Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  The name of the place where the battle was supposedly fought – ‘the Holme’ – is Old Norse in origin, from holmr (‘small islet’, or ‘area of dry land set in wetland’). In the midst of the Fens, the meaning is obvious: any raised area of dry land can feel like an island rising from the reed beds. Although holmr is a relatively common topographical term in England (with around fifty examples around the country), most of these apply to small, isolated places, and there is no other battlefield of the early Middle Ages in England that is identified with this place-name element.20 The term, however, had a particular significance in Old Norse literature, where it referred to the idealized location of a type of quasi-judicial knockabout known as the hólmgang (lit. ‘island-going’), a form of arbitration-by-combat, a settling of differences through formalized and circumscribed violence.

  Several accounts describe duels and hólmgang fought in Britain. Flóamanna saga, for example, tells the tale of the Icelander Thorgils who fought a hólmgang in Caithness on behalf of Olaf, the local jarl. The most elaborate description of the hólmgang ritual is contained in Kormáks saga, a thirteenth-century account of the life of the Hiberno-Icelandic skald Kormákr Ögmundarson. The saga describes a weird and highly ritualized event, revealing how it was the ‘the law of the hólmgang’ that a hide should be spread on the ground, ‘with loops at its corners. Into these should be driven certain pins with heads to them, called tjosnur. He who made it ready should go to the pins in such a manner that he could see sky between his legs, holding the lobes of his ears and speaking the forewords used in the rite called “The Sacrifice of the tjosnur”.’ Once this was done, ‘Three squares should be marked round the hide, each one foot broad. At the outermost corners of the squares should be four poles, called hazels; when this is done, it is a hazelled field.’

  Only after these bewildering preparations had been accomplished could the combat commence:

  Each man should have three shields, and when they were cut up he must get upon the hide if he had given way from it before, and guard himself with his weapons alone thereafter. He who had been challenged should strike the first stroke. If one was wounded so that blood fell upon the hide, he should fight no longer. If either set one foot outside the hazel poles ‘he went on his heel’, they said; but he ‘ran’ if both feet were outside. His own man was to hold the shield before each of the fighters. The one who was wounded should pay three marks of silver to be set free.21

  In reality there is nothing contemporary to suggest that this sort of ritual duel was actually a Viking Age practice, or – if it was – that it was as formal as accounts like the one in Kormáks saga describe.

  Nevertheless, a number of similar accounts in other sagas, as well as a definition in the Hednalagen (‘the heathen law’), a fragment of Swedish law written down c. 1200 which specifies the conditions under which the hólmgang should occur, present a compelling picture.22 It is possible that, in the militarized and Viking-inflected culture of tenth-century East Anglia, battle could be seen as hólmgang on an epic scale – particularly if that battle was considered to be arbitrating a dispute between kinsmen. In this light, the battle of the Holme may have acquired its name as a result of the importation not only of the Old Norse lexicon, but of Old Norse cultural practices as well. And while it was almost certainly not seen in ritualistic terms by those unfortunate enough to fight there, it is entirely likely that it was remembered in those terms afterwards.

  It would certainly be no surprise to find that Scandinavian legal concepts were beginning to drift into British syntax and toponymy: everywhere the Vikings had settled in Britain, they were bringing their systems of law and administration with them.

  In the wider Viking world, the places set aside for ritual combat seem often to have been located in areas designated for legal or administrative assembly of other kinds. For example, hólmgang that took place after deliberations at the Icelandic ‘parliament’ – the Althing – were fought on an island (ON holmr) in the Axewater, the river that cuts through Thingvellir (ON Þingvöllr, ‘the assembly plain’), gushing over the rim of the great tectonic rift and surging into white thunder at Öxarárfoss (‘Axe-water-fall’).23

  William Morris, visiting Iceland in 1871, recorded his impressions of his arrival at this extraordinary place. The spontaneity of his language reflects the immediacy of the emotional response:

  As we ride along (over the lava now) we come opposite to a flat-topped hill some way down the lava stream, and just below it opens a huge black chasm, that runs straight away south toward the lake, a great double-walled dyke, but with its walls tumbled and ruined a good deal in places: the hill is Hrafnabjörg (Raven Burg), and the chasm Hrafnagjá (Raven Rift). But as we turn west we can see, a long way off across the grey plain, a straight black line running from the foot of the Armannsfell right into the lake, which we can see again hence, and some way up from the lake a white line cuts the black one across. The black and the white line are the Almannagjá (Great Rift) and the Öxará (Axe Water) tumbling over it. Once again that thin thread of insight and imagination, which comes so seldom to us, and is such joy when it comes, did not fail me at this first sight of the greatest marvel and most storied place of Iceland.24

  Thingvellir is rightly famous; it sits amid an alien world, a landscape unlike any other on earth. Like many parts of Iceland, it feels as though it sits at the beginning and ending of time – a place rent and moulded by the primeval forces that stand behind the world, where the ‘sun turns black, land sinks into sea; the bright stars scatter from the sky. Flame flickers up against the world-tree; fire flies high against heaven itself.’25 As has been long remarked, it is easy to see how the crushing waterfalls and grinding glaciers, hot geysers and livid lava flows, and the spectral green corona of the aurora borealis, could have shaped the elemental tenor of the myths that were first given literary form in this unforgiving outpost of the northern world.

  The primordial nature of this environment is part of what makes Thingvellir seem such a suitable cradle for the earliest European experiment in representative republican government.26 One of the most evocative images of the place remains a painting by the English antiquarian W. G. Collingwood, at once a highly observant portrait of the tortured lithics of the primeval geology – the ‘curdled lava flows’ (to borrow a Morrisian expression) – and an unusually convincing (for its time) reconstruction of the bustle of an Althing in session. Morris, like Collingwood and many more of his Victorian peers, was fascinated by the aspects of representative and communal government that such assemblies embodied. For Morris, the ‘doom-rings’ and ‘thing-steads’ of the sagas seem to have helped him to bridge the intellectual chasm that lay between his romantic old-northernism and the metropolitan socialism by which he was so energized in later life.27

  A thing in progress, Halfdan Egedius, 1899 (Wikimedia Commons)

  Things (ON þing) had been a ubiquitous element of the legal, political and administrative culture of Scandinavia long before the settlement of Iceland in the mid-ninth century, and not all things were great national gatherings like those at Thingvellir. From what we can tell, mostly from later medieval sources, most were regional or local comings-together of heads of families, wealthy farmers, warlords and aristocrats, sometimes under the auspices of a king or jarl. Laws were made and disseminated at these gatherings, and arbitration was entered into when disputes arose. Criminal matters were also heard and judgements handed down in accordance with the settled laws of the jurisdiction in which the thing was held. These laws – with some exceptions – were not written down. This does not mean that they were vague or flimsy or made up on the hoof; quite the opposite. The laws were traditional and cumulative and, like modern legal practice, freighted with precedent and spiced with occasional innovation: maintaining the laws was integral to the life of a community and rich with ancestral tradition and ancient lore. The burden of keeping this knowledge intact rested primarily on the ars memoriae, as practised by a single individual – t
he lǫgsǫgumaðr, the ‘law-speaker’.28

  There are a number of place-names in Britain that incorporate the Old Norse þing element, most commonly in combination with völlr ‘plain’ (that is, ‘the assembly plain’ – the same origin as Thingvellir): Tinwald in Dumfries, Dingwall in Ross and Cromarty, Tinwhil on Skye, Tiongal on Lewis (now unlocatable), Tingwall in Orkney, Tingwall in Shetland, Tynwald on the Isle of Man, Thingwall in Lancashire and Thingwall in the Wirral. There are also Thingoe (Suffolk), Thinghou (Lincolnshire) and Thynghowe in Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire (all from ON þing haugr, ‘assembly mound’).29

  Some of these sites remained in use for centuries. Thynghowe in Sherwood Forest was discovered by amateur historians Stuart C. Reddish and Lynda Mallett who, in 2005–6, came into possession of a document dating to 1816 that described the perambulation of the bounds of the Lordship of Warsop. The local people involved in this expedition gathered at a mound known as Hanger Hill to drink beer and eat cheese and have what sounds like a jolly good time; they did so, apparently, ‘according to ancient custom’. Further research revealed that the name Hanger Hill had replaced the old name – Thynghowe – in the seventeenth century. Subsequent exploration of the site revealed parish boundary markers tumbled and choked by undergrowth – ancient standing stones and a Viking meeting place lost to memory, swallowed by the forest for a thousand years.

  At Tingwall in Shetland, assemblies were held on an island (a holm, in the Old Norse-derived dialect of the islands) in the loch that drives inland from the west. It is an extraordinary place, the hills rising gently on all sides around the water, a sublime natural amphitheatre that cups the setting sun. An account written by a visitor called John Brand, dating to 1701, describes how ‘three or four great Stones are to be seen, upon which the Judge, Clerk and other Officers of the Court did sit’. The rest of the assembly gathered on the grassy banks ‘at some distance from the Holm on the side of the Loch’. When their cases were to be heard, individuals were called to the island and each crossed the water by a stone causeway ‘who when heard, returned the same way he came’.30 The earliest records of its use date to around 1300, but it is likely that the place was an assembly site from the earliest days of Scandinavian settlement on Shetland.

  Tynwald, on the Isle of Man, is the one place in Britain where the Viking past continues to shape the performance – if not the content – of modern law-making. Every year, on 5 July, a representative of the British crown attends a ceremony at Tynwald Hill – the enormous stepped mound, 80 feet in diameter at the base, heavily modified and landscaped over the centuries, that still plays an important role in the tiny devolved government’s legislative rituals. There he ascends to declaim the previous year’s enacted legislation in English and Manx Gaelic (but not, alas, in Old Norse).31

  Þorgnýr the law-speaker holds forth; Christian Krohg, 1899 (Wikimedia Commons)

  It may be that not all of the thing sites in Britain were new meeting places established by Vikings in the ninth century; some may have been old local and regional meeting places that came to be known by names and terms introduced by Scandinavian settlers. The same is likely true of the terminology that came to be applied to territorial units in parts of the ‘Danelaw’; whereas Anglo-Saxon territories were divided into parcels of land called ‘hundreds’, by the time of the Domesday Book (1086), these territorial units were known in large areas of north and west Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire as ‘wapentakes’, from the Old Norse vápnatak (‘weapon-taking’). The term indicates how weapon-bearing had a direct link to political participation in Viking society. To attend a ‘weapon-taking’, one obviously had to have weapons to take; the costlier and more elaborate these were, the better to show off one’s wealth and status in a highly public forum.

  A sense of what weapon-taking was all about can be found in a handful of sources (most of which, in what becomes a tedious refrain for both author and reader, date to long after the Viking Age itself, and are therefore of questionable reliability). The following vignette from Óláfs saga Helga, for example, gives an impression of how the intimidating atmosphere of a weapon-bearing assembly could be used to influence authority. Here the venerable Þorgnýr the law-speaker tells the Swedish king how things stand:

  ‘Should you be unwilling to accept what we demand, then we shall mount an attack against you and kill you and not put up with hostility and lawlessness from you. This is what our forefathers before us have done. They threw five kings into a bog at Múlaþing who had become completely full of arrogance like you with us. Say now straight away which choice you wish to take.’

  Then the people immediately made a clashing of weapons and a great din.

  The king of the Svear to whom this intemperate diatribe was addressed, evidently not fancying his chances, swiftly agreed to ‘let the farmers have their way […] in everything they wanted’.32

  Such a scene, however improbable we may find the limpness of the Swedish king’s authority, evokes in ways otherwise inaccessible how political assembly in a highly militarized society might have felt; it is no wonder that rules of ritual combat should have developed in connection with such events – the potential for violence must have ever simmered at the surface. But, in their essence, such assemblies acted as a means by which royal and aristocratic authority could achieve public legitimacy, a spear-shaking mandate from the warrior class.

  After the death of Æthelwold at the battle of the Holme, the early reign of Edward the Elder proved relatively uneventful, although it was clear that tensions between Wessex and the ‘Danish’ north and east continued to run high; in 906 it was apparently felt necessary to confirm a peace between King Edward and the East Anglians and Northumbrians – with eastern Mercia remaining a contested region. (Indeed, it is utterly unclear who exactly was in effective control of this part of eastern Mercia during the four decades between 870 and 910. Coins minted in the name of an ‘Earl Sitric’ (‘SITRIC COMES’) at Shelford (‘SCELFOR’) in Cambridgeshire suggest that effective authority did not necessarily emanate from kings alone, as in fact continued to be the case in Norway. And, as we shall see, when the towns of the ‘Danelaw’ made peace, they tended to do so one by one, often with named jarls offering their submission along with the local communities in which they presumably had some standing.)

  The peace of 906 – like so many before – did not hold, although this time it was Edward’s kingdom that was the aggressor. In 909, men from Wessex and Mercia ‘raided the northern horde very greatly, both men and every kind of property, and killed many of those Danish men, and were inside there [Northumbria] for five weeks’.33 It is not surprising that the Northumbrians sought retaliation the following year, though the Anglo-Saxon chronicler seems unduly put out by their refusal to see sense, remarking with a slightly indignant tone that ‘the-horde in Northumbria broke the peace, and scorned every peace which King Edward and his councillors offered them’.34 They would have been better advised to take Edward up on his offer.

  The campaign started well enough for the Northumbrians. They seem to have wrongfooted King Edward, who had assembled a fleet of a hundred ships, perhaps imagining a waterborne assault in the south; when the Northumbrians started marauding across Mercia, Edward was stuck on a boat off the Kentish coast. But it is clear that, by this stage, the military and defensive innovations that had been implemented by Alfred and continued by Edward were in good working order. It was possible, in a way in which in the past it seems not to have been, for Edward to command (presumably from some distance away) the armies of Wessex and Mercia to rouse themselves swiftly and move against the invaders.35 Even so, it was nearly too late; the raiding army had already had plenty of time to plunder western Mercia, with doubtless unpleasant consequences for its inhabitants. This, however, may ultimately have been their undoing, for, as they headed back home, ‘rejoicing in rich spoil’ as the chronicler Æthelweard put it, they became bogged down:

  crossing to the east side of the river Severn over a
pons to give the Latin spelling, which is called Bridgnorth [Cuatbricge] by the common people. Suddenly squadrons of both Mercians and West Saxons, having formed battle-order, moved against the opposing force. They joined battle without protracted delay on the field of Wednesfield [Vuodnesfelda, ‘Woden’s Field’];36 the English enjoyed the blessing of victory; the army of the Danes fled, overcome by armed force. These events are recounted as done on the fifth day of the month of August. There fell three of their kings in that same ‘storm’ [turbine] (or ‘battle’ [certamine] would be the right thing to say), that is to say Healfdene and Eywysl, and Inwær also hastened to the hall of the infernal one [ad aulam properauit inferni], and so did senior chiefs of theirs, both jarls and other noblemen.37

  The three ‘kings’ whom Æthelweard delights in dispatching to Old Nick are better known by the Anglicized names Halfdan, Eowils and Ingvar; none of them is known from other sources, and no coins (that we know of) were minted in their names. If they truly were somehow joint kings of Northumbria, they have left a remarkably light historical footprint; it may well be that they were simply warlords of a lesser degree (the English sources seem often to exaggerate the quantity of royal blood that was spilled on the edges of Saxon swords). But it is also possible that they were related to the dynasty known in Irish sources as the Uí Ímair – the descendants of Ivar – a Viking clan that had made it big in Ireland and whose founder was the same Ivar the Boneless who, with his brothers, had wreaked such havoc among the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England.38 (Whether or not this is so, it is almost certainly the case that – as we shall see – an influx of Vikings from the Irish Sea had begun to make their presence felt in Northumbria at the beginning of the tenth century, refugees from their expulsion from Dublin in 902.39)