threat in the shape of Aethelred’s young sons, Aethelhelm and Aethelwold, but nobody can have been much in the mood for dynastic squabbling. Even so, there may have been some resistance to Alfred’s accession, as his biographer Asser simply notes that he ‘undertook the government of the whole kingdom’ rather than being crowned king.40
By now a new Viking group had arrived in England, called by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ‘The Great Summer Army’. It joined up with Halfdan’s army at Reading and the combined force defeated the new King of Wessex at Wilton (in Wiltshire). Faced with the prospect of his tenure on the throne being a very short one indeed, Alfred had little option but to pay Halfdan a hefty tribute to withdraw from Wessex. The respite this gained was only a temporary one, although it still gave Alfred time to marshal his forces for the inevitable new onslaught. In the meantime, the Viking army had to divert to put down a revolt in Northumbria where they expelled King Egbert and Archbishop Wulfhere from York. It was not until the autumn that the Vikings turned southwards again to attack Mercia, whose ruler, Burgred, found that his policy of paying ever greater tributes had merely betrayed his weakness and made his kingdom a more inviting target.
Late in 873 the Viking army arrived at the royal Mercian cult centre at Repton, where they set up their winter base. Burgred was in no position to dislodge them and his support melted away. A broken man, he embarked on a pilgrimage to Rome,41 in effect abdicating, while the triumphant Guthrum installed ‘a foolish king’s thegn’ named Ceolwulf as a puppet ruler.
Evidence of the Viking army’s stay at Repton has been found in the form of a D-shaped earthwork enclosing some 3.6 acres, which they constructed for their overwintering. These defences incorporated within them a Saxon mortuary chapel (previously used for royal Mercian burials) in which the remains of around 260 mostly male skeletons were tightly packed around a single high-status burial and were then covered with a mound of earth and pebbles. Some of the bodies have been radiocarbon-dated to around 700–750 and so may represent members of the monastery attached to the chapel, who had been exhumed and reburied. However, the fact that 45 per cent of the buried male corpses showed evidence of cut wounds to the head suggests that many of them had violent deaths, possibly in battle, and the association with the undoubtedly Viking earthwork makes it most likely that they were warriors who died during the Great Summer Army’s campaign. Exactly who the war leader buried in the central grave was is unknown, although he is unlikely to have been as tall as the nine feet reported by Thomas Walker, the labourer who discovered the remains in 1686. Walker gave the skull of the giant skeleton to a certain Mr Bower, the Master of the local school, but sadly it was later lost.42
The threat to Wessex was further diluted when the Great Army split in two, with Halfdan taking his men to Northumbria. Having sacked Carlisle, Hexham and the unfortunate monastery at Lindisfarne yet again, in 876 the Vikings are said to have ‘shared out the lands of Northumbria, and they proceeded to plough and to support themselves.’43 It is a crucial development, marking the real start of the Viking settlements in England. Halfdan himself, meanwhile, showed little inclination for farming and launched an expedition against Ireland in 877, which ended in his death in a battle at Strangford Lough in the north-east.44
The other section of the Great Army, now commanded by Guthrum, transferred to Cambridge in 875 to prepare for a renewed invasion of Wessex. In autumn that year, he crossed into Alfred’s territory and marched all the way to Wareham in Dorset before facing any real opposition. Although he was then besieged by the West Saxon army, the threat of reinforcements from a 120-strong fleet that was making its way east along the coast encouraged Alfred to permit Guthrum to leave his beleaguered encampment on the promise of an oath he made the Norse warlord take on a sacred gold arm-ring. The Vikings had slipped out of Alfred’s trap.
Guthrum felt himself no more bound by an oath sworn on a hallowed pagan object than he would have been by a promise made on a Christian relic, and he promptly moved to Exeter, ready to welcome the approaching fleet. This was, unfortunately for the Vikings, wrecked off Swanage with the loss of as many as 3,600 men. With adversity rather than piety weighing most heavily on his mind, Guthrum stuck to the terms of a new agreement and in autumn 877 withdrew his men from Wessex. Then, to Ceolwulf’s great discomfiture, but no doubt to Alfred’s delight, the Vikings partitioned Mercia, with a portion of the army settling down in the eastern part of the kingdom, just as their compatriots had done in Northumbria. In their settlement lay the origins of the ‘Five Boroughs’ (Lincoln, Nottingham, Leicester, Derby and Stamford) which formed the core of Viking territory in the Midlands, and the heart of the Danish-occupied portion of England, which came to be known as the Danelaw.45
Guthrum, meanwhile, remained encamped around Gloucester, waiting for an opportune moment to renew the attack at Wessex. Alfred had dismissed the fyrd for the winter, and while he was celebrating the Christmas feast at the royal estate at Chippenham, presumably secure in the belief that he was safe at least until the following spring, the Viking army crossed the frontier. On Twelfth Night, Guthrum reached Chippenham to find that his quarry, together with the leading men of the royal council, had slipped away. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it: ‘the enemy host came stealthily to Chippenham, and occupied the land of the West Saxons and settled there and drove a great part of the people across the sea, and conquered most of the others, and the people submitted to them – except for King Alfred. He journeyed in difficulties through the woods and fen fastnesses with a small force.’46
Alfred was reduced to the state of a fugitive in his own land. His biographer Asser writes of Alfred leading ‘an unquiet life among the woodlands of the county of Somerset, in great tribulation; for he had none of the necessaries of life, except what he could forage openly or stealthily by frequent sallies, from the pagans, or even from the Christians who had submitted to the rule of the pagans’.47 By around Easter, the runaway king was confined to a narrow strip of territory in the Somerset Levels near Athelney – destined, it seemed, to be a mere footnote in the Viking conquest of all England.
Alfred had plenty of time to brood on his predicament. It is from this period that the famous story of his burning of the peasant woman’s cakes comes. The king is said to have taken refuge in the cottage of a humble cowherd, whose wife asked him to look after some cakes that were baking over a fire. Preoccupied with the downturn in his fortunes, Alfred distractedly let them burn, resulting in a hearty scolding from the peasant woman, who was blithely unaware of the identity of her absent-minded guest. The story contains an apt pun on the Anglo-Saxon word for lord (which was hlaf-weard, ‘loaf wielder’), implying that just as Alfred burnt the bread, so he had failed to look after his royal inheritance of Wessex.48
The king did not wait passively for Guthrum to hunt him down, and his messengers criss-crossed Wessex seeking to rally support for a counter-attack. The appointed rendezvous for those who chose to join the loyalist cause was ‘Ecgbert’s Stone’, located somewhere between Athelney and Warminster on the Wiltshire–Somerset border. Alfred and his small band emerged from the marshes in May 878 to find a significant force of men from Hampshire, Somerset and Wiltshire already gathered there, perhaps 4,000 strong.49
Guthrum had to strike fast to avoid the insurgency gathering strength and moved rapidly south-west from Chippenham to occupy an abandoned Iron Age hill fort at Bratton near Edington. The Wessex fyrd advanced up the ridge of a line of chalk-hills to the outer ditches of the defences. There, they formed up into a shield-wall and moved against the Viking formation. After a brutal clash, the scratch Anglo-Saxon army penetrated the Viking line and, as Asser puts it, ‘destroyed the Vikings with great slaughter, and pursued those who fled as far as the stronghold, hacking them down’. Those Norsemen who had escaped the rout – Guthrum among them – were trapped in Chippenham and, after a fortnight of increasing privation, ‘the pagans, driven by famine, cold, fear, and last of all, by despair, asked for peace on condition that they should give the king as many hostages as he pleased, but should receive none from him in return’.50 There was an additional stipulation: that Guthrum and thirty of his leading followers must become Christian, with Alfred himself acting as godfather for the Danish king. So, now bearing the baptismal name of Athelstan, Guthrum retired, first to Mercia and then in 879 to East Anglia, where his army too ‘settled and shared out the land’.
There were now Danish settlements based in Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia, and sometime in 879 or 880 Alfred made a formal treaty with Guthrum setting out the boundary between English-controlled territories and those in the Danelaw (the area in which the Vikings held sway). As well as Wessex, the Anglo-Saxon portion included the western part of Mercia, under the supervision of Ealdorman Aethelred (Ceolwulf having recently died). The divide between the two domains lay roughly along the line of the old Roman road of Watling Street (‘up the Thames, and then up the Lea and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to the Watling Street’), with London falling within the West Saxon sphere.51
Guthrum kept the peace with Wessex for five years, until 885 when he launched a large-scale attack across the frontier, but this was easily beaten back by Alfred. In the meantime, the West Saxon king had scored another coup when Guthfrith, Halfdan’s successor as Viking lord of York,52 also accepted baptism. Alfred did not, however, rest on his diplomatic laurels, well aware that it was Wessex’s brittle defences that had made it and the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms vulnerable to takeover by the Vikings. He ordered the construction of burhs, fortified towns and strongholds, planning to establish a network in which no one would be more than 20 miles from such a refuge. They included many places that later prospered as market towns, such as Wallingford, Chichester, Worcester, Bath, Hastings and Southampton, and were funded by a system of taxation later set out in a document called the Burghal Hidage.53 When the scheme was fully in operation, it may have represented a force of some 27,000 men available to defend the towns and fortresses of Wessex.
In 884–5 the new defences were put to the test when a new Viking raiding force arrived from Francia. This group found that the easy pickings experienced by the micel here some twenty years before were now a thing of the past, as Alfred’s defence-in-depth strategy began to prove its worth. As the Vikings struggled to make progress, he attacked their camp near Rochester, causing many of the foreigners to flee back to Francia. Even so, some of the remainder succeeded in reaching their countryman Guthrum’s kingdom of East Anglia54 and took to coastal raiding.
Alfred now unleashed another of the weapons he had developed to counter the Viking threat, a fleet of English ships that could take on the Norsemen at sea, a medium in which they had until now been the undisputed masters. Asser recounts a sea-battle at the mouth of the Stour where ‘all the Vikings were killed and all their ships were captured’. Thirteen Viking ships sank or were taken that day, an astonishing victory for the West Saxons, and a salutary deterrent for any small forces of Vikings who might contemplate a spell of freelance raiding in the old style.
The Viking army that landed in 892 was no small band, however, but the largest force to arrive since the micel here itself. It was said to have included 250 ships,55 which set sail from Boulogne and landed in the estuary of the Lympne (near Romney Marsh in Kent). They captured the burh at Eorpeburnan (which had not yet been completed)56 and then established themselves in a new encampment at nearby Appledore. Alfred’s situation was further imperilled by the arrival of a fleet of eighty ships under Hasteinn, which sailed up the Thames estuary and set up camp opposite the Isle of Sheppey. If the East Anglian or even the York Vikings had joined in, then, for all Alfred’s military and administrative reforms, Wessex might once more have been overwhelmed.
Alfred and his son, Edward the Elder, fought a series of running engagements with the various Viking groups throughout 893, and even persuaded Hasteinn to allow one of his sons to undergo christening, a conversion that – accompanied by the payment of a hefty baptismal bribe – only kept him off the battlefield for a brief few months. Under severe pressure, the main Viking force withdrew across the Midlands and finally overwintered within the walls of the old (and, presumably, by now decrepit) Roman legionary fortress at Chester. Deprived of supplies by the pursuing Wessex fyrd’s scorched-earth policy, the Vikings moved on to North Wales, where they attacked their erstwhile ally Anarawd ap Rhodri, King of Gwynedd, before wheeling round again and making their way to Mersea in Essex.
The far stiffer resistance they faced compared to the raids of the 860s had discouraged many in the various Viking fleets, and one large group made its way back across the Channel; a second contingent, led by Sigeferth, crossed the Irish Sea, where it attacked Sihtric Ivarsson, the Viking King of Dublin.57 Those who remained made an ill-judged sally in 895 against London and ended up being chased by the Wessex fyrd across Mercia until they were trapped at Bridgnorth in Shropshire. But this time there was no battle, no climactic conclusion to the four-year campaign, and the Vikings simply agreed to disperse, with some going to East Anglia, others to Northumbria, and a third group (described as those ‘who were moneyless’) returning to Francia.
The 892 Viking invaders had been seen off with only a fraction of the disruption caused by the Great Army of 864–5, and their attack was not followed by any large-scale incursions. After a small-scale raid against the Isle of Wight, which was seen off by the new English fleet, Alfred then enjoyed three years of comparative peace, until his death in October 899. At fifty years old, he had been at war with the Vikings for more than half his life and, despite all the odds he had faced, he bequeathed to his son Edward a realm more secure than anyone could have imagined twenty years before.
This still left the Danelaw in Viking hands. The term is not, strictly speaking, contemporary, as it first appears in law codes dating from the reign of Aethelred II (978–1016) and by that time referred more to a separate legal jurisdiction within England than a politically independent territory. It was not, moreover, until the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042–66), some forty years later, that the Danelaw’s area was defined to comprise East Anglia, the East Midlands (broadly the area known as the Five Boroughs) and Northumbria, some fifteen counties in all, amounting to around one-third of England.58 Here, Viking rule lasted between thirty and seventy years.
The extent to which there was a particularly Norse imprint on the customs (and the genes) of these areas, and the numbers of Vikings who came to settle there, have been the subject of much debate. A critical contribution to this is the evidence of place-names of Scandinavian origin. There are virtually none to be found south of the Danelaw, and even north of it there is a great deal of variation in the density of Norse toponyms,59 with particular concentrations in Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire. An outlying cluster on the Wirral in Cheshire is explained by settlement by Norwegian Vikings fleeing the fall of Dublin in 902.
The most notable category of Scandinavian place-names in England is the ‘Grimston hybrids’, which combine English and Scandinavian elements, and which may represent English villages that were acquired by Norsemen; these include names containing the suffix ‘–thorpe’ (as in Grimsthorpe or Mablethorpe), which is probably derived from the Old Norse thorp, meaning a secondary settlement; and those ending in the suffix ‘–by’ (such as Grimsby), which comes from the Old Norse by, meaning a farmstead.60 The latter are the most numerous, with more than 850 names ending in ‘–by’ recorded, over half of them in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.61 Efforts to determine whether these place-names demonstrate that waves of Scandinavian colonists came to settle the newly conquered lands, or whether they simply came about through the acquisition by a Danish military elite of villages and estates from the Anglo-Saxon nobility they supplanted, are complicated by the fact that some of the name-forms may have appeared as late as the twelfth century. Others could have acquired Danish names at the time of the conquest of England by Cnut in 1015.62 In most cases, all we can say is that the settlements had Scandinavian name-forms by the time of the Domesday Survey in 1086, which comprehensively listed the landownership of much of England.63
The Viking imprint was perhaps most profound in York, a city they ruled for nearly ninety years (from its first capture in 866 to its final loss in 95464), establishing a mini-kingdom in the north of England whose links with its counterpart in Dublin looked likely at times to create a Viking realm with the Irish Sea at its heart. The core of the Norse settlement at Coppergate (‘Street of the Cupmakers’) has yielded a mass of Viking-Age artefacts, preserved in the waterlogged soil near the River Ouse, which leached oxygen and allowed organic material such as leather and wood to survive. These range from the almost ubiquitous bone-combs found in settlements throughout the Viking world, to the world’s largest human coprolite (fossilised faeces) and, more precious, assorted swords and jewellery.65
Little is known of the very early phase of Viking rule in York. After the expulsion of King Egbert by the Norsemen in 872, control of the city seems to have been exercised by the Anglo-Saxon Archbishop Wulfhere for a few years. The fragile authority of the Vikings in Northumbria is further emphasised by the fleeting career of Halfdan, who ‘settled’ the land with his men in 876 and was almost at once expelled north of the Tyne. The ‘kingship’ of York was anything but settled, and the next known Viking ruler of the city was Guthfrith, who held power from around 880 to 895 and was buried at York Minster, indicating that at least some of the Viking elite had converted to Christianity. From around 910, the York mint hedged its bets by producing coins that did not carry the royal name – a wise move in an era when battles and blood-feuds led to changes of ruler with monotonous regularity – but instead bore the legend ‘St Peter’s Money’ on one side (honouring the city’s patron saint) and the pagan motif of Thor’s hammer on the other.
In 899, when Alfred the Great died, it seemed that the Danelaw, and in particular the Viking kingdom of York, was set to become a permanent fixture on the English political landscape. Yet almost at once events unfolded that questioned this supposition. The children of Alfred’s older brother, Aethelred, had always represented a potential danger for him; excluded as they were from the succession, they could act as focal points for malcontents or even rebels. With his uncle dead, one of them, Aethelwold, decided to make a bid for the throne in place of the appointed heir, Alfred’s son, Edward the Elder. He seized the royal manor at Wimborne in Dorset, but failed to gather sufficient support before Edward came up with a force of the local fyrd. Hopelessly outnumbered, Aethelwold managed to slip away under cover of darkness.
He made his way to York, where he seems to have been elected king by the Vikings, although it is possible that they were merely recognising the Anglo-Saxon princeling as a convenient ‘overlord’ in place of Alfred, intending in due course to install him as puppet ruler of Wessex. His ‘reign’ seems to overlap with other Viking rulers of York, such as Sigfroth (c.895–c.900) and Knut (c.900–c.905),66 casting doubt on the idea that he exercised any kind of sole power there. Whatever Aethelwold’s precise status, his rule was fleeting, as his cousin Edward the Elder abandoned the generally defensive stance of Wessex over the preceding twenty years and launched a campaign that step-by-step pushed the Vikings out of East Anglia, the Five Boroughs and ultimately from York itself. Edward’s position was strengthened by the marriage during Alfred’s reign of his sister, Aethelflaed, to Aethelred, ealdorman (the ‘elderman’, or most senior royal official, in an area) of the Mercians. She became the ruler of English Mercia after her husband’s death in 911 and helped rally local sentiment in support of what effectively became a takeover by Wessex.
In 902, Edward crossed the frontier of the Danelaw and killed his cousin Aethelwold in a hard-fought battle at the Holme (near Biggleswade in Bedfordshire). Although the Vikings had the upper hand on the battlefield, his death caused their resistance to collapse. Edward had rid himself of a dangerous pretender to his throne, but this success led to no immediate acquisition of territory, particularly as the arrival of new Norse bands in the north-west after their expulsion from Dublin the same year provided reinforcements for the York Vikings.
Disaster for the Vikings in Ireland offered opportunities for them elsewhere. One large group seems to have established a base on the River Ribble around 905. They deposited a hoard there, which included a huge quantity of hack-silver (silver coins or other artefacts that were chopped up for their value as bullion). Much of it came from Ireland, while large numbers of Northumbrian coins imply at least contact, if not cooperation, with the Viking lords of northern England. The Cuerdale Hoard was so substantial – the largest hoard of Viking silver ever found outside Russia – that it may well represent the war-chest of an army that was intended for the reconquest of Dublin.67 The hoard was discovered by workmen repairing an embankment on the River Ribble in 1840. Each of the finders was allowed to keep one of the coins, but the bulk of the 8,500 items, weighing more than 100 pounds (including some 7,000 coins), found its way to the British Museum. Even if they had not originally intended to stay, many of the Vikings who came east across the Irish Sea fanned out and settled across a wide area, including Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire and East Yorkshire (and some even made their way to the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy). As an indication of their Irish origins, they left a number of place-names ending in ‘–erg’ (from the Old Irish áirge or ‘shieling’). The density of names of Scandinavian origins is particularly high in the Wirral, especially in the north of the peninsula, including Irby, which may be derived from Írabyr (‘settlement of the Irish’). Elsewhere, Scandinavian place-names are common in West Lancashire, especially on the coast north of the Ribble (with Thingwall, close to Knotty Ash, containing the telltale element thing or assembly, which may mean it was the site of a local meeting place). The most immediate and enduring impact of the new Scandinavian influx, however, was to provide a more secure western flank for the kingdom of York and to render communications between Viking Northumbria and Norse Dublin (after its re-establishment in 917) much easier.
The Viking exodus from Dublin also led to an upsurge in Scandinavian attacks against Wales, where a certain Ingimund is recorded attacking Ros Melion on Anglesey in 902/3. After his defeat at the hands of Cadell ap Rhodri, the ruler of Deheubarth, he joined the Viking diaspora in the north-west of England and settled near Chester. Although Ingimund was soon expelled from the city and failed to recapture it in 907, Chester seems to have acquired a Scandinavian element in its population; a number of ring-headed pins of Scandinavian type and arm-rings have been found in the city, while in 921 a pair of coin dies were cut there for the minting of coinage in the name of the Dublin Viking ruler Sihtric.
In 906 Edward made a treaty at Tiddingford with the Vikings of East Anglia and Northumbria.68 Once again the peace did not last long, but this time it was Edward who took the offensive, unleashing a combined Mercian and West Saxon army across the frontier into Northumbria in 909. The following year the Vikings took their revenge, harrying far and wide in Mercia as far as Bristol, while Edward was away in Kent. Finally, the Wessex and Mercian fyrd caught up with the Vikings at Tettenhall in Staffordshire. In an encounter every bit as decisive as Ashdown, the Scandinavians were crushed, with three of their leaders (Ásl, Halfdan and Ivar69) killed, opening the way for further West Saxon expansion into the Midlands and East Midlands.
Edward took advantage of his victory by building burhs in forward positions, gradually making inroads on the territory of the Vikings, who were too weak to resist him. He pushed forward the line of his control deep into East Anglia, occupying Huntingdon in 917, and conquering Colchester in November the same year, while the main Danish army in East Anglia submitted to him soon afterwards. In 919, he even managed to place a burh in Northumbrian territory, when he constructed a fort at Manchester.
Meanwhile, the Irish Vikings had been active in the north of England under the leadership of Rögnvald, a grandson of Ivar the Boneless. In 918, he led a large army against Constantine (900–43), King of the Scots, and the English of northern Northumbria under Ealdred of Bamburgh.70 The two armies clashed at Corbridge, located on a strategic crossing point on the Tyne just south of old Hadrian’s Wall, and the honours seem to have been evenly matched. Despite the stalemate, Rögnvald was still able to establish himself as the dominant Viking leader in England. The death of Aethelflaed in June prevented her from taking up an offer of submission from the York Vikings71 and Rögnvald moved in to fill the political vacuum.
In this way Edward the Elder was blocked from the conquest of the last major Viking territory in England, on the very point of achieving it. Although Rögnvald notionally recognised the West Saxon king as his overlord, his successor Sihtric (another grandson of Ivar the Boneless) adopted a more belligerent tone in his dealings with Edward, whose establishment of a new burh at Bakewell in Derbyshire in 920 posed a considerable threat to York.72 It was left to Edward’s son, Athelstan (924–39), to re-establish more cordial relations with the York Vikings; giving one of his daughters to Sihtric in marriage was no doubt deliberately calculated to this end. Yet again, however, West Saxon hopes were dashed by Sihtric’s early death the following year and his replacement by Guthroth, another grandson of Ivar, who crossed the Irish Sea to ensure that the family patrimony did not slip into the hands of Athelstan.
His patience with the dizzying succession of York Viking rulers exhausted, the King of Wessex crossed into Northumbria with a large force in 927. He soon drove Guthroth out of York and then reinforced his position at a meeting at Eamont in Cumberland, where King Hywel of West Wales, King Constantine of Scotland, and Ealdred (son of Eadwulf, the lord of Bamburgh) all acknowledged his supremacy. To avoid any re-establishment of Viking control over York, Athelstan had the fortifications that the Danes had built there destroyed. He further stamped his authority on the city by abolishing the Anglo-Scandinavian coinage which had circulated and ordering his own issues minted there.
For seven years Athelstan’s supremacy in the north of England went unchallenged, and it seemed as though Viking rule in York was ended for good, but then in 934 a new attack was launched on Scotland. The King of Wessex seems to have been afraid of a gathering coalition of enemies, both old and new; in Dublin, Guthroth’s son Olaf had come to power in 934, and Athelstan’s assault that year, in which he is said to have laid waste to large areas of Scotland, may have been an attempt to pre-empt adventures by the Irish Vikings. If so, then the warning was not heeded, and in 937 Olaf Guthrothsson set out with a large fleet to link up with the Strathclyde Britons and Constantine’s Scottish army.
The combined force pushed south into England, before it was intercepted by Athelstan and his brother Edmund at Brunanburh. The location of the spot where the two armies clashed is uncertain; there is a wide variety of candidates, but the leading contender is probably Bromborough in Cheshire.73 Although English losses were heavy, the Vikings suffered a catastrophic defeat, with five kings and seven jarls from Ireland counted among the dead, as well as one of Constantine’s sons. Olaf limped back to Dublin, his force a mere shadow of the one that had accompanied him from Dublin just months before, the grand alliance with the Scots and Britons seemingly shattered for ever.
A poem preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle shows the exultation of the men of Wessex at their victory:
In this year King Athelstan, lord of nobles, dispenser of treasure to men, and his brother also, Edmund atheling, won by the sword’s edge undying glory in battle around Brunanburh. Edward’s sons clove the shield-wall, hewed the linden-wood shields with hammered swords . . . Their enemies perished: the people of the Scots and the pirates fell doomed. The field grew dark with the blood of men . . . There lay many a man destroyed by the spears, many a northern warrior shot over his shield; and likewise many a Scot lay weary, sated with battle.
The whole day long the West Saxons with mounted companies kept in pursuit of the hostile peoples, grievously they cut down the fugitives from behind with their whetted swords . . . Five young kings lay on that field of battle, slain by the swords, and also seven of Olaf’s earls, and countless host of seamen and Scots. There the prince of the Norsemen was put to flight, driven perforce to the prow of his ship with a small company; the vessel pressed on the water, the king set out over the fallow flood and saved his life.
Then the Norsemen survivors from the spears put out in their studded ships on to Ding’s mere to make for Dublin across the deep water, back to Ireland, humbled at heart. Also the two brothers, king and atheling, returned together to their own country, the land of the West Saxons, exulting in the battle. They left behind them the dusky coated-one, the black raven with its horned beak, to share the corpses, and the dun-coated, white-tailed eagle, the greedy war-hawk, to enjoy the carrion, and that grey beast, the wolf of the forest.
Never yet in this island before this, by what books tell us and our ancient sages, was a greater slaughter of a host made by the edge of the sword, since the Angles and Saxons came hither from the east.74
Yet for all its fame, the West Saxon victory at Brunanburh staved off the Vikings for a paltry two years. In 939 Olaf set sail again, perhaps encouraged by news of the death of Athelstan (and the succession of the eighteen-year-old Edmund). Amidst the confusion that almost always accompanied the start of a new reign, Olaf had little trouble in being accepted as King of York. By the following year his army had overrun most of the Five Boroughs, a fact that Edmund was forced to accept in a humiliating treaty following a stinging defeat near Leicester.75 In 940 Olaf pushed northwards, deep into the old Anglian territories of southern Scotland, reaching as far as Dunbar. His death in 941 and the succession of his cousin, Olaf Sihtricsson (nicknamed Cuarán or ‘sandal’), then allowed Edmund to recoup some lost ground, mainly in the Five Boroughs. Finally, in 943, the two kings came to an agreement very similar to that between Alfred and Guthrum sixty years earlier, setting the boundary between their realms along the line of Watling Street. As had become almost a tradition in Viking–Wessex peace treaties, Olaf accepted baptism, while Edmund stood as his sponsor.
The situation in York was complicated by the appearance of a rival Viking king, Rögnvald Guthrothsson, who lasted only a year (943–4) and for whom, confusingly, Edmund also stood as baptismal sponsor. The following year Edmund expelled them both from York and, for the second time in six years, West Saxon armies occupied the Viking capital of the north. Edmund was killed in 946 (in a fracas when he tried to defend his steward from a man who was assaulting him) and in the turmoil following his death and replacement by his brother Eadred, there seems to have been a short-lived uprising in York, which brought the last, and most famous, of the Viking rulers of York to the throne.
Eirik, the man whom the York Vikings chose as their new king, has traditionally been identified with Eirik Bloodaxe, the former King of Norway, whose unpopular rule (during which he murdered both his brothers) resulted in his forced abdication in 936. The association between the two Eiriks seems to have arisen in the twelfth century, and there is no definite evidence in the sources that they are the same man (with one theory that the Viking ruler of York was instead another descendant of Ivar the Boneless76). If he was the King of Norway, then Eirik seems to have spent some time raiding in the northern isles of Scotland before receiving the summons to become ruler of York. His first reign (if indeed it existed77) was short, and by 947 Eadred of Wessex had already managed to impose his authority in Northumbria. The next year Eirik definitely succeeded in establishing himself at York, but the chronic division among the Scandinavians between Northumbrian-based Norsemen, their Irish counterparts and incoming Vikings from Denmark or Norway (such as Eirik himself) once again undermined attempts at a stable settlement.
Despite the support of Archbishop Wulfstan (which implies that his reign cannot have been as blood-stained as his nickname would imply), an invasion of Northumbria by Eadred in 949 led to Eirik’s expulsion. Even now, the people of York clung doggedly to their independence from Wessex, and received back Olaf Cuarán (who had in the meantime also become King of Dublin78) as king. His second reign proved no more successful than the first and in 952 the men of York threw him out in favour of none other than Eirik Bloodaxe.
The events of Eirik’s second (or possibly third) spell on the York throne are obscure. In 954, during the course of yet another invasion by Eadred, Eirik fled north towards Scotland. Somewhere along the way, at a place called ‘Stainmoor’, he was betrayed by Earl Oswulf (the ruler of Bamburgh) and killed by a certain Earl Maccus, son of Olaf.79 Although it could not have been clear at the time, Eirik was the final Viking King of York, and the last Scandinavian to establish a significant powerbase in the Danelaw.80 There was a brief upsurge in Viking activity in Wales from the 950s as those displaced from York continued to make mischief, but now the ambitions of the Viking rulers of Dublin to establish an Anglo-Irish realm including York had been shattered, so the Viking settlements on the Isle of Man became much more important as an alternative means of dominating the sea-lanes of the Irish Sea.
With its strategic location close to the coastlines of north-western England, south-west Scotland and the north of Ireland, the Isle of Man was a logical base for a seafaring power such as the Dublin Norsemen. It was from there that Viking raiders may have established a base at Llanbedrgoch on Anglesey in the 970s and 980s.81 Yet there is no definite record of a Viking ruler there until a reference in Florence of Worcester’s History of the Kings of England to a Maccus, described as ‘king of many islands’, who may have been King of Man and who was one of a number of rulers who pledged allegiance to Edgar of Wessex at Chester in 973. A Viking presence on the island must clearly pre-date that time, however, since at least one Viking coin hoard has been found from the period 955–60.82 There are very few literary accounts of the kingdom of Man – there is a reference to a battle off Man in 987, and Manx Norsemen fought on the side of Sihtric of Dublin at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014.83 The next secure mention is of the death of a Godred, son of Sytric, in 1070, and the accession as King of Man of his son Fingal, but nothing else is known of these two kings. In 1079 Godred Crovan seized the island. He is said to have been a survivor of the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 106684 and used Man as the base for building a mini-empire stretching as far as Ireland, taking Dublin and Leinster before his death in 1095. By the time Magnus Barelegs, King of Norway, arrived on Man in 1098, he found the island ravaged by a war of succession, and thereafter the island remained closely tied to the Norwegian crown (although with its own kings) until it was ceded to the Scottish crown in 1266.
Although there is little record of tenth-century Viking Man in the historical record, a number of Viking-Age burial mounds have been found. One of them, at Balladoole, contained the remains of a boat burial. Another mound at Ballateare contained evidence of possibly the only human sacrifice known from the Viking British Isles,85 a female skeleton with a clean-cut hole sliced into her skull. In burials at Balladoole and Knock y Doonee, the remains of a boar were found in the grave, a rite that is rare in Viking graves in the British Isles, but far more common in Scandinavia, perhaps suggesting recent immigrants rather than an established Norse population.86 Christianity seems to have been present already in the tenth century among the Vikings on Man, attested by a series of beautiful carved crosses, many ornamented in a Scandinavian style (and some of them with Norse runic inscriptions). Possibly the earliest of these, at Kirk Michael, contains the typically Viking boast by the rune-carver Gautr that he had ‘made this and all Man’ – in other words, he had carved all the crosses on the island. The iconography on the crosses is suggestive of a mixed population, with one cross87 showing a carving of Odin, his foot jammed into the jaws of the wolf Fenrir on one side88 and an image of Christ on the other face.
The most tangible relic of the Viking Age on Man is the island’s assembly, the Tynwald, which lays claim to being the world’s oldest parliament with an unbroken history.89 The site is first mentioned in 1237 as tingualla (a word close to the Icelandic Thingvellir, the site of the medieval Icelandic assembly), and now consists of a tiered mound some 80 feet in circumference at the base, rising to more than 12 feet. Still to this day the Lieutenant-Governor (the queen’s representative) sits on the topmost level, surrounded by the bishop, clergy and members of the legislature on the lower tiers, an echo of a time when a genuine Norse assembly met there.
Of far more lasting importance than the settlement in Man were the Viking settlements in Scotland, principal amongst them on Orkney. Just as the tempo of Viking raids in England had grown more insistent after the arrival of the micel here in 865, so the Vikings in Scotland rapidly graduated from raiding to the seizing of bases. Although Orkney is said to have come under Norwegian control after an expedition by Harald Finehair of Norway in 874, it is clear that Norsemen had begun to settle there some time before this date, not least because Harald’s motive was said to have been to put an end to the raiding by Vikings already established in the islands, which had begun to threaten the security even of Norway. The reconstruction of the Viking-Age history of the Orkneys is rendered simpler because we possess a detailed source – the Orkneyinga Saga – in contrast to the relative paucity of material from the Shetlands, Hebrides and elsewhere in Viking Scotland. Yet the saga’s narrative is deceptively smooth and, without corroborating evidence from elsewhere, it is sometimes hard to be certain that the stories we possess were not carefully crafted (or modified) to suit some political agenda long after the events themselves took place.
When the Vikings arrived in northern Scotland and the islands in the ninth century, they did not enter an empty landscape. The pre-existing population was Pictish, belonging to a people first mentioned in Roman sources in AD 297,90 and who took their name from the Latin Picti (‘the painted ones’, a possible reference to their custom of tattooing). By the sixth century, when written historical records begin to appear, the Picts had become Christianised and had begun to develop a centralised kingship. In the ninth century, however, pressure from the emerging kingdom of the Scots and from the newly arrived Vikings gradually squeezed them out. A few place-names, such as Pitlochry and the Pentland Firth91 (the ‘Firth of the Picts’), were left as testament to their presence, alongside a large number of carved symbol-stones, many of the earliest ones decorated with patterns of animals and geometric designs. The later ones (denoted Class II and Class III92), which post-date the conversion of Pictland to Christianity, are generally rectangular slabs with a cross on one side and a number of mysterious symbols – possibly pictograms – on the other.
The significance of these symbols – indeed, even whether they have any linguistic meaning at all – is unclear, and so they are of little help in identifying (let alone translating) the Pictish language, although it is now generally considered to be a P-Celtic language (like Welsh),93 as distinct to the Q-Celtic or Goidelic form, which evolved into modern Gaelic and would supplant the Pictish language after Pictland collapsed following a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Vikings in 839.
The air of mystery surrounding the Picts extends to medieval chroniclers. The author of the Historia Norwegiae, writing at the beginning of the thirteenth century, describes the original inhabitants of the Orkneys as ‘Picts and Papae’.94 One of these groups, the Picts, only a little taller than pygmies, he describes as having accomplished miraculous achievements by building towns, morning and evening; but at midday every ounce of strength deserted them and they hid out of fear in underground chambers. The author – or his sources – may have been led astray by the existence of ‘souterrains’, a kind of underground chamber which are characteristic of the Pictish area. That he also describes the Papae as Africans adhering to Judaism shows that his knowledge of the real situation was at best patchy.
The process by which the Vikings came to dominate, push out or even eliminate the local Pictish population of the Orkneys is obscure. The Orkneyinga Saga tradition suggests that by the time Harald Finehair reached the Orkneys in the 870s there was already an established Viking population there, capable of causing enough nuisance by freelance raiding of its own as to warrant royal Norwegian attention. The effect of Harald’s expedition is probably somewhat exaggerated, since, as well as the Orkneys, he is said to have subjugated the Shetlands, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man and lands ‘further west’, while the settlers of the Faroes and Iceland ascribed their ancestors’ migration there to resentment at the growing tyranny of Harald’s rule in Norway, an improbably wide-ranging impact for a short-lived campaign. The archaeological evidence cannot, however, be used to corroborate the idea of a settlement before the 870s, as none of the pagan Norse burials so far found in Orkney date to earlier than the mid-ninth century (with the latest of them, a male grave found at Buckquoy, a little after 950).95
The story in the Orkneyinga Saga probably significantly overstates the role of Harald Finehair and oversimplifies the process by which Orkney became Viking. The insistence in Norwegian (and Icelandic) sagas and histories on Harald’s role in conquering Orkney could instead have been a way of asserting the claims of the Norwegian crown on the islands.96 According to the traditional account of the course of Harald’s extended raid, Ivar (one of the sons of the Norwegian Earl Rögnvald of Møre) was killed during the expedition and, to compensate him for this loss, the king gave Orkney and Shetland to Rögnvald, who in turn passed them to his brother Sigurd. Nicknamed ‘the Mighty’ (hinn ríki), Sigurd thus became the first of the Orkney earls, a Viking line that would rule the islands for more than four centuries.
Whatever the truth about Harald Finehair’s expedition, Orkney was the first convenient landfall after crossing the North Sea from Norway, and so would have been an obvious point to use as a base from which to launch raids elsewhere. The next definite report we have from the islands is of an attack on the north of Scotland around 890 by Sigurd the Mighty, allied with Thorstein the Red, the grandson of Ketil Flatnose, whom some sources describe as the ruler of the Sudreys (‘the south islands’ – the Norse term for the Hebrides). The local Pictish leader was a ferocious warrior named Maelbrigte Tusk (from the large tooth that protruded from his mouth). The Norse and Picts had agreed to fight with only forty men aside, but on the appointed day Maelbrigte saw that Sigurd had brought double the agreed number.97 Badly outnumbered, the Pict had little hope of winning, and Sigurd duly killed him and cut his head off. On his return home, Maelbrigte’s skull was dangling from Sigurd’s saddle-bag, and the Orkney earl grazed his leg against the ‘tusk’. The scratch became infected and Sigurd died, a posthumous victim of his own treachery.
The dead earl was buried in a mound by the River Oykel in Sutherland, and his ally Thorstein perished soon after in a battle in Caithness, a testament to the early involvement of the Vikings in the far north of Scotland, and the beginning of a presence there that would continue until the thirteenth century. Sigurd’s son and successor, Guthorm, ruled Orkney for only a year before dying childless, whereupon Rögnvald of Møre despatched another of his sons, Hallad, to govern Orkney with the title of earl. The new ruler found a chaotic situation in which Danish Vikings were plundering unhindered as far as the coast of Caithness and, unable to bring the situation under control, he soon slunk back to Norway. Orkney was now left in the hands of two of the freebooters, Kalf Scurfa (‘Scurvy’) and Thórir Tréskegg (‘Tree-beard’). Displeased at Hallad’s cowardice, Rögnvald is said to have gathered together all his remaining sons, whose future careers he then predicted; Thórir was to succeed him as Earl of Møre, Hrollaug would go to Iceland, while Hrolf’s destiny was to conquer Normandy. Only the youngest, Torf-Einar, born of a slave, had no glorious future in store for him. Instead, this least-favoured child was packed off with a single ship to Orkney and the hardly paternal counsel that, as all of his mother’s family were thralls, the further away he went and the longer he stayed there, the more satisfied Rögnvald would be.98
Lying 60 miles to the north of the Orkneys at their most southerly point, the Shetlands never played a central role in the history of Viking Scotland, the lack of land suitable for the type of farming the Norsemen had carried out back home in Scandinavia being a principal obstacle. The islands were, however, rich in steatite, an easily quarried form of soapstone, which the Vikings valued highly for the creation of cooking and storage vessels. Little is known in detail of the early Viking period in Shetland, with the only Viking farmstead that has been excavated, at Underhoul on Unst, probably coming from a later period.
The earliest trace of Viking settlement on Shetland is probably the hoard of Pictish silver found on St Ninian’s Isle in 1958. Discovered by a rather lucky sixteen-year-old schoolboy who was assisting on an archaeological dig, the hoard of some twenty-eight pieces of silver plate (and, eccentrically, the jawbone of a porpoise) may well represent the wealth of a Pictish chieftain, which was plundered by the Vikings and then buried under the floor of St Ninian’s chapel, a seventh-century church which is the oldest in the Shetlands.
The most famous remains of the Viking era, however, are at the settlement at Sumburgh on the southern tip of Shetland. Known as Jarlshof, the name that Sir Walter Scott gave to the ruins in his ‘Viking’ novel The Pirate, the site was built over in the Middle Ages with a baronial dwelling (which is what Scott would have known). Beneath this later building, excavations in the 1950s uncovered a large Viking farmhouse, which occupied nearly the same area as a group of Pictish ‘wheel-houses’99 (which, in turn, had been built on top of earlier Bronze and Iron Age layers). Each of these successive phases appears to have been abandoned because of the effects of sand drifting from the nearby dunes, rather than through any act of violence. The presence of only a handful of weapons discovered in the Viking layer, together with the reuse of nearly the same site as the Pictish houses, indicates a more gradual takeover rather than the violent expulsion of the pre-existing inhabitants.100
Pictish place-names almost completely disappeared in the Northern Isles, the most notable exception being Orkney itself, which may derive from a Pictish word meaning ‘pig’ and could refer to the islands being the domain of the ‘pig people’.101 This has led to suggestions that the Vikings totally displaced the pre-existing population, either by expulsion or by killing them. The evidence from Jarlshof, however, seems to point towards assimilation (at least in Shetland). Instead the islands were probably settled by a combination of gradual Scandinavian influxes followed by a more formal acquisition around the time of Harald Finehair.102
Although the recollection of Viking settlement is strong in Orkney, the most spectacular remembrance of the Scandinavian period in the Northern Isles comes from Shetland. There, on the last Tuesday of each January, in the depths of the dark, bitter northern Scottish winter, the people celebrate the beginning of lighter days with a spectacular festival of fire. The name of the festival, Up-Helly-Aa, is possibly a corruption of ‘Uphalliday’, marking the end of the winter celebrations, and it once featured the dragging of burning tar barrels through the streets of Lerwick until, fearing a fatal conflagration, the town council banned the practice in 1874.103 Up-Helly-Aa is still hugely impressive, with squads of costumed islanders (and one of them, that of the Guizer Jarl, dressed as a Viking) carrying blazing torches with which they set light to a reconstructed model of a Viking longship, in a re-creation of the funeral pyres of the warriors of old. The Norse longship in fact only first appeared in the ceremony in 1889, but the whole festival celebrates a pride in the Shetlands’ Viking heritage, which stretches back more than a millennium.
Viking influence was less strong in the Hebrides, the third major area of Viking activity in the Scottish isles. It was, however, the area of the first-recorded Viking raids in Scotland, with a violent attack on Skye and Iona in the 790s. That the Gaelic for the Hebrides came to be Innse Gall (‘Isles of the Foreigners’) is an indication of the extent of early Scandinavian control there, while the entry in the Frankish Annals of St Bertin for 847 shows that already by the ninth century it was clear that the Vikings had established bases in the Hebrides: ‘The Northmen also took control of the islands all around Ireland, and stayed there without encountering resistance from anyone.’104
Signs of a violent occupation may come from the site at Coil-eagan an Udail on North Uist, where a small Viking fort appeared around the middle of the ninth century, followed by a development of six closely packed buildings, coupled with the complete near-simultaneous abandonment of a site that had been occupied since the Iron Age. It is likely that the first, small toehold (its defensive perimeter was only 20 feet wide) enabled the Vikings to dominate and then to expel the existing inhabitants in a process far less peaceful than the coexistence indicated at Jarlshof.
Place-name evidence, however, suggests a density of Viking population in the Hebrides far less than that in the Orkneys or Shetlands, and diminishing in the south of the islands. On Lewis, nearly 80 per cent of the village names are Norse, reducing to two-thirds in the east of Skye and far lower figures to the south. On the west coast of Scotland they fall away completely, with Ullapool (in Wester Ross) being one of the few names of Norse origin. Lewis, too, has yielded the greatest concentration of Norse archaeological sites, including the burial site at Cnip where the body of a wealthy woman wearing oval brooches and a necklace with forty-four beads was found, though no Viking settlements (such as at Jarlshof in Shetland or Birsay in Orkney) have yet been identified.
On the other side of the Irish Sea, isolated attacks from the 830s on the coast of Ireland, and the easy pickings to be had from rich ecclesiastical foundations were succeeded, just as they had been in England, by more substantial Viking expeditions. In 837, a fleet of sixty Norse ships was reported on the Boyne and the Liffey, which inflicted a serious defeat on the Uí Néill kings. The Vikings then began to infest the inland waterways of Ireland (such as Lough Neath, the Shannon, the Bann and the Boyne), striking deeper inland than ever before. In 838, the death of a Viking chieftain named Saxolb (or Saxulf) marks both an infrequent success by the Irish defenders and the first leader of the raids on Ireland who is known to us by name.
The first certain Viking overwintering base was on Lough Neath in 840–41 (the entry in the Annals of Ulster for 842 records ‘heathens still at Dublin’, as though their failure to return home for the winter was considered a remarkable event). The Vikings now began to establish longphorts, fortified ship enclosures, beginning with one at Annagassan (or Linn Dúachaill) in County Louth and, more importantly, in 841–2 at Dublin. They then proceeded to found a string of similar ports along the coast, at Waterford, Woodstow, Wexford (Veighsfjörður), Wicklow (Vikingaló) and Limerick (Hlymrekur).
Dominating the important crossing over the River Liffey, Dublin (in Irish Dubh-linn, ‘the black pool’) soon became the Vikings’ principal base in Ireland, a position it retained until the final dwindling of their power on the island in the eleventh century. Traces of the Viking settlement have been found throughout Dublin, from the Viking cemetery on its western outskirts at Islandbridge, where the skeletons of scores of warriors were discovered buried with their swords (of Norwegian manufacture), to the remains of the earliest Viking settlement around the modern Christ Church Cathedral. The exact location of the first longphort, which had long been believed to lie north of the Poddle River, and possibly on the site of the later Dublin Castle, has now been found in a series of burials and remains of habitation sites of the mid- to late-ninth century that lie on the other side of Dublin’s ‘Black Pool’.105
By the eleventh century an artisan quarter was thriving in Viking Dublin, containing houses and workshops of wattle bound together with hazel and ash rods, whose inhabitants have left a treasure trove of discarded and broken scraps, including soapstone moulds for casting the hammer-shaped amulets dedicated to Thor. The settlement, which was abandoned – at least by the Viking elite – in 902, and then refounded after 917, was defended by an earthen bank in the tenth century, around which another circle of banks was constructed in the eleventh century (replaced in turn by a stone wall around 1100).106 The Vikings clearly imported elements of their political organisation in Scandinavia; a Scandinavian thing (or assembly) appears to have been held on a mound on College Green (in origin a prehistoric burial mound); while an official called the ‘law speaker of Dublin’ (airlabraid Atha Cliath), echoing similar titles in Iceland, is recorded as having died at the Battle of Tara in 980.107
The Vikings were by now firmly ensconced in Ireland, and even a series of Irish victories in 848 could not drive them out. The chronic division of the Irish – who had around 150 different sub-kingdoms grouped under the general overlordship of the kings of Connaught, Leinster, Munster, Ulster and the northern and southern Uí Néill, with one ruler or another asserting himself as ‘high-king’ over the rest – meant that the Vikings were able to exploit the divisions amongst their adversaries to make inroads on the coast. Yet the Balkanisation of Ireland (where conquering one sub-kingdom left scores of others still in the field) also gave it a kind of resilience in depth, which the Anglo-Saxons of England lacked.
The setbacks of 848 caused a crisis for Viking Ireland. A state of near civil war seems to have broken out among the surviving Norsemen, with a group called the Dubh-Gaill (‘Dark Foreigners’) arriving in Dublin in 851 and slaughtering large quantities of the Fin-Gaill (‘Fair Foreigners’) who were already established there.108 The Dubh-Gaill then defeated the Finn-Gaill in a battle on Carlingford Lough in 852, and the next year a new Viking chieftain arrived, Olaf (or Amlaib, as the Irish annals refer to him), who is described as ‘the son of the king of Laithlind’109 and who, together with his brother Ivar, and a third sibling Ásl, put an end to the fighting and came to dominate Viking Ireland in the 850s and 860s.
Ireland gained a brief respite when Olaf left for the Isle of Man and Hebrides in 854–5, the first sign of the Dublin Viking rulers’ penchant for involvement across the Irish Sea, which would, over time, fatally weaken their home base. The death of the high king Maél Sechlainn in 862, after a reign in which he had brought the overkings of Munster and Leinster into his obedience, allowed the Vikings to expand outwards from Dublin into the lands of the southern Uí Néill. In 864, Olaf defeated and killed Conchobar, one of the joint rulers of Meath, drowning him at the church of Clonard, but that year Ivar left Ireland for England. Two years later Olaf and Ásl took an army to Pictland, and these departures allowed an Irish fightback, which saw the destruction of many of the Viking bases in north-eastern Ireland and defeats of Viking forces at Leinster and Clondalkin, close to Dublin (where the heads of 100 Viking chieftains were collected as war-trophies by the victorious Irish).
These disasters brought Olaf hurrying back to Ireland. He struck out in all directions, raiding the church at Armagh, and by 870 felt confident enough to leave for Britain again. There he joined forces with Ivar to besiege and capture the British stronghold of Alt Clud (or Dumbarton Rock), the capital of the kingdom of Strathclyde. After a four-month siege, the fortress fell – inflicting a blow from which Strathclyde never truly recovered – and both of them returned to Dublin with 200 ships laden with the spoils.110 Although Olaf died in a further attack on Pictland in about 874, Ivar took up the kingship of Dublin, and his position was sufficiently secure that at the time of his death in 873 the Irish Annals refer to him as ‘king of the northmen of all Ireland and Britain’.
Ivar’s family continued to rule Dublin, with three of his sons obtaining the throne in succession, ending with the accession of Sihtric in 888. His rule was challenged in turn in 893 by Sigfrith, an unrelated Viking jarl,111 before the two rivals temporarily patched up their differences to allow them both to go raiding together in Britain. The infighting did not cease on Sihtric’s return in 894, and two years later he was murdered by a rival Viking group. The internecine feuding led to a slackening – but not the total cessation – of raiding that is referred to in Irish sources as the ‘Forty Years’ Rest’. In 902, the Irish took advantage of the chronic divisions among the Norsemen and came together in a coalition led by Máel Finnia of Brega and Cerball of Leinster, which overwhelmed the Scandinavian defenders of Dublin. The ‘heathens’ are said to have fled ‘half dead after they had been wounded and broken’.112
A diaspora of Irish Vikings retreated to Britain, where Ingimund raided Anglesey in 902/3, while others turned their attentions to Scotland. There were a few sporadic raids on north-eastern Ireland, but the Vikings did not return in force until 913, when ‘a great new fleet of heathens’ attacked Waterford Harbour, led by Óttar, whom the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records as having sailed from Brittany. Then, in 917, a new Viking fleet arrived under the command of Rögnvald and Sihtric, two grandsons of Ivar, and pushed aside Óttar’s group. While Rögnvald took over Waterford, his brother sailed on to Leinster, defeated an Irish army at Confey and then re-entered Dublin.113
An Irish attempt to expel the interlopers failed in September 919 when the overking of Ulster and four other kings died in a devastating defeat at the hands of the Vikings. The renewed Norse occupation seems to have been followed by a period of some prosperity for Dublin, with a rapid expansion along the waterfront of the Liffey and a more organised network of plot-divisions appearing in the town. At Waterford, too, the focus of the Viking settlement seems to have shifted, from the probable site of the first longphort at Woodstown to a point further south along the River Suir.
The chimera of a joint Viking realm that transcended the Irish Sea and bound together York and Dublin continued to preoccupy the latter’s Irish Viking rulers, to the point where it weakened their hold on both towns. It led Sihtric to transfer to Britain in 919 (where he became King of York in 921), leaving Gothrith, another grandson of Ivar, as King of Dublin. His rule was marked by a complex struggle in the 920s with rival Viking centres at Limerick and Waterford that led to the foundation of new camps throughout Ireland, including at Lough Gur south of Limerick and at Linns in Dundalk Bay in 926.
A temporary check to this enlargement of the Viking sphere occurred in 926, when Muirchertach mac Néill, king of the southern Uí Néill, defeated the Vikings at Carlingford, killing 200 Norsemen. Later the same year he overcame another Viking force at Strangford Lough, an engagement in which Gothrith’s son Halfdan perished. Despite these setbacks, when Sihtric died at York in 927, Gothrith seems not to have hesitated to take the well-worn path from Ireland to Northumbria in an effort to replace him. The rapid failure of this enterprise, and his expulsion by Athelstan of Wessex the same year, led to his premature return to Ireland.
Guthfrith died in 934, his renewed feud with Limerick having preoccupied him for most of the final seven years of his rule. With the conflict still unresolved, it was left to his son Olaf to claim victory in 937, when he smashed the Limerick fleet on Lough Ree and captured his rival king, who was also named Olaf and who rejoiced in the unflattering nickname ‘Scabbyhead’. Feeling secure in his position in Ireland, Olaf now turned to the worrying phenomenon of the growing power of Wessex in northern England, which was threatening to snuff out the Viking kingdom of York for good. He joined forces with Constantine of Scotland and other northern magnates in an alliance that ended in disaster with defeat by Athelstan at Brunanburh.114
Despite a siege of Dublin by the Uí Néill in 938, Olaf hesitated little on hearing of his arch-enemy Athelstan’s death in 939, before hurrying back over to England to claim the throne of York. Control of Dublin now passed to his cousin Olaf Sihtricsson, whose Gaelic nickname Cuarán (‘sandal’) is perhaps an indication of the degree of assimilation that was beginning to occur. But Olaf Cuarán, too, felt the pull of York and, after barely a year on the throne of Dublin, abandoned it to another cousin, Blákári Gothrithsson. During this period conflict with the native Irish intensified, and in 944 Congalach, overking of Brega, was able to capture and sack Dublin, killing up to 400 Vikings. As the merry-go-round of Norse kings alternated between the two cities, Olaf was pushed out of York and in 945 returned to Dublin to reclaim it by force from an unwilling Blákári. Then, when the latter regained control of the city in 948, Olaf returned to York for a final three-year stint on the throne.
All of this turmoil weakened the Viking settlement’s ability to fend off Irish attacks, and Blákári lasted only a few months before being killed at a battle with the southern Uí Néill. Stability of a sort was only restored in 951, when a chastened Olaf Cuarán returned from York, having been expelled once more in favour of Eirik Bloodaxe.115 Olaf would rule over Dublin for the next thirty years, a period in which the Viking kingdom reached the peak of its influence in Ireland, yet at the same time saw the seeds of its final downfall being sown.
There was one further area of Viking activity in western Europe, although it was probably the one in which they enjoyed the least success. During their extensive raiding against Aquitaine in Francia, the Vikings must have become aware of the rich lands to the south-west. The Iberian peninsula was divided in the early ninth century between the Islamic emirate of al-Andalus, centred on Córdoba, and a collection of small Christian states in the north, principally León and Castile, with a ‘Spanish March’ under Frankish control in the north-east around Barcelona. Between the two lay a debatable frontier zone, which occupied an area to the north of the River Ebro.
One of the attractions of Spain to the Vikings – other than opportunistic plundering – was slaves: both the opportunity to trade those (Franks and Anglo-Saxons) whom they had already acquired in the north and to capture new ones.116 The inhabitants of Islamic Spain became familiar enough with the Vikings to give them a special name, the majus or ‘fire worshippers’, although whether this is a reference to any specific Scandinavian cult practice is unknown.117 We also have a record of an embassy sent by ’Abd ar-Rahman II (who was the ruler of the Arab Umayyad emirate of Córdoba from 822 to 852) to an unknown northern king, who has been variously identified as Turgeis, the Viking King of Dublin, or Horik of Denmark.118 The envoy, the poet Yahya ibn Hakam al-Jayyani – who was nicknamed al-Ghazal (‘the gazelle’) because of his good looks – had previously completed a successful diplomatic mission to the Byzantine emperor Theophilus. This second embassy was considerably less fruitful, in part because the foreign ruler tried to humiliate al-Ghazal by making him bow down before him, which the Arab envoy refused to do. Finally, the king had the entrance to the audience chamber lowered so that al-Ghazal would have to abase himself, but he is said to have entered backwards, exposing his ‘shameful parts’ to the king. It also cannot have helped that the northern queen became infatuated with the attractive Moorish ambassador and insisted on summoning him to her chambers almost every day in order, she claimed, to hear his stories about life in al-Andalus.
Contacts between the various Spanish kingdoms and the Vikings seem to have been less intense than in Francia, Ireland or Britain. Very few Viking artefacts have been found119 and there is only a handful of place-names, such as Lordemanos in León and Lodimanos in Galicia (which both mean ‘north-men’), that indicate the regular presence of Norsemen. Although there are hints that there may have been Viking raids on northern Spain in the early ninth century,120 the first major recorded raid in the Iberian peninsula occurred in 844. Its wide-ranging voyage took the Viking fleet of fifty-four ships far further than they had probably planned. Beginning in Brittany, they first plundered in south-western France, before carrying on to attack Christian northern Spain (including the port of La Coruña). The Norsemen then sailed on southwards to the Muslim-controlled lands, where in a few short weeks they did more damage than the Christian kingdoms had inflicted on the Umayyad emirate in more than a century, burning Cádiz and Algeciras. The Vikings then sailed up the Guadalquivir, taking advantage of the same ability to navigate shallow waters that had allowed them to penetrate the Seine and Loire in France, and pitched camp on the Isla Menor near Seville. The city at the time lacked walls and so they found it relatively easy to plunder, but, since the Guadalquivir is unnavigable beyond Seville, they were then forced to take to the land, where a Moorish army hastily mustered by ’Abd ar-Rahman experienced little difficulty in crushing them.
Many of the surviving Vikings fled back to the ships, and in the ensuing slaughter some 1,000 of them were killed and thirty of their ships set ablaze by a weapon that the Vikings may not have encountered before, Greek Fire – an incendiary hurled from catapults, which had the peculiar property of remaining ablaze even on water.121 Some 400 Vikings were taken captive and most were hanged, although a few survivors converted to Islam and remained near Seville, where it is said in later years they made a living selling cheese.122 Those who escaped in the remaining ships made a desultory raid on the Algarve on their way northwards and then limped back to Francia.
Perhaps deterred by the adverse reports of the 844 raid, there was no further Viking raid recorded in Iberia until 859. The leaders of an expedition that year, Hasteinn and Björn Ironside, sailed into the Mediterranean (an achievement in itself) and so far to the east that they won themselves enduring fame. The fleet was large (somewhere between sixty and a hundred ships) and it seems to have set out with the extraordinary objective of sacking the city of Rome itself.123 The expedition did not enjoy an auspicious start, though, as a raid on the hugely wealthy pilgrimage centre of Santiago de Compostela was beaten back. Hasteinn and Björn then suffered a further setback outside Seville, where they were defeated by the new Umayyad ruler, Muhammad I.
The Vikings pressed on, sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar, where they met practically no opposition – pausing only briefly for plundering sorties against Cádiz and Algeciras – and so became the first Norse fleet to enter the western Mediterranean. The two Viking chieftains then achieved another first by attacking the coast of North Africa, descending on the Moroccan emirate of Nekor, which they sacked and then held for a week. They also seized two women from the royal harem, who were only released after the payment of a hefty ransom by Muhammad of Córdoba.
The Vikings proceeded north and eastwards up the coast of Spain, attacking Valencia and the Balearics before arriving in due course on the south coast of Francia. There they raided a number of monastic houses and burned the town of Narbonne. Finally, with winter approaching, they set up camp in the Camargue, a refuge protected by its marshes from unwelcome Frankish attention. The following spring, Hasteinn and Björn sailed up the Rhône and sacked Nîmes and Arles. It seemed as if the Viking experience on the Loire and Seine might be repeated, with this new group establishing a base in southern Francia and the Rhône, from which to raid over a prolonged period. But at Valence they were repulsed by a force under Count Gerard of Provence124 and they decided to press on instead to Italy.
There – at least in the story as related by the Norman chronicler Dudo of Saint-Quentin – the Vikings finally reached a magnificent city, its walls and towers all made of bright white marble. Not being strong enough to assault it directly, they took it by a ruse which, even if the tale is not true, at least shows the level of cunning that their antagonists tended to ascribe to the Vikings. On arriving at the town, Hasteinn let it be known that he wished to convert to Christianity. The next day his men bore him to the city gates in a coffin, claiming that their leader had, most tragically, passed away during the night. The town’s citizens permitted the funeral cortège to enter the gate, but once they were safely inside, the Vikings drew their swords and Hasteinn leapt dramatically from his coffin. The Norsemen then engaged in an enthusiastic sack of the city, which turned out not to have been Rome at all, but the much more modest town of Luni.125
Disappointed in their hoped-for prize, the Vikings continued their plunderers’ progress through the Mediterranean. They may even have entered the eastern Mediterranean and operated in the sphere of the Byzantine empire, but their exact route cannot be traced until they tried to return through the Straits of Gibraltar in 861. This time they had to force their passage, for their way was barred by a large Muslim fleet. Although Hasteinn and Björn managed to fight their way through, it was at the cost of a large number of their remaining ships. On their retreat northwards, they did manage to capture King García of Pamplona and extract a 70,000-gold-piece ransom for his release and so, with at least these consolation prizes and some African slaves they had taken in Nekor (whom the Norsemen referred to as blámenn, or ‘blue men’), they returned to the Loire in the spring of 862.126
The Umayyad response to these Viking raids was to construct a chain of forts and strengthen their navy (with ’Abd ar-Rahman II establishing a new naval base at Almería). As a result, Viking raids in Spain in the tenth century were largely directed against the Christian kingdoms of the north. Raids are recorded against Galicia in 951, 965 and 966 and a major attack occurred in 968 when a Viking force led by Gunnauð killed Sisnano, Bishop of Santiago. Emboldened by this, the same group continued to raid for three years from a base on the Ulla River, causing enormous devastation. In 972, they struck the Algarve in the Muslim-controlled area, but the Umayyads in general were easily able to fend off the few attempts the Vikings made against them.
Occasional raids did continue into the eleventh century, with a large-scale attack in 1014 against Tui on the Miño River, another on Galicia in 1029 and a major series of assaults in 1047–66 in the region of Santiago. Yet the Vikings were never able to establish themselves in Spain in the way they did in Francia. Distance and more determined resistance to their attacks meant that in Iberia the raids never reached anywhere near the level of menace that they posed in north-western Europe. As a result, of the Viking presence in Spain there is scant trace, save a few place-names, a cylindrical bone box in the treasury of León Cathedral carved in the Mammen style, the annual Romaria Vikinga festival at Catoira in Galicia, and of course the immortal memory of the voyage of Hasteinn and Björn Ironside.