Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  Walker went on to confess that ‘The Head of the great Skeleton he gave to Mr. Bowers, Master of the Free-school.’ Dr Degge made further enquiries with the son of the aforementioned Mr Bowers, who said at the time that ‘he remembers the Skull in his Father’s Closet, and that he had often heard his Father mention this Gigantic Corps …’23

  Wonderful as this all is, we would be right to be sceptical, and a later generation of fascinated antiquarians were determined to prove the case one way or another. Excavations in 1789 and 1914 followed, the former – despite finding the Gigantic Corps absent – confirmed the presence of ‘vast quantities of human bones’.24 It wasn’t until the 1980s, however, that a systematic programme of excavation was undertaken. The results of that campaign revealed one of the most shocking and enigmatic burials ever excavated in the British Isles.

  The mound had been constructed over a twin-celled stone building dated to the seventh or eighth century, undoubtedly part of the religious complex on the site. Prior to its final repurposing it had been used as a workshop, although it may originally have been built as a chapel or mortuary. To construct the mound, the walls of the building had been dismantled to ground level, leaving only the subterranean part of the building in situ. The floor of the eastern cell was covered with a layer of red marl, and a stone cist had been erected in the centre. All traces of the body which this contained, as described to Dr Degge, had disappeared – as had most evidence for the cist itself (unsurprising, given the repeated, and mostly inexpert, prior interventions). What did survive, however, were the other bones: 1,686 of them to be precise, the disarticulated remains of 264 people, strewn about in charnel chaos, a disordered landscape of death. Among the bones, objects were discovered – a Scandinavian-style axe-head, sword fragments, two long single-bladed knives (seaxes), a key and a range of decorative fragments of metalwork dating to the seventh or eighth centuries. Amid all this were five silver coins, four of them dated to 872, one of them to 873/4. These last artefacts were a critical, and astoundingly fortuitous, discovery, for they dated the construction of this extraordinary monument, with exceptional precision, to the period when Repton was under occupation by the Viking micel here.

  Although the scene uncovered by the excavators was one of morbid disarray, this was all as a result of the rough treatment the burial had received at the hands of Thomas Walker and his ilk. It soon became apparent that the bones had originally been carefully sorted by length and stacked neatly around the central grave. Moreover, most of the small bones (hands, feet, vertebrae) were absent, suggesting that the skeletons had been moved, reinterred in the mound after an initial period of burial elsewhere – long enough, it would seem, to ensure that the remains were free from fleshy parts. Carbon dating of a small sample brought back a range of dates between the seventh and the ninth centuries, and the general absence of trauma to the bones complicates an interpretation of these skeletons as the remains of battle-damaged Vikings of the micel here or their victims.

  Debate continues about who they were and why they were interred in this way, and ongoing analysis seeks to clarify their origins. It may be – as the excavators believed – that some of the bones are Scandinavian, the remains of the followers of some great lord gathered up to lay beside him in death. On the other hand, it may be that some of the disarticulated bones are the remains of Mercian monks, nuns and aristocrats whose bones were disturbed by the digging of the ditch and the clearing of the mausolea.25 It may even be the case that the bones of the Mercian kings – Æthelbald and Wiglaf – were jumbled in among them, as well as, perhaps, the holy remains of St Wystan himself:26 the carefully conserved relics of a proud nation, reduced to morbid trophies in a ghoulish heathen catacomb.

  Who, then, was the missing occupant, the ‘Humane Body Nine Foot long’ who had once been laid in the central grave in such grim splendour? Although we can be pretty certain that his or her physical stature was exaggerated, this was clearly the grave of an important individual, afforded a rare and imposing memorial. We know with more certainty who it was not. The movements of the Viking leaders Halfdan and Ubbe are mentioned in the years following the over-wintering at Repton; other leaders of the army – Guthrum, Oscetel and Anwend – led a part of the army to Cambridge in 874 and were also clearly still alive. Bacsecg was killed at Ashdown in 871, and it seems unlikely that even the most devoted of followers would have been prepared to carry a ripe corpse around England for three years. There is only one other Viking warlord active in England whose name we know, but whose fate and movements in the years after 870 are uncertain. The evidence is contradictory, but the excavators make a good case that the mound at Repton was raised for Ivar the Boneless.27

  Two and a half miles west and slightly south of Repton, on high ground overlooking the valley of the Trent, yet more mounds were being raised to the dead in the years following 873. The cemetery at Heath Wood comprised fifty-nine barrows, hillocks of earth that once stood on open heathland – like the workings of an army of giant moles. These were monuments that marked the places where the ashen remnants of the dead had been interred, fifty-nine memorials to occasions when the earth of Derbyshire had been dug and reformed to cover the cremated fragments of human beings and animals, swords and shields, buckles and spurs, nails, pins and melted treasures. These were the graves of pagan people whose community practised a rite of burial long abandoned by the Christian English, laying out the dead upon a funeral pyre, draped with jewellery or girded with weapons, surrounded by sacrificial offerings, immolated.

  Snorri explained that ‘Óðinn […] ordained that all dead people must be burned and that their possessions should be laid on a pyre with them. He said that everyone should come to Valhǫll with such wealth as he had on his pyre, and that each would also have the benefit of whatever he himself had buried in the earth. But the ashes were to be taken out to sea or buried down in the earth, and mounds were to be built as memorials to great men.’28 Although we would be right to be dubious of the specificity with which Snorri describes the thoughts and motivations of people who lived hundreds of years before his own time, his words nevertheless resonate not only with the archaeology, but with other more contemporary accounts. Here once more is ibn Fadlan, describing the funeral of a Rūs chieftain:

  They dressed him [the dead man] in trousers, socks, boots, a tunic and a brocade caftan with gold buttons. On his head they placed a brocade cap covered with sable. Then they bore him into the pavilion on the boat and sat him on the mattress, supported by cushions. Then they brought nabīdh [alcoholic drink], fruits and basil which they placed near him. Next they carried in bread, meat and onions which they laid before him.

  After that they brought in a dog, which they cut in two and threw into the boat. Then they placed his weapons beside him. Next they took two horses and made them run until they were in lather, before hacking them to pieces with swords and throwing their flesh on to the boat. Then they brought two cows, which they also cut into pieces and threw on to the boat. Finally they brought a cock and hen, killed them and threw them on to the boat as well.29

  After a lengthy ritual, the slave-girl was finally killed, having been laid beside the dead man:

  Then people came with wood and logs to burn, each holding a piece of wood alight at one end, which they threw on to the wood [that was piled below the boat]. The fire enveloped the wood, then the boat, then the tent, the man, the girl and all that there was on the boat. A violent and frightening wind began to blow, the flames grew in strength and the heat of the fire intensified.30

  This was a grand funeral for a great man. The burning of boats, like their burial, was probably uncommon,31 but the broad outlines of the pomp and sacrifice – and their explanation – would have been familiar across the Viking world. As they stood on the banks of the river watching the burning, one of the Rūs party spoke to ibn Fadlan’s interpreter. ‘You Arabs are fools!’ he apparently exclaimed. ‘Why is that?’ ibn Fadlan politely enquired through his interlocutor. ‘Because
you put the men you love most, and the most noble among you, into the earth, and the earth and the worms and insects eat them. But we burn them in the fire in an instant, so that at once and without delay they enter Paradise.’32

  The rites practised at Heath Wood may have replicated – albeit on a smaller scale – the scenes witnessed by ibn Fadlan on the Volga; similar funerals are also known to have taken place in Scandinavia – Norway and Sweden especially – during the Viking Age.33 Nevertheless, in England, obviously ‘Viking’ burials are rare discoveries. Despite the development of new Scandinavian-inflected identities and socio-economic change that occurred in the decades following the 870s, the graves at Heath Wood and Repton remain the only places where good evidence exists for a whole community behaving in a way that was significantly divergent, obviously heathen. These were the people of the micel here, and here – for the first time – they were putting their roots into English soil. They would run deep: although their funerals would become less distinctive – less visible in the archaeological record – Viking sculpture, found at Repton, attests to a more than transient Scandinavian presence in this part of Britain. And, in time (or perhaps straight away), Old Norse names were bestowed on the neighbouring villages, names which speak eloquently of perceived ethnic difference in the first phases of Viking settlement. They are still the names these villages bear today: Ingleby – the ‘farm of the English’; Bretby – the ‘farm of the Britons’.

  In 874, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the great Viking army that had first arrived in England in 865 broke apart, never again to operate as a unified force in England. (Perhaps the death of whoever lay in the Repton mound snapped the last thread of unifying authority binding together the confederation of chieftains and warlords that made up the micel here. Perhaps the raising of that mound to their fallen leader was a last symbolic act of triumph and remembrance – the interment of a Viking hero at the symbolic heart of England’s once mightiest realm, left to slumber on among the skulls of conquered kings.) Guthrum and the others went east. Halfdan, however, went back to Northumbria to assert some measure of authority in the northern part of that kingdom. He wasted no time in getting on with the traditional occupations of Northumbrian rulers by harassing the Picts and Strathclyde Britons ranged along his northern and western borders. What was recorded under the year 876, however, was much more significant. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in one of the most understated but consequential remarks in the recorded history of early medieval Britain, notes that ‘Halfdan divided up the land of Northumbria,’ and his people ‘were ploughing and supporting themselves’.34

  By 875, the land was changing – utterly and irrevocably. And not merely in the terminal collapse of age-old kingdoms; the Vikings had insinuated themselves into the very marrow of England. The soil was being ploughed by Viking hands, and their dead were laid to rest in it. The earth was being worked and mounds raised; even the bones of the English dead, perhaps even their kings, were now being co-opted into the graves of warriors born in Denmark, Norway or beyond. In every part of these islands, the children of Viking men were being born to native mothers. And, perhaps most profound of all, the names of things had begun to change: places that had borne English names for 400 years or more were shedding them as a new lexicon established itself in the wake of settlement: Norse words, Viking words. This was no longer a harrying, nor even a simple conquest, the exchange of one ruling dynasty for another. This was colonization, with all the cultural, linguistic, geographical and political upheaval such a process brings in train. Its impact can still be felt today.

  11

  The Return of the King

  And naught was left King Alfred

  But shameful tears of rage,

  In the island in the river

  In the end of all his age.

  In the island in the river

  He was broken to his knee:

  And he read, writ with an iron pen,

  That God had wearied of Wessex men

  And given their country, field and fen,

  To the devils of the sea.

  G. K. CHESTERTON, The Ballad of the White Horse (1911)1

  In March 878, seeking refuge, King Alfred came to Athelney, a hidden spit of land, rising gently from the bleak expanse of the Somerset Levels.

  He had led his battered court to this remote place in the short dark days of January and February, ‘leading a restless life in great distress amid the woody and marshy places of Somerset’.2 The language of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, with its woods (wuda) and moor-fastnesses (mór-fæstenas), recalls the monster-haunted wildernesses of Beowulf and St Guthlac, drawing, with allusive economy, a world at the margins of human life – a place of estrangement and shadow-life. Asser tells us that the king ‘had nothing to live on except what he could forage by frequent raids, either secretly or even openly, from the Vikings as well as from the Christians who had submitted to the Vikings’ authority’. Alfred was a king turned wulvesheofod (‘wolf’s head’), his tenure in the wilderness an inversion of the order of Anglo-Saxon life. Alfred, like Grendel, had become the sceadugenga – the ‘shadow-walker’ – the wolf beyond the border ‘who held the moors, the fen and fastness …’3

  These days, Athelney is a nondescript lump of ground, surrounded by the flat fields of the Somerset countryside. But when the flood tides come – as they did in with devastating effect in 2012 and 2014 – we can see it again as Alfred saw it: white sky and white water, the sheet of pale gauze split by the black fingers of the trees, torn by sprays of rushes, limbs of willow lightly touched with sickly green, catkins swinging like a thousand tiny sacrifices. Off in the distance a heron hauls itself skyward, spreading wide black pinions, beating a lazy saurian path across the Levels. The other birds carry on their business, snipe and curlew boring surgical holes into the shallows. The plop of a diving frog adds percussion to the throaty chorus of his fellows, lusty young bulls emerging bleary-eyed from their winter beds, seeking out mates to tangle with in the mud.

  Later in his life, Alfred would invest in Athelney by founding a monastery there, perhaps in gratitude and recognition for the role it had played in his career, or perhaps as part of his campaign of self-mythologization. ‘Æthelingaeg’ is how Asser spells it, though the manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle present various different iterations. It means ‘isle of princes’ (Æðeling ‘prince’ + eíg ‘island’), an auspicious name for a royal refuge and one which we might suspect was bestowed only after it had played its part in Alfred’s story. He would also establish a stronghold there, a ‘formidable fortress of elegant workmanship’ connected to the island by a causeway, the genesis of the modern village of East Lyng.4 But at the time he came there in 878 it was an isolated place – cut off amid the swollen waters of the Levels, an island, ‘surrounded’ as Asser explained ‘by swampy, impassable and extensive marshland and groundwater on every side’.5

  In 878, Athelney was a place where Alfred could hide from his Viking enemies and plan his attacks against them – attacking them ‘relentlessly and tirelessly’.6 It would briefly become for him the seat of a guerrilla government in exile, of a king without a kingdom, an Avalon unto which the king would pass and where he would be reborn.

  It had taken several years for the situation in Wessex to reach this sorry pass. By 875, Northumbria and East Anglia had fallen to Viking armies, and Mercia was riven by faction and war, its ancestral tombs ransacked and defiled. Only Wessex had weathered the Viking storm and remained intact: the military resolve of Alfred and his people had delivered four years of peace. That peace, however, was now over and in 875 the king’s warriors fought (and won) a maritime skirmish with a raiding fleet. One Viking ship was captured and six (Asser says five) were driven off. This, however, was only the opening move in a new war for the West Saxon kingdom.7

  In 876, the army that had been led to Cambridge from Repton by Guthrum, Oscetel and Anwend moved suddenly into Wessex and occupied Wareham, a fortified convent in Dorset. Crisis
seemed initially to have been averted through negotiation – hostages were exchanged and the Viking army swore holy and binding oaths – but it transpired that this Viking force had no particular intention of leaving Wessex. The army slipped away from Wareham by night, executing the hostages granted by Alfred (we can imagine that the Vikings held by the West Saxon army suffered a similar fate in return) and moved on to occupy Exeter in Devon. Alfred gave them good chase, but once again the limitations of early medieval siegecraft sucked all the momentum from the campaign: the king ‘could not overtake them before they were in the fortress where they could not be overpowered’.8 Had it not been for the weather, things might have looked bleak for Wessex – 120 Viking ships were lost in a storm near Swanage, preventing them from linking up with their comrades at Exeter.9 The result, yet again, was a stalemate, and once more hostages were exchanged (none of whom can have felt very optimistic about his future) and oaths sworn; this time, perhaps sapped of confidence as a result of the failure of their planned pincer-movement, the Viking army did indeed withdraw. They went, in fact, to Mercia, where they formally carved up Ceolwulf’s kingdom, leaving the latter a rump part, and saw out the winter in Gloucester.10

  This occurred in 877, and we know nothing of what befell Ceolwulf and his subjects in that, presumably depressing, period. It is likely, however, that the time spent in Mercia was used by the Viking army to consolidate their land-taking and to gather reinforcements. Soon after Twelfth Night (7 January) in the deep winter of early 878, the Viking army rode south into Wessex, to the royal estate at Chippenham in Wiltshire. They probably came via Cirencester, joining the Fosse Way and cutting through southern Gloucestershire like a dagger, before turning to the south-east. No early sources record whether Alfred was himself present at Chippenham, or whether he fought the Vikings there. All we are told (to give Asser’s version) is that ‘By strength of arms they forced many men of that race [West Saxons] to sail overseas, through both poverty and fear, and very nearly all the inhabitants of that region submitted to their authority.’11