The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Although the Frisian merchants obviously worked together (as the use of convoys suggests), there is no hard evidence for the existence of trading companies; individual merchants apparently traded on their own account. It has been suggested that their palisaded houses expressed their strong individualism: at Dorestad, ‘the houses by the Rhine were packed closely but each made itself into an island’, so that they possessed ‘all the connection and the isolation of the terpen’.44 At any rate, the fact that they stored their goods in their own houses rather than using communal stores indicates that they had a strong sense of private property. On the other hand, they may have been pioneers in the creation of guilds of merchants, which formed the basis for the famous urban guilds that flourished in Bruges, Ghent and other Flemish cities.45 Whether or not that degree of continuity existed, the most important point about the Frisian merchants is that they did lay the foundations for the great trading network of medieval Flanders; they operated from towns that lay well within the borders of what later became the county of Flanders, and they were open to new opportunities. Their towns absorbed immigrants from Frankish lands, from England and in due course from Scandinavia; and they set up their own trading stations far from Frisia, in places such as Kaupang, in the Oslo fjord, and Birka, beyond Stockholm, about which more will be said later. They were open to the excellent new opportunities that arose on the other side of Jutland, in the Baltic, at the start of the ninth century, around the same time that Viking marauders began to exploit the wealth of the Frisian and Anglo-Saxon trading world. By the tenth century the term ‘Frisian’ had become a generic word for merchants, just as in Merovingian Gaul the terms ‘Syrian’ and even ‘Jew’ had conveyed the same idea. So, although the Frisians originated among their terpen, the world they explored and the experiences they underwent far from home generated a cosmopolitan identity that enabled them to act as intermediaries between the peoples living by the shores of the North Sea.

  This chapter has set alongside one another the peaceful traders of eighth-century Frisia and the aggressive invaders who set out from Jutland and northern Germany, transforming large parts of Roman Britannia into Anglo-Saxon England. But the line between pirates and honest merchants has always been fuzzy; with the irruption of a new wave of Scandinavian raiders into the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean the distinction between raiders and traders becomes even more difficult to sustain. In some respects, as will be seen in the next chapter, the Vikings represented more of the same; but in other respects – the scale of their assaults and the development of new shipping technology – the Viking world differed dramatically from what had come before.

  19

  ‘This iron-studded Dragon’1

  I

  Changes in ship design elevated the level of threat posed by the Scandinavian raiders to a new level. This can be seen thanks to the remarkable excavations in Norway and Denmark that have brought to light both sunken and buried ships, while memorial stones from the Swedish island of Gotland carry images of ships that are rich in information about the parts that do not survive – sails and rigging. Then there is archaeological evidence for the towns and trading networks of the Scandinavians, extending far from their homeland, which helps answer the question whether these attacks had economic motives.2

  The other evidence that has attracted continuous attention comes from the written texts that describe the first arrival of the ‘Danes’ on the shores of England, and the horror of monks and others at the first appearance of ‘heathens’ and ‘Danes’, a generic term that also included raiders from ‘the Northern Road’, the meaning of the name ‘Norway’, and occasionally from Sweden as well. These accounts of murder and theft are interspersed among accounts of equally bloody conflicts among the competing kings of Anglo-Saxon England, so that the main source of information, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which in any case survives in several versions, leaves the reader puzzled as to how England could have become the prosperous and well-ordered state that it eventually did become under Anglo-Saxon rule: in 878, we are told, a ‘great part of the inhabitants’ of Wessex fled across the sea, while the English king, Alfred, took refuge in the woods and marshes.3 England’s prosperity was one of its attractions, as far as the Vikings were concerned. They perhaps realized that they should not kill the goose that laid the golden egg, though some accounts of Viking devastation give the impression that great swathes of territory were ‘harried’ to the point of ruin.

  The Viking raids on England began, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in 789, with a small Norwegian, or possibly Danish, raid on Portland in Dorset: ‘these were the first ships of the Danes to come to England.’4 But terror struck in 793, when, amid great portents (‘fiery dragons were seen flying in the air’) and severe famine, heathens came and laid waste the monastery at Lindisfarne on the coast of Northumbria, the pride of the Northumbrian Church. The next year the monks of Jarrow were attacked, though the chronicler recorded with satisfaction that some of the Danish ships were wrecked in stormy weather and that a good many Danes were drowned or killed.5 The Viking raids became intense by the 830s, and a striking feature was their range: the Isle of Sheppey, off Kent, was a target in 835, and a group of Vikings wintered there in 855; but they also appeared close to Plymouth, where the Danes entered into an alliance with the Cornish Britons, and where King Egbert of Wessex scored a victory in 838; and this victory was all the sweeter as the year before Egbert had been defeated by a Danish warband that had arrived off Somerset aboard thirty-five, or possibly twenty-five, ships.6 How big these warbands were has been a topic of controversy. The authors of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle referred several times to the mycel hæþen here, ‘the great heathen host’, that arrived in 865, although massive Danish fleets were recorded earlier too, as in 851, when 350 Viking ships penetrated the Thames, ravaging London and then marching inland, where they were soundly defeated. This is exactly ten times as many ships as were recorded in 843, so either the scale of the attacks had changed dramatically, or the monks who wrote about the attacks became more and more prone to exaggeration.7 The Vikings had learned what rich pickings were to be found in England, as also along the northern coasts of the Frankish Empire, and their ambitions began to expand in new directions: in Kent the Vikings were promised money in the hope that they would remain peaceful, but this was to underestimate the lure of war booty, and they devastated eastern Kent nonetheless.8

  Danish ambitions became ever greater, as groups of Scandinavian settlers arrived, and as plans evolved for the conquest of parts of England. The individual raids of the early ninth century, where a group of like-minded warriors set out in search of booty and adventure under a war-leader, often in just a few ships, gave way to much larger expeditions led by kings and other great lords, although as early as 810 the Danish king, Godfred, invaded Frisia, nearby, with 200 ships and carried off 200 pounds of silver as tribute from one of the most prosperous provinces of Charlemagne’s great empire. No doubt the idea of earning a pound of silver for each ship had a certain attraction, quite apart from helping to cover the cost of putting together such a large fleet. This, however, has to be understood from the perspective of regional politics, as a conflict between neighbours. Still, it provides evidence that Danish kings could mobilize large fleets if they chose to do so; further away, in Norway, royal control was yet to be imposed, and individual enterprises were the norm.9 A Scandinavian kingdom was established at Jorvik, or York, while King Alfred, later in the ninth century, agreed to divide much of England between himself and the Viking ruler Guðrum, who, however, did accept baptism. On the English side, there was some awareness that preventive action at sea would be more effective than attempts to overwhelm the mycel here on land, and Alfred’s newly formed fleet managed to defeat a small Danish squadron in 882; one result was that the ‘great host’ was deflected away from Alfred’s realms and travelled instead up the River Scheldt, to make a nuisance of itself in northern France and Flanders.10 So, by 896, King Alfred built up his naval d
efences, and in some accounts of British naval history this was the moment when the English navy was founded: the king

  ordered warships to be built to meet the Danish ships: they were almost twice as long as the others, some had sixty oars, some had more; they were both swifter, steadier, and with more freeboard than the others; they were built neither after the Frisian design nor after the Danish, but as it seemed to himself that they could be most serviceable.11

  Exactly what these ships looked like remains a mystery, as we are only told what they did not look like, although their size sounds impressive. Thereafter, well into the reign of King Athelstan, an English navy was able to defend the shores of the Anglo-Saxon realm. However, one difficulty was that raids did not simply start in Scandinavia.12 Even after 911, when the Frankish ruler conceded control of what would henceforth become Normandy to the Northmen from whom it took its name, sea raiders arrived in southern England from northern France, sailing up the River Severn; they also raided the Welsh coast, for the Celtic lands, notably Ireland, were constant targets of Viking attacks and, in the case of the area around Dublin, long-term settlement.13

  A detailed chronicle of Viking raids on England would show how, even as the Christianization of Scandinavia was under way, the raids did not cease; the arrival of Svein Forkbeard and his son Cnut in England early in the eleventh century, followed by the submission of England to these rulers and by the creation under Cnut of an empire that embraced England, Denmark and Norway, did not mean the end of Scandinavian raids.14 In 1066 the Norwegian king, Harald Hardraða (‘hard ruler’), brought the claimant to the English throne, Tostig, across the sea to northern England, where both were defeated and killed by Tostig’s half-brother king, Harold Godwinsson, just as Duke William of Normandy (himself of Scandinavian descent) launched his own combined assault on southern England.15 Viking raids only gradually petered out, for when conquest was not the motive there was always the lure of being paid off with handsome bribes. Like all forms of blackmail, a gift of what came to be known as Danegeld simply acted as an invitation to return later and to demand more.

  So far, then, a bare chronicle of some of the most vicious Viking raids tells a story of murder, theft and eventual partial conquest. But this does nothing to explain who the raiders were and why the attacks were launched in the first place. Even the word ‘Viking’ has been the subject of debate. The most reasonable explanation is that it means ‘men of the vik’, that is, the inlets from which raids were launched, whether the majestic steep-sided fjords of Norway or the low-lying creeks of Denmark and southern Sweden. The term víkingr was used in Scandinavia to mean a pirate; these people went í víking, that is, raiding across the sea, and were celebrated for doing so on the runestones that commemorated their life.16 This term has been applied rather too widely, so that even the Scandinavian settlements in late medieval Greenland (of which more later) are often presented as ‘Viking’, a term best applied instead to the raiders who have been described in this chapter. Within the Baltic, the Swedish Vikings who raided the southern coasts and sent their ships down the river systems of eastern Europe, to reach Mikelgarð, ‘the Great City’ (Constantinople), are often described as Varangians, another term of uncertain origin, derived from the Greek word Varangoi, which was applied particularly to the Scandinavian and also Anglo-Saxon mercenaries who were greatly valued by the Byzantine army. Raiding within the Baltic did not cease in the late eleventh century, and later Swedish wars of conquest along the shores of what are now the Baltic states had much in common with the Varangian raids of earlier centuries, even if a strong element of Christian mission sometimes intruded.17

  It is already obvious that the raids did not have a single cause, and that attempts to ascribe them to overpopulation or political strife within Scandinavia (leading to an exodus of dissenters) may fit some of the evidence, but fail to account for the great variety of Viking attacks: lightning strikes from the sea, aiming at wealthy monasteries where the raiders could seize great treasures in gold and silver; attempts at political conquest; migrations in which women as well as men crossed the sea (as in the case of Iceland and the lands beyond); to which should be added peaceful trading expeditions in the sort of ship that will be described shortly.18 The colonization of Iceland was apparently launched after King Harald Fairhair gained control of large swathes of Norway in the late ninth century and demanded the payment of new taxes, so that discontented Norsemen who had lived free from royal interference set off to create their own new commonwealth in a virtually empty land across the ocean.19 But it is impossible to ignore one very distinctive feature of Viking society (using the term to mean the select group of those who went raiding). Far from possessing a sense that stealing treasure and murdering one’s victims was disgraceful, the Vikings gloried in their achievements. They expounded a cult of the violent hero:

  Cattle die, and kinsmen die,

  And so one dies one’s self;

  But a noble name will never die,

  If good renown one gets.20

  A good name was to be won through heroic deeds, and death in battle brought the glory of fame, which was more valued than life itself.

  The greatest glory was to be found through winning a reputation not just as a great war leader but as a generous host. Indeed, it was impossible to become a generous host without raiding. Arriving back at home laden with booty and distributing prizes to one’s followers marked the high point in the Viking year. The Orkney Saga describes an eleventh-century Viking named Svein Asleifarson who used to take Hakon, whose father was earl of Orkney, on raids ‘as soon as he was strong enough to travel with grown men … doing all in his power to build up Hakon’s reputation’. Svein would spend each winter in Orkney, ‘where he entertained some eighty men at his own expense’. After a winter of hard drinking and carousing, and a spring spent sowing the soil, he would go off raiding, once in late spring and again in the autumn, reaching the Hebrides, the Isle of Man and Ireland. As well as raiding on land, Svein and his men would attack merchant ships, such as two English vessels they found crossing the Irish Sea; these ships carried a rich cargo of fine cloths, which the Vikings seized, hoisting some brightly coloured pieces of sailcloth as a visible boast of their success.21 Piracy and plunder sustained an aristocratic lifestyle, and one’s greatness was measured by one’s generosity as well as by deeds in war, but that generosity could only be funded through war.

  The Vikings shared their culture of warfare and feasting with neighbours around the North Sea, including the Anglo-Saxons and the Celtic peoples of Scotland and Ireland, with whom they often intermarried. Scandinavians based in such places as the Orkney Islands were as content to plunder Norway as they were willing to raid the Scottish isles or Ireland. Scandinavian Vikings shared a language (already fragmented into mutually comprehensible dialects), though they could probably make sense of Anglo-Saxon speech as well. The major distinction between Vikings and their neighbours was not so much ethnic origin or the culture of feasting and warfare; it was their paganism – for their victims, the most important feature of the raiders who attacked Lindisfarne in 793, and Irish monasteries in later decades, was not that they came from Scandinavia, but that they were heathens, lacking all respect for Christian holy places and for the accumulated treasures of the Anglo-Saxon and the Irish Church.22 Yet the Viking raids continued even in the eleventh century, when the Scandinavian kings had adopted Christianity (which is not to say that all their subjects had abandoned paganism). The Orkney Saga saw no contradiction between belief in Christ and a life of raiding; indeed, the twelfth-century earl of Orkney, Rognvald, went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, travelling out by sea, and returning home by way of Rome. The culture of raiding was very deeply ingrained.

  II

  One question is whether larger changes in economic relationships across Europe and western Asia stimulated the Vikings into action. So long as the routes across the Baltic and down the river systems were open, the Varangians managed to make contact with prosper
ous, urbanized societies in the Steppes, and conveyed large quantities of silver northwards, either in the form of coin or as silver bullion (including hack silver, silver objects cut into pieces and valued by weight); Varangian merchants reached as far as the shores of the Caspian Sea, while several widely read Arab writers noted their peculiar ways, including boat burials and the custom of sacrificing a slave girl at the funeral of her master, after her master’s companions had one by one taken advantage of her.23 More than 100,000 Islamic coins have been unearthed in Scandinavia, and the number of finds is still growing.24 The Caspian gave access to northern Iran, with its silver mines, and beyond that to the Abbasid empire in Iraq.

  All this coincided with the emergence of the first towns in Scandinavia. Sweden’s oldest town was Birka, which lay on a small island in Lake Mälaren, the large island-studded lake that extends westwards from present-day Stockholm; in this period, many of its islands had not risen out of the sea or were much smaller (Birka’s own island was half its present size), while the lake consisted of saltwater and was in effect an extension of the Baltic Sea. Across the many thousands of islands of the Stockholm archipelago small settlements came into being that were linked to one another by boat traffic, and every community had its little fleet of boats, from small fishing vessels to larger ships suitable for Viking raids or longer-distance trade. All this meant that Birka was quite easily accessible from the open sea by boat. The town benefited from the protection of the king of central Sweden, who maintained a manor house just across the water on the larger island of Hovgården. Without royal protection, who would ensure the safe passage of Birka’s boats through a dense network of islands, stretching far beyond the coast of Sweden, each of which might provide a base for Viking pirates? On the other hand, if one could make the journey across the Baltic in safety, the riches that were now to hand were the stuff of fable: furs from Russia and the silver of the Orient, accessible in such places at Staraya Ladoga only a little distance down the rivers that led towards the principality of Kiev, also known as Rus. By the tenth century, Birka was home to about a thousand people, boat-builders, artisans, sailors and merchants, who lived in sturdy wooden houses on little plots of land. A similar story can be told of the nameless trading centre not far from modern Oslo that looked out towards the North Sea; known to archaeologists by the convenience name of Kaupang (‘trade centre’), it was the first town to emerge in Norway.25