Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  What we do know is that the battle, wherever it was fought, shook the nations of Britain. Æthelweard, writing in the late 900s, wrote that ‘a huge battle [pugna immanis] was fought against the barbarians at Brunandun, wherefore it is still called the “great war” [bellum magnum] by the common people’.33 The Chronicles of the Kings of Alba told of the battle of Duin Brunde, ‘where the son of Constantine was slain’. The Welsh Annals blankly referred to ‘Bellum Brune’ (‘the war of Bruin’), almost as if they couldn’t bear to repeat the horrid details. The Annals of Ulster, however, recalled that ‘a great, lamentable and horrible battle was cruelly fought between the Saxons and the Norsemen, in which several thousands of Norsemen, who are uncounted, fell, but their king, Amlaíb [Olaf], escaped with a few followers. A large number of Saxons fell on the other side, but Athelstan, king of the Saxons, enjoyed a great victory.’

  It is in the pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, however, that the battle was truly immortalized. In the E manuscript, the scribe simply recorded that ‘King Athelstan led an army to Brunanburh.’34 But it was in the A text that an unknown West Saxon poet went to town. In seventy-four lines of Old English verse, a monument was crafted that celebrated the martial prowess of Athelstan and his brother, the future King Edmund. It invoked the ghosts of the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of old and rubbed defeat in the faces of the other peoples of Britain – a bitter draught they would force down the throats of every idealist who dreamt that, one day, ‘the Saxons will sing, “Woe!”’

  One day soon the Saxons would indeed sing ‘Woe!’; but it would not be this day. Now was the time to sing the triumphal song of a new, self-confident nation. England had been fathered, born and christened – now it had found a voice, and its voice was harsh and crowing. It was, in many ways, a suitable subject for translation by the poet laureate of Victoria’s Empire, even if it stands a little at odds with the melancholia that characterizes much else of Alfred Tennyson’s poetry:

  Athelstan King,

  Lord among Earls,

  Bracelet-bestower and

  Baron of Barons,

  He with his brother,

  Edmund Atheling,

  Gaining a lifelong

  Glory in battle,

  Slew with the sword-edge

  There by Brunanburh,

  Brake the shield-wall,

  Hew’d the lindenwood,

  Hack’d the battleshield,

  Sons of Edward with hammer’d brands.35

  Athelstan’s victory at Brunanburh ensured that his status was upheld for the rest of his life, and kept a lid on the simmering cauldron of grievance and aspiration that had given rise to the conflict in the first place. In the longer term, its memory inspired a burgeoning sense of English nationalism. When Athelstan died in Gloucester on 27 October 939, his death was not marked with any great fanfare in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Annals of Ulster, however, reported that ‘Athelstan, king of the Saxons, pillar of the dignity of the western world, died an untroubled death.’36 His reign, coinciding with that of Constantín II in Scotland, was pivotal for British history, with new identities crystallizing that would shape the history of the island for centuries.

  In the short term, however, the immediate political significance of the battle was limited. The hegemony that Athelstan had established over Northumbria died with him, and the following decade and a half bore witness to one of the periods of intense political insecurity to which the Northumbrian kingdom had long been prone. Olaf Guthfrithsson, the Viking king of Dublin who had been defeated and humiliated at Brunanburh, was quick to take advantage.

  19

  Bloodaxe

  […] that mighty

  maker of men

  ruled the land from beneath

  his helmet of terror;

  In York

  the king reigned,

  rigid of mind,

  over rainy shores.

  Arinbjarnakviða1

  Within a year of Athelstan’s death, Olaf Guthfrithsson was back in York, claiming power for himself apparently unopposed. He swiftly set about exerting his authority across Northumbria and extending his reach even further south, sacking Tamworth (Staffordshire) and annexing the towns of northern Mercia. This new Viking realm didn’t last long, however. Olaf died in 941, possibly during a raid on Tyninghame in Lothian.2 It was mere months before Athelstan’s brother – the new King Edmund – came north to ‘liberate’ the so-called ‘Five Boroughs’ (Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford and Derby).

  These events are celebrated in a poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which describes the forceful subjection of the ‘Danish’ population of northern Mercia to the heathen ‘Norsemen’ – the latter term being used to describe the Dublin-derived Vikings who were now back in power in York.3 This narrative of unwelcome subjugation may be a fiction of sorts – it seems likely that some, at least, of the folk of northern Mercia would have been perfectly happy (or at least ambivalent) about swapping rule from Wessex with rule from York. But it does point to an interesting perception that was developing in England about the role of ‘Danes’ in English society. They were still evidently regarded as an ethnically distinct group and retained a distinctive legal status;4 these ‘Danish’ English were presumably also distinguishable from the ‘English’ English by dress or dialect. But, while they were still Danes, they had briefly become – from a certain Anglo-Saxon perspective – ‘our Danes’. This paternal attitude to England’s immigrant communities was politically expedient in the 940s, but ultimately it would not last. The way a society treats its ethnic minorities can often reveal a great deal about a nation’s political priorities and the challenges it faces, and things were no different in tenth-century England – the young nation was soon to be stress-tested to breaking point.

  Those calamities, however, lay in the future. More immediately pressing was the bewildering cast of players who now began to agitate for the Northumbrian throne. The chronology of this period is confused (and confusing). Some of the individuals are indistinct to the point of vanishing altogether, and there is general disagreement among historians about the sequence and veracity of the events recorded. Nevertheless, the following paragraphs offer a summary which, if concise and complex, is not, I hope, misleading.

  The claim of the West Saxon dynasty over Northumbria was weak. It had never, before the reign of Athelstan, been subject to southern kings, and its people were naturally mindful of their own distinct customs and cultural heritage. Since 866, this sense of Northumbrian particularism had been overlaid by a stratum of Scandinavian settlement and culture which – while it had changed much in the kingdom – had not fundamentally shaken its independence. Significant elements of the old Northumbrian hierarchy had survived – not least its ecclesiastical magnates, particularly the bishops of Lindisfarne and York – and there is a sense in which the Northumbrian elite were willing to accommodate Viking rulers, provided that they were able to offer a bulwark against the imperial ambitions of Alfred’s descendants. Naturally, however, the political aspirations and calculations of factions within Northumbria meant that the individuals and dynasties ascendant at any one time could change rapidly, particularly when the political dynamics were being destabilized by the suddenly inflated power of the English kingdom to the south and – to a lesser extent – by the Scottish kingdom to the north.

  In the 940s, the simmering potential for chaos seems finally to have bubbled over, precipitated by the deaths in rapid succession of Athelstan and Olaf Guthfrithsson. The secret deals and back-stabbing that resulted can only be seen obliquely in the sources that survive, but the political meltdown that resulted is all too apparent. Olaf Guthfrithsson was replaced as king in York by his cousin, Olaf Sihtricsson (also known as Olaf Cuarán, or Olaf Sandal). This Olaf was the son of Sihtric Cáech who had ruled in York before the previous Olaf’s father, Guthfrith. At the same time, however, another son of Guthfrith – Ragnall (OE Rægnald) Guthfrithsson – also seems to have been in Northumbria pressing his fat
her’s (and deceased brother’s) claim. At some point in all of this, a man called Sihtric (not the same man as the second Olaf’s late father) was causing coins to be minted in Northumbria in his name. (The coins are the only evidence of his existence; he is not otherwise mentioned anywhere in the historical record.) According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, however, in 944 King Edmund (like many a bemused student of the Viking Age) had had enough of these shenanigans, and ‘brought all Northumbria into his power, and caused two kings to flee, Olaf Sihtricson and Rægnald Guthfrithsson’.5

  Edmund was an energetic ruler, and swiftly got on with giving the people of Cumbria a hard time, ceding territory (possibly won from the kingdom of Stathclyde) to the new Scottish king Malcolm in a diplomatic move presumably intended to normalize relations on the Anglo-Scottish border. (Malcolm succeeded his father, Constantín II, who abdicated in 943, though he lived for another nine years. Constantín was at least sixty-four when he died, but is likely to have been considerably older, and had reigned for forty-three years; the Old English poem, The Battle of Brunanburh, set in 937, describes him as har hilde-rinc – ‘the hoary (that is, old/silver-grey) warrior’. Silver-haired he may have been, but he had managed to outlive his English nemesis, Athelstan, by fourteen years.) Edmund’s firm hand did not, however, bring an end to the turmoil in Northumbria. In 946 Edmund also died (stabbed by a chap called Liofa – described by John of Worcester as ‘an atrocious robber’6 – at Pucklechurch in Gloucestershire) and the new English king, Eadred, a younger brother of Athelstan and Edmund, was obliged to extract pledges of allegiance from the Northumbrian worthies. The north, however, had become ungovernable, and in 948 Eadred was heading there again. He had received the news that the Northumbrians, having renounced their oaths to him in 947, had invited another man to be their king.

  His was a name to conjure with: Eric, son of King Harald Finehair of Norway, known to us as Eiríkr Blóðøx – Eric Bloodaxe.

  The sources for Eric’s earlier life in Norway are all late and are frequently contradictory, but all agree that he was a violent and belligerent man. As the idea of the Viking has percolated through the British psyche, Bloodaxe, over the course of the twentieth century, became emblematic of the domestic Viking; never mind that he was (at least nominally) a Christian and that he lived more of his life as a king than as an outlaw. His (nick)name is enough: it presents with effortless economy, with two short, emphatic syllables, the image of the screaming berserker with the wild beard and the bloodstained battle-axe, eyes rolling and mouth frothing with a lust for battle and a mania for death. The explanation for his nickname, however, was not simply the frequent doing of bloody deeds; those were so commonplace during the Viking Age (and not just on the part of ‘Vikings’) that it can hardly have raised an eyebrow, let alone inspired an epithet. No, what apparently set Eric apart from his peers were cruelty and kin-slaying. The twelfth-century Norwegian historian Theoderic the Monk described him as fratris interfector – ‘brother-slayer’. When taken together, the range of sources for Eric’s life suggest that Eric, alongside his wife Gunnhild (who, we are told, was a wicked, manipulative and beautiful enchantress – a literary trope for which human society apparently has an inexhaustible patience), was responsible for the deaths of no fewer than five of his brothers: five rival sons of King Harald Finehair bumped off in the pursuit of his own ruthless ambition.7

  That ambition – to succeed his father and become the undisputed king of Norway – was ultimately fulfilled. Eric ruled as king of Norway for three years during his aged father’s dotage and two after his death. But his fratricidal tendencies were to pay dividends of another sort. The end of Eric’s reign in Norway was brought about by yet another of Harald’s many sons – Haakon the Good, also known as Haakon Aðalsteinsfóstri (‘Athelstan’s foster-son’). Haakon was, according to the Old Norse saga tradition, raised as an Anglo-Saxon prince in the court of King Athelstan. English sources make no mention of this, but it is perfectly plausible. Fostering of this sort among aristocratic families seems to have been common, an accepted way of forging diplomatic and quasi-familial bonds, and the sagas record that Haakon governed Norway in a fashion far more typical of Anglo-Saxon kings than of their Norwegian counterparts.8 When Haakon, with his legitimate claim to the Norwegian throne and powerful English connections, arrived in Norway, he provided Eric’s many enemies with the perfect banner to rally behind. When the inevitable showdown came, Eric didn’t even put up a fight.

  Instead, Eric fled to England where, according to Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, he was accommodated by King Athelstan and deputed to rule in Northumbria; from there, it was said, ‘he raided Scotland and the Hebrides, Ireland and Bretland, and so increased his wealth’.9 Most of the Scandinavian sources broadly agree that Eric was active in Northumbria during the 930s. It is certainly possible that he held some sort of power in Northumbria during Athelstan’s reign (we know very little about what exactly was happening in the region during this period), and it is also possible that he was involved in the power politics of the 940s; if this was the case, however, English sources make no mention of it. Whatever the truth, and whatever path he had taken to get there, by 948 Eric emerges into the contemporary historical record for the first time as the man chosen by the Northumbrians to be their king. Unfortunately for him, however, like his previous experiments with executive power, Eric’s kingship was not an unqualified success. Immediately after he had been invited to take the throne, in 948 a peeved King Eadred sent an army north to show the Northumbrians who was boss, burning down Ripon Minster before heading back south. The Northumbrians, however, presumably on Eric’s orders, ‘overtook the king’s army from behind at Castleford, and a great slaughter was made there’.10 This, perhaps not surprisingly, displeased Eadred considerably, and proved to be a spectacular political blunder. ‘The king became so enraged’, the chronicler of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle A text explains, ‘that he wanted to raise an army and utterly destroy. When they heard that,’ the chronicler continues, ‘they [the Northumbrian bigwigs] abandoned Eric and compensated King Eadred.’11 It is a revealing comment, one which strongly indicates where the true backbone of Northumbrian independence lay.

  A poem, composed in the tenth century (part of which is reproduced as the epigraph to this chapter), pictures Eric at York, brooding and sinister, his barren soul mirrored in the poet’s evocation of the Yorkshire countryside: rain-wracked and storm-weathered. One can imagine him, with panic gripping York as word of the king’s rage came north, holed up in his royal hall – taciturn, uncompromising, isolated – waiting for the political realities to come crashing down on his head. It is harder to imagine, however, how the city itself appeared in Eric’s day. By the tenth century the Roman walls had been buried under an earthen bank with a corresponding ditch on the outer side, probably with a wooden palisade wall on the top and perhaps equipped with timber gate towers and walkways. There may have been stone towers too – the eleventh-century church tower of St Michael at the North Gate in Oxford was originally a free-standing masonry tower incorporated into the defensive circuit of the burh;12 it is similar to York’s oldest standing building, the eleventh-century tower of the Church of St Mary Bishophill Junior.

  However, the vast hulking mass of York Minster, the great gothic cathedral that squats at the centre of the city’s web of narrow streets and alleyways, was constructed between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries (obliterating, in the process, much evidence for earlier churches and other buildings on the site). York Castle, or the surviving part of it (Clifford’s Tower), is also a product of the late thirteenth century. Likewise, the walls of the city, though the lower courses in many places retain the Roman masonry, were rebuilt and renovated in stone in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries before their restoration in the nineteenth.

  Thus to the untrained eye it appears – despite the picturesque antiquity of the city – as though nothing of Viking Jorvik remains to be seen. But it’s there, fundamental, an endos
keleton of words and roads that the intervening centuries have hung their flesh upon. Nearly all of the roads of York that predate the Norman Conquest are (or were) named with the suffix ‘-gate’, from the Old Norse gata (‘street’). Often the prefixes – which are sometimes Old English, sometimes Old Norse (often impossible to determine given the similarity of the languages), and sometimes Middle English or modern – provide clues to particular trades or notable characteristics of these places over time: Coppergate, for example, means the street of the wood-turners (that is, cup-makers from ON koppari); Micklegate is the big street (‘main street’ is a better translation); Goodramgate is the street of Guthrum, a fine Scandinavian name. These roads follow what are almost certainly lines that were set in the ninth or tenth centuries, and the width of the houses and shop-fronts on these thoroughfares still preserves the dimensions of the plots of land that, divided by wattle fencing, were once occupied by the Viking Age townsfolk.13