Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  In the text and Notes, ‘ON’ denotes Old Norse, ‘OE’ Old English and ‘ModE’ Modern English.

  1

  Outsiders from Across the Water

  When the watchman on the wall, the Shieldings’ lookout

  whose job it was to guard the sea-cliffs,

  saw shields glittering on the gangplank

  and battle-equipment being unloaded

  he had to find out who and what they were. So he rode to the shore,

  this horseman of Hrothgar’s, and challenged them

  in formal terms, flourishing his spear.

  Beowulf1

  In the days of King Beorhtric of Wessex (786–802), ‘there came for the first time three ships of Northmen from Hordaland’,2 and ‘they landed in the island which is called Portland’.3 ‘[T]he king’s reeve, who was then in the town called Dorchester, leapt on his horse, sped to the harbour with a few men (for he thought they were merchants rather than marauders), and admonishing them [the Northmen] in an authoritative manner, gave orders that they should be driven to the royal town. And he and his companions were killed by them on the spot. The name of the reeve was Beaduheard.’4

  ‘Those were the first ships of Danish men which came to the land of the English.’5

  Looking south from the summit of the barrow, the land feels like it is slipping away, yielding itself to the ineffable splendour of the ocean. Away in the distance the dark bulk of Portland languishes, a last defiant redoubt set in the glittering sea. The world is wide here, the coast of England laid out in broad wings to east and west; on a bright clear day – the ozone hollowing out the sinuses – you feel weightless, as if you could step from the top of that mound and be lifted into the firmament, soar into that white light obliterating the edges of land, sea and sky, tumbling in the breeze.

  The mound is known, for reasons now lost, as Culliford Tree. It is a tumulus, a Bronze Age burial mound – one of five running east to west – that had stood on the Dorset chalk for more than 2,000 years before it received a name in the English tongue. Like breakwaters in the surf, the mounds and their ancient dead have endured the battering tides of time, forcing history to shape itself around them. At some point after it was named, the barrow became the meeting place of Culliford Tree Hundred, the administrative district of which Portland formed part at the time of the Domesday Survey in 1086. It had probably served this purpose for hundreds of years prior to William the Conqueror’s great national audit and by the end of the eighth century it was almost certainly a significant regional meeting place. It was in this place and in others like it that royal officials enacted the king’s will and delivered his justice, adjudicating disputes and pronouncing verdicts which could include fines, mutilation and death. From the summit of the barrow, the landscape reveals itself to the watcher – a place from which the land could be claimed, authority enacted in the act of seeing.

  On that day at the end of the eighth century when three ships came unasked to Portland, the man riding down to Portland strand might well have paused and looked back over his shoulder, looked for Culliford Tree. He might have sought comfort from the distant mound on the horizon – a dark beacon of antiquity and earth-fast custom, a symbol of territory and authority, of land and legitimacy. This man, Beaduheard, would have known that the barrow watched over him, lending him the power in the land, confirming the prerogatives of his office. He was reeve to the king of Wessex, Beorhtric, and as such he exercised the king’s delegated authority. Reeves represented the king in towns, ports and sometimes across whole shires; the modern and medieval word ‘sheriff’ has its origin in these ‘shire-reeves’. Beaduheard, therefore, was an important man – responsible, perhaps, for local government in Dorchester and the surrounding countryside, a man used to getting his own way.

  Beaduheard arrives on Portland to find a group of travellers arrayed on the beach, their ships drawn up behind them, their backs to the sea. They are wary – frightened even. They are strangers in a strange land, conditioned perhaps to expect a frosty welcome. Beaduheard dismounts from his horse to receive them, others following his lead, shingle crunching beneath leather-shod feet. Words are exchanged but their meaning is lost – whatever mutual words they understood failing in the tension of the moment, drowned by the crashing of the waves. But Beaduheard is no diplomat, and the tenor of his words is clear enough. He ‘admonishes’ the newcomers in an ‘authoritative manner’, he attempts to ‘drive them’ to the king’s residence (‘against their will’ as the chronicle of John of Worcester adds).6 He knows his duty, and he knows the law.

  The West Saxon edicts that are closest in date to these events are the laws of King Ine (r. 688–726). Clause 20 gives a sense of the sort of welcome that the unfortunate wanderer could expect in eighth-century Wessex: ‘If a man from afar, or a stranger, goes through the woods off the highway and neither calls out nor blows a horn, he may be considered a thief, to be slain or to be redeemed [by paying his wergild (“man-price”)].’7 Britain’s most southerly realm offered cold comfort to the lost.

  In the Old English poem Beowulf – composed at some point between the early eighth and the early eleventh century – there can be found, expressed in the Reeve’s own West Saxon tongue, a form of words that we might imagine Beaduheard speaking in his final hours: an echo of a lived experience.8

  ‘What kind of men are you who arrive

  rigged out for combat in coats of mail,

  sailing here over the sea-lanes

  in your steep-hulled boat? […]

  Never before has a force under arms

  disembarked so openly – not bothering to ask

  if the sentries allowed them safe passage

  or the clan had consented […]

  So now, before you fare inland

  as interlopers, I have to be informed

  about who you are and where you hail from.

  Outsiders from across the water,

  I say it again: the sooner you tell

  where you come from and why, the better.’9

  In the poem, these words are spoken by the Danish coastguard to the eponymous hero and his men as they arrive from the realm of the Geats (southern Sweden) to lend their aid to Hrothgar, the Danish king. They are formalities, to be understood both by questioner and visitor: the back-and-forth ritual of arrival.

  In the real-life counterpart to this scene, however, the newcomers on the Portland beach chose not to participate, not to play the game. Perhaps they did not know the rules.

  The travellers, berated in a foreign tongue by an aggressive stranger, are frightened and frustrated – the instinct to fight or flee like a high-pitched whine, raised to intolerable pitch. In the heavy moments that follow, the confrontation develops the hypertension of a shoot-out: a bead of sweat running down the back of a sun-burnt neck, eyes darting left and right as time slows to dream-pace, measured out by the metronomic crashing of the surf. Perhaps a hand flickers towards a sword hilt; perhaps a horse stamps, a cloak billows, a gull shrieks … When the spell finally breaks the violence seems inevitable – preordained – as if only death can bring the world back into balance.

  In the end, all that is left, in place of Beowulf’s polite and formal replies, are huddled corpses on the strand, their blood swallowed between stones.

  The arrival of these Northmen in Portland – the carbuncle that sprouts from Dorset into the English Channel – established the leitmotifs for Britain’s early interactions with its northern neighbours: unanswered questions and sudden brutality, the fluid identity of the merchant-marauder, the collision of cultures at the margins of the land. For almost three centuries, seaborne marauders would return again and again – sometimes like the inevitable attrition of the tides, dissolving the most vulnerable shores one wave at a time, at others like a mighty storm that smashes sea-walls and wreaks devastation before expending itself exhausted. Sometimes it would seem more like the inexorable flood of a climate apocalypse, the waters rising and rising without respite, wash
ing deep inland and bursting river banks deep in the interior of the land. Everywhere the crimson tide flowed and pounded, the history of these islands would be changed for ever, new channels and shapes scoured and moulded in the clay of British history.

  The island that the crew of those three ships blundered into in the reign of King Beorhtric was still far from settling into its familiar modern grooves. Scotland, Wales and England did not exist, and the shifting patchwork of petty kingdoms that made up the political geography of Britain was fractured along cultural, linguistic, religious, geographical and historical lines. Major fault-lines divided those parts of Britain that had once been exposed to intensive Roman colonization from those which had not, those which adhered to Roman and which to Irish forms of Christian liturgy, those who believed their ancestors were British from those who looked to a homeland in Ireland or across the North Sea. Landscape sundered highland zones from lowland zones; language divided speakers of Celtic languages from those who used a Germanic tongue; the sea brought an influx of foreign goods and ideas to some, while shutting others out.

  The map of Britain at the end of the eighth century had developed slowly from conditions arising from the decline of the Roman Empire during the fourth century. In Britain, the removal of direct Roman administration and military defence around the year 400 coincided with changes to the cultural orientation of communities along Britain’s eastern seaboard. Increasingly, their centre of gravity shifted from the Mediterranean world to the North Sea. Part of the reason for this was political and economic, but migration also played a major role. People from what is now northern Germany, southern Scandinavia and the Low Countries had been moving into eastern areas of Britain – particularly Kent, East Anglia and England north of the Humber – from at least the early fifth century. The numbers involved, and the nature of the migration, remains fiercely contested, but the impact was undeniable and dramatic.

  By the early eighth century, the northern monk Bede was able to write with confidence about an ‘English-speaking people’ who were distinct from the native British. The key distinguishing characteristic of this group – as implied by Bede’s phrase – was their tongue. These were people who spoke a different language from both Romano-British elites (for whom Latin was the ubiquitous written language) and the ‘indigenous’ Britons, who spoke varying forms of a Celtic language known as Common or Old Brittonic (or Brythonic). The newcomers, however, spoke a Germanic language known to modern scholars as ‘Old English’ (or, more rarely these days, as ‘Anglo-Saxon’) which was closely related to the languages spoken in the regions from which migrants across the North Sea had come.

  While doubts hover over a great deal of Bede’s narrative, and particularly his migration and conquest narratives (much of which is an elaboration of a vague, tendentious and ideologically motivated sermon written by the British monk Gildas in the sixth century),10 the impact of the English language is not in doubt. Place-names and early vernacular written records attest that English became dominant and widespread at a remarkably early date. Moreover, these English-speakers (whatever their genetic ancestry) had, by Bede’s day, become culturally and linguistically dominant in most of lowland Britain, forming a tapestry of greater and lesser kingdoms which had grown out of an inconsistent pattern of tribal groupings and late Roman administrative districts.

  The most northerly of these English-speaking realms was Northumbria – literally the land north of the River Humber. By the late eighth century this kingdom covered a huge swathe of northern Britain, from the Humber to the Forth, cobbled together from a number of former British territories: Deira, Bernicia, Gododdin, Rheged and Elmet. For over a century, Northumbria had represented a high point of post-Roman achievement in scholarship and artistic culture, driven from major centres of learning such as Wearmouth-Jarrow (where Bede wrote, among much else, his Ecclesiastical History of the English People) and the island monastery of Lindisfarne. This extraordinary cultural flowering was also remarkable for its fusion of British, Irish, Anglo-Saxon and Mediterranean influences. The Lindisfarne Gospels – an illuminated manuscript of breathtaking beauty and craftsmanship – exemplifies the splendour, ingenuity and spontaneity of this northern renaissance, its famous ‘carpet pages’ weaving Celtic, Germanic and Coptic Christian themes into mind-bending symphonies of colour and cultural synthesis.

  However, despite the cultural refinement and territorial muscle, Northumbria had been growing weaker throughout the eighth century, undermined by the incessant feuding of its aristocracy and the instability of its royal house. In 790, for example, around the time that the Northmen had arrived in Portland, King Osred II was deposed after only a year on the throne, forcibly tonsured and exiled from his kingdom. His replacement, Æthelred I, seems to have had powerful friends. It is likely that the coup was carried out with the support of Northumbria’s large and belligerent southern neighbour: the kingdom of Mercia.

  Covering most of the English midlands from approximately the modern Welsh border in the west to the borders of East Anglia in the east, and from the Thames valley in the south to the Humber and the Wirral in the north, Mercia dominated southern Britain and reached the apogee of its political dominance under King Offa (r. 757–96). In the last decade of the eighth century, Offa was at the height of his powers. From his power-base in the Staffordshire heartlands around Tamworth, Lichfield and Repton, the king exercised not only direct rule over Mercia, but political and military control over the neighbouring kingdoms of East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex. The greatest surviving monument of his reign is the massive defensive earthwork marking the western boundary of Mercia: Offa’s Dyke. The scale of this engineering project is testament to the extent of the king’s power and ambition, not to mention his ability to coerce his subjects into undertaking state-wide projects.11 Offan statecraft was of the Corleone school of governance. When, for example, King Æthelberht of East Anglia attempted to assert a measure of independence (briefly minting his own coins), ‘Offa ordered King Æthelberht’s head to be struck off.’ This sort of gangland authority was closely tied to the personal charisma of the king and, as it turned out, the Mercian supremacy unravelled shortly after Offa’s death in 796.12

  The decapitation of King Æthelberht wasn’t enough to bring the kingdom of East Anglia to an end. Comprising at its core the ancient counties of Norfolk and Suffolk (the ‘north folk’ and the ‘south folk’ in Old English), the kingdom had, at the beginning of the seventh century, been an important power-broker. East Anglia had once boasted links to Scandinavia, the rest of continental Europe and beyond, and nothing better exemplifies the kingdom’s cosmopolitan splendour than the great ship burial at Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge in Suffolk. The famous mustachioed helmet found at Sutton Hoo is the ubiquitous icon of the Anglo-Saxon age, an object which in its style, iconography and manufacture has its closest parallels among the grave goods buried with the military elite of southern Sweden. But the burial also contained – among other objects – silverware from the Byzantine Empire (the surviving eastern part of the Roman Empire, centred on Constantinople – modern Istanbul), coins from Merovingian Gaul (which comprised parts of France, Germany and the Low Countries) and weapons and jewellery embellished with garnets imported from India. Although East Anglia would never again achieve the influence it commanded in this glittering seventh-century heyday, it nevertheless maintained its independence long into the ninth century.13

  The smaller kingdoms which had lain under Mercian domination during Offa’s reign were, however, destined ultimately to becoming defunct as independent concerns. The royal dynasty of the East Saxons (with its core in Essex) and those of the South Saxons (Sussex) and Kent either disappeared or had been demoted to junior aristocratic rank by the early ninth century. The killer blow in each case was delivered not by Mercia but by another resurgent player in the English-speaking community: Wessex – the kingdom of the West Saxons.

  Wessex had experienced a torrid eighth century. With its heartlands in Ham
pshire and Dorset, Wessex was an assertive force in southern Britain, extending north across Somerset, Wiltshire and Berkshire, and eating steadily westwards into Devon. During its heyday in the reign of King Ine (r. 688–726), West Saxon authority had also extended across Surrey and Sussex in the east. But more than sixty years of attritional warfare with the Mercians to the north had eroded its territories south of the Thames, created a militarized zone across the chalk uplands of Wiltshire and Berkshire and seen control of Sussex lost to Offa’s Mercia. In 786, the pugnacious West Saxon ruler Cynewulf was killed in a power-struggle and the man who emerged as king, Beorhtric, was, it seems, Offa’s man. The impression of Wessex in these years is of a beaten-down kingdom, exhausted by war and resigned to its subordinate status in Offa’s new order. The man who would pick up the banner of West Saxon kingship from Beorhtric, however, was of a markedly different stamp. King Ecgberht (r. 802–39) would take the West Saxon kingdom to the peak of its power and prestige, overwhelming its smaller neighbours, restoring the pride and reputation of its royal house, and ultimately providing the self-confidence that future kings would need in the dark days that lay ahead. But all this was in the future. When the Northmen arrived on Portland, Wessex yet remained a weakened client state of the Mercian supremacy.

  Although English kingdoms had been, and continued to be, dominant in lowland Britain, they were never the whole story, and in parts of Britain – notably the highlands and islands of what is now Scotland, Cumbria and the valley of the Clyde, the lands west of Offa’s Dyke and the Cornish peninsula – a number of kingdoms of mixed provenance maintained distinct identities, languages, religious practices and cultural norms. Cornwall, beyond the south-western marches of Wessex, had been only lightly touched by direct Roman rule. At the western end of the kingdom of Dumnonia (Devon and Cornwall), the region had developed a distinctive culture that blended British and Irish influences and maintained maritime links with both Brittany and the Byzantine Empire. While Devon, the eastern part of Dumnonia, became subsumed by Wessex over the course of the eighth century – becoming thoroughly Anglicized in the process – Cornwall, for the time being, retained its independence.