Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  When I visited Kit Hill with my wife and parents, it was a disconcerting experience. Thick banks of dreary mist swamped the landscape and shut down visibility to 20 feet in every direction. I felt as though, rather than standing at the summit of a massive Precambrian abscess on the sedimentary bedrock, we had been washed up on the shores of some weird fog-bound island, its coarse cliff-top vegetation concealing innumerable pits and fissures from which some Cornish Caliban could spring at any moment. The atmosphere was distinctly alien – a landscape stripped of all familiarity; even the cagoule-clad ramblers seemed vaguely sinister. At the highest point a great masonry tower rises through the white shrouds of clinging ether like a star-gazer’s tower, the haunt of some Prospero, rising – to use Mervyn Peake’s immortal words – ‘like a mutilated finger […] pointed blasphemously at heaven’.19 Or, perhaps, like the funnel of some fantastical steamship, ploughing onwards through fog-bound oceans, on its way to a lost world.

  This tower is, indeed, a chimney, unusually ornamental for its purpose. An obsolete monument to the industrial mining operations of the second half of the nineteenth century, it once exhaled the by-products of the steam engine which pumped water from the deep delvings below. Mining took place on Kit Hill from the Middle Ages until the early twentieth century, and the seemingly random gouges in the upper slopes are memorials to the earliest, open-mining phases of this activity. In subsequent centuries, workings grew deeper and more elaborate, as miners began seeking out the veins of tin and copper that had seeped into fissures in the granite in some unimaginably ancient epoch, and now the hill is riddled with shafts and tunnels, their lethal openings hidden amid gorse and bracken. These borings reached their climax in the 1880s with the Excelsior Tunnel, an 800-yard gallery driven horizontally into the side of the hill, like the passage to some improbably vast tomb. It was, in fact, constructed to mine the deepest lodes, and was extended on a few occasions in the early twentieth century. In 1959–60, however, the tunnel was taken over by the UK Atomic Energy Authority for bomb testing. Despite rumours to the contrary, these tests never involved any nuclear material, although – despite modern radiation tests confirming the Ministry of Defence’s assurances – rumours to the contrary inevitably persist.20

  In the ninth century, Kit Hill was known for other reasons and, as we have seen, by a different name – Hengestdun, the hill of Hengest – and a wisp of its memory still clings to its lower eastward slopes in the tautological place-name Hingsdon Down (‘don’ and ‘down’ both derive from OE dun, meaning ‘hill’).21 The name is important. Hengest would have had a dual meaning in Old English. It means ‘stallion’. But it was also the name of the legendary founding father of the English-speaking people – one half of the alliterative duo who, according to Bede, arrived in three ships from across the North Sea in the mid-fifth century. Landing in Kent, Hengest and his brother Horsa (and later his son Æsc) defeated the unfortunate Vortigern and his sons and began the process of clearing out the degenerate Romano-British order, founding the royal house of Kent in the process.

  The story raises all sorts of red flags. The idea of a duo named ‘Stallion’ and ‘Horse’ paving the way, through the might of their arms, for a whole new set of nations, has ‘foundation myth’ written all over it (despite its continued acceptance as fact in some quarters). It may well be that Hengest and Horsa were, originally, a pair of pre-Christian deities who were turned from gods into human ancestors by Christian writers and given prominent roles in the authorized version of English origins. Whatever the reality, it is clear that the name had a great deal of potency attached to it by the ninth century.22

  Early medieval battles were often fought at places associated with the names of gods and heroes, some of them burial mounds, others – like Hengestdun – massive hills that might have been imagined in some way to house the oversized remains of superhuman occupants. These were places where the past dwelt and where the memories of mighty warriors could be imagined to confer an aura of legitimacy, rootedness and martial prowess on those who fought in their shadow. These were also, conversely, places where ancient English claims could be challenged and new (or older) associations of landscape inscribed or resurrected – places where symbolic blows could be struck in the struggle for hegemony.23 It must be partly for these reasons (as well as for its strategic significance) that when the Cornish wished to challenge the supremacy of the West Saxon dynasty, it was here that they came to meet King Ecgberht in battle.

  The defeat of the Cornish cemented West Saxon authority over the south-west, but it did little to deter future Viking war-bands from chancing their arm in Britain. For the rest of the century, a rising tide of violence was directed towards the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Some of them were raids, directed – just as they always had been – towards concentrations of wealth. However, the battles of Ecgberht’s reign, fought at places of symbolic significance like Carhampton and Hengestdun, signalled a shift in the level of engagement that the Vikings displayed towards their adversaries. From this point onwards, Viking armies were to display an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how power was articulated within the kingdoms of Britain, exploiting, undermining and appropriating the political and physical landscape until they themselves became an integral part of it.

  7

  Dragon-Slayers

  This is a very old story: the Danes who used to fight with the English in King Alfred’s time knew this story. They have carved on the rocks pictures of some of the things that happen in the tale, and those carvings may still be seen. Because it is so old and so beautiful the story is told here again, but it has a sad ending – indeed it is all sad, and all about fighting and killing, as might be expected from the Danes.

  ANDREW LANG, ‘The Story of Sigurd’ (1890)1

  In 850, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports, ‘heathen men stayed over the winter for the first time’. Although this notice passes without commentary in the Chronicle, dropped in almost as though it were an afterthought, the over-wintering of the heathens was the breath of wind that carried off the first leaves of autumn from the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. It was the harbinger of a storm that would not only strip those old oaks bare, but tear many of them up by their roots.2

  Viking attacks had been increasing in volume and severity since the 830s, particularly in Wessex and the south-east. Between 840 and 853, this part of Britain was attacked at least fifteen times, and an attack is also recorded as taking place in Northumbria in 844 – resulting, disastrously, in the death of the king and his heir.3 The first raids on Lundenwic (London) occurred in 842 and 851,4 and there were attacks on Southampton and Portland (840), Romney Marshes (841), Rochester (842), Carhampton again (843) and Canterbury (851).5 Many of these seem to have started off as raids with, presumably, economic motives, and most seem not to have encountered serious resistance. On occasion, however, Viking raiding armies were intercepted by shire levies raised by local leaders or by the king, resulting in pitched battles in which Viking armies often took a serious mauling.

  At the mouth of the River Parrett in 848, the men of Dorset and Somerset – led by their respective ealdormen, Osric and Eanwulf, and Ealhstan, bishop of Sherborne – ‘made a great slaughter’ of a Viking war-band.6 The Vikings were defeated again in 850 at a place called Wicga’s Barrow by Ealdorman Ceorl and the men of Devon,7 and in the following year King Æthelwulf of Wessex and his son Æthelbald routed the Viking army at a place called Aclea where they ‘made the greatest slaughter of a heathen horde that we have ever heard tell of’.8 Achieving a crushing victory over his heathen foes would have brought the king great personal satisfaction. In 843 he had gone to Carhampton with the intention of defeating a Viking army at the very place where humiliation had befallen his father, Ecgberht, in 836. But at the second battle of Carhampton, Æthelwulf too had been outfought. The victory at Aclea in 851, therefore, avenged both his own and his father’s shame, ending it the way that Anglo-Saxon feuds had always traditionally been settled: in blood.9


  After this robust West Saxon response, Viking war-bands seem to have become wary of assaulting Wessex directly, with raids in southern Britain confined to Kent for the rest of the decade. But the Viking winter camps of 850 – or at least the concept of such camps – were never abandoned. It became possible for Viking armies to mount raids throughout the year, as seems to have been the case in the early 850s, and by living off the land they could keep large numbers of warriors permanently in arms. Reinforcements from overseas could join them unimpeded, and the numbers of men and the size of their fleets could therefore grow unchecked. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon warriors they faced, there was no imperative for them to return to their fields for the harvest, or – like their compatriots in Scandinavia – to stay at home when North Sea storms kept their ships moored over the winter.10

  Conflict between Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had always been, to a certain extent, a ritualized activity. The phrase ‘ritual war’ is an unfortunate one, implying something lacking in severity (what one anthropologist has compared to ‘over-enthusiastic football’),11 and in truth there is no reason to believe that Anglo-Saxon battles were not brutal and serious affairs. But they rarely resulted in lasting political change. Warfare seems generally to have followed a traditional pattern that was mutually understood, and battles – as we have seen – were often fought at places that held a mutual significance. Conflict was also limited by the natural constraints of the agricultural year. Campaigns took place during summer, before the harvest, while the weather was at its best and the roads were most passable; fortifications were seldom used, the Anglo-Saxons seeming to have preferred to face their enemies in the open, an opportunity – whether in victory or defeat – to carve out a legend that would be worth remembering.12

  The Vikings, however, seemed – in the beginning at least – to be breaking all of these rules.13 They had no respect for the traditional patchwork of allegiances and loyalties, the ancient boundaries or the conventions of war. They were perfectly happy to dig themselves in to fortified harbour-sites on major rivers, and their focus on portable food and wealth meant that much of their violence fell on settlements, monasteries and royal halls. They avoided pitched battles where they could and were able – thanks to their ships – to strike quickly and quietly into the very heart of Britain, regardless of the state of the roads. Places that had been far from any border now found themselves, as a result of a coastal or riverine position, exposed to war in a way that they had not been in the past.14

  ‘They have no cultivated fields,’ one contemporary Islamic writer observed of the Rūs he encountered travelling through eastern Europe and central Asia. Instead, he went on, ‘they live by pillaging the land of the Saqāliba’.15 These (the Rūs) were men who had chosen a different path to prosperity, and their harvest lay before them, to be reaped on the battlefield: ‘When a son is born,’ the same writer elaborated, ‘the father throws a naked sword before him and says: “I leave you no inheritance. All you possess is what you can gain with this sword.”’16

  Entrepreneurial values like these, arising in a society that praised highly the fruits of memorable feats of violence and bravery, bred dangerous men with a single-minded determination to get rich quick or die trying. They were not going home to stack hay and muck out pigs, at least not empty-handed. And this meant – for the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England – a threat unlike any they had previously had to face.

  In 866 an army appeared in East Anglia that was described in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a micel hæðen here – ‘great heathen horde’. Here is a difficult word to translate. It is clear that, in general terms, it meant army – the numerous ‘herepaths’ and ‘herefords’ that can be found among the place-names of England testify to its common usage in describing militarized infrastructure. However, the word normally used of Anglo-Saxon armies in this period is fyrd, and presumably here originally had other connotations. A clue to what these were can be found in the laws of King Ine, which explain how þeofas (‘thieves’) appropriately describes a group of up to seven individuals and hloð (‘band’) a group of more than seven but fewer than thirty-five. Any more marauders than this should, according to the laws, be called a here. A here therefore, in this context, was just a large group of thieves all working together – as good a definition as any for a Viking army operating unlawfully within the bounds of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, without regard to life, property or the king’s laws.17

  What is less debatable is that this particular here was hæðen, and that it was micel. Although numbers are problematic (as Ine’s laws make clear, a here need have been no bigger than three dozen – the number needed to crew a single vessel the size of the ship discovered at Gokstad, near Oslo in Norway), the Viking forces that had menaced Carhampton had, on both occasions, numbered perhaps as many as 1,500 men – enough to defeat West Saxon royal armies on two separate occasions. It is probably safe to assume that the ‘great heathen horde’ was considerably bigger; as we shall see – archaeological traces of Viking camps of this period in Britain imply sizeable groupings.18

  What happened next is not altogether clear, but it seems that the micel hæðen here, having taken horses from the East Anglians, rode north. Once out of East Anglia, they may have used Ermine Street – the ‘Great North Road’ – that climbs the country between the Pennines and the Fens, linking London with York. It seems likely, though the sources do not tell us this, that the Viking fleet shadowed the progress of the mounted army as it made its way north, carrying supplies and reinforcements and providing the means for a quick getaway if things turned out badly. Certainly this would have allowed the land-based force to travel faster and more lightly than would otherwise have been possible, while at the same time removing the constraint on manpower that a purely amphibious offensive would have entailed.19

  Out in the countryside, the inhabitants of the timbered hamlets and farmsteads would have been woken, if they were lucky, by dark news riding hard up the Great North Road: they would have grabbed what they could and fled, the Viking army sweeping through deserted settlements, taking the wheat and slaughtering the livestock, ransacking the church and burning the homes. The horde swept into Northumbria, a sudden blitzkrieg that took the kingdom off guard. Before any resistance could be mustered, the Vikings were already within the walls of Eoforwic (York), the heart of Northumbrian power and the seat of the second most important ecclesiastical diocese in Britain.

  By the mid-ninth century, Northumbria was no longer the beacon of Christian learning and sainted warrior kings that it had once been; the lustre of its golden age had dulled considerably by the time of the first raids on Lindisfarne and Jarrow. Civil wars and endemic feuding had weakened the kingdom, and Viking attacks had taken a toll on its ruling class, killing its king in 843 and disrupting the succession. And, although the kingdom was by no means a spent force, there can be little doubt that the sacking of its monasteries – international powerhouses of wealth, learning and industry – had been a setback to Northumbrian culture and economy, disrupting trade and creating the insecurity in which political fragmentation was ever more likely.20

  Northumbria’s rivals seem to have sensed its weakness. In 828, Ecgberht of Wessex had led a huge army to Dore (literally ‘door’ or ‘narrow pass’), part of a continuum of features that marked the northern borders of Mercia.21 The result of the meeting at Dore was that Ecgberht received the ‘submission and concord’ of the Northumbrians, and was recognized (in the Wessex-produced Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at least) as ‘Bretwalda’ – overlord of Britain.22 Forty years on and the situation had not improved; the Northumbrian king, Osberht, had been deposed in favour of a rival named Ælle, of whom very little is known, other than that – from the perspective of later chroniclers – he was an ‘unnatural king’ (that is, he was perceived as a tyrant without a legitimate claim to the throne).23 It is unlikely, given the precedent of Northumbrian politics over the previous century, that this had been a peaceful transition of power, and it is probable that murders and ci
vil war had taken a toll on the aristocracy and the fighting capacity of the kingdom. It may have been, in some respects at least, a weakened state, unprepared to face a ruthless and opportunistic enemy seeking to take advantage.24

  The Viking capture of York in 866 seems initially to have stunned the Northumbrians into inaction, and it took months for them to organize a response. Part of the delay was probably diplomatic, for when an Anglo-Saxon army was eventually gathered, both the rival claimants to the Northumbrian throne were present. The idea, presumably, was to set differences aside until the existential threat had been overcome. For Ælle and Osberht, however, the reassuring familiarity of their former enmity was gone for ever.

  The Anglo-Saxon counter-attack on York was, at first, dramatically successful. The old Roman walls, reduced in height but still largely intact, had been reinforced with wooden ramparts by the ninth century. Nevertheless, it seems the Northumbrian forces were able to break into the city with little difficulty. The exuberance of this head-on assault, however, seems to have been the undoing of the Northumbrians; having smashed their way in, they swiftly found themselves trapped inside the city. Surrounded and outnumbered, with no means of retreat, the vanguard was annihilated.

  No one knows what happened within the walls of York in 867. But the remnants of the Northumbrian army must have looked on in horror as the Viking army emerged from a city that remained resolutely in their grip. Perhaps the Vikings jeered at the survivors, or hurled foul abuse; perhaps they bared their arses or displayed the severed heads of fallen Northumbrians on the points of their spears.25 Whatever the case, Northumbrian resistance was broken. Fighting continued, but by the end of the day ‘an immense slaughter’ had been made of the Northumbrian army, and both Ælle and Osberht were dead.26