Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  Other inscriptions are even more specific, setting in stone particular events that are chronicled in English sources. A stone at Yttergärde in Uppland (Sweden), erected by two men called Karse and Kalbjörn in memory of their father, Ulf, records that ‘Ulf has taken three payments in England. That was the first that Tosti paid. Then Thorkell paid. Then Cnut paid.’22 ‘Tosti’ was probably a man identified by Snorri as Sköglar-Tosti, father-in-law to both Svein Forkbeard and the Swedish king, Eric the Victorious.23 ‘Thorkell’ was Thorkell the Tall, whose exploits deprived the English of £48,000 in 1012. Cnut, of course, needs no explanation. It was men like Ulf who were the beneficiaries of England’s years of pain.

  More rarely, runic inscriptions provide a glimpse of the Scandinavians who died in Cnut’s England: ‘Sveinn and Þorgautr made this monument in memory of Manni and Sveini,’ an inscription on a stone in Scania (Sweden) runs. ‘May God help their souls well. And they lie in London.’24 Stunning archaeological evidence for the presence of an eleventh-century migrant community in London was discovered in 1852 in the graveyard of St Paul’s Cathedral. A stone, decorated in the Scandinavian Ringerike style with an elaborate backwards-turning beast, once painted in colours of red, white and black, carries a runic inscription down one edge: ‘Ginna and Toki had this stone set up.’ For whom, we will never know. The gravestone can be seen now in the Museum of London, beside a display of the Viking axes that have been dragged from the stinking mud of the River Thames at low tide – the debris scattered where wave after wave of violence had broken, crashing on the walls of the city that held out until the bitter end.

  Most of the Scandinavians who died in England, however, remain nameless, though the manner of their deaths is sometimes laid horribly bare. In 2009, during the initial stages of the construction of the Weymouth Relief Road in Dorset, a grave was discovered on the downs. The skulls were found first, a pile of yellowing husks, forty-seven heads tossed haphazardly into a pit. The bodies were found later, fifty-two headless corpses heaped naked one upon the other – a charnel tangle of ribs and femurs jutting from the earth. Analysis of the remains revealed that the heads had been hacked off with swords. The killing had been hard work – many hands and blades had laboured over it, often it had taken multiple blows to sever the vertebrae, and sometimes the aim of the killers had been poor or hasty, shearing through skulls and faces, blood staining the white chalk in crimson torrents. It would have taken hours. The five heads that were missing from the grave might well have been the only memorial for these men – taken and rammed on to wooden stakes (heofod stoccan) and set up to watch sightlessly from the hills.

  Analysis of the skeletal remains revealed that all of the people who died here were men, aged mostly between their teens and early adulthood, and that they had died in the years around 1000. Only five of them might have grown up in Britain, the rest came from Scandinavia and the Baltic, from Iceland, Russia and Belarus, from the Arctic and the sub-Arctic, from every corner of the Viking North. They had come to Britain and they had died in England, though what had brought them here, and who did this to them, remains a mystery. The men who died were not professional fighters – their bones show no evidence of wounds gained and healed, of the stresses and strains of a life of battle. Some in fact seem to have suffered from debilitating illness and disability. Perhaps these were people who came to England to seek their fortune, tempted by the silver they had seen flowing north, by stories of adventure and the weakness of the English, lured by the runestones that boasted of payments in the service of famous and mighty lords. All they found was death.25

  The identities of these people will never be known, but someone, somewhere, must have grieved for them. A sad stone in Norway records that ‘Arnsteinn raised this stone in memory of Bjórr his son who died in the retinue when Knútr attacked England.’26 Perhaps Bjórr was a hardened warrior who came to grief in the thick of battle; or perhaps he was a mere boy, hacked to death before his adventure even began.

  Edmund survived the battle of Assandun long enough to negotiate a peace with the victorious Danish king. They may have fought again in the Forest of Dean (depending on how a skaldic reference to a battle at Danaskógar is interpreted),27 but all sources agree that the parties then met for talks at a place called Olanige (‘Ola’s Island’) near Deerhurst in Gloucestershire. According to a later tradition, the two kings were transported to this island in the River Severn where they engaged in single combat – a royal hólmgang to determine the fate of the kingdom. However improbable it may seem, there is no way of knowing whether anything like this really happened. I like to imagine that it did – the two great warriors slugging it out alone, as though two and a quarter centuries of conflict and compromise had been distilled down to this single scene: the young kings of Wessex and of Denmark, the Anglo-Saxon and the Dane, wrestling for the soul of England as the olive-green waters passed slowly by. Whatever the reality, a settlement was ultimately reached. Tribute payment was agreed (the astronomical figure of £72,000 was collected in 1018), oaths were made and hostages were given by both sides. And Edmund was to keep his throne, retaining his familial lands and rule over Wessex; Cnut was to receive Mercia (as well as, presumably, East Anglia and Northumbria). England, so recently assembled, was to be partitioned once more.

  That was the idea. As things turned out, however, the details proved academic. Edmund died on 30 November 1016, the third English king (including Svein) to have died in two years. In 1017 ‘King Cnut succeeded to the whole kingdom of England.’28 Edmund’s sudden and unexplained death has always smelled suspicious. If it wasn’t murder, it was certainly convenient for Cnut. A later tradition, first recorded by the Norman historian Henry of Huntingdon in the early twelfth century, had Edmund suffering an unseemly end, shot up the arse with a crossbow while enthroned upon the privy.29 It is, happily for Edmund’s posthumous dignity, unlikely to be true.

  Cnut’s first actions as king were probably the most radical of his reign. He divided England into four great earldoms that corresponded to the four ancient realms of Wessex (which he governed directly himself, at least to begin with), Mercia (which was given, briefly, to Eadric Streona), East Anglia (given to Thorkell the Tall, who had reconciled with Cnut in 1015) and Northumbria (which was put under the authority of the Norwegian, Eric Hákonarson). The title ‘earl’ (OE eorl) was an Anglicization of the Old Norse title jarl, and it was introduced into English at this time, a new rung of power between the existing English nobility and the king. Cnut also took the opportunity to raise the enormous tax agreed at Olanige, crush a number of dissenting English noblemen, and – in what may have been a more popular move – have Eadric Streona killed at London and thrown over the city wall. This was done, according to the Encomium, in order that ‘retainers should learn from this example to be faithful, not faithless, to their kings’.30

  Cnut would rule England until his death in 1035, and his sons Harald and Harthacnut until 1042. For the twenty-five years that the Knýtlinga (the house of Cnut) ruled England, the latent Scandinavian influences – already so prominent in the north and east of the country – became a part of mainstream English culture. During those years, England would lie at the heart of a North Sea empire that swelled to include Denmark, Norway and parts of Sweden, and exert claims of lordship over the Norse-speaking communities of the Northern and Western Isles of Britain. Old Norse was spoken at the royal court at Winchester, Scandinavian warlords ruled as earls in what had once been Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and Scandinavians could have runestones raised to them in the graveyard of St Paul’s Cathedral. Objects like the gilded bronze brooch found in Pitney in Somerset – hardly an epicentre of Viking settlement – demonstrate the convergence of late Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon art-styles in places that may have experienced little direct contact with speakers of Old Norse before the reign of Cnut. Likewise, a remarkable monument stone from Bibury in Gloucestershire was carved in the Ringerike style, leonine faces on weird twisting necks sprouting from its base li
ke flowers seeking the sun.

  Even after the West Saxon dynasty had been restored in the person of Edward the Confessor, many of these influences remained deeply entrenched. England’s last ‘Anglo-Saxon’ king, Harold Godwineson, had a Norse name (Haraldr) and a Danish mother, as did his brothers Tostig, Svein and Gyrth. Even the great double-handed axes, wielded to devastating effect by so many English warriors in the Bayeux Tapestry’s telling of the battle of Hastings, were a Scandinavian import – horse-killing weapons developed in Denmark to stop the Frankish cavalry that was increasingly dominating the continent.

  And yet it was at this moment, at the very zenith of Scandinavian influence and power in England, that the Vikings as they had been would begin to fade away.

  In some ways, Cnut was the most awesome Viking of them all – a Danish king whose longships bound together a maritime empire through fear and force, and whose skalds composed bloodthirsty eulogies about his victories – just as his ancestors had done. But, in other, perhaps more important ways, Cnut was not a Viking at all. A Danish aristocrat like his father, Cnut was king of England before he was ever a king in Scandinavia (he became king of Denmark in 1018 and of Norway in 1028), and he spent considerable time in Britain. He was emphatically Christian, and in his laws, his coinage, his self-depiction and his generosity to the Church, he presented himself as the quintessential Anglo-Saxon king. He made a point of reconfirming the laws of Edgar and even married the late King Æthelred’s queen, Emma – it was at the behest of their son Harthacnut (king of England, 1040–2) that her Encomium was later written.31

  The Liber Vitae of New Minster and Hyde Abbey is a book, produced at the beginning of the 1030s, which records donations to the New Minster at Winchester, the church built by Edward the Elder, and which housed the bones of his father, King Alfred. Among its pages is an extraordinary illustration – produced while the king and queen were still alive – of Cnut and Emma presenting an enormous altar cross to the New Minster. Christ and St Peter hover overhead, and an angel places a crown upon Cnut’s brow. He stands on the altar steps, at the threshold of the Middle Ages, looking every inch the ideal monarch of a new era. The heathen warlords of the ninth and tenth centuries had gone, and although Scandinavians would continue to bother the British Isles for a century or more, there would be no going back. The world had moved on.

  When he died, Cnut was buried at the Old Minster, the venerable church that the New Minster had been constructed to replace. He had earlier, in an expression of a curious affection that Cnut seems to have held for his one-time rival, had the remains of King Edmund Ironside translated there in 1032. Harthacnut, his son by Emma, was buried in the New Minster there in 1042, and his long-lived wife Emma in 1052. In the church next door, separated by a few feet, lay King Alfred and his wife, Ealhswith, their sons Edward (the Elder) and Æthelweard, and Edward’s son Ælfweard. For years the house of Wessex and the house of Cnut slumbered on in their separate mausolea – similar but distinct, separated by walls and clear green grass. But as the centuries passed and the old churches tumbled, to be replaced by the great gothic cathedral that still stands in Winchester, the royal tombs were moved – Alfred’s family to the monastery at Hyde, and Cnut’s family along with a number of others (including Edmund and, perhaps, the tenth-century King Eadred) to the cathedral where they would lie alongside the remains of Anglo-Saxon bishops and Norman princes for hundreds of years.

  There they remained until 1642, when soldiers fighting for the Parliamentary army in the English Civil War broke into the cathedral. These men, ‘for whom nothing is holy, nothing is Sacred, did not stick to profane, and violate these Cabinets of the dead, and to scatter their bones all over the pavements of the Church’. The stained-glass windows ‘they brake to pieces, by throwing at them, the bones of Kings, Queens, Bishops, Confessors and Saints’.32 In 1661, in an attempt to remedy the chaos, ‘the bones of princes and prelates scattered by sacrilegious barbarism’ were ‘brought together again mixed up’ and deposited in the chests that still sit atop the walls of the choir.33 Subsequent investigations in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries revealed total disorder: a hopeless jumble of mortal remains.

  New DNA research offers the slender possibility of bringing some sense to it all. But for the time being the puzzle remains unsolved, a physical expression of what England by the end of the eleventh century had become. Anglo-Saxons and Danes, hopelessly muddled together in death, impossible now to tell apart.

  Epilogue

  The death of the second of Cnut’s sons, Harthacnut, in 1041 and the re-establishment of the house of Wessex (in the person of Edward the Confessor) by no means spelled the end of Scandinavian Britain or, indeed, of the Viking Age.

  In the north and west, particularly in the island strongholds of Orkney, Shetland, Man and the Hebrides, Viking lordships endured and prospered long into the Middle Ages, exerting a decisive influence on Scottish history for centuries. The Lords of the Isles (Man and the Western Isles) remained independent from Scotland until 1266 (there was a brief period of direct rule from Norway in the late eleventh century that followed the intervention of King Magnus Barefoot). The earldom of Orkney – the polity established in Caithness and the Northern Isles through Scandinavian settlement from the ninth century onwards – was even longer lived; Orkney and Shetland remained a part of the kingdom of Norway until 1467 and 1468 respectively. But, no matter how vitally entangled this northern fringe of Britain was with Scandinavian politics, or how deeply penetrated by Scandinavian culture, language and people, these lordships only emerge into historical view in the late eleventh century, their origins and their development obscure.1

  The earldom of Orkney, in particular, presents something of a conundrum. The eradication of almost all traces of pre-Scandinavian (Pictish) place-names, language and material culture on the islands has given rise to a suggestion that the settlement of these North Sea outposts was carried on a wave of genocidal migration. Others have stressed the absence of secure chronology, the uncertainties of earlier population size and density, the many centuries of continuing migration and influence from Scandinavia. The evidence is equivocal, though the pride the islanders take in their Viking heritage remains palpable. For these parts of Britain, as for much of England, the Viking Age never really ended. Nobody packed up their battle-axes and Thor’s-hammer amulets and went ‘home’. These Viking Age immigrants may have imported new ideas and new identities, making accommodations of various kinds with their neighbours, but they were – certainly by the eleventh century – as British as anyone else in these islands.

  Scandinavian raids also continued, though they remained the province of kings rather than freebooters. The failed invasion of England in 1066 by the Norwegian king Harald Harðráði (‘Hard-ruler’) was only one of many. In 1069, in the aftermath of the Norman conquest of England, the Danish king Svein Estridsson (r. 1047–76) captured York in alliance with the last viable member of the West Saxon dynasty (Edgar the Ætheling). William the Conqueror paid him to go away. (In 1075 he came back again for a quick pillage.) Svein’s grandson, Cnut IV (r. 1080–6), was keen to keep up this national pastime, and readied a fleet to invade England in 1085. His people were less enthusiastic, however, and refused to serve; when he tried to round them up a second time they chased him into a church and stabbed him to death. Even in the mid-twelfth century, Scandinavian kings sometimes felt the temptation to harass the shores of Britain. The Norwegian king Eystein Haraldsson (r. 1142–57) led a fleet that menaced Orkney, Scotland and northern England in the 1150s during the reign of King Stephen.

  Should these be considered Viking raids? Perhaps they should, although – in the end – all attempts to define the limits of the Viking Age dissolve into fruitless semantic arguments. What is perhaps better to acknowledge is that, by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the literary idea of the Viking – the image that would shape and colour perception of the Age until the present – was being born, both in Iceland’s saga literatur
e and in fanciful Anglo-Norman tales like that of Havelok the Dane. The creation of literary tropes and fantastical tales depended, to some degree, on a critical distance from the world these works sought to describe. It was a past that had become safe to romanticize precisely because it was over.

  The Vikings had changed Britain, that is without doubt. But Britain had also changed the Vikings – transforming them until it seemed that they were gone for ever. One of my goals in writing this book has been to try to show them as less monolithic than they are popularly presented as – more susceptible to the influence of their environments and of the people and ideas they encountered. But they were also a vital force: agents of change who transformed the world they moved through, even if they sometimes lost themselves in the process, emerging only as a shadow, a figure of legend to be put back together in new shapes. It has also been my goal to share the stunning legacy of their world, to illuminate to those who may never have encountered it the breadth and depth of the footprint that they have left in Britain, and to allow their story to serve as a reminder that culture, identity and ethnicity are often more complex and contestable than we might imagine.

  I have also tried to steer a course that, though it recognizes the debt we owe to Viking culture and the impact of these events and processes on British history, does not diminish the strangeness of the people who fashioned the Viking Age. They were not ‘just like us’: there is more to being human than using coins or wearing shoes, and mundane things do not readily reveal how people felt, thought and dreamt. But we can still stand where they stood, and feel the grass under our feet and know that they felt it, and taste the sea-breeze on our tongues and know that they tasted it. And when we wait by the shoreline, with the sun dipping like blood into the west and the breakers crashing on the strand, we can still hear their voices singing with the tide, the grinding of keels on the shingle.