Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  Some of these plots have been excavated, most extensively so at Coppergate in digs carried out between 1967 and 1981. What these revealed was a city that, even as Eric Bloodaxe brooded in his hall, was undergoing an economic boom. Leatherwork and textile production, ironwork and copperwork, cup-making and carpentry, bone- and antler-craft, minting, amber-shaping and glass-recycling were all taking place with high intensity in the tenth-century city, many on an apparently industrial scale: moulds and crucibles for the mass production of jewellery and dies for coin production have been found and the sheer quantity of iron slag and wooden cores from cup- and bowl-making indicates production on a scale far beyond the domestic. Raw and manufactured goods were arriving from overseas – amber from the Baltic, silk from Byzantium, pottery from the Rhineland – and local produce was presumably exported via the same trading connections. Scales and large numbers of weights bear testament to the flourishing market that had developed at this commercial-industrial hub on the River Ouse – a major cog in the engine of North Sea trade.

  And the population of York was growing too. Plots were becoming increasingly heavily utilized as the century wore on, more and more of the available space given up to timber buildings until the walls of each unit were almost touching its neighbour on either side. Rubbish pits were dug in backyards over and over again, to accommodate the sewage and the food waste, the industrial by-products and the general detritus. In the most waterlogged parts of the city, near the river, decomposition would have been slow and inefficient, parasites breeding in stagnant meres of mud and excrement. Ground level was rising by up to three-quarters of an inch every year (over the course of the tenth century an increase of between 3 and 6½ feet). The monastic writer Byrhtferth of Ramsay, writing at the end of the tenth century, put the population at 30,000. This may be an exaggeration, but the numbers were still high. Extrapolating from the density of settlement and the number of stray finds (principally of coins and pottery), as well as from the number of turds found preserved in the Viking Age soil, has enabled population estimates to be made in the region of 10,000–15,000, a 500 per cent increase on the population of pre-Viking York.14 Gut worms were endemic and half of women died before they reached thirty-five (without childbirth to contend with, men could hope to hit fifty if they were lucky). In short, this was a society experiencing all of the typical problems of rapid urbanization: overcrowding, filth, disease, infestation.

  It was also a city on the make. By 1066 it was easily the second largest in Britain (after London) and the hammers that smashed out thousands of silver coins in the names of Northumbria’s Viking kings were working the city’s abundant flow of silver into symbols of royal power and civic prestige. Even without evidence of coin production we would know that the coinage was produced in York from the legend that many of the coins bear: ‘EBRAICE’ (from ‘Eboracum’, the Latin name for the city). What is less clear is how much of this hustle and bustle was driven by Scandinavian immigrants and how much by native Northumbrians, or even whether such distinctions were noticed or considered important. The archaeology is equivocal – new trading links with Scandinavia certainly opened up, and new styles of object became fashionable. Shoes in a typically Scandinavian style, for example, started to be manufactured in the tenth century. But, crucially, traditional Northumbrian footwear remained in vogue, indicating that not only the expertise but also the market for both styles remained available and viable.15 Thus the evidence can be argued from multiple perspectives. The only certainty is that tenth-century York was booming, and Scandinavian contacts and culture were playing a leading role.

  Not that this made much difference to the political theatre playing out in the early 950s, except perhaps to raise the stakes for the players involved: York had become an attractive prize to kings of any stamp. The Northumbrians themselves, however, were fickle and – from a southern perspective – incorrigible. In 949 they recalled Olaf Sihtricsson to rule over them, but he didn’t last long. In 952 Olaf was out, and Eric was back in.16 This time, however, Eadred seems to have decided to apply pressure where it really mattered in Northumbria, hauling the archbishop of York to the stronghold at Jedburgh because, apparently, ‘he was frequently accused to the king’. Nobody knows what threats and promises the king made to the archbishop there, but in 954 Eric was expelled from York for the second and final time; it can be no coincidence that the archbishop, in the same year, was finally restored to his lands by King Eadred. For the third time in his life, Eric Bloodaxe found himself in political exile.

  This time, however, there was to be no comeback.

  What is the worth of a king, he wonders, who has been driven out by his own subjects, hunted like a wolf’s head over the mountains? He needs ships, and men. Perhaps he will go to Ireland. He doesn’t know what welcome he might receive there – perhaps he will find kinsmen among the Dubliners, or someone to whom his name still means something, still carries weight. He is tired, mud-splattered, shoulders hunched, his horse slipping on wet stones in the pass. Turning in the saddle, he looks back at the column of dejected men behind him, fewer now he thinks than when they left York.

  ‘Niþings,’ he murmurs; ‘cowards, oath-breakers.’

  He is always looking back: listening for sounds of pursuit, watching for the carrion birds that herald the approach of pursuing armies. But he sees only the grim clouds and the grey land, the stones and the heather, the dull mud; a world rinsed of colour. He pulls his cloak, damp and heavy, tightly around himself, turns towards the wind that drives the rain into his face, and carries slowly on.

  It is bleak on Stainmore, treeless and rugged, a high wind-scoured upland that reaches 1,370 feet above sea level; there is no protection up here from the Atlantic weather that comes billowing from the west. When I went there it was foul, a cold driving rain forcing me back into the car to sit miserably in a lay-by on the side of the A66, the busy trunk road connecting Carlisle in the north-west to Catterick in the east, by way of Penrith and Barnard Castle, heavy freight thundering past on its way across the Pennines. A few minutes in the elements were quite enough for me, but for Eric in 954, trying to break west for the sea, there would have been no rest and no respite. Perhaps there would have come a moment up here when he saw the land drop away to the west, the blue fells marching on the horizon, the westering sun dazzling him as it dipped below the slate-grey clouds – a beacon of white light offering the promise of salvation. If it did it might have lightened his heart for a moment – held out the hope of a new life and refuge, an opportunity to find the time and space to plan his political renaissance. Perhaps he saw himself coming back this way, at the head of a glorious host, a king of kings. But perhaps he didn’t even make it as far as I did.

  It is unclear how Eric died, but it was not from internal parasites. He likely had them (as everyone who spent any time in York probably did), and a perennially itchy arsehole can only have contributed to his bad mood. But the sources, though they differ wildly in most respects, are in agreement on one key issue: that Eric Bloodaxe died a violent death. The Norwegian so-called ‘synoptic histories’ – Ágrip af Nóregskonungasögum (‘A Synopsis of the Sagas of the Kings of Norway’) and Historia Norwegiæ – record a tradition that Eric died raiding in Spain, the least plausible explanation of how he met his end.17 Other sources agree that Eric died in Britain, but the manner of his death, however, remains far less certain. According to the Anglo-Norman historian Roger of Wendover, ‘King Eric was treacherously killed by Earl Maccus in a certain lonely place which is called Stainmore, with his son Haeric and his brother Ragnald, betrayed by Earl Oswulf; and then afterwards King Eadred ruled in these districts.’18 Oswulf was the quasi-autonomous ruler at Bamburgh in the north of Northumbria, and was to become Earl of Northumbria under Eadred when Eric was dead. In this version of events we can see Eric dying with a dagger between his ribs – bleeding out the last of Northumbrian liberty on a lonely moor, friendless and betrayed, his ertswhile companions turning their mounts back to York t
o tell Oswulf that the dark deed was done, the last impediment to his own ambition now removed.

  The sagas, however, tell a different story; a story of how King Játmundr (Edmund) ‘mustered an invincible army and went against King Eiríkr, and there was a great battle […] and at the end of that day King Eiríkr fell and five kings with him’.19

  In the Norse mythological cycle, the death of the gods at Ragnarök represents the tragic, heroic, final stand of a world doomed to die. Of all the deaths and endings it is the death of Odin that is the most poignant, the one that speaks most clearly to the contradiction at the heart of the human condition. Odin may be the darkest of the gods, but he is also the most like us. He has watched the ebb of time across the ages, the rise and fall of kings and nations, the petty hurts and feeble triumphs of humanity. And despite knowing it to be futile, that ultimately he must fight the wolf and fail, he has prepared carefully for that day, selecting and curating the champions who will fight beside him when the last sun rises over the battle-plain. The einherjar, they are called, the glorious dead, doomed to die on earth in battle in order that they may fight again, one last time. It is this bloody-mindedness – the obsessive quest for wisdom though it brings no peace, the desire to gain knowledge of a future that cannot be circumvented, the relentless preparation for a doom that cannot be avoided – that reminds us of our own self-defeating consciousness, the knowledge of mortality that defines our humanity.

  The capacity to think, to remember, to dream, to prepare against whatever the future holds – all of it leads inevitably to the only certainty that the universe can provide: that all things fade and all things fail. And yet, like Odin, we struggle on heedless of the long defeat, wading against the tide that one day will overwhelm everything. It was acceptance of this harsh reality that permeated Viking warrior culture, shaping its mentality and appetite for adventure – the willingness to stare death and defeat in the eye, knowing that to carry on is futile and that failure is assured, yet determined to fight on regardless, to struggle until the last breath is spent. It is in that struggle – internal, ethical – that true bravery lies; and there, precisely there, eyeball to eyeball with death unflinching, was the place where legends could be born that might outlast the living.

  This desire to be remembered – to secure true immortality in the stories told after death – was the force that drove composition of eulogies and praise-poems, the contemporary material on which so much of our knowledge of Viking kings is ultimately founded. When Eric died, his wife was said to have commissioned a poem that commemorated his life and his deeds. The result, Eiríksmal, pictures the arrival of the great king in Valhöll, ‘the hall of the slain’, to take his place among the einherjar, the heroes of the past – with Sigmund and his son Sinfjǫtli – and sit by Odin’s side. There he would enjoy the pleasures of the hall that are described in the eddic poem Grímnismál and by Snorri in Gylfaginning: to feast on the hog Saehrimnir who replenishes his flesh every evening; to fight the endless duels with the other einherjar, battling without hurt; to drink the mead that flows unending from the udders of the goat Heidrun, brought by valkyries in gilded cups: a warrior’s paradise, filled with all the pleasures of a macho life.20

  The poem, only the beginning of which survives, is cast as a conversation between Odin, the legendary poet Bragi, Sigmund and Eric himself.

  O: ‘What kind of dream is this, that I thought that a little before daybreak I was preparing Valhǫll for a slain army? I awakened the einherjar, I asked them to get up to strew the benches, to rinse the drinking cups, [I asked] valkyries to bring wine, as if a leader should come. I expect certain glorious men from the world [of the living], so my heart is glad.’

  B: ‘What is making a din there, as if a thousand were in motion, or an exceedingly great throng? All the bench-planks creak, as if Baldr were coming back into Óðinn’s residence.’

  O: ‘The wise Bragi must not talk nonsense, though you know well why: the clangour is made for Eiríkr, who must be coming in here, a prince into Óðinn’s residence. Sigmundr and Sinfjǫtli, rise quickly and go to meet the prince. Invite [him] in, if it is Eiríkr; it is he I am expecting now.’

  S: ‘Why do you expect Eiríkr rather than other kings?’

  O: ‘Because he has reddened his blade in many a land and borne a bloody sword.’

  S/B: ‘Why did you deprive him of victory then, when he seemed to you to be valiant?’

  O: ‘Because it cannot be known for certain when the grey wolf will attack the home of the gods.’

  S: ‘Good fortune to you now, Eiríkr; you will be welcome here, and go, wise, into the hall. One thing I want to ask you: what princes accompany you from the edge-thunder [battle]?’

  E: ‘There are five kings; I shall identify for you the names of all; I am myself the sixth.’21

  Eiríksmal, unlike the detailed descriptions in Grímnismál and Gylfaginning, dates to the Viking Age itself. It offers a vivid and immediate depiction of Valhöll and the relationship between Odin, his champions, and his messengers, the valkyrjur, the ‘choosers of the slain’ – the spirits of death and conflict who haunted the battlefields of the Viking imagination. In the courtly poetry of Eiríksmal, valkyries were already undergoing the transformation that would see them become cleaned-up icons of femininity – servile cup-bearers and entertainers for the exclusive clientele at Valhöll, the precursors of the romanticized visions of nineteenth-century painters and the buxom Wagnerian parodies of popular imagination. But for most Vikings these lesser deities would have been possessed of wilder and more savage personae, terrifying war-spirits with names to chill the soul: Tanngniðr (‘teeth-grinder’); Svava (‘killer’); Skǫgul (‘battle’); Randgniðr (‘shield-scraper’); Hjalmþrimul (‘helmet-clatter’); Geirdríful (‘spear-flinger’) …22

  In 954, when the valkyrjur came shrieking from the heavens, screaming over the corpse-strewn Stainmore Pass to harvest the souls of the dead and dying, we must picture them coming, not from the clear, crisp skies of Norway or Denmark, nor even from the cold skies above Iceland’s ashen peaks, but from the drear, leaden clouds of Yorkshire – come to claim Northumbria’s last king.

  20

  Wolves

  We pay them continually and they humiliate us daily; they ravage and they burn, plunder and rob and carry to the ship; and lo! what else is there in all these happenings except God’s anger clear and evident over this nation?

  ARCHBISHOP WULFSTAN, ‘The Sermon of the Wolf to the English’ (1014)1

  It was 1006 and the Viking army had come from bases in the Isle of Wight, riding unopposed through the heart of Wessex – from Hampshire into Berkshire, from Reading to Wallingford, burning as they went. There they turned on to the Ridgeway, the path that so many armies in the past had taken, and travelled east to Cwichelm’s Barrow (a place known today as Skutchmer Knob). There, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates, they prepared for the showdown they had been promised and ‘awaited the boasted threats, because it had often been said that if they sought out Cwichelm’s Barrow they would never get to the sea’.2

  The barrow, a Bronze Age burial mound, was the shire meeting place of Berkshire. It was a place of power and belonging, an upwelling of the ancient past around which the English organized their lives and, perhaps, a point of access to their own past. Cwichelm was a figure of legend, a West Saxon king who, it was said, had slain 2,045 Britons at a place called Beandun (‘Bea’s Hill’) in 614 – a warrior ancestor whose blade was sorely needed by the English in the dark days of the early eleventh century. Perhaps there was a belief that the dead king was somehow present, that he slumbered under the mound like Arthur, ready to rise up and drive the enemies of the English to their doom.3 Perhaps this was the story that the Vikings had heard from their victims as the southern shires burned – a defiant threat spat through blood – that if they dared ride too far, if they probed too deeply into the kingdom’s heart, Cwichelm would get them. Or perhaps this was where the muster of Berkshire would assemble, a
formidable phalanx of West Saxon warriors ready to stand firm in the presence of their ancient king. Perhaps the Vikings who came here felt a creeping dread as they approached from the west, the dark mound casting long shadows in the wan mid-winter light, skeleton trees clutching at the gloomy threatening skies. They knew that the dead shuffled uncomfortably in their chambered tombs, draugr who might hunt the living if awoken by the clumsy or the careless.4

  But no one came; neither the living nor the dead. It was as though everything had deserted the English – even their ancestors.

  The Viking army travelled back along the Ridgeway, west towards Avebury where the path turned towards the south, plunging over the edge of the chalk downs into the Pewsey Vale and the low country that rolls away towards the sea. It was here that the Anglo-Saxons chose to mount their defence, a last bid to halt the Viking horde as it made its way back to the Isle of Wight. Word had travelled, watch-fires flickering up from hill to hill, points of angry flame in the grey December twilight, summoning men from Avebury and Marlborough to follow the herepaths – the army-roads – to muster.

  They would have seen and heard the carrion birds first, the tattered black shapes wheeling and cascading over the Ridgeway, their hollow, rasping cries announcing the arrival of the Viking army. Larger birds of prey might have joined them, buzzards or even eagles, circling high above the squalling crows. In the woodland that crept up the hillside from the valley floor to the circle of hoary megaliths where the English waited, other shapes might have been seen, moving furtively among the shadows of the ancient trees: a shaggy pelt, a lupine silhouette, a red eye caught in the pale light of the mid-winter sun.