The Vikings (38 page)

Opinion varies as to how long Norse survived as a spoken language in those areas of the British Isles in which Scandinavian speakers settled. In Normandy, as in Kiev, the native tongues were linguistically so remote from Old Norse that a quick adoption of the native languages was a necessity of life. It seems, however, that there were sufficient similarities between North Germanic Old Norse and West Germanic Anglo-Saxon for them to be mutually comprehensible with a little effort and good-will, facilitating the import and export of words as convenience, density of linguistic population, and fashion dictated, and encouraging a much longer survival of Old Norse in the Danelaw than in Kiev or Normandy. The inscription on a stone, found in 1902 at a farmhouse in Pennington in Cumbria, mixes Old Norse and English runes. The presence of Norman decorative features on the base of the stone dates it to the twelfth century and shows that Norse was, if not still spoken, at least not forgotten in the area. Owing to the thoroughgoing nature of the Norwegian colonization of Shetland and the Orkneys a local form of Old Norse known as Norn may have been spoken into the eighteenth century, before finally giving way to Scots.

Some of the monumental art associated with the Scandinavian invaders and settlers of England and the islands of Britain shows a similar combination of Irish or Anglo-Saxon sources with imported Scandinavian styles. A well-known example is the stone cross found at Middleton, in Yorkshire, which depicts in its lower panel a warrior in a peaked helmet with his spear, axe, sword, shield and knife. Above the panel is the cross, and on the other side a Scandinavian creature in the Jelling style, which we have encountered before on Harald Bluetooth’s great stone. The sculptor of the great stone cross found at Gosforth in Cumbria used Christian elements inspired by the high crosses of the Irish monasteries, in combination with Scandinavian mythological scenes and ornamentations in the ring-chain Borre style, so named after a characteristic example of the style on a metal fitting found at Borre, in the Norwegian Vestfold. On its eastern face is a representation of Christ bleeding on the cross; close by is a woman holding out a drinking horn, a representation of a Valkyrie, familiar from Gotland picture-stones that depict the welcoming of the dead hero into Odin’s Valhalla; a scene on the south face appears to show Odin and Mimir; another showing two figures fishing from a boat may illustrate the story of Thor’s encounter with the Midgard serpent. The 4.5-metre-high monument is evidently a reproduction in stone of a cross made in wood. In another of its many syncretic moments it symbolizes both Yggdrasil, the tree of life of northern Heathendom, and the cross of Christianity. Some scholars now believe that, far from being a spontaneous effect, this mingling of styles in monumental form was a technique deliberately employed by Scandinavian chieftains, in particular those from Norway, as a way of re-creating in the minds of followers in the new country visible and traditionally accepted symbols of power familiar to them from ‘the old country’, in circumstances where, by the very fact of recent settlement, no such physical manifestations of past landed power existed.
⁵³
The incorporation of Heathen imagery into the monuments was, in this perspective, both a reassurance and an affirmation of continuity within change.

 

Although the areas of England occupied by the Great Army and its descendants never formed a coherent political unit corresponding to Wessex and Mercia, for the medieval annalists and historians who coined the term ‘Danelaw’ it was the insistence of the invader-settlers on importing their own law and administration into the areas in which they settled that became the defining characteristic of the new model of England that arose as a result of the Viking invasions.
⁵⁴
One of the more striking results of this insistence was that Old Norse
lagu
- was presently adopted into English as ‘law’, replacing Anglo-Saxon
æ
. The ‘by-’ element in modern English compounds relating to local government, such as ‘by(e)-laws’ and ‘by(e)-elections’, derives similarly from the Old Norse word meaning ‘town’ or ‘settlement’. The invader-settlers brought the tradition of the
thing
meeting with them, familiar to Norwegians from the Eyrathing in Trondheim, the Gulathing in western Norway, and the Borgarthing from the Sarpsborg region to the south of Oslo, and to Danes from the
thing
held at Viborg. The Tynwald on the Isle of Man, which still meets annually on 5 July, is etymologically the same word as
thingvellir
, where the Icelandic
althing
met from the earliest days of the Free State until 1798. Ingimund and his group of exiled Norwegians established a
thing
at what is now Thingwall in the centre of their settlement on the Wirral peninsula.
⁵⁵
Thingwall is very likely the place where Ingimund, dissatisfied with the offer of land made to them by Ethelfled, stood and exhorted his men to join him in an attack on Chester - ‘Let us beseech and implore them first. And if we do not get them willingly in this way, let us contest them by force.’
⁵⁶
The settlers divided Yorkshire into separate administrative units which became known as Ridings, a noun derived from Old Norse
thri
ð
jungr
, meaning ‘the third part’. These Yorkshire Ridings were later divided into areas called
wapentakes
, derived from the word
vápnatak
, meaning ‘weapon-taking’. In the Scandinavian homelands the word referred to the raising of weapons as a gesture of assent to a decision or verdict reached at a
thing
meeting; in England the meaning was extended to cover both the actual assembly itself, and the area represented by the assembly.
⁵⁷
From King Ethelred’s laws (III), issued at Wantage in 997, it is apparent that the
wapentake
was the basic unit of local administration for the areas that fell under the group of districts known as the Five Boroughs, namely Derby, Stamford, Lincoln, Nottingham and Leicester, corresponding to the
hundred
in the rest of England.
⁵⁸
Domesday Book of 1086 used the terms indiscriminately, suggesting that by that time there was no real difference, and that the form chosen was largely a matter of the majority voice of the local population.
⁵⁹
The North, West and East Ridings of Yorkshire survived as local government districts of the county until well into the twentieth century.

There is not enough surviving evidence to enable us to judge whether parallel law codes were necessary because the societies involved cultivated fundamentally different ethical systems, or whether they were largely a symbolic statement of separate cultural identity by the Scandinavians. There is no doubt that certain legal matters and crimes were treated differently under the distinct law codes. A legal stipulation from the time of Edward the Elder on the subject of fugitives allowed for their separate treatment in Wessex, and in ‘the eastern or northern kingdoms’. In Wessex, the laws of Wessex were to apply; in the Danelaw areas, the issue was to be settled ‘in accordance with the provisions of the treaties’.
⁶⁰
Evidence of a separate legal culture is still found in the law code issued at Wihtbordesstan by King Edgar in 963. Clause 2.1 strikes a note of ambiguity as the king stipulates that: ‘It is my will that secular rights be in force among the Danes according to as good laws as they can best decide on. Among the English, however, that is to be in force which I and my councillors have added to the decrees of my ancestors, for the benefit of all the nation’:
⁶¹
his ‘will’ in the matter appears only to affirm that, as far as the Danes are concerned, it is an irrelevance. Other clauses in the same law code hint at a change in attitude in which the distinct nature of the Danelaw as an area is still recognized, but only up to a point. Edgar presents himself as showing largesse towards the settlers, allowing them to live by laws familiar to them from their homelands, as a reward for their loyalty, ‘which you have always shown me’. Yet he also announces a measure concerning stolen property which is to be ‘common to all the nation, whether Englishmen, Danes or Britons, in every province of my dominion’.
⁶²
By the end of the tenth century and the reign of Ethelred, the position seems to have been that, while differences of procedure were acceptable, different standards of justice were not.
⁶³

As we saw earlier, the Wessex dynasty’s policy of building fortified
burhs
across the length and breadth of England as landmarks in the gradual repossession of formerly Viking territories led to the growth of towns and cities in England during the Viking Age. The Vikings’ fortification and expansion of the five midland towns of Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln and Stamford in the attempt to counter the Anglo-Saxon retaliation was likewise a contributory factor in the growth of these towns. But it was the rapid expansion of the city of York, essentially the capital of Viking-occupied territories in the east of England, that was the major contribution of the Vikings to the development of urban life in England. Originally fortified by the Romans to control the Celtic tribes in the region, the settlement was abandoned after almost four centuries of occupation. Following a period of neglect, it was taken over by the Anglo-Saxons. As Eoferwic, it became the capital of the northern kingdom of Deira. The pattern of streets laid down by the Romans was restored and the walls fortified. With the coming of Christianity to the region the town enjoyed a widespread prestige and prosperity which survived its incorporation in the seventh century into the kingdom of Northumbria. It was this prosperity that attracted Viking raiders to York in the first place. From the time of the arrival on the east coast of the Great Heathen Army in 865, Eoferwic was the scene of almost constant fighting between invaders and natives. Once they had triumphed, the Vikings showed an accommodation to the Church that allowed the archbishopric of York to carry on as usual. Indeed, Wulfstan of York was said to have preferred Scandinavian to West Saxon masters and the rule of Eric Bloodaxe, after his acceptance as king of York in 948, to the rule of Edred.
⁶⁴

With settlement came the freedom to indulge commercial instincts. The act of capture and the subsequent infighting had wiped out most traces of previous settlements. If they wished to go on living there, the Vikings had no choice but to reconstruct what they had destroyed. Streets and houses were rebuilt, workshops opened. Through a century of uncertainty and fighting the city prospered and grew. Pressure of space within the narrow streets led, in time, to the replacement of the earlier wattle-and-daub buildings with two-storey structures in timber. According to Byrhtferth of Ramsey, by the year 1000 it had a population of 30,000. Even the more sober modern estimates of 8,000 to 10,000 based on Domesday Book still suggest a city that was large by contemporary European standards.
⁶⁵
This rapidly swelling population left behind plentiful archaeological documentation of its thriving social and commercial life, and of the activities of craftsmen and women working there in textiles, metal, leather, wood, glass and bone. Byrhtferth tells us that merchants came to York ‘from all over the place’. A coin minted in Samarkand in the early tenth century has been found there, as has a cowrie shell stemming from either the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden. The city’s bread was made from flour ground by lava millstones imported from the Rhineland, its wine traded from Germany, its silk from Constantinople. Such remarkable social and commercial enterprise has even led to an identification of Viking and late Anglo-Saxon York as the site of the first true manifestation in England of an urban middle class that is more conventionally located to the London of some six or seven hundred years later.
⁶⁶
Here the transition from raiders to traders ran its full course.

12

When Allah met Odin

At about the same time as Harald Bluetooth was erecting his great monument to Viking Christianity at Jelling, and the Wessex dynasty was completing the first unification of England with the expulsion of Harald’s brother-in-law Erik Bloodaxe from York, seafaring Vikings of the old-fashioned sort (Erik perhaps among them) were making, after an interval of almost a century, a second series of violent investigations of the territory and peoples of al-Andalus (Muslim Spain and Portugal), and the northern and western shores of Africa.

Muslim civilization had grown dramatically since the founding of the religion in Mecca in about 610 and Mohammed’s emigration to Medina in 622. The territorial and cultural expansion eastward and westward during the period of the Umayyad caliphs in the eighth century created an empire that extended from the borders of China to the Atlantic Ocean, from the Sahara to the Caspian Sea, from India to al-Andalus. With the rise to power of the Abbasid caliphs in the middle of the eighth century, the capital of the Islamic empire moved east, from Damascus to Baghdad. A dramatic rise in interest in Hellenistic and Persian culture followed, and the writing of local, Arab-nationalist literature that had characterized the Umayyad period was replaced by a universal literature. Much of it was scientific. As well as mathematics and cosmography, it reflected a vivid interest in the history and geography of the many peoples with whom the expansion of the seventh and eighth centuries had brought the Arabs into contact. The postal service of the Islamic empire assumed an important role in this trend, facilitating communication and knowledge of the routes and roads that bound the far-flung and disparate parts of the vast empire together; its head of staff was a leading political figure who was also chief of the security service.
¹
Books written initially for the purpose of describing the routes connecting the empire presently evolved into textbooks that nurtured an abstract interest in the history and geography of the peoples of the world, and most of what we know of the encounters between Vikings and Arabs in the territories bordering on the east and west of the Muslim empire is derived from books written in this spirit of enlightenment.