A Brief History of the Vikings (23 page)

His nemesis was Ulfkell Snilling, a man of Anglo-Danish descent, a local leader in the Norwich region and powerful enough for some Scandinavian sources to refer to East Anglia as ‘Ulfkell’s Land’.
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Faced with Forkbeard’s oncoming fleet, Ulfkell had initially been prepared to pay the tribute demanded,
realizing that he did not have time to assemble his own men. In theory, Forkbeard’s men should have waited by their ships for the money to arrive, but clearly tired of it, and decided to attack anyway. Ulfkell immediately mustered what little manpower he could. The Vikings were taken by surprise at the resistance, and might have even been completely defeated had Ulfkell’s victory not been ruined for him by his own allies. As in other cases alluded to in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
, disorganization was the worst enemy of the local defenders, and Ulfkell’s order to them to destroy the Viking ships was ignored. The failure of his associates to act on his plan gave the Vikings an opportunity to escape. As had so often been the case in other parts of the Viking world, they simply fled in search of easier pickings, and Ulfkell could not be everywhere at once.
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Forkbeard’s fleet left for Denmark in 1005, because that year England was struck by famine (probably thanks at least in part to the previous year’s fighting), and the starving locals had little worth stealing. In 1006, Forkbeard was back in force, establishing a base on the Isle of Wight and plundering the Wessex heartland. Forkbeard’s fleet was packed with a new generation of Vikings; Scandinavia was divided between the victors, all the best land in Iceland was taken, news of Greenland had yet to spread, so England it had to be. The men with Forkbeard included one Olaf the Stout, a short but powerful teenage Viking whose father was that same Harald Grenske who had been legendarily killed by Sigrid the Haughty. At least for now, the old Viking feuds had been put to rest, while they united against a common foe.

Forkbeard’s assault was a military exercise in depopulation and despoiling. The Vikings set up guarded supply dumps in Reading, allowing them to conduct missions further inland, before returning to recuperate. They may have even been
encouraged in this by English bragging, since in an outbreak of Alfred-style patriotism, it had been widely boasted that if the Vikings ever dared to advance as far as Cwichelm’s Barrow (Cuckhamsley Knob in Wiltshire), they would never make it back to their ships alive. Such a challenge was too good for Forkbeard to resist, and he not only made it to Wiltshire, but also saw off the English army that had been waiting for him there. We get a sense of disorganization prevalent in England. Even as Denmark became ordered enough to mount an invasion on a national scale, England was reverting to a cluster of small states, each unwilling or unable to cooperate with its neighbour. Forkbeard met resistance, but the forces that ranged against him seemed consistently unable to work with each other towards a common good. By 1007, a shaken Aethelred scraped up another small fortune to pay Forkbeard off, and for two years there was peace.

Local legend in some parts of England holds that captured Danes were skinned alive and their flayed hides nailed to church doors. In Copford, near Colchester, and Hadstock near Saffron Walden, fragments of this supposed Daneskin survive, and the Hadstock piece still sports grey-blond hairs. However, the gruesome local legends have their doubters – another ‘Daneskin’ from Westminster Abbey was found to be perfectly normal leather, a completely mundane and everyday protective covering for a door. The precise origin of the Hadstock and Copford skins are unconfirmed; the Hadstock fragment only survived because it sat under the hinges, and, far from being nailed to a church by irate locals after a Danish attack, it appears to have been carefully laid in as part of the door’s original construction. Hadstock church itself was founded by a Dane, King Canute in fact, making the presence of a Daneskin unlikely, to say the least. Even more damagingly for the Daneskin legend’s believers, the first documented
mention of one is by Samuel Pepys in 1661, when the noted diarist recorded a visit to Rochester cathedral, ‘. . . observing the great doors of the church, as they say, covered with the skins of the Danes.’ There is already a sceptical note here, perhaps because it would take a very rotund Dane, roughly the size of a cow, to cover such a door.
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Sometime around 1005–6, the dire situation in England led to a quiet revolution. Although Aethelred remained the nominal ruler, a number of the powers behind the throne lost their influence in a palace coup. The largely South Saxon clique that had previously ‘helped’ Aethelred run the country so badly was replaced by a largely Mercian group, who were to find a number of entirely new and original ways of failing. Most notable among them was Eadric
Streona
(‘the Acquisitor’), a power-hungry nobleman who soon proved to be no less corrupt than his predecessors.

Whoever really held the reins of power, the problem remained the same. Forkbeard would be back the next time he needed silver, whether or not Aethelred and his ‘advisors’ provoked him by another massacre. The Normans across the Channel were uncooperative and untrustworthy, so Aethelred’s marriage to Emma of Normandy had achieved little. The Danes, at least, were not attacking, but Aethelred had bought himself nothing but time, which he devoted to preparing a better resistance against the next assault. It is likely that his attempts to find the money to fight the Vikings were almost as extortionate as the Vikings themselves. The unit of taxation was the
hide
, an area of land thought to be large enough to support a peasant family, but more likely to support several by the early eleventh century. Every 310 hides had to come up with enough money to construct a warship, and every eight hides had to raise enough funds to provide armour for a single soldier. By these means, it was hoped, England might defeat
the Vikings by fighting fire with fire, and destroying them on the sea.

England’s new navy was ready in 1009, and was immediately mired in squabbles over who was in charge – the exasperation in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
’s reporting of events is clear to this day.
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One nobleman of the new faction, Beorhtric, made a series of accusations against the West Saxon leader Wulfnoth, who had control of another part of the fleet. Since Wulfnoth’s father had been one of the previous ‘advisors’ to Aethelred, we may assume that Beorhtric’s attack was an attempt to edge the old guard out once and for all. Whatever Beorhtric may have accused him of, Wulfnoth took great exception, absconded with much of the fleet, and conducted a series of his own raids against the south coast.

The one and only significant battle of the new English fleet was thus fought against itself, as Beorhtric’s squadron pursued the breakaway faction. Beorhtric went aground in a storm, and his ships were burned on the beach by Wulfnoth – a third of the new navy was thus destroyed before it had even seen a Viking.
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With civil war threatening to break out between Wessex and Mercia, Aethelred and his ‘advisors’ hurried to London for safety, taking the pitiful remains of their fleet with them. It was thus nowhere to be seen when the Vikings landed in Kent on 1 August 1009.

The new arrivals were followers of Forkbeard, but Forkbeard was no longer with them. He was otherwise occupied in Denmark, and had delegated the next round of extortion and pillaging to a party of lesser Vikings, led by one Thorkell the Tall. The Vikings of 1009 were not the old-style traders, wheeler-dealers, ne’er-do-wells, and criminals. Instead, they were professional soldiers, many of them Danes, with a significant proportion of Swedes. We know this from the number of rune stones in Sweden that commemorate their deaths.
There were no hoards of Muslim silver in Scandinavian graves of the eleventh century; instead, old Vikings were buried with coins that bore the face of Aethelred Unraed.
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The people of Kent bought off the raiding party for 3,000 pounds – enough to protect a county, but not its neighbours. Abandoned by Aethelred, the people of south England did not make any attempt to hold off the Vikings from their next target: London.

Dates in contemporary accounts do not match each other for the period 1009 to 1014, but we can still work out a progression of events from the contradictory sources. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
for the period sees only undifferentiated Vikings and fierce resistance in London. The Norse sagas are more forthcoming, albeit less trustworthy, and reveal that there were at least two distinct groups of Vikings in the area – possibly four. Moreover, the battles in the south of England were fought not only between English and Vikings, but between Vikings themselves.

Both before and after the death of Forkbeard, several groups of Vikings were already choosing to serve his enemies. Among them was Olaf the Stout, the eldest descendant of Harald Fairhair, who seems to have chosen this moment to rediscover his family vendetta against the Danes. Norwegians, fighting in the name of England, attacked a fortress of Danes, nominally loyal to Denmark, on the south bank of the Thames.
Heimskringla
reports fierce fighting in
‘Súthvirki’
(modern South-wark) around the site of London Bridge, a heavily fortified structure that not only crossed the river, but permitted archers, catapults and the like to threaten any passsing ships.

What happened next, doubtful though
Heimskringla
’s account may be, lives on in a nursery rhyme, and indeed in the name of a London street. Just as Vikings of an earlier age had been thwarted by fortified bridges over the rivers of France, the
Norwegians serving in the English army found their passage barred by London Bridge. In a conference between Aethelred and his generals, Olaf the Stout volunteered a plan that would make him forever famous on both sides of the North Sea. Olaf led a river assault on the bridge, using mastless longships roofed over with ‘soft wood’ – wicker and unseasoned green planks that would be more resistant to fire. Amid a constant hail of rocks, spears and other missiles, Olaf’s ships attached strong cables to the wooden pilings that supported London Bridge. The rowers then propelled their ships away from the bridge, no doubt using the current’s momentum and their own brute strength to pull down the wooden pilings. The old wooden bridge now collapsed, other forces were able to land at an undefended portion of the south bank, seize Southwark and regain control of London. The location of Olaf’s alleged adventure is marked today by the hidden London alleyway, St Olaf Stairs.

According to Olaf’s own saga, his forces continued to fight on Aethelred’s behalf, in the internecine conflict that continued to destroy many of the best men in England. At some point, Olaf’s fellow-Viking Thorkell the Tall transferred his allegiance to the English as well. Some historians see Thorkell’s sudden defection as a sign of his newfound ambition – a desire to win a kingdom for himself as his predecessors had done in Ireland, Scotland, Northumbria and elsewhere. Certainly, with England left in ruins by attacks both within and without, Thorkell does not seem to have had much trouble convincing the Anglo-Danish population of East Anglia that he would make a good ruler – he even married a daughter of Aethelred.
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What difference would it make to them if they were paying ‘tax’ to Saxons or ‘tribute’ to Vikings?

Other sources regard Thorkell’s change of heart as something more spiritual. In 1012, his army took Canterbury, with
the aid of a traitor. One of the Vikings’ prize prisoners was the archbishop Aelfheah, for whom they demanded a ransom.
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Aelfheah, however, would not allow anyone to pay it on his behalf. The 58-year-old clergyman was dragged along with the Viking host as far as Greenwich, where, in what seems to have been a banquet prank that turned deadly, he was pelted with bones, offal and heavier missiles, until his captors tired of their sport and buried an axe in his skull. Thorkell, however, attempted to stop his followers from torturing their eminent guest, and even offered to pay the ransom himself. It is claimed that this may have been the last straw for him, deciding him to abandon Viking ways.

For some years, England had been a battleground, source of revenue, and ultimately a pressure valve for Viking ambitions. For as long as England was plundered and exploited, Forkbeard’s Scandinavia remained at relative peace. But with Thorkell and Olaf the Stout defecting to Aethelred, it did not take a genius to see what could happen next. ‘Ill-Counselled’ or not, King Aethelred now had the chance to follow in his predecessors’ footsteps. Just as his great-uncle Aethelstan had done in the case of Earl Hakon the Good, he could deal with his local Viking problem by sending it back. Instead of cowering before a series of assaults from Scandinavia, Aethelred now had the opportunity to cultivate his newfound Viking friends, perhaps suggesting to Thorkell or, more sensibly, Olaf the Stout, that their true destinies lay in Norway and Denmark. Unless Forkbeard did something quickly, every Viking in England, and a fair number of English reprobates, might suddenly invade Norway with Aethelred’s kingly blessing. Whether his next move was provoked by fear or merely the culmination of a long-hatched plan, in spring 1013 Forkbeard arrived at the head of his fleet, to invade England.

The Danelaw welcomed him. The northern regions of
Northumbria, Lindsey and the Five Boroughs took one look at his fleet and proclaimed their allegiance. Forkbeard’s fleet did not begin raiding until it reached the south. Establishing a base at Gainsborough on the Trent under the command of his son Canute, Forkbeard took his army south, through Oxford, to Winchester and then west to Bath. London remained safe, defended by soldiers under Thorkell the Tall. Others, however, deserted the beleaguered Aethelred – Olaf the Stout took himself off to France, and so did Aethelred himself. Realizing that London would be unable to hold out much longer, Aethelred and his family fled for Normandy, abandoning England to Forkbeard.

In 1013 Svein Forkbeard proclaimed himself the King of England by right of conquest. Five weeks later, in what the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
boldly describes as a ‘happy event’, he dropped dead.
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