Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  19. Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, p. 128; Townend, The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland, p. 52

  20. Townend, The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland, pp. 189–90; M. Townend, Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic Relations between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English (2002, Brepols Publishers)

  21. G. W. Kitchin, ‘The Statesmen of West Cumberland’ in Ruskin in Oxford, and other Studies (1904, John Murray), p. 56; Isaac Kitchin, my great-great-great-great-grandfather, was born in Cumberland and educated at St Bees Theological College

  22. When Kitchin spoke of the ‘love of liberty and simple independence, bred in the blood of men of mountain regions’ he was also, of course, including himself in this blood-borne character portrait (Ibid.)

  23. Quoted in Townend, The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland, p. 192

  24. D. Griffiths, Vikings of the Irish Sea (2010, Oxbow), p. 23

  25. W. G. Collingwood, The Book of Coniston, pp. 1–7

  26. Ibid.

  27. Ibid.

  Chapter 16: A New Way

  1. W. G. Collingwood, Thorstein of the Mere (1895, Edward Arnold), p. 1

  2. C. Krag, ‘The early unification of Norway’ in K. Helle, (ed.), The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, Volume I: Prehistory to 1520 (2003, Cambridge University Press), pp. 184–9

  3. e.g. ‘Haralds saga ins hárfagra’, chapter 19 (Heimskringla I)

  4. Krag, ‘The early unification of Norway’

  5. Griffiths, Vikings of the Irish Sea, p. 51

  6. K. A. Hemer, J. A. Evans, C. A. Chenery, A. L. Lamb, ‘No man is an island: Evidence of pre-Viking Age migration to the Isle of Man’, Journal of Archaeological Science 52 (2014), pp. 242–9; Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, pp. 14, 148–52

  7. AU s.a. 878

  8. AU s.a. 839

  9. A. Woolf, From Pictland to Alba, 789–1070 (2007, Edinburgh University Press), pp. 9–10

  10. Ibid., p. 66

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid., pp. 93–8

  13. CKA

  14. The Annals of St-Bertin, s.a. 847; J. Nelson (ed. and trans.), The Annals of St-Bertin (1991, Manchester University Press)

  15. CKA; AU s.a 866

  16. AC s.a. 870

  17. AU s.a. 870

  18. AU s.a. 871

  19. CKA; Woolf, From Pictland to Alba, p. 109

  20. AU s.a. 873

  21. Downham, Viking Kings

  22. Glasgow Community Planning Partnership, Govan Area Partnership Profile 2016 (2016, Glasgow City Council) [https://www.glasgow.gov.uk/councillorsandcommittees/viewSelectedDocument.asp?c=P62AFQDNT1Z3DN0GUT]

  23. K. Goodwin, ‘The Glasgow Effect’, Guardian (10 June 2016) [https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jun/10/glasgow-effect-die-young-high-risk-premature-death]

  24. ‘No City for Old Men’, The Economist (25 August 2012) [http://www.economist.com/node/21560888]

  25. A. Campsie, ‘Everything You Need to Know About Clyde Shipbuilding’, Scotsman (30 March 2016) [http://www.scotsman.com/heritage/people-places/everything-you-need-to-know-about-clyde-shipbuilding-1-4086097]

  26. I say probably, because, as others have observed, none have survived in their original settings: H. Williams, ‘Hogbacks: The Materiality of Solid Spaces’ in H. Williams, J. Kirton and M. Gondek (eds), Early Medieval Stone Monuments: Materiality, Biography, Landscape (2015, Boydell & Brewer)

  27. J. T. Lang, ‘Hogback Monuments in Scotland’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 105 (1976), pp. 206–35

  28. See, for example, the largest of the brooches, BM 1909,0624.2; Graham-Campbell, The Cuerdale Hoard, contains considerable detail on the contents of the hoard and its protracted recovery

  29. NMS X.FC 8 [http://www.nms.ac.uk/explore/stories/scottish-history-and-archaeology/hunterston-brooch/]

  30. The Irish of the tenth century had their own word for this phenomenon: Gallgoídil (‘foreigner Gaels’); see Downham, ‘“Hiberno-Norwegians” and “Anglo-Danes”’

  31. CKA

  32. AU s.a. 900; CS s.a. 900

  33. The development of the Scottish nation is a complex subject to which this book cannot hope to do justice; for the fullest narrative treatment, see Woolf, From Pictland to Alba

  Chapter 17: The Pagan Winter

  1. Völuspá, v. 45 (author’s translation)

  2. There’s no point searching for it – it was flattened after excavation in 1946 to facilitate the progress of farm traffic

  3. For discussion of the burial see: http://skaldic.abdn.ac.uk/db.php?table=mss&id=22110&if=myth; see also Wilson, Vikings in the Isle of Man

  4. These are often, mistakenly, assumed to have been used as the figureheads of ships. Five such pillars accompanied the occupants of the Oseberg burial into the grave-mound, and we can presume therefore that they had some purpose in the most elaborate Viking death theatre. Handles at the base of the posts would have allowed these objects to be attached to another object – what, why or precisely how is unknown

  5. Lunde and Stone, Land of Darkness, pp. 47–8

  6. H. E. Davidson, ‘Human Sacrifice in the Late Pagan Period of North-Western Europe’ in M. O. H. Carver (ed.), The Age of Sutton Hoo: The Seventh Century in North-Western Europe (1992, Boydell Press), pp. 331–40

  7. Griffiths, Vikings of the Irish Sea, pp. 81–3

  8. Reynolds, Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial

  9. Ibid.

  10. Price, ‘Belief and Ritual’

  11. Price, The Viking Way

  12. The list of objects is adapted from that published by the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History [http://www.khm.uio.no/english/visit-us/viking-ship-museum/exhibitions/oseberg/in-the-grave.pdf]

  13. [http://www.khm.uio.no/english/visit-us/viking-ship-museum/exhibitions/oseberg/in-the-grave.pdf]

  14. Canmore ID 9383

  15. Sjøvold, The Viking Ships in Oslo

  16. The story of the discovery of the grave is dramatic in itself, involving a race against time by archaeologists, bracing themselves against the dire Orkney storms that sweep off the Atlantic in the autumn; Graham-Campbell, Vikings in Scotland: An Archaeological Survey (1998, Edinburgh University Press), pp. 138–40; see also http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/scarboat/

  17. Broadly speaking: as ever, the details are contradictory and late

  18. C. Abram, Myths of the Pagan North: The Gods of the Norsemen (2011, Bloomsbury), pp. 157–68

  19. Maughold (I) [202A]; Kirk Michael (III) [215]; individual Manx runestones are identified by the parish in whch the stone was found, followed by the individually assigned number of the stone within that parish. The Rundata reference is provided in square brackets

  20. This is not to say that Scandinavian runestones never feature carved crosses – they frequently do – but the style and form of these monuments is usually very different

  21. Braddan (IV) [193A]

  22. Andreas (II) [184]

  23. Ballaugh [189]

  24. Andreas (I) [183]

  25. Braddan (III) [191B]

  26. Braddan (II) [191A]

  27. The twin ravens Huginn (‘thought’) and Muninn (‘memory’) were key attributes of Odin; see, esp., Gylfaginning 38

  28. W. S. Calverley and W. G. Collingwood, Notes on the Early Sculptured Crosses, Shrines and Monuments in the Present Diocese of Carlisle (1899, Titus Wilson); C. A. Parker, The Ancient Crosses at Gosforth and Cumberland (1896, Elliot Stock)

  29. Gylfaginning 51

  30. Völuspá 59, p. 13

  31. Völuspá 65, p. 14

  32. Abram, Myths of the Pagan North, p. 165

  33. Price, ‘Belief and Ritual’

  34. Abram, Myths of the Pagan North

  Chapter 18: The Great War

  1. APV, lines 14–17, 115–20

  2. Halfdan didn’t last long according to the HSC. In punishment for his depredations ‘he began to rave and stink so badly that his whole army drove him from its midst’

  3. ASC s.a. 875; see also CKA and Woolf
, pp. 111–12

  4. ASC s.a. 875

  5. HSC, ch. 13

  6. Ibid.

  7. Oswiu of Northumbria (r. 640–70) was the king whose reign can be said to have ushered in that kingdom’s Golden Age. It was Oswiu who had killed (against all expectations) the notorious pagan king of Mercia, Penda, in the battle of the Winwæd in 655 – an act which had made him the most powerful man in Britain and overturned the last bastion of non-Christian belief on the island. During his reign he had also presided over the Synod of Whitby (664), a meeting which formally brought religious observance into line with Roman practice, and Northumbria firmly into the orbit of the mainstream religious–political–intellectual circles of post-Roman Europe. For any king to be proclaimed at a place named Oswiu’s Hill would have been to make an unmistakable political statement and, indeed, we may well wonder if this place had a long association with the public acknowledgement of kingship in Northumbria; see also discussion and references in Hadley, The Vikings in England, pp. 37–41

  8. Hadley, The Vikings in England, pp. 44–54

  9. Ibid.; Blackburn, Viking Coinage; G. Williams, ‘Kingship, Christianity and Coinage’

  10. G. Williams, ‘Kingship, Christianity and Coinage’

  11. This identification has at times been contested, see Downham, Viking Kings, pp. 94–6

  12. AU s.a. 902

  13. AC; FA

  14. FA s.a. 907; see also Lavelle, Alfred’s Wars, pp. 230–3

  15. Hadley, The Vikings in England, p. 177

  16. AU s.a. 913

  17. AU s.a. 917; ASC s.a. 924

  18. J. Graham-Campbell, The Viking-Age Gold and Silver of Scotland, AD 850–1100 (1995, National Museums of Scotland); Graham-Campbell, Cuerdale

  19. T. Hugo, ‘On the Field of Cuerdale’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 8 (1853), pp. 330–5; Graham-Campbell, Cuerdale, pp. 21–37

  20. ASC D, s.a 926, ASC E s.a 927; GRA 1.3

  21. Woolf, From Pictland to Alba, p. 158; EHD (104)

  22. ASC D s.a. 926

  23. North, English Hammered Coinage

  24. Woolf, From Pictland to Alba, pp. 164–6

  25. HR

  26. ASC D s.a. 934; Woolf, From Pictland to Alba, p. 161, n. 73

  27. CC s.a. 934

  28. GRA 1.3

  29. APV, lines 132, 143, 162

  30. AFM s.a. 937

  31. APV, lines 40, 60

  32. Brunanburh, lines 61–5; M. Alexander (trans.), The Earliest English Poems (1991, Penguin), p. 97

  33. According to Æthelweard, writing in the late tenth century; CA, p. 54

  34. ASC E, s.a. 937

  35. A. Tennyson, ‘The Battle of Brunanburh’, lines 1–14 in C. Ricks (ed.), The Poems of Tennyson III (1987, Longman), pp. 18–23

  36. AU s.a. 939

  Chapter 19: Bloodaxe

  1. Egil’s Saga, 80, v.4 (p. 159)

  2. The Chronicle of Melrose, s.a. 941; J. Stevenson (ed. and trans.), A Mediaeval Chronicle of Scotland: The Chronicle of Melrose (1991 [reprint of 1850s edition], Llanerch)

  3. ASC A s.a. 942

  4. See Chapter 20

  5. ASC A s.a. 944

  6. CC s.a. 946

  7. G. Williams, Eirik Bloodaxe

  8. Ibid.

  9. ‘Hakonar saga góða’, chapter 3 (Heimskringla I)

  10. ASC D s.a. 948

  11. ASC A s.a. 948

  12. M. Shapland, Buildings of Secular and Religious Lordship: Anglo-Saxon Tower-nave Churches (2012, unpublished PhD thesis, UCL)

  13. R. Hall, Viking Age England (2004, The History Press), p. 283; R. Hall, ‘York’, in Brink with Price (eds), The Viking World, pp. 379–84; Hadley, The Vikings in England, pp. 147–54; the full Coppergate excavations are published in twenty-one volumes by York Archaeological Trust

  14. Hall, ‘York’, p. 376

  15. Q. Mould, I. Carlisle and E. Cameron, Leather and Leatherworking in Anglo-Scandinavian and Medieval York (2003, CBA/York Archaeological Trust)

  16. Olaf ended his days as a monk on Iona, not the retirement one might imagine for a Viking king – it shows how much the cultural compass had shifted since the Viking Age began

  17. G. Williams, Eirik Bloodaxe

  18. FH I

  19. ‘Hakonar saga góða’, chapter 4 (Heimskringla I)

  20. Grímnismál, verse 36

  21. Slightly adapted from R. D. Fulk, ‘(Introduction to) Anonymous, Eiríksmál’ in D. Whaley (ed.), Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1: From Mythical Times to c. 1035 (2012, Brepols), p. 1003

  22. Price, The Viking Way

  Chapter 20: Wolves

  1. ‘Sermon of the Wolf to the English’, EHD (240)

  2. ASC CDE s.a. 1006

  3. No Anglo-Saxon remains have been found, although the former use of the mound as a Bronze Age burial mound has been confirmed: A. Sanmark and S. J. Semple, ‘Places of Assembly: New Discoveries in Sweden and England’, Fornvännen 103. 4 (2008), pp. 245–59

  4. The walking dead appear frequently in Old Norse literature, most famously in Grettis saga: see G. A. High (trans.) and P. Foote (ed.), The Saga of Grettir the Strong (1965, Dent)

  5. Egil’s Saga, 61, v.11 (p. 116)

  6. T. J. T. Williams, ‘For the Sake of Bravado in the Wilderness’; E. M. Lacey, Birds and Bird-lore in the Literature of Anglo-Saxon England (2013, unpublished PhD thesis, UCL), pp. 114–19

  7. T. J. T. Williams, ‘Landscape and Warfare in Anglo-Saxon England and the Viking Campaign of 1006’, Early Medieval Europe 23 (2015), pp. 329–59

  8. The stones replaced an even older timber monument; J. Pollard, ‘The Sanctuary, Overton Hill, Wiltshire: A Re-examination’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 58 (1992), pp. 213–26. J. Pollard and A. Reynolds, Avebury: The Biography of a Landscape (2002, Tempus)

  9. CC

  10. This Maccus may conceivably have been the man who ended King Eric’s life in 954: there is no way to be certain. More importantly, this reference represents the first time that a kingdom of the isles is mentioned in contemporary records. A political entity that brought together the Scandinavian-settled territories of north-western Britain and the Irish Sea was coming into view for the first time

  11. Lavelle, Alfred’s Wars

  12. CC; FH

  13. ASC D s.a. 959; in the twelfth century, William of Malmesbury helpfully elaborated on Wulfstan’s sentiments by explaining how the English had picked up the despicable foreign habits of drunkenness from the Danes, effeminacy from the Dutch and ferocity from the Germans (GRA)

  14. EHD (41)

  15. Ibid.

  16. FH

  17. Maldon, lines 46–56; trans. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry

  18. J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son’ in The Tolkien Reader (1966, Ballantine)

  19. Neil Price, in a personal communication to me, suggested the old-fashioned word ‘vim’ – a particularly apposite approximation

  20. Maldon, lines 96–100

  21. Halsall, Warfare and Society, p. 183

  22. Maldon, lines 312–19

  23. J. D. Niles, ‘Maldon and Mythopoesis’, Mediaevalia 17 (1994), pp. 89–121; Wanderer

  24. Other, smaller sums were dished out on an ad hoc basis; S. Keynes, ‘The Historical Context’ in D. Scragg (ed.), The Battle of Maldon AD 991 (1991, Blackwell), p. 100

  25. See J. Gillingham, ‘“The Most Precious Jewel in the English Crown”: Levels of Danegeld and Heregeld in the Early Eleventh Century’, English Historical Review 104 (1989), pp. 373–84 and ‘Chronicles and Coins as Evidence for Levels of Tributes and Taxation in Late Tenth and Eleventh Century England’, English Historical Review 105 (1990), pp. 939–50

  26. J. C. Moesgaard, ‘The Import of English Coins to the Northern Lands: Some Remarks on Coin Circulation in the Viking Age based on New Evidence from Denmark’, in B. J. Cook, G. Williams and M. Archibald (eds), Coinage and History in the North Sea World, c. AD 500–1250: Essays in Honour of Marion Archibald (2006,
Brill)

  27. E.g. coins of Svein Estridsen (r. 1047–76)

  28. ASC CDE s.a. 999

  29. S. Keynes, ‘The Declining Reputation of King Æthelred the Unready’ in D. Hill (ed.), Ethelred the Unready: Papers from the Millenary Conference (1978, BAR), pp. 227–53; L. Roach, Æthelred (2016, Yale University Press)

  30. ASC A s.a. 1001

  31. ASC CDE s.a. 1001

  32. ASC CDE s.a. 1002; A. Williams, ‘“Cockles amongst the Wheat”: Danes and English in the Western Midlands in the First Half of the Eleventh Century’, Midland History 11 (1986), pp. 1–22

  33. EHD (127); S909

  34. A. M. Pollard, P. Ditchfield, E. Piva, S. Wallis, C. Falys and S. Ford, ‘“Sprouting like Cockle amongst the Wheat”: The St Brice’s Day Massacre and the Isotopic Analysis of Human Bones from St John’s College, Oxford’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology 31 (2012), pp. 83–102

  Chapter 21: Mortal Remains

  1. EHD, 48

  2. ASC CDE s.a. 1013

  3. T. Lindkvist, ‘Early Political Organisation: Introductory Survey’ in K. Helle (ed.), The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, Volume 1: Prehistory to 1520 (2003, Cambridge University Press)

  4. See chapters by I. Skovgaard Petersen (‘The Making of the Danish Kingdom’), C. Krag (‘The Early Unification of Norway’), M. Stefánsson (‘The Norse Island Communities of the Western Ocean’), T. Lindkvist (‘Kings and Provinces in Sweden’) in Helle (ed.), The Cambridge History of Scandinavia

  5. A. Pedersen, ‘The Royal Monuments at Jelling’ in G. Williams et al., Vikings: Life and Legend, pp. 158–60

  6. The Dream of the Rood (ASPR 2); Alexander, Earliest English Poems, p. 87

  7. ASC CDE s.a. 1012

  8. CC s.a. 1013, p. 477

  9. ASC CDE s.a. 1014

  10. ASC CDE s.a. 1016