The term Viking refers to groups of Scandinavian people principally from the south and west coasts of what is now Norway, and the Jutland peninsula to the south across the Skagerrak. These people, in possession of their lands from ancient times, had probably been part of successive patterns of migration by Germanic tribes across the Great Northern Plain of Europe, which offered few natural obstacles to such migration.
Quite what impelled the Vikings to their sudden, violent and energetic expansion overseas from the eighth century is uncertain. There may have been population pressures, which would have been particularly severe in Norway with its rocky coastal valleys trapped and surrounded by impassable mountains on the landward side. The combination of limited and poor land together with the unforgiving northern climate would have made such habitats especially vulnerable to population growth, with any surplus population impelled to shift for itself. The gradual development of the proto-kingdoms of Norway and Denmark in the early Viking period may also have caused tribal groups alienated from the move towards centralised kingdoms to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
The Vikings appear for the first time off the Irish coast in 795 and attacked the wealthy monastery on Lambay island, just north of Dublin Bay. They were raiding in search of loot and treasure and in this they were not alone, for native Irish raiders did not scruple to emulate their example. Undefended monasteries and their riches made a tempting target. For almost half a century, these Viking depredations continued, with the Norse the principal presence on the east and south coasts while the Danes pushed farther inland in their shallow-draughted longboats.
This so-called ‘hit and run’ period ended in 841 with the establishment of a proto-settlement, known as a longphort, on the banks of the Liffey. A longphort was a defensible enclosure for shipping which offered adequate berthage and easy access to the open sea. The establishment of the settlement marks the foundation date of the city of Dublin. The towns of Cork, Limerick, Wexford and Waterford all followed either side of 900 CE, each of them of Viking foundation. Interestingly, the Vikings fared worse in Ulster, where the Uí Néill had the measure of them.
Waterford dates from the first twenty years of the tenth century. The name is Norse, Vadrefjord, meaning the inlet of the ram. Indeed, the magnificent harbour — fed by three major rivers of the south-east of Ireland, the Barrow, Nore and Suir — looks on a map vaguely like a ram’s horn. At any rate, it is the finest natural harbour and safe haven in Ireland. It is no surprise that the Vikings sent their longships there and founded a settlement.
Reginald’s Tower, named for its alleged Viking builder, is the oldest surviving civic building in Ireland. It dates from about 1000 CE. It is almost certainly the first building in Ireland — and beyond doubt the oldest to have survived intact — to have been constructed using mortared stone. Its original function was military, standing as it does at the eastern salient of the old town walls where they touched the quay. It therefore commanded the seaborne approach to the settlement upriver.
As in the other urban settlements they started, the Vikings were displaced by the Normans in Waterford. The city prospered for centuries on shipbuilding and trade. It was well positioned for the wool and meat trades to Flanders and to the Low Countries generally, as well as to the west of England. In later centuries, it had a vigorous commerce with the West Indies and with North America. Its staple cargoes included butter, salted beef and pork, wine and cod. Bristol was a key connection, both as a port of destination and transit, but Waterford ships traded as far afield as Lisbon and Cadiz.
In modern times, Waterford became best known for its eponymous crystal. But the city’s origins are unmistakably Viking, although nearly all traces of their foundational presence have disappeared. Reginald’s Tower is the conspicuous exception to that rule. On the contrary, the Norman — and by extension, Old English — inheritance is still palpable.
Ireland as we know it is unimaginable without the Viking contribution. All the island’s urban life starts with them and for that alone they are an indispensable presence in the Irish past. They have had a bad history — all that raping and pillaging — not least because the history was written by the raped and the pillaged. But towns and cities are essential building blocks of civilisation. They provide a focus for commerce, trade, fine architecture, schools of learning, specialisation of function, civic and religious display. They are forcing houses for talent and human energy. One of the great differences between those parts of Europe outside the ambit of the Roman Empire and those within was that the empire was essentially a network of towns, all diminutive Romes linked by a kind of invisible mental thread to the eternal city.
That was why the post-imperial Christian church was organised on a diocesan basis, with each diocese centred on the greatest town in its region. In Ireland, which had no towns before the Vikings, the church’s organisational structure was monastic and did not come into line with standard European practice until the thirteenth century.
So, whatever destruction the Vikings wrought on Gaelic Ireland, they also started a process of urban development that was absolutely fundamental to the subsequent history of the island. Had it not been them, it would have been others. But those others would, like the Vikings, almost certainly have been invaders, foreigners; for Gaelic Ireland had shown no potential for significant urban development. This was unusual in early medieval Europe. Towns often thought of as classic colonial impositions — like the Hanseatic towns and cities along the eastern Baltic — were in fact developed versions of preexisting if less sophisticated urban centres.
There were no such centres of distribution and exchange in Gaelic Ireland. The Vikings were the fons et origo of Irish urbanity. And for that, we owe honour to their memory, so splendidly extant in stone on the waterfront in Waterford.
