LIKE THE PAW PRINTS OF A TIGER, THE TRACKS OF A NEW menace stalking vulnerable coastal monasteries in the 790s left the identity of the perpetrators in no doubt. Traders and fishermen from the Baltic lands were no strangers; they brought exotic furs, the tusks of walrus and narwhal, tall tales of ice and the endless darkness of the northern winter. Their gods were recognized as those whom the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons had revered in these islands more than three centuries previously. Their speech was exotic, but comprehensible.*
Since no contemporary account tells of the Viking Age from a Scandinavian point of view, historians and archaeologists must piece their story together from fragments. Those fragments reveal the stark, brutal realties of inglorious contact with native populations—and recent archaeological discoveries allow us to paint an increasingly detailed picture of the crime scene. That picture begs the question: why did they come?
The social and economic forces that propelled these maritime entrepreneurs to take up arms and go a-Viking, to engage in theft, arson, enslavement and murder, may have been opaque even to the raiders themselves. We can say that the inexorable growth of the Christian Frankish empire under Charlemagne led to a fateful clash of cultures between the inheritors of Rome and the Northern world, and that the tribal chiefdoms of Denmark, Sweden and Norway saw the Holy Roman Emperor as a threat. We can also suggest that the limited cultivable lands of Scandinavia were insufficient to provide for a growing, outward-looking population needing land to farm and on which to raise a family.
We know, too, that by the year 800 something like perfection had been achieved in the Scandinavian art of shipbuilding, the boatyards of its rivers and fjords producing fast, oceangoing vessels superbly adapted to coastal trade, deep-sea fishing, exploration and raiding. And we can point to the inherently inward-looking conservatism of the kingdoms of the British Isles: intently focused on the domestic agricultural cycle of the seasons, on a rigid caste system and on the competitive relations between a well-established church and centuries-old kingdoms. Ritualized warfare and the ancient rules of overlordship maintained a comfortable status quo among their warrior élites. The Vikings, then, had means, motive and opportunity to strike at the vulnerable fringes of the Atlantic islands. But that does not in itself explain the Viking Age: an unstoppable movement of peoples overseas in search of new lands to conquer and settle.
For the first quarter of the ninth century the interests and preoccupations of Insular† kings remained primarily domestic. The death of King Offa of Mercia, the greatest of the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon warlords, reopened a struggle with the West Saxon kings for superiority over southern Britain. They fought for the right to control the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury; for rights to trade along the River Thames and, in particular, for the financial perks generated by a thriving riverside trading settlement at Lundenwic. By the late 830s the dynasty of King Ecgberht of Wessex was able to assert imperium over many of the Anglo-Saxon, and some of the Welsh, kingdoms while, further north, the Gaelic kings of Dál Riata were beginning to exercise an ultimately successful claim to subdue the kings of Pictland and obliterate their culture.
Across the Irish Sea a Norse dynasty established itself in a settlement that became Dublin on the River Liffey and founded pirate bases, the longphuirt, elsewhere. From these bases they raided across the Irish Sea with apparent impunity; and a hybrid Norse–Irish culture established the towns that would underpin the wealth and power of medieval Ireland. The Norse conquered Man and left an indelible legacy of settlement, art and language there. In the Hebrides, and further north in Orkney and Shetland, Norse raiders-cum-farmers found much to please them: after subduing or marrying into native communities they built a great diaspora which has profoundly influenced life in the islands over all the centuries since.
By the end of the first quarter of the ninth century monastic communities had been devastated by Viking raids across a whole generation. From the 830s onwards those raids began to be felt more widely and, if they did not yet threaten the state, they began to affect the relations between states and to weaken the institution of the church, already in decline under pressures from a secularizing state. Their effect was also felt on the wealth and productivity of the land: trade routes were disrupted; silver supplies choked off; treasure was stolen, never to be recovered; productive farms and trading settlements went into terminal decline.
The tiger may have left its prints all over the scene of the crime; but a predator that ghosted in on the dawn tide and was gone at dusk, who could penetrate Britain’s rivers and ride fast along its Roman roads, presented a threat that could not, at first, be countered. It took long and bitter experience, another generation, before the Insular states began to both resist and accommodate their unwelcome visitors. The arrival of a Great Host, crossing from Francia in hundreds of ships, turned raiding into conquest in the 860s.
As it happens, the two decades of greatest threat coincided with the emergence of Ælfred, the only English king to have earned himself the epithet ‘Great’. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries his reputation as a highly competent and religious—if perhaps unpopular—king was reforged into that of a republican hero. In the nineteenth century statues were raised to another sort of Ælfred of Wessex by Whig protestant imperialists who saw him as a bulwark against barbarism: a noble, moustachioed savage who gave England (and therefore the British Empire) its inherent legal and educational superiority.
The real Ælfred was a man of his age, obliged to fight in battle at the head of his fyrð,‡ the summoned levies of his people, the West Saxons. He was the survivor of four older brothers, all of them kings in Wessex before him. He learned, through defeat, disloyalty and the humiliation of flight, to counter the apocalyptic threat facing his kingdom. He saw how to exploit adversity to enhance the power of the Anglo-Saxon state: to professionalize it. But Ælfred was also something more: a soldier-philosopher in the mould, perhaps, of Marcus Aurelius; an administrative reformer whose experience with the Great Host taught him the art of the possible; a passionate educator and expert in the deployment of his powers of patronage to initiate his own renaissance. We are lucky enough to have Ælfred’s own words to demonstrate the value he placed on wisdom. From a disastrous defeat that must have seemed as though the End of Days was come, he staged a brilliant fightback and, at Edington in 878, was able to tame the tiger in the smoke.§
* Forespæc: An Old English word meaning ‘preface’.
† Insular, as an adjective, meaning ‘of the Atlantic islands of Britain and Ireland’.
‡ The levies of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. For its complexities and development see Richard Abels’s excellent Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England (1988).
§ The Tiger in the Smoke is the title of a wonderfully atmospheric thriller by Margery Allingham set in the London fogs of the late 1940s and published in 1952.