AS THE EIGHTH CENTURY DRAWS TO ITS CLOSE, BANDS of feral men, playing by a new set of rules and bent on theft, kidnap, arson, torture and enslavement, prey on vulnerable communities. Shockwaves are felt in the royal courts of Europe, in the Holy See at Rome. The king’s peace is broken. Economies are disrupted; institutions threatened. In time the state itself comes under attack from the new power in the North, a power of devastating military efficiency and suicidally apocalyptic ideology. It seems as if the End of Days is approaching. Out of the chaos come opportunities to shuffle the pack of dynastic fortune, to subjugate neighbouring states, to exploit a new economics and re-invent fossilized institutions.
The economic strengths that made Britain such an attractive target lay in the exploitation, by an organized, self-knowing élite, of abundant resources: its cattle, sheep, grain, timber, minerals and the labour to harvest and process them. The ease with which people and goods were able to move through the landscape, and the institutions which evolved to benefit from that wealth, rendered Britain uniquely wealthy, but also uniquely vulnerable. No king or counsel saw the disaster coming; only, perhaps, the wise and Venerable Bede, wagging a warning finger at the future from his writing desk in 734.1 After the first shock, a little before the year 800, a century—four generations—passed before effective state strategies tamed the wild beast and a new European culture, vibrant, energetic and ambitious, began to take shape. Accommodations were made between native and incomer. In Britain grand projects were conceived: to unify peoples under the banners of kingdoms that came to be known as Scotland, Wales and England. It is not so clear who conceived those projects; even less so that they were successful.
The first notice of a new-dawning reality comes to us from an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 789. In this year, it was remembered, three ships came out of the North. Presuming them to be traders, the West Saxon king’s man of business—his portgerefa, or port-reeve—rode to meet them somewhere on the south coast, perhaps Portland in Dorset. They slew him. Within a decade, a rash of notices recorded the sacking of monasteries along the North Sea coasts of Britain, among the Hebridean islands and as far west as Ireland. The famous attack on Lindisfarne, Holy Island, in 793 was and is seen as a marker for the start of a new European age of warfare, uncertainty and migration.
In the rich imaginations of the Scandinavian male nobility, from whose swelling ranks the sea raiders were drawn, treasure was guarded by fierce, vindictive dragons in unearthly lairs. It could only be won by guile, deceit, luck and the aid of complicit gods. Its acquisition invariably led to vengeful pursuit by jealous gods, brothers, sons. Action required reaction; warriors won honour and a place in Valhalla; death must be glorious; the pursuit of material wealth, at great personal risk, was a game every bit worth the candle.
In Britain and Ireland and on the north-western coasts of Continental Europe, where monasteries had been established under the protection of tribal warlords and founding saints across 200 years and more, treasure was guarded by prematurely balding men, sometimes by women, wearing woollen robes, unarmed and untrained in combat, living in remote communities far from the protective reach of kings’ armies. Their only defensive weapons, it seemed, were the word and the cross. For any enterprising northern warrior the holy islands of Britain and Ireland were too good an opportunity to pass up.
For twenty or thirty years raiders probed the coasts and estuaries of Frisia, Saxony and Francia, Britain and Ireland, picking off the precious treasures of the church without challenging its institutional power. They set off in in their sleek longships in springtime and returned to their homelands in autumn. Dynasties rose and fell across north-west Europe, and Scandinavian entrepreneurs took a close interest in their fortunes. The middle decades of the ninth century saw more ambitious raids: scores and even hundreds of ships at a time falling on trading settlements, penetrating deep inland and occasionally, increasingly, overwintering in secure bases, their longphuirt,* in uncomfortable proximity to their victims.
Those military states facing the Atlantic and North Sea experimented with defensive and offensive tactics; they constructed signal stations, built fleets, dammed rivers, enforced ever-increasing military burdens on the estates of their nobles and bishops. They chased and sometimes caught the enemy, and when they were able to bring him to battle in open country they were often victorious. Much of the time they were engaged in wild goose chases across land, by river and at sea. Often and unsuccessfully they attempted bribery and sometimes they tried pitting one band of raiders against another.
In 865 the game changed: a great army landed in East Anglia, an army of conquest, precipitating a series of wars which lasted until the middle of the following century. Ælfred the West Saxon king has often been the central figure in the narrative of those conflicts—understandably, in many respects: he was an individual of rare talents, not least of which was that, like Winston Churchill, he ensured history’s enduring affection by writing it himself. My purpose in writing this book is to place Ælfred’s part in the story of the Viking Age in Britain in a wider cultural and geographical context. The Britain encountered by the Scandinavians of the ninth and tenth centuries was one of regional diversity and self-conscious cultural identity: of Pict, Dál Riatan and Strathclyde Briton; of Bernician and Deiran, East Anglian, Mercian and West Saxon. Ancient kingdoms surviving in Kent and Cornwall, Powys, Gwynedd and Dyfed, Hwicce, Lindsey and Man had profoundly individual identities that endure, in many respects, into the present and played pivotal roles in the story of the Viking Age. The richness of those peoples’ encounters with the cultures of Scandinavia, at war and in peace, cannot be captured through either a purely Ælfredan or Anglo-centric lens. A broader view brings perspective. Nor can the story of those encounters be told without offering a more nuanced portrait of the Scandinavians who both wreaked destruction and drew creative energy from their compulsion to explore and exploit the world.
Ælfred’s Britain is a history and archaeology of the peoples of Britain, native and immigrant, during the formative century and a half between those first raids and the expulsion of a Scandinavian dynasty from York in 954. Some of the parallels that this age offers for the early twenty-first century are remarkable; disturbing, even.
Brother will fight brother and be his slayer
Sister’s sons will violate the kinship bond
Hard it is in the world; whoredom abounds
Axe-age, sword-age, shields are cleft asunder
Wind-age, wolf-age, before the world plunges headlong;
No man will spare another.2
* The singular is longphort.