A Brief History of the Vikings (2 page)

This book was commissioned by Nicola Chalton, who was always supportive and ready to champion my unorthodox approach with her colleagues, while my agent, Chelsey Fox of Fox and Howard, was able to channel the spirit of Freydis
whenever work needed to be done with an axe. Becky Hardie of Constable & Robinson was a patient and flexible editor, who diligently made this book better than it should have been, while Roger Hudson was benignly ruthless in excising my unnecessary
kennings
. Edward James made many helpful comments on the manuscript, and pulled me up on several important issues of nomenclature and classification. However, I did not take his advice on every occasion, and made several decisions which may indeed turn out to be my own mistakes, certainly not his. Although this book manages to incorporate some research material published while it was still being written, this might also be a good point to mention that many of the relevant books in my collection are over 25 years old – notably a Magnusson and a Brønsted given to me as a child by Penny Clements and Stephen Jones. So they are at least partly to blame for my obsessions.

This book would not have happened at all were it not for Kati, whom I met on Saint Olaf’s day in a place called Harald’s, and who will claim endlessly not to be an inheritor of any sort of Viking tradition, despite combining all the very best traits of Aud the Deep-Minded, Gunnhild Kingsmother and Thorbjorg Shipbreast.

My grateful acknowledgement goes to Penguin Books for permission to quote from
The Vinland Sagas
, translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson, from
The Vikings
by Johannes Brønsted, and
Byzantium: The Apogee
by John Julius Norwich; and to Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a division of the Orion Publishing Group, for permission to quote from
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
, translated by Michael Swanton. Quotation from
Orkneyinga Saga
, translated by Hermann Palsson and Paul Edwards, published by Hogarth Press, has been granted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
The University of Wisconsin Press acknowledges that my quotation from
The Kensington Stone: A Mystery Solved
by Erik Wahlgren is within the bounds of fair dealing, for which I am also grateful.

Sometime in the fifth century
AD
, a group of soldiers had a farewell party. We have no record of precisely where it was held or what the menu may have been. There is no evidence of any remarkable after-dinner speeches or entertainment. But we still know the party took place, because they clubbed together and bought a token of their appreciation for their leader, Aurelius Cervianus. A local British craftsman was hired to engrave a bronze dish, its lower half showing a collection of exotic beasts, including a pair of peacocks and a somewhat boss-eyed lion.
¹
The upper half has a number of troops under Cervianus’s command, with their legion insignia and designations – XX Valeria Victrix, and II Augusta. Between them lies Cervianus’s name, and a message from the boys:
Utere Felix
, ‘Use this Happily’.

Valeria Victrix and II Augusta had long histories, but both
had spent much of their operational lives in Britannia. Originally a frontier legion on the banks of the Danube and Rhine, the men of Valeria Victrix had garrisoned the British island for centuries. They had gained their title, ‘Valiant and Victorious’, after serving the empire well in the suppression of the revolt of Queen Boudicca.
²
II Augusta was even older, with a regimental history that may have even stretched back into the days when Rome was still a republic. Both legions had formed part of the original Roman invasion force, and had made Britannia their home for many generations of service. Now they were leaving.

The Romans were deserting their farthest outposts. The soldiers were required closer to a ‘home’ which some of them had never even seen. We do not know what happened to Cervianus, but his hardwearing dish eventually turned up, intact, in what is now France.

Most books about the Vikings begin long after this time. The ‘Viking Age’, such as it was, is taken by most authorities to span the period from the infamous raid on Lindisfarne in
AD
793, to the death of Harald Hardraada in 1066. But the dates were not quite so clear-cut as that. The Vikings did not spring fully formed on to the international stage; they were the inheritors of a long tradition.

There is much to be gained from ignoring such arbitrary barriers as the end of the Classical period, or the start of the ‘Dark Ages’ – students of the Vikings can learn much from what happened both before and after this historical watershed.

Scandinavia was one of the last places in Europe to be settled. The Ice Age lingered longer in its mountainous, northern regions, and much of its atavistic power can still be felt in a Scandinavian winter. In times of great plenty, when the climate was warm, a few hardy souls ventured further northwards. But when the weather took a turn for the worse, many of those northern explorers were forced back to their ancestral homes.
Hardened by their harsh northern existence, they were often more than a match for their southern kinsmen – population overspill is a common factor in Scandinavian history. The first members of the society to head elsewhere were usually those with little investment in the place of their birth – the young men, deprived of land, wives and wealth, coalescing into gangs that sought new opportunities. If they had the means of mobility, horses perhaps, or boats, then their adventures would take them substantially further than the next settlement.

In the early Middle Ages, such periodic growths of population may have led to the Viking invasions that are the main subject of this book, and are dealt with in detail in subsequent chapters. But there were also many signs of earlier, less well-recorded incursions of Scandinavian settlers before the Middle Ages.

As early as a hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Roman Republic was threatened by an onrushing tide of northern attackers. The Cimbri, originating on the Danish peninsula, and their Teuton allies from the far north of Germany, threw the republic into a state of emergency and were only defeated a generation after their migration began, in a series of battles in what is now southern France. Roman navies also had to deal with tribes that travelled by sea and preyed upon imperial shipping. In 12
BC
, a Roman fleet advanced along the northern coast of Europe, and reported a series of skirmishes with the seaborne Bructeri tribe. The earliest recorded circumnavigation of the British Isles was conducted not by the Romans, but by a group of the Usipi in
AD
83. Deserting from their posting as Roman mercenaries in Britain, this group stole three galleys which were eventually wrecked on the coast of Denmark.
³

Denmark was also the place of origin of the Chauci, who soon spread along the coast of northern Europe as far as the
Rhine. Led by Gannascus, a tribesman of the Canninefates who had learned Roman tricks by serving in a Rhine legion before deserting, the Chauci preyed upon the coast of what is now known as Belgium in
AD
41, before advancing in force up the river Rhine itself in 47.
⁴
The Chauci were defeated by the Roman fleet which sailed up the Rhine to meet them in battle. But even this imperial navy seems to have relied heavily on barbarian sailors and seamen. A generation after the incursions of the Chauci, barbarian oarsmen in the same Roman fleet staged a revolt, stole 24 galleys, and fought their way down the Rhine towards the sea. The oarsmen, men of the Batavii, joined with river pirates from other tribes and attacked a Roman troop convoy in the English Channel.

The Romans were able to contain such marine assaults, but only barely. While records of Roman Britain are all but silent about the dangers, the archaeological evidence speaks for itself. During the second and third centuries
AD
, Roman legions built forts along the eastern coast of Britannia, designed to watch and warn against a mystery threat from the sea. Tribes from the north and east, making greater use of sails over oars, had begun periodic attacks on the British coastline.

By the third and fourth centuries
AD
, the coast of the Black Sea was ravaged by ships of the Goths and Heruls, originating from Scandinavia. Meanwhile, the northern shore of the European mainland was attacked by a confederation of many tribes, now combined as the Franks. The Franks had been pushed out of their homeland by the fiercer Angles and Saxons, themselves pressured by the Jutes to the north in Denmark. Taking advantage of a local revolt within the Roman Empire, the Franks plundered northern Gaul, also preying for a while on Spain. When order was eventually restored, the Romans consolidated their coastal defences – both sides of the Channel came under the same military command, and a
series of fortifications attempted to deal with the problem of pirates and raiders approaching from the North Sea. These defences came to be known as the Saxon Shore-forts, and for a while, they kept the enemy at bay.
⁵

Aurelius Cervianus’s farewell party and the evacuation it signified did not merely deprive the former colony of Britannia of its military occupiers. It also left the coasts wide open to invasion. Moreover, the pirate problem of the North Sea, once contained at Dover by the Roman fleet, could now spread all along the northern coast of Europe.

The tribes had an additional reason for their movements. The centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire saw a rise in temperature all over the globe, known as the ‘Little Climatic Optimum’. During this period, Europe was roughly one degree centigrade warmer than it is today. The warmer climate made it possible to have vineyards as far north as the River Tyne, and ensured rich harvests that helped the population of Scandinavia increase to levels that required resettlement. More ominously, it also caused more polar ice to melt than before. Sea levels rose, only by a little, but it was enough to cause floods throughout the homelands of many north European tribes. In the area now known as the Low Countries, numerous tribes struggled against the rising waters, clustering on high ground and building their homes on artificial mounds. After a few generations, they too gave up, and went in search of less flood-prone lands to settle.
⁶
Saxon ships began appearing off the coast of Britannia in twos and threes; when they met with no resistance from the deserted forts, they returned in much larger numbers.

Little distinguishes the upheaval caused by the Saxons from that caused by the Vikings several hundred years later – the only real difference is the lack of contemporary reportage. Place names and archaeological evidence offer the only real
clues to what happened at the end of the fifth century
AD
. A great wave of Saxon settlers, we assume, broke upon the eastern coast of Britannia. With the Roman defences unmanned, there was nothing to stop them. They took the land as their own and pushed the locals out.

Eventually, the locals rallied under a heroic leader, and fought the Saxons to a standstill.
⁷
Accounts written decades after the event refer to him as Ambrosius Aurelianus, a name of suitably Roman origin to imply that his family, education, or background had something to do with the recently departed legions. It is not impossible that some legionaries remained behind in their adopted homeland – spending several centuries in the same place was likely to cause many families to develop local ties that they were reluctant to sever. Centuries later, this resistance was codified into a tale of twelve great battles against the invaders. The last was the one that really counted – Ambrosius, or someone like him, supposedly dealt a crushing blow to the Saxons at the unknown location of Mons Badonicus (‘Badon Hill’). The Saxon advance ground to a temporary halt, and the raiders slowly became part of the landscape. The original British, far from united among themselves, held on in Cumbria, south-west Scotland and the reaches of Wales and the West Country, telling tales about a mythical leader who held off the invaders – eventually, the twelve battles would somehow transform into a series of legends about a man called Arthur.
⁸

With the passing of the Roman Empire, the map of Europe was redrawn once more. Gaul now bore a name derived from the tribe that had conquered it, Francia, later France. The island once called Britannia was now a patchwork of petty kingdoms – the ‘West Saxons’ in Wessex, the ‘East Saxons’ of Essex and the Angles of East Anglia, the Mercians of the Midlands and the Northumbrians ‘North of the Humber’. The
eastern part of Britannia, home to the Anglo-Saxon settlers, came to be known as Angle-land, or England. Some Britons fled the Saxon advance by sailing for the area in north France that now bears their name, Brittany. The word
Saxon
became synonymous with foreigners and enemies throughout the Celtic realms: the Scottish
Sassenach
, the Welsh
Saesneg
and the Cornish
Sowsnek
.

The Saxons, once described by the emperor Julian as ‘. . . the fiercest of the tribes who lived beyond the Rhine,’
⁹
largely developed into Christian farmers, traders and artisans.

Then, in the late eighth century
AD
, sporadic raids on the coast turned out to be the precursors of another forceful incursion from Scandinavia. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
reported the arrival of these new enemies with utmost horror, loaded with tales of pillage and slaughter. To inhabitants of what had once been Britannia, their enemies were ‘Danes’; to the French, they were ‘Normans’, men from the North; the Irish called them
Gall
(‘Strangers’); the Germans named them
Ascomanni
(‘Ash-men’) after the wood of the ships that carried them. On the eastern edge of Europe, they were called
Rus, Rootsi
or
Ruotsi
, thought to derive from a Norse word for rowers. In Constantinople, they were called
Vaerings
or
Varangians
, ‘pledgers’ who swore an oath of service to the empire. In Baghdad, they were the
Waranke
or
ar-Rus
, and when they plundered Spain, the Muslim inhabitants called them
Majus
– ‘heathen wizards’.
¹⁰