The Vikings (34 page)

I want to be led to slaughter not by slaves but rather by a man not lower than you; nor will such a one be hard to find - and let him hold my hair away from my head so that my hair will not become bloodstained.
⁴⁷

A man steps forward and twines the long fair hair around his hands. As the executioner Thorkel brings down the sword the youth jerks away and the sword slices off the assistant’s arms below the elbow. The young man coolly inquires whose hands these are in his hair. Youth, sharpness of wit, bravery and vanity are the essential qualities of the heroic Viking and the young man has shown all four in abundance. He is reprieved and invited to become a member of Earl Erik’s
hird
. And yet the realities of Viking Age war are hardly glamorized by scenes in the saga of men interrupting battle to remove items of clothing because the heat of the day has made them uncomfortable; nor of ships that return to shore to pick up fresh supplies of stones, the stone for throwing being the weapon of choice for the average foot-soldier or sailor throughout most of the Viking Age.

Such details remind us of how differently things were done in the past. The distinction is emphasized by a naming culture that has handed down to us Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, Erik Bloodaxe, Halfdan the Black and Ivar the Boneless, and scores of other personal names that dramatize the cultural gap between the Viking Age and our own times. For reasons best known to marketing people, ‘Bluetooth’ has recently been resurrected as the name of a form of wireless communication (never
blåtann
, always English ‘Bluetooth’, even in Scandinavia). If King Harald did indeed have a prominent blue or black tooth at the front of his mouth this may have been a simple case of dental decay. There is, however, a slight possibility the name might be related to the recent discoveries of twenty-four skeletons of young Viking Age males, in locations spread across Denmark and Sweden, whose teeth have horizontally filed furrows on the frontal upper part of the tooth crown. The work appears to have been done by people skilled in the practice. The furrows are usually several, though single furrows occur, and the modified teeth are at the front of the mouth. Their significance is obscure, but a suggestion put forward by the researchers is that the furrows may have been coloured to make them visible from a distance, perhaps in an erotic or a warlike signalling, in which case Harald’s would have been blue.
⁴⁸

Harald Bluetooth’s son, successor and probable usurper, Sven, bore the less enigmatic after-name Tveskegg or Forked-Beard. Within thirty years of Harald’s death Sven would become the most powerful Scandinavian king we have so far met, and we might cautiously suppose that his dream of empire derived in part at least from close observation of his own father’s manifest ability to build on the grandest scale.

11

The Danelaw II

The treaty between Alfred and Guthrum, with its reference to the distinct parties to the agreement as ‘all the English race and all the people which is in East Anglia’, starkly recognized that the invasion of the Great Heathen Army in 865 had brought about a far-reaching change in England’s demographic make-up.
¹
As we saw earlier, the boundary between the new neighbours was settled as running ‘up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to the Watling Street’.
²
The first use of the term ‘Danelaw’ to define the regions where Scandinavian influence was most intense does not occur until 130 years after the share-out of land, in two legal compilations made by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, which use the Anglo-Saxon terms ‘on Deone lage’ and ‘on Dena lage’.
³
No surviving documents relate to the separate acts of settlement of the eastern part of Mercia and of Northumbria, but a document dated to the second half of the eleventh century lists the shires comprising the Danelaw as Buckinghamshire, Middlesex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire.
⁴
For the familiar reason that the Vikings practised little self-documentation not much is known for certain of how things developed in these areas during the intervening years. The raiding and the hostile settlement had far-reaching consequences for Anglo-Saxon England. The seven kingdoms, which had been reduced to four by the time of the Lindisfarne raid and to two by the time of Alfred the Great, underwent a final rationalization under Alfred’s successors into one kingdom under the rule of one king. The creation of an English monarchy laid the foundations for a model of kingship so efficient that later Scandinavian kings and conquerors were able to take over England and run it in their own interests with a minimum of administrative adaptation. The sixty or seventy years that the process took culminated in the expulsion from York, in 954, of the city’s last Scandinavian ruler, the Norwegian Erik Bloodaxe. His eviction and subsequent death signalled the end of independent Scandinavian power in England.

It is tempting to describe this process as the re-taking of the Danelaw, as though it involved a single and coherent campaign aimed at wresting back territories wrongly taken from ‘us’ by ‘them’. The moral basis for such an attitude is what Norwegians call
hevd
, a right established not in law but in possession and usage over time. This is the right Alcuin was unconsciously invoking in his letter to Ethelred, king of Northumbria, after the Lindisfarne attack, that it was ‘nearly three hundred and fifty years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such a terror appeared in Britain as we have suffered from a pagan race’. In this he was overlooking the fact that the Vikings were simply doing to him what ‘we and our fathers’ had done to the Britons 350 years earlier.
Hevd
led Alcuin to consider the Angles and the Saxons the rightful owners of England, but
hevd
is a relative concept. The irony of Alcuin’s position is that the genetic survey carried out for the BBC by the team from UCL in 2000 found it impossible to distinguish between the DNA of the fifth-century Saxon invaders and ninth-century Vikings. The notion of a persisting racial identity is one of history’s most obstinate and mischievous myths. It was natural, however, that the English should have seen the Scandinavian settlers in the east of the country as usurpers and thieves from whom it was right and proper to attempt to recover stolen property. It was just as natural for the Scandinavian settlers to nourish dreams of appropriating an even larger share of the new country, and to collude with and harbour those of their own cultures and countries when one or another leader arrived with an army that seemed capable of realizing these dreams. Call it what we will, tribal, racial or cultural solidarity set the political agenda for the unfolding of events over the next 100 years.

The campaign to repossess the occupied lands got off to an inauspicious start. Ethelred I, the last of Alfred’s three brothers to hold the throne of Wessex before him, left an infant son Aethelwold at his death. Grown to manhood, Aethelwold rose and contested the succession of Alfred’s son Edward in 899. Driven out by Edward, he persuaded the Viking Northumbrians of York to accept him as their leader. Shortly afterwards, with the help of East Anglian Danes, he mounted a military challenge to Edward. It failed, and he met his death on the battlefield at Holme. The last East Anglian king whose name we know, Eohric, fell with him. That the direct threat to Wessex from Danish East Anglia should have been so rapidly neutralized lends credibility to Dudo’s account in his Norman history of the trouble Guthrum had with his disobedient and rebellious English subjects, whom he was able to subdue only with the help of Rollo. East Anglia was, in any case, always going to be the most difficult part of Danish-occupied territory for the invaders to hold on to. Alfred’s treaty with Guthrum was a personal agreement between two leaders that established the dividing line between their territories. It made no claim to regulate the terms of the Scandinavian settlements in Northumbria and Mercia. That Mercia in the midlands should have been the next to fall, after a longer resistance, and York in the far north after one even longer, is a direct reflection of the relative distances of the Danish kingdoms from Wessex.

We saw earlier how the old rivalry between Wessex and Mercia had fallen away as their leaders made common cause against the invaders, and how Alfred’s marriage to a Mercian princess, and the marriage of his daughter Ethelfled to Ethelred, the leader of English-occupied Mercia, strengthened the dynastic bonds between the two kingdoms. Throughout the early years of his campaigning, Edward continued to enjoy the support of Ethelred and his Mercians. The inspiration to continue Alfred’s policy of creating fortified
burhs
at strategically important points across the territory under English control came from that quarter. In the west, Mercia’s vulnerability to raiders using the Bristol Channel, and the open invitation to Irish-based Viking fleets in the north-west of the British isles to penetrate inland via the Dee and the Mersey, had to be urgently addressed. Struggles for power among the invaders themselves remained concentrated on Dublin. The brief respite that followed the intervention of the king of Lochlain in 853 ended with the death of his successor in 873. Three turbulent decades followed, at the end of which the Vikings were driven out of Dublin by Caerball, leader of the Leinster Irish. This expulsion has been associated with the Cuerdale hoard, found in May 1840 by workmen repairing the embankment on the south side of the river Ribble at Cuerdale, near Preston. Until dwarfed by the discovery of the Spillings hoard on Gotland in 1999, it remained the largest trove of Viking silver ever unearthed. Among the numerous items in the hoard were bossed penanular brooches and thistle brooches, stamped arm-rings and neck-rings, rings from east of the Baltic, Slavic beads, Carolingian and Pictish items, a coin from Constantinople, a handful of Kufic dirhams, a large number of coins from Anglo-Saxon mints and some 5,000 coins minted within the Danelaw.
⁵
The dates on the coins give a
terminus ante quem
of around 905, which accords nicely with the expulsion from Dublin. After a failed attempt to settle in Anglesey, an army of expelled Norwegians under Ingamund landed in the Wirral peninsula, between the Dee and the Mersey, and demanded to be allowed to stay. Ethelred’s health had failed by this time and his role in the negotiations was taken by Ethelfled. She gave her permission. Aware, however, of the attractions of wealthy Chester, she had the city walls repaired in 907, and established a garrison there that could control the peninsula. The Wirral, and those other parts of north-west England later occupied by Norwegians, never formed part of the physical entity of ‘the Danelaw’; and perhaps it was for this very reason they thrived in their historically rather neglected colony. Over 600 place-names of Scandinavian origin on the Ordinance Survey maps of the Wirral area amply demonstrate the size and permanence of their settlement.
⁶
The DNA traces tell the same story: in a study of the Y-chromosome of 150 Liverpool men carried out by a team from the University of Nottingham in 2007, findings showed that 50 per cent were likely to have been of Norwegian descent.
⁷

In 906 the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
records a peace agreement entered into ‘from necessity’ between Edward and the East Angles and Northumbrians, but it was a routinely uneasy peace, and following a number of skirmishes the Northumbrian Danes swarmed into English Mercia in 910. The combined levies of Wessex and Mercia under Edward caught up with them as they were making their way back to their own territory and inflicted a heavy defeat on them at Tettenhall in Staffordshire. The
Chronicle
proudly records the names of twelve Viking leaders who fell in the battle, a setback which greatly reduced Northumbria’s power to challenge Wessex for the dominance of England, and led to a concentration of the kingdom within the city of York.

Following her husband Ethelred’s death in 911, Ethelfled raised no protest when Edward annexed Oxford and London, which were clearly easier for Wessex to defend than Mercia; and her action in fostering Edward’s son Athelstan further strengthened the regional and dynastic ties. She continued the remarkably successful policy of creating
burhs
along the strategic routes that led into Mercia from the west, fortifying Bridgnorth in 912 to control the middle reaches of the Severn; Stafford and Tamworth along Watling Street the following year; Warwick, to guard the use of the Fosse Way, possibly in response to a raid in 914 by Vikings based in Brittany who landed in South Wales; and Runcorn in the Mersey estuary.
⁸
In the east she drove the Danes from Derby in 917, after fierce fighting in which four of her personal favourites were killed inside the walls of the town.

Edward, meanwhile, battled his way up the east coast against Danish armies whose forces were at times supported by visiting Viking fleets. The fortification and colonization of Hertford in 911 protected London from hostile approaches along the River Lea, and control of Essex came with the building of garrisons at Maldon, Witham and Colchester. Buckingham and Bedford were strengthened to protect the Lower Ouse and, in connecting the defences of the Ouse with those of the Dee and the Mersey,
burhs
created at Towcester, Nottingham and Bakewell brought to completion what was clearly a logically formulated plan to make the hostile penetration of the interior of England by river a fraught and dangerous enterprise for any ambitious Viking. In all, twenty-eight of these fortifications were built in the years between 910 and 921.

The
Chronicle
gives vivid detail of the fighting in the crucial year of 917, with Viking armies from Northampton being frustrated in their attempts to take Towcester and an East Anglian army being repelled with heavy loss of life by the men of Bedford.
⁹
The English were greatly encouraged by their successes, and a large army of men from Kent, Surrey and Essex seized Colchester after another fierce battle. By the close of the year Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire were under Edward’s control, as well as the whole of East Anglia. Ethelfled’s forces took Leicester in 918, and in June of that year she received the submission of the Danes of York.
¹⁰
The Viking kingship there was as little settled as East Anglia. By the following year the leadership had changed again, reverting to another reputed grandson of Ivar the Boneless, Ragnald, who seems to have held it once before, in 911, briefly but long enough to strike his own coins. This was probably the same chieftain who fought a sea-battle off the Isle of Man in 914 and, as a king of the
Dubhgall
or ‘black foreigners’, fought the Irish in the area around Waterford in 917. After ravaging in Ireland and Scotland he faced an alliance of English and Scots forces at Corbridge, and in 919 threatened and then took York. His second, brief reign ended with his death in 921, at which he was succeeded by Sihtric, another of Ivar’s grandsons.